there is a prevenient grace...

I write these things not as new insights—for many poets, theologians, and philosophers have expounded on these truths much more incisively, eloquently, and deeply than I will ever—but as reminders for myself, and maybe others. Despite the daily evidence of these truths, I am forgetful and easily distracted! For the times that I can remember them I count as blessings, and for the moments in which I can act on them, I count as divine miracles, a bestowing of a supernatural grace.

New Camaldoli Hermitage, 10/16

Love and grace precede us.

By which I mean that the existence and efficacy of love and grace are not contingent on our actions and words, and not even on our ability to receive them. Their power, in fact, lies in their prevenience, in our inability to merit either. We receive them nonetheless.

We forget this too often because in our everyday lives, we are tethered to a very human, which means limited, conception of justice, elementary cognitive systems of what is right and wrong. We miss the point completely when we define ourselves by our weaknesses but also when we overestimate our strengths. We are blind when we are mired in darkness, but also when we over-expose ourselves to false and artificial light…

The systems and institutions we live in have their own measures of justice, of course, doling out rewards and punishments deemed worthy and necessary based on subjective measures of goodness and evil. What a fair punishment is in another part of the world may seem like an atrocity here, and what standards of freedom we uphold here may seem like a misstep in justice elsewhere. Beyond our governments, our cultures also shape our sense of propriety, and for the most part, we must live under these laws, spoken and unspoken, that organize the places that we live in. But for this very reason, it is easy to believe that we are incapable of harm, or evil, or darkness, when we stay within the bounds of the laws set upon us, whether visibly or invisibly. We forget—it’s easier to—that, as complex creatures with even more complex admixtures of good and evil in us, we are not merely one or the other but inevitably possessors of both. Sometimes it is impossible for us to distinguish one from the other. That we do not suffer the punishments of human society or profess visible signs of madness does not mean we are exempt from darkness; that we do not receive the praise of men does not mean we have no goodness in our hearts either.

For when you witness, in all its agony and dissonance and mystery, the unsettling heterogeny of the human soul—whether you see the moments of light in a swath of darkness, or echoes of light receding into the shadows—you are not seeing something separate from yourself. You cannot distance yourself from the reality of realities, supposing you are any better or any worse. He is not an aberration, and neither are you.

I am not justifying or rationalizing atrocities. My theodicy is not to condone or ignore evil; I cannot condemn, that is not my place. But I am saying all this because, amidst the sorrow and tragedy and betrayal that our lives are not without, it is much easier to try to make sense of darkness—muddling is futile though—than to seek the light. I am wrestling with questions much too great for my understanding and knowledge, but let me clarify—I am not trying to answer the question of why evil exists, or why people do evil. I am saying, that in what I know to be true, grace was bestowed on us before we knew that we needed it.

The narratives that drive us to do good or wrong are complex, for sure. Give people the benefit of this complexity. Our broken, faltering natures will always be a fact and a mystery. I do not know why we do the things that we do, but I also know, that in the irrational way we are compelled to fuck things up, we are also recipients of an irrational love, and by irrational, I mean, incomprehensible by the human mind, unexposed by reason.

In the face of utter desolation and devastation, when we are in the wilderness of ourselves, perhaps we are not to justify it or make sense of it, or to even come to terms with it, but instead, run towards what we know to be true.

For men are not cast off by the Lord forever. Though he brings grief, he will show compassion. So great is his unfailing love. For he does not willingly bring afflictions of grief to the children of men.*

I think back to the moments in which someone has been gracious to me—given me something when I felt I deserved nothing. Was it my need or their gift that was the grace? Surely the grace began at its mere intention, at the giving before it was given. The grace was not consecrated because of my need for it. Neither was the grace amplified because I felt diminished, or lessened because I was no longer in need of it (the latter is impossible, I think).

            Forgive them for they know not what they do.**

It is much easier to receive grace than to give it of course, especially when the extension of such—and what is alike: mercy, forgiveness—feels like a betrayal of our selves, the pride of our principles, our precarious sense of justice. We might even feel offended by the possibility of such grace. What’s left of us might be rend asunder. We cling onto what we know; all else is unsafe and dangerous, an affront to our identities, our culture, whom we know ourselves to be.

By our sensibilities and our senselessness, we demand to know exactly what it is that we are forgiving, and whether, by our own calculating conscience, such an offense is worth the forgiveness. Can we risk such a transaction? Often we wait to be distracted from our anger or we force time to dissipate our anger before we will admit to the relevance of grace in our circumstances.

How then do we extend it? Not by our own will, and not by the abilities that we have. We do have to try to extend it though, calling upon what divine help there is. We extend it with both joy and sorrow, I suppose, which I believe, are not in diametrical opposition—for you can be joyful, that in God’s prevenient grace we have an incredible example to follow and a great gift to receive, and you can be sorrowful in the clear-eyed recognition that, in the first place, our truly broken selves require such divine grace to heal.

This happens for reasons that are hidden from us, utterly hidden, for as long as we think they must proceed from what has come before, our guilt or our deserving, rather than coming to us from a future that God in his freedom offers us … 

The future always finds us changed. Each of them, joy and loss, exists in its own right and must be recognized for what it is. Sorrow is very real, and loss feels very final to us. Life on earth is difficult and grave, and marvelous.  

