I find that the denial of suffering is a denial of reality itself. Of the four noble truths "Life is suffering" has always seemed like the most salient, the most incisive, and frankly most obvious of the truths to meditate on. It seems perfectly clear, as Seneca put it "Life in its entirety is lamentable." This doesn't require some act of faith or ascent to certain doctrinal views, it's merely a brute fact of life as we experience it. And yet, we see the modern project's goal is quite literally the denial of reality itself. And of course this suits the machine because it's what helps sell you more stuff. We see among all the noble spiritual traditions of the world an effort to confront these brute realities, but when existing within the anesthetizing opium of modern middle-class life we are able to push this suffering elsewhere until we start seriously believing that suffering isn't part of the deal of existence.
So sure, it's not our children losing limbs in sweatshops anymore, but it's the Vietnamese and Chinese who are working 15 hour shifts in overcrowded unventilated factories that pay the price for our $15 t-shirt. The modern West's great lie of progress is predicated on the fact that it is no longer we who suffer, but rather, the rest of the world. Global capitalism has successfully enabled us to export our suffering and ecological waste overseas! We tremble at Christ's words "In this life you will face trials" because we have lost the faith in his promise to "Be of good cheer, for I have overcome the world."
Eduardo- It is as if there is a law of the conservation of suffering. The industrial economy requires people to sacrifice themselves to the machine. If not here, then it will be cheaper somewhere else. In this one becomes part of the procedure, the algorithm. A cog in the machine. It is literally dehumanizing. Years ago when I first hear the term "wage slave" it seemed to be a contradiction in terms. But it isn't. No one who had a different option would choose to work on an assembly line day after day.
And we in the West who supposedly benefit from this arrangement, has it made us happier? Now that we no longer "need" one another for aid and for survival--the system provides-- we are increasingly alone and isolated. As to what the alternative is that is harder to say.
Thank you for your comment. Beautifully expressed, as usual.
One particularly ugly way I see this play out in the lives of many of my loved one here in the US is that when they do (inevitably) experience pain, sorrow and disappointment in life, there's an underlying sense of shame or self-condemnation. It's as if once we've bought into the idea that we don't have to suffer, suffering is experienced as a sort of personal failure, rather than simply a universal human experience. The effect is further suffering, coupled with a sense of isolation, rather than a sense of solidarity with the rest of (suffering) humanity. Talk about a recipe for misery!
Mark- This is an important point. The autonomous self is supposed to "have it all together" and suffering is a sign of our failure and weakness. Our suffering must be hidden. But if it is a failure, it is a failure of compassion--literally to "suffer with" or perhaps a bit more broadly, "to undergo together". Suffering is unavoidable, but the mistake is to think we must suffer alone. Which I am as prone to do as anyone.
Yet in my own times of suffering, when I did reach out to others I found something quite different happened. There was a healing that went deeper than the suffering, even though the pain experienced often remained (at least, for a time). There is in this a communion--being one together. A taste of the Trinitarian nature of reality, perhaps.
The loss of community and communion with others in suffering is a tremendous one. I take hope in what you all are doing at Metanoia. I look forward to your future posts. Perhaps more of us can begin to follow suit.
Thank you for your comment. I hope all is well with you. -Jack
Yes, well said! I've experienced this as true, as well - suffering shared (com-passion) brings us into love and healing, and when we hold the pain alone it tends to further narrow us and constrict our souls.
I once heard an Orthodox teacher mention that we are all saved together (I think it was a reference to the mystical body of Christ), but we are only damned alone. It's interesting to think how this dynamic applies equally to both love and suffering - when shared, we become more whole, human and holy.
Thank you for your words of support, and your insight. I, and we, are well, deo gratias!
Jenny- Thank you for pointing me to this. It is exactly what I needed to hear. I prayed Lectio Divina with this passage this morning. It may even make an appearance in the post I am currently working on. I hope you are well. -Jack
Andrew- I have to wonder whether enough of our individual consciences remain to leave us troubled by all this. I think of Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment. His intention was to "leap over morality" and become a kind of proto-superman, like Napoleon and murder the old woman pawnbroker. Yet ever after he does so he is never at rest and is consumed by his deed. Even though he could get away with it he eventually turns himself in.
