Stepping on Air
“The teachers praise love, and highly too, as St. Paul did, when he said, ‘No matter what I do, if I have not love, I am nothing.’ Nevertheless, I put disinterest higher than love.” Which he then goes on to explain—why he sees disinterest higher than love.
Now that the enthusiasm has spent itself, I wonder how it could have had me sailing so close to Christian shores, after a lifetime of fishing in their waters yet untempted to land. The turning-point came this morning, on my way to a haircut, captured verbatim by my new voice-recorder in these words: “I think the joy in life comes from making the most of what you’ve got. So, possibly Eckhart is wrong.”
It was a delightful moment. Free again! Free to obey the inner impulse, not sit at the feet of a teacher. But then, sometimes the inner impulse does take you to such feet. In different circumstances (born to different parents, say) I might have woken up one morning and yielded to a youthful impulse to fight for a cause, not waste my life kicking a ball around with other deadbeats in this mean street that offers no hope. And then, before I came to my senses, if I ever got the chance to before being shot like a mad dog, I’d be masked in black & threatening America with my blood-thirst; knowing that many who remained carefully silent would applaud my stand, even if millions of others wished nothing more than to crush me underfoot like a cockroach. A Faustian contract: to trade one’s human misgivings for the sense of mighty power and divine destiny.
Enthusiasm: possession by a god, supernatural inspiration, prophetic or poetic frenzy; an occasion or manifestation of these: obsolete. Oxford English Dictionary.
“Make the most of what you’ve got!” That’s what drives me to tap out something on this keyboard. To craft some words for the sake of it; to say the thing that expresses my sincerity and uniqueness. Never mind sermons, never mind pious aspirations. Just to use the gift, spend the talent. Yes, spend, for talent originally meant a sum of money, and only acquired its present meaning through a parable of Jesus as related in Matthew 25:14-30. Let me assure you my talent, if any, is in pedantry, not preaching—whilst getting a passing buzz from dishing out the biblical quotes, just as socialites might get a buzz from celebrity name-dropping.
And what it comes down to, me changing my mind like this, is sometimes feeling old and sometimes feeling young. Perhaps it’s one of those times in life, hesitating at the cusp, as in puberty or menopause; or in my case, old age, if such an outcome cannot be avoided. The human animal is full of quirks, and don’t imagine we can transcend them through haughty monasticism that talks of “higher things”. I shall revert to a habitual suspicion of any idea which comes from the thinking brain when divorced from biological rootedness, this inescapable physicality. The senses speak, the body responds to what the day brings. I rejoice. Today, anyhow.
I went for my haircut, I felt good & felt that I looked good, before and after equally (better before actually, but it will grow). It won’t always be so. The barber’s newspaper, The Sun, that rag of Rupert Murdoch, showed a photo of Paul Gascoigne, a mere 47, footballer and media darling of yesteryear, being rescued from the street with a bag of booze, in a state of terminal haggardness and drunken collapse, and why? There but for the grace of God go I—yes we still need God, surely it’s madness to be an atheist, for I can claim no credit for anything in my life. It’s all grace, my success in avoiding ending up as a jihadi fighter or a famous Newcastle United footballer. But I can make the most of what I’ve got. Which, I suddenly realize, in this piece tapped out extempore & without editing*, is exactly what that parable of the talents says.
And now, before I deny it thrice and the cock crows, I have to admit that I’ve written a sermon after all. Whereas, my original intention this morning was to try and write something to accompany the picture alongside, cropped from a photo I took the day I published a post called “Stairway to Heaven”. I decided the title this time should be “Stepping on Air”, before having any thought of the content. How to link the writing to the picture and title? Ok, here goes.
Stepping on air: a new-minted expression referring to the human ability to feel good supported on something which has no physical substance: a memory, reminder or mere symbol of wellbeing. The sense of pride or feeling that one looks good, with scant objective basis; or that one is loved, “if only” by God; the confidence that everything is OK; the placebo. Stepping on air: an idea that explains so much (not just religion). Stepping on air: a skill some learn and no one can rely upon unconditionally. Radical!
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* “tapped out extempore & without editing”—written before some very light editing (Ed.)
15 Comments:
William Blake: Jacob's Dream
http://www.blakearchive.org/exist/blake/archive/object.xq?objectid=but438.1.wc.01&vg=biblicalwc&vcontext=biblicalwc&landing=object&titles=&java=no&mode=vcopy
Thanks, as always.
What a beautiful post to end disinterest & bless good heart & sweet content!
Here's to your talent of love & a world we hope someday will be full of it...
Ellie, thanks for the link. Jacob's dream of a ladder to heaven has had so many interpretations---illustrations and purported "real meanings"---that I'm glad I did not think of Genesis Chap. 28 at all, but just saw a pretty fire-escape as a fresh symbol. Having said that, I do like Blake's idea of a spiral staircase instead of a ladder; I think before they had ever been envisaged as open-air stairways
Cindy, thanks. I felt very pleased to write it so rapidly & find little need to tinker with it afterwards.
In fact the world surely is full of love already. But sometimes there is a trick of the light, where we see the grim shadow without seeing the thing which obscured the light and caused it.