Nothing makes sense until we understand that experience does not accumulate like money, or memory, or like years and frailties. Instead, it is presented to us by a God who is not under any obligation to the past except in His eternal, freely given constancy. When I say that much the greater part of our existence is unknowable by us because it rests with God, who is unknowable, I acknowledge His grace in allowing us to feel that we know any slightest part of it. Therefore, we have no way to reconcile its elements because they are what we are given out of no necessity at all except God’s grace in sustaining us as creatures we can recognize as ourselves.  

So joy can be joy and sorrow can be sorrow, with neither of them casting either light or shadow on the other.*** 

We are broken, but we do not have to be crestfallen, for that brokenness is not all there is. Instead, there is hope, and that hope is manifest in the prevenience of the abundant grace and love which I have seen and felt, and I hope you do too.

So have compassion. Have mercy. It is much easier to not than it is to live by these things, but we must persevere. I think it a travesty—a perversion, really—of the density and beauty of these truths, to reduce them to mere bolsters of identity and self-worth, or to decide by our own human and arbitrary means, what merits compassion and what does not. Certainly, having compassion and mercy can result in the betterment of society and of humankind as a whole, and yet we cannot depend on these measures to justify our actions, and we cannot depend on ourselves to make better what will break over and over again.

Redemption comes from outside us. To see redemption is to first see darkness, followed by a miraculous light… I do believe that our lives, as brief as they may be, as much tragedy and sorrow as they do bear, are gifts, spans of time bestowed on us in which we know love and love more, in which we receive grace and give it, in which the character of God becomes more apparent and more astounding as we parse through our own joys and sorrows. His love, his mercy, his grace, his compassion are endless and infinite, and these are the things to which our lives must cleave. I have no authority in writing all this, but there is a beginning, a greater author by whom we must, if we will live hopefully and joyfully, carry out all the unconditional love and compassion we can muster. There is a root in a Creator, and He is the reason and the first manifestation, the highest principle.

But what is it which gives a man immortality, what except the love which abides?****

Sources:
* Lamentations 3:31-33
** Luke 23:34
*** Marilynne Robinson, Lila
**** Soren Kierkegaard, Works of Love

Francis Bacon. Three Studies of the Male Back, 1970 

"The way I try to bring appearance about makes one question all the time what appearance is at all. The longer you work, the more the mystery deepens of what appearance is, or how can what is called appearance be made in another medium. And it needs a sort of moment of magic to coagulate colour and form so that it gets the equivalent of appearance, the appearance that you see at any moment, because so-called appearance is only riveted for one moment as that appearance. In a second you may blink your eyes or turn your head slightly, and you look again and the appearance has changed. I mean, appearance is like a continuously floating thing."

-Francis Bacon, in conversation with David Sylvester

What's madness but nobility of soul

At odds with circumstance? The day's on fire!

I know the purity of pure despair,

My shadow pinned against a sweating wall,

That place among the rocks—is it a cave,

Or winding path? The edge is what I have . . .

-Theodore Roethke, "In a Dark Time"

"Like that bewildered savage who has picked up a strange object . . . perhaps something thrown up by the sea, perhaps disinterred from the sands or dropped from the heavens . . . an object intricate in its convolutions, which shines first with a dull glow and then with a bright shaft of light . . . who keeps turning it over and over in his hands in an effort to find some way of putting it to use, seeking some humble function for it, which is within his limited grasp, never conceiving a higher purpose . . "

-Aleksandr Solzenitsyn, "Beauty Will Save the World"




"About my interests: I don't know if I have any, unless the morbid desire to own a sixteen-millimeter camera and make experimental movies can be so classified. Otherwise, I love to eat and drink—it's my melancholy conviction that I've scarcely ever had enough to eat (this is because it's impossible to eat enough if you're worried about the next meal)—and I love to argue with people who do not disagree with me too profoundly, and I love to laugh. I do not like bohemia, or bohemians, I do not like people whose principal aim is pleasure, and I do not like people who are earnest about anything. I don't like people who like me because I'm a Negro; neither do I like people who find in the same accident grounds for contempt. I love America more than any other country in the world, and exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually. I think all theories are suspect, that the finest principles may have to be modified, or may even be pulverized by the demands of life, and that one must find, therefore, one's own moral center and move through the world hoping that this center will guide one aright. I consider that I have many responsibilities, but none greater than this: to last, as Hemingway says, and get my work done. I want to be an honest man and a good writer."

-James Baldwin, "Autobiographical Notes"

this is the beyond

Nicasio Reservoir, 10/21

On the drive to Point Reyes Station from San Francisco, after ten miles on Lucas Valley Road, you’ll curve around the Nicasio Reservoir, a shallow basin of glassy water with fingers that reach into the surrounding crevices of Marin's dry and grassy hills. You’ll be focused on making your way around each bend with enough speed and balance, and the scenery will move—appear and then disappear—as you move through it. Even so, you will inevitably be struck by how still the water is, a mirrored expanse upon which Jesus surely could have tread. The sky above, the wisps of fog contrails that crown the peaks below, are doubled—made more glorious—in the water, a reflection that seems to be a landscape unto itself, not just a cheapened reproduction of the thing above, but the expansion of an Edenic vision. The light makes it so. For reflections and shadows, which are transient, changing footprints, marked and then unmarked, may slip away from us—they are not things or objects to which we can give a proper name—, but they are, nevertheless, the vital signs of a prelapsarian light cast from up above. They give shape and sense to an otherwise formless darkness.

I have been noticing these reflections and shadows everywhere. As I glean and then tell the stories of people who are making objects and books and vessels to eat off of, I suppose I am merely shifting and shaping and refracting light to ensure that the reflection I put forth is as rich a thing as the person herself, and that the reflection might expose what the eye itself might have trouble seeing otherwise, a small, evanescent glimpse at the richness and the complexity of being human.

Lately, I have been going into strangers’ houses and asking them to tell me about their lives, which takes courage on my part as well as theirs—and I have been impressed by earnestness, openness, hospitality. Most of what I do is listen, which I like to do, and then I try to see, like not just look at what’s in front of me—the surfaces—but really see what is on the peripheries, and what little gems I might find if I just push aside a log, or brush off some sand—an obsidian arrowhead or a sand dollar or a piece of smooth glass tumbled over and over again in crashing waves.

It is a privilege to see the different textures of light, the multiplicity of hues and tones and colors, which you know is an infinite range if you’ve driven from the west coast to the east and seen the way light casts itself differently in every landscape. White looks different in every place you go. It is a privilege to be given the time and space to hear the voice of a person’s consciousness—this will never be dreary or boring for me, ever. To be in wonderment, to be in awe—I thank God for those things, for, through an exchange of words, finding myself in new terrains, exploring perspectives not owed to me, but gifted graciously.

In listening to other people's stories, and trying to know them more, I have a clearer sense of similarity and difference, both of which imply relations, or perhaps, a relationship. The profound realization that we are similar, or that we are different, is a recognition at the very least, that we are related in some way. To see similarity in a person is to know that this person is not irrelevant to you; to see difference, is to realize that you can't make generalizations about humanity as a whole—which you (and I) do not understand, beyond a few fundamental things, like our collective need for love and respect and kindness. Both similarity and difference require the space—and grace—of empathy; they demand acceptance that goes beyond acknowledgment. To know a person, of course, is to break through a surface, render the glass asunder, I suppose, and to know that impressions might be mere shadows or reflections—sometimes distorted, overexposed, twisted. The resonance of the ocean changes as you go down into its depths, as you pass through the sunlight zone, into the twilight zone, the midnight zone, and then finally, into the abyss. In those deepest of depths—I have not explored—life exists we might not know otherwise. Knowing those depths at all, requires that we admit we might not have known anything at all.

Most days, we shuffle through a long, dark tunnel from home to work to the places we know that are bounded in ways that make us feel safe and comfortable. It is hard to see beyond those walls, and it is easy to repeat those shuffling motions numbly, without any sense of obligation to an outside world, a wilderness beyond ourselves that we can’t fathom, or bear to try. But in the very little I know—in the very few years I’ve lived—I know that people gather a sense of meaning about their lives—a sense of resilient joy, which I mean to be a profound acceptance of their own existence—from moments in which they see beyond themselves. Do we not thirst for the transcendent? We want to see beyond tangible things, beyond what is merely physical. Despite our beliefs or unbeliefs, the seeking for the beyond, for the farther, for what lies outside of our humanly grasp, seems to be the most redeeming—and at times the most damning—quality of our consciousness. Like water refusing to be held, our understanding of what we cannot see seems to slip out from under us, again and again. Sometimes we can’t be bothered. Most of the time we are distracted by the shiny baubles that dangle around our heads like a child’s mobile toy, a temporary pacifier—but no maternal comfort.

Knowing this, I am relieved—elated, in fact—to live in this particular Bay Area landscape, in which so many different terrains and ecosystems—lakes, mountains, dry deserts, marshes, deep forests, grasslands—converge and make themselves known to us, if we will pay attention. Because there is no way you can, when you meet these mountains, and lakes, and oceans, ignore their grandeur, their infinity, their mystery, their glimpses of this truth that we are minute and small and that much else exists beyond our lives as we know it. They the rolling hills, they the bodies of water, they the great sequoias are mere synecdoches, parts of some greater whole. They are nature’s figures of speech that implore us to acknowledge the existence of secrets we will never know and crevices we will never explore. There are ways moving and being in the wild that we will never understand. The humility—the unknowingness—in the face of all that, is comforting, I think, breathlessly so; I am relieved to relinquish a need to know it all, to know how it all plays out.

"Wabi-sabi is an aesthetic appreciation of the evanescence of life. The luxuriant tree of summer is now only withered branches under a winter sky. All that remains of a splendid mansion is a crumbled foundation overgrown with weeds and moss. Wabi-sabi images force us to contemplate our own mortality, and they evoke an existential loneliness and tender sadness."

-Leonard Koren