There may be some slender bit of hope if our consciences have not completely atrophied. -Jack
I am unable to practice the Arsenios Option for various reasons, but the search for stillness anywhere is helpful and instructive. I just came back from a walk in the woods with my son. It was beautiful and still, with blue winter shadows and water trickling under frozen streams. But my son chuckled at me a few times as we made our way back, as it was evident to him I had not been paying attention and was quite lost about what path we were on—this, despite having been on those paths many times, and with the sun high in the sky as my compass. What was I thinking about? Some distraction or other. Meanwhile he, with his little brain, navigated like a nimble squirrel.
It is for good reason that monasteries are often out in pristine nature. Living mostly in artificially constructed environments diminishes us. This disconnection makes us anxious. A walk in the woods is often the best remedy. Sometimes when I can't sleep, after five or ten minutes under the stars I fall back asleep without much trouble. We are alienating ourselves even from our alienation. Nature is one path of remembrance.
I very much enjoyed your latest post. As a lover a learning, but never a fan of school, it resonates. Developing alternatives is essential.
“We are alienating ourselves even from our alienation.”
That’s a good one, and so true. Almost the first step to recovering, for many, is to retreat from the distractions of life, and to feel, in a very raw sense (mentally and bodily), how dislocated one is. When this step is delayed too long, the pain and suffering underlying it will eventually erupt or become symptomatic.
I think this is where society itself is headed—deepening alienation and isolation, and then some kind of unhealthy eruption. We see fits and spurts of this everywhere (internet, campuses, politics, families), but the wound is not done festering.
At least the path of suffering, as you noted, can be a path of love, so there is always hope. Many good people will emerge from the mess to come.
I think the elite fear of an "unhealthy eruption" is one of the many reasons there seems to be the push to see humans as a "hackable animal". The motives aren't benevolent. Why might they want to "hack" us?
The art of suffering, if pursued, may offer one at least the ability to opt out of the hedonic calculus of control and manipulation. That is the hope anyway. In this one can be free and at its best free from hate and resentment that can only have ugly consequences for everyone. Love is the only path that allows us to remain human in all this.
“I think the elite fear of an ‘unhealthy eruption’…”
I’m guessing they both fear it and want it. They fear it for the reason you mentioned, but they want it because chaos in society helps loosen historical or normative ways of life, so that they can swoop in to rescue us.
This is a troubling thought though it rings true. There is a sense of continual cultural provocation. When anyone resists and responds effectively they get labeled fanatics, or even terrorists. It is a double bind. If any unhealthy eruption comes, the official response--perhaps a clampdown--can be justified by saying, "see we told you they were dangerous".
Jan 23, 2023·edited Jan 25, 2023Liked by Jack Leahy
"The soul has to make a choice, and the outcome will either break it into pieces or enable it to sail to it's destination in God. And the choice comes down to this: will the soul accept or reject suffering?"
F_S- This is a beautiful quote. I am pondering at the moment how this not only plays out in our own inner lives but also in the trajectory of modern civilization. I think the choice is the same. Are we capable of seeing this let alone making the difficult choice? I am not an optimist. But nonetheless, each of us in our hearts can make the difficult choice and live it out as best as we are given.
And regarding footnote 5: 'Tragedy is the inevitable consequence of adherence to any ideal.' (the verbal emphasis was on 'any').
I wish I could find the author of this quote, from a philosopher on a BBC TV programme many years ago. But even unattributed, it holds true. There is no ideology that is correct in all circumstances. Ideologies are not truth. Truth is beyond words and is known by its fruit, as shown in your quote from John. (This is why we speak of 'method' and not 'technique' in Tao when we speak of the Way.) The ideology of the avoidance of all suffering and difficulty, in which the Machine schools us, inexorably leads to greater, bone deep suffering. Lacking a common framework to suffer difficulty together, such as communal pilgrimage or fasting, Moderns are cut off from a deep source of sustenance, a truth my Muslim neighbours experience every year when the entire Ummah observes Ramadan.
Caroline- To be a follower of the Way, in the broadest sense, is to seek and live the unfathomable, inexpressible truth beyond all contractions of human ideology. Even if, in some sense, we still use such contractions. We shouldn't be used by them--though we often are. As I noted in other comments compassion is to "suffer with" or to "undergo together" such as, as you note, in fasting and pilgrimage.
The Machine is the absence of compassion where we lean on the system and its ideology to bear us up rather than each other. It is well said to see how this only increases our suffering that we could bear together to a "bone-deep" suffering done in isolation. No technique will return us to the Way. The more we try the further away it gets, and yet the Way is always right here now. But we can practice the art of suffering and suffering fruitfully with one another. In loving one another Love will abide in us which allows us to love one another. This, I think, is the only Way.
Jack, you are hand-in-hand with the other substackers -- Peter and Paul. Good food for us readers!
I share a quote from my dear George MacDonald:
"No words can express how much the world owes to sorrow. Most of the Psalms were born in the wilderness. Most of the Epistles were written in a prison. The greatest thoughts of the greatest thinkers have all passed through fire. The greatest poets have "learned in suffering what they taught in song." In bonds Bunyan lived the allegory that he afterwards wrote, and we may thank Bedford Jail for the Pilgrim's Progress. Take comfort, afflicted Christian! When God is about to make pre-eminent use of a person, He puts them in the fire."
Since we are talking of fire I will repost the lines from Eliot I shunted off to the footnotes. The choice Eliot gives is not whether we will consumed by fire, but which fire. Or perhaps for what purpose do we suffer?
I've heard a theologian once say that there's only one fire, and that is Divine Love. Resist it fully, and you experience it as the tormenting fires of hell. Both open to it partially and resist it partially, you experience it as the fire of purification (purgatory). Open/align oneself fully to the fire, and you experience it as the light of heaven.
Clara- It is interesting. I purposefully did not read Paul's or Peter's subtacks until I had finished my own. And then we all say similar things. I really wrestled with this one (though I often do) and it wasn't what I set out to write. But there is an odd logic playing itself out that many of us are trying to fathom. The dark outline of which is easy to both dismiss it as kookery or become anxious and overly zealous.
The work for all of us, I think, is to try to see it soberly and carefully. In this it is easy to miss the mark. Miss by an inch, miss by a mile.
Thank you for the MacDonald quote. It hits the mark. As for being put in the fire, I will add the related story from the desert fathers:
Abba Lot went to Abba Joseph and said to him, “Abba, as far as I can I say my little office, I fast a little, I pray and meditate, I live in peace and as far as I can, I purify my thoughts. What else can I do?” Then the old man stood up and stretched his hands towards heaven. His fingers became like ten lamps of fire and he said to him, “If you will, you can become all flame.”
It will be interesting to see where this all goes. -Jack
Thank you for this conversation! In my limited understanding of Christian history it certainly appears that the saints are more abundant in eras of persecution and hardship - it seems the fire of conscious suffering, with love, purifies the soul. I see echoes of this in this beautiful quote from George MacDonald. Thank you all.
Mark- There is a sense that we are entering--have entered--into such a time. I have begun listening to the podcast of your latest posts. I listen while I do my morning exercise, so I am only part way through. But the topic of loving one's enemies is particularly crucial for us now, though it is perennial. Thank you for helping me clarify my thoughts. My investigation of the thought of Rene Girard resonates with what you are saying. Particularly in our tendency to create scapegoats. -Jack
And I should have included Mark from Metanoia of Vermont whose latest looks to be related also, though I haven't read it yet. Maybe Jack could change to John or Bartholomew even? Then the list would sound quite biblical!
Jan 14, 2023·edited Jan 14, 2023Liked by Jack Leahy
Great essay, thanks!
I just happen to be reading the last work of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (which was called "Citadelle" but translated into English as "The Wisdom of the Sands"), which is a sort of quasi-Nietzschean treatise or monologue, told by a fictional desert ruler and mostly about what it takes to create and grow solidly rooted people and thus solidly rooted communites.
This little piece will give you the vibe:
"If something opposes you and hurts you, let it grow; for this means that you are taking root, engendering a new self, and welcome are these pangs if they enable you to bring yourself to birth. For no truth is proved, no truth achieved, by argument, and the ready-made truths men offer you are mere conveniences or drugs to make you sleep.
Thus if you ask me, “Should I rouse that man or let him sleep on and be happy?” I would answer that happiness signifies nothing to me. “Yet,” I would add, “if an Aurora Borealis kindled in the skies, would you let your friend sleep on? Surely none should sleep when such a wonder may greet his eyes. True, that friend of yours is enjoying his sleep, nay, wallowing in it; yet you would be kinder to wrench him from his happy torpor and hale him outdoors, so that he may become."
CP- Thank you for this quote. I have been reflecting on it this morning. Particularly, "the ready-made truths men offer you are mere conveniences or drugs to make you sleep." The drug of ideology eventually wears off unless we continually increase our dose and become fanatics. Something we see going on all around us.
Solidly rooted communities are the antidote to the false drug of ideology. Our technology allows us to have things entirely our own way, but the cost is increasing isolation. I think of Sebastian Junger's little book, Tribes. Basically his idea we are made to heal from trauma. The real problem for combat soldiers, for example, who experience trauma is that upon returning home, they find only isolation. Those who return to the fullness of love in community do much better.
Not only do you and I seem to be on the same wavelength, but I think this book I mentioned (written during WW2, obviously another time of immense upheaval where all meaning became unmoored) is also hitting some very apt nails on the head. (I really just love writing that deals with the eternal and heavenly and mostly ignores the ephemeral and human.)
I mentioned it was quasi-Nietzschean but it also has a real Old Testament vibe.
Will leave you with this:
"And for the first time I perceived that the whole greatness of prayer lies in the fact that no answer is vouchsafed it, and into this exchange there enters none of the ugliness of vulgar commerce. And that the lesson of prayer is a lesson of silence; and love begins there only where no return may be expected. Thus love is, primarily, the practice of prayer, and prayer the practice of silence.
"For God is the supreme meaning behind men’s language, and your words take meaning only when they show you God. If a little child’s tears move you, they are windows opening on the vastness of the sea; for not those tears only, but the whole world’s tears, are quickening your compassion, and that child is but one who takes you by the hand and shows you the sorrows of mankind.
“Nothing is lacking but that divine knot which holds things together—and then all is lacking.”
This is a beautiful thought provoking essay. I am all ways late on New Year’s resolutions, and I don’t even really think of them as such, but I’m going to bookmark this as a bit of inspiration for when it feels right to consider what the “theme” of this year is.
Siochana- When and if that theme becomes apparent feel free to share it should that seem good to you. Often I don't see the theme for a year until the year is long over.
Jan 16, 2023·edited Jan 16, 2023Liked by Jack Leahy
Thank you for the many thought-provoking points you make!
What l do believe, though, is that l am part of nature, or should l say Nature. And l am a part of Nature that is developing some self awareness - enought to, like a toddler, believe that l know it all and that if l throw a hissy fit or tantrum, l will get my way. Hence suffering. Hence the concept of suffering.
But. We're doing well, l think. All these mistakes and cock ups are part of Nature becoming more and more aware of herself, more and more conscious. And to that end, how can anything be a mistake? I do believe that we're part of the expanding universe, we are agents of expansion. Tools, in so many meanings of the word...insensitive, destructive nutjobs, perhaps, but we still help life unfold in every possible direction - destructive at times, constructive at others.
P.S
When l say Nature, l do mean both the physical aspect of nature but also Spirit, God or whatever Divine fuse it is that drives us forth...
Anna- This reminds me somewhat of a quote from The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius:
All fortune is good fortune; for it either rewards, disciplines, amends, or punishes, and so is either useful or just.
and, famously, St. Julian of Norwich:
All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.
To which one could add, all shall be well--all *is* well--not *despite *that which rewards, disciplines, amends, or punishes...but precisely *because* of it.
Thank you for your thoughts. It is worth meditating on it further. -Jack
I'm thinking along the lines of humans being a link between Nature and nature. Buiding blocks made from dust; carbon, oxygen, iron, helium created life forms that have become animated and self aware. Reaching up from the swamps towards the stars. Pure spirit fill and animate souls incarnated in lumbering lumps of clay until we have transformed these crude building blocks themselves into light. And meanwhile, as we transform ourselves, we inform Nature, our Father and Mother, about what it is like to watch a sunset. Fall in love. Get drunk and experience a hangover. Feeling lost and a long way from home. What the colour blue feels like. Etc. Stuff Nature has no clue about. I believe the information goes in both directions, see? And as we suffer and rejoyce we enrich the universe.
I find that the denial of suffering is a denial of reality itself. Of the four noble truths "Life is suffering" has always seemed like the most salient, the most incisive, and frankly most obvious of the truths to meditate on. It seems perfectly clear, as Seneca put it "Life in its entirety is lamentable." This doesn't require some act of faith or ascent to certain doctrinal views, it's merely a brute fact of life as we experience it. And yet, we see the modern project's goal is quite literally the denial of reality itself. And of course this suits the machine because it's what helps sell you more stuff. We see among all the noble spiritual traditions of the world an effort to confront these brute realities, but when existing within the anesthetizing opium of modern middle-class life we are able to push this suffering elsewhere until we start seriously believing that suffering isn't part of the deal of existence.
So sure, it's not our children losing limbs in sweatshops anymore, but it's the Vietnamese and Chinese who are working 15 hour shifts in overcrowded unventilated factories that pay the price for our $15 t-shirt. The modern West's great lie of progress is predicated on the fact that it is no longer we who suffer, but rather, the rest of the world. Global capitalism has successfully enabled us to export our suffering and ecological waste overseas! We tremble at Christ's words "In this life you will face trials" because we have lost the faith in his promise to "Be of good cheer, for I have overcome the world."
Eduardo- It is as if there is a law of the conservation of suffering. The industrial economy requires people to sacrifice themselves to the machine. If not here, then it will be cheaper somewhere else. In this one becomes part of the procedure, the algorithm. A cog in the machine. It is literally dehumanizing. Years ago when I first hear the term "wage slave" it seemed to be a contradiction in terms. But it isn't. No one who had a different option would choose to work on an assembly line day after day.
And we in the West who supposedly benefit from this arrangement, has it made us happier? Now that we no longer "need" one another for aid and for survival--the system provides-- we are increasingly alone and isolated. As to what the alternative is that is harder to say.
Thank you for your comment. Beautifully expressed, as usual.
-Jack
One particularly ugly way I see this play out in the lives of many of my loved one here in the US is that when they do (inevitably) experience pain, sorrow and disappointment in life, there's an underlying sense of shame or self-condemnation. It's as if once we've bought into the idea that we don't have to suffer, suffering is experienced as a sort of personal failure, rather than simply a universal human experience. The effect is further suffering, coupled with a sense of isolation, rather than a sense of solidarity with the rest of (suffering) humanity. Talk about a recipe for misery!
Mark- This is an important point. The autonomous self is supposed to "have it all together" and suffering is a sign of our failure and weakness. Our suffering must be hidden. But if it is a failure, it is a failure of compassion--literally to "suffer with" or perhaps a bit more broadly, "to undergo together". Suffering is unavoidable, but the mistake is to think we must suffer alone. Which I am as prone to do as anyone.
Yet in my own times of suffering, when I did reach out to others I found something quite different happened. There was a healing that went deeper than the suffering, even though the pain experienced often remained (at least, for a time). There is in this a communion--being one together. A taste of the Trinitarian nature of reality, perhaps.
The loss of community and communion with others in suffering is a tremendous one. I take hope in what you all are doing at Metanoia. I look forward to your future posts. Perhaps more of us can begin to follow suit.
Thank you for your comment. I hope all is well with you. -Jack
Yes, well said! I've experienced this as true, as well - suffering shared (com-passion) brings us into love and healing, and when we hold the pain alone it tends to further narrow us and constrict our souls.
I once heard an Orthodox teacher mention that we are all saved together (I think it was a reference to the mystical body of Christ), but we are only damned alone. It's interesting to think how this dynamic applies equally to both love and suffering - when shared, we become more whole, human and holy.
Thank you for your words of support, and your insight. I, and we, are well, deo gratias!
It's the narrow gate philippians 4: 11-13.
Jenny- Thank you for pointing me to this. It is exactly what I needed to hear. I prayed Lectio Divina with this passage this morning. It may even make an appearance in the post I am currently working on. I hope you are well. -Jack
That last paragraph is the inconvenient truth that most of the liberal west would rather you didn't point out.
They recycle, they eat "green", they consume "green", they drive their electric cars and in doing so consider themselves virtuous.
Out of sight, out of mind.
Andrew- I have to wonder whether enough of our individual consciences remain to leave us troubled by all this. I think of Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment. His intention was to "leap over morality" and become a kind of proto-superman, like Napoleon and murder the old woman pawnbroker. Yet ever after he does so he is never at rest and is consumed by his deed. Even though he could get away with it he eventually turns himself in.
There may be some slender bit of hope if our consciences have not completely atrophied. -Jack
I am unable to practice the Arsenios Option for various reasons, but the search for stillness anywhere is helpful and instructive. I just came back from a walk in the woods with my son. It was beautiful and still, with blue winter shadows and water trickling under frozen streams. But my son chuckled at me a few times as we made our way back, as it was evident to him I had not been paying attention and was quite lost about what path we were on—this, despite having been on those paths many times, and with the sun high in the sky as my compass. What was I thinking about? Some distraction or other. Meanwhile he, with his little brain, navigated like a nimble squirrel.
Peter-
It is for good reason that monasteries are often out in pristine nature. Living mostly in artificially constructed environments diminishes us. This disconnection makes us anxious. A walk in the woods is often the best remedy. Sometimes when I can't sleep, after five or ten minutes under the stars I fall back asleep without much trouble. We are alienating ourselves even from our alienation. Nature is one path of remembrance.
I very much enjoyed your latest post. As a lover a learning, but never a fan of school, it resonates. Developing alternatives is essential.
I hope all is well. -Jack
“We are alienating ourselves even from our alienation.”
That’s a good one, and so true. Almost the first step to recovering, for many, is to retreat from the distractions of life, and to feel, in a very raw sense (mentally and bodily), how dislocated one is. When this step is delayed too long, the pain and suffering underlying it will eventually erupt or become symptomatic.
I think this is where society itself is headed—deepening alienation and isolation, and then some kind of unhealthy eruption. We see fits and spurts of this everywhere (internet, campuses, politics, families), but the wound is not done festering.
At least the path of suffering, as you noted, can be a path of love, so there is always hope. Many good people will emerge from the mess to come.
I think the elite fear of an "unhealthy eruption" is one of the many reasons there seems to be the push to see humans as a "hackable animal". The motives aren't benevolent. Why might they want to "hack" us?
The art of suffering, if pursued, may offer one at least the ability to opt out of the hedonic calculus of control and manipulation. That is the hope anyway. In this one can be free and at its best free from hate and resentment that can only have ugly consequences for everyone. Love is the only path that allows us to remain human in all this.
-Jack
“I think the elite fear of an ‘unhealthy eruption’…”
I’m guessing they both fear it and want it. They fear it for the reason you mentioned, but they want it because chaos in society helps loosen historical or normative ways of life, so that they can swoop in to rescue us.
This is a troubling thought though it rings true. There is a sense of continual cultural provocation. When anyone resists and responds effectively they get labeled fanatics, or even terrorists. It is