I don't know whether I can express, with any acceptable degree of clarity, the promptings that arose whilst reading your latest post. In the seventh paragraph you say, "The senses speak, the body responds to what the day brings." It seems to me that your suspicion that any idea that is divorced from biological rootedness is well-founded. To separate the thinking and/or the feeling functions from the senses is tantamount to splitting the ego-personality in twain, from which little if anything that is good can arise. The hatred of the body may well be one of the extreme outcomes of that divorce.
Beyond that, there seems to be something else that is alluded to in your script and that is the experience of the here and now. Most of our lives are spent in the past, either directly or by association. Every object around us has a past, where it came from, what is its use, how it is used and so on. Only the child, and perhaps the child within all of us, is truly comfortable with the here and now, divorced from the experiences of the past, and concerns about the future. It is perhaps the sense of peace in the eternal present that is so attractive and compelling.
As I said, I cannot offer comment with any acceptable (to me) degree of clarity, but for a while something has opened in front of me, an acknowledgement of the Now perhaps.
Have you read Karen Armstrong's "Spiral Staircase: My Climb out of Darkness"?
Notice in Blake's picture that there is travel both up and down, and that folks offer gifts to one another.
Traveling in a spiral facilitates moving in multiple directions. We get back to where we were but we have been changed.
Tom, the degree of clarity of your comment is very acceptable to me, and I thank you for it!
But I may understand you by analogy to my own response to your recent posts, where I have equally been unable to verbalize the promptings arising. I think I might paraphrase them at a distance, though; the sense of a parallel path, which I may have mentioned before, in which inchoate experience is translated into personal expression arising from our different life-journeys so far---and our Now experiences being as distinct as Now experiences always are, whilst touching a common ground of existence.
So you write about the gender of God, where that kind of God has always been hearsay to me and the only God I can grasp is utterly unknowable, but constantly available to receive thanksgiving and petition. Clearly your question comes from somewhere known to yourself, and passes me by.
With the female Presence of the Morning, vs the presence of the Evening, I feel a little closer, but again by analogy, mainly from the observation that night thoughts (e.g. brooding in the small hours) are capable of arousing anxieties which evaporate like dew in morning consciousness. Which has little to do with what you say in your piece, but a lot do do with why I often hold my peace when reading your fascinating posts.
Ellie, your comment arrived whilst I was replying to Tom. I've ordered The Spiral Staircase from the library, & await it eagerly. Especially as her book about the Bible, mentioned in response to Larry's post, is so brilliantly written. (And it's available cheap from Amazon too)
And especially also because I much enjoyed another book about an escapee nun: I Leap Over the Wall, by Monica Baldwin, from an earlier generation. I found it in a secondhand shop many years ago, with this cover.
One of the reasons I enjoy reading your posts is that I never sense opposition, but as you describe it, parallel paths - which may well reach the same goal - whatever they may be revealed to be. They are always thought-provoking.
You seem to be a very uncertain, nay, unwilling follower of any 'almighty' with your words, yet, those same words belie an inner battle of cultural will against emotional belief and awareness.
Tried to write something less telegrammatic, but my ipad porgramme froze up.
Your brief telegram is admirably clear, and I don't disagree, but they are your words ZACL. You may be right but I see it differently. Uncertainty is not inner battle in my case because I'm content that the question is asked and not answered, or answered differently, day to day. We are candles in the wind, so it's our nature to flicker, until we are blown out. In any case there is inner shelter from the storm, and the theological questions are merely the quest for a framework of understanding, and sometimes a little need for guidance.
And one good reason for confidently denying that inner battle lies in a book I got yesterday from Healthy Planet, a mysterious charity which gives books away free, though I always donate, without knowing who benefits. (A poster in the shop talked about protecting red kites, which have completely overrun the Chilterns since being reintroduced 20 years ago, I suspect at the expense of other species.)
The book is The Last Temptation, by Nikos Kazantzakis. Now there's someone beset by an inner battle between flesh and spirit! He projects it on to the character of Jesus, who in his depiction is constantly pulled different ways by God and Satan, and much in between. As in the film of the book, but more so.
In a follow up to our recent interchange here, I came across a quote from Fr. Richard Rohr's daily meditations in which the following appeared:
Khalil Gibran......wrote in The Prophet:
Say not, “I have found the one true path of the Spirit!”
Say rather, “I have met the Spirit walking on my path.”
For the Spirit walks on all paths.
I thought I could get away with responding "Yep!" to this, Tom, but that wouldn't cover your earlier remark as well. Thank you for both.
K & I are accustomed to saying "To hell with Kahlil Gibran", but that's when we disobey his injunction, "Drink not from the same cup", for it's something we sometimes literally do. So it's a pleasure to say that Gibran was right, and mean it.
Ellie, I finished Karen Armstrong's memoir today: The Spiral Staircase. It was gripping and I'm glad for your prompt. It gives a lot to think about.
I reread the last portion of he book with the same uneasiness I felt before.
Karen Armstrong seem to get so close to saying yes to the experience of God that is so fascinating to her. She approaches but leaves us doubting that she is capable of making the leap. "Yet we do have glimpses of transcendence, even though no two experiences of the divine are the same. All traditions insist that the sacred is not merely something 'out there' but also immanent in our world." She escapes to what other people say.
If she has 'glimpses of transcendence', if she experiences the 'sacred value of all human beings, even our enemies', she has a relationship with God. If she pulls back from that to view God as only and object for study in order to understand how others describe him, she is short-changing herself. I'd rather explore what I can do with my computer however inadequate my skills, than leave it in the box and read the manual.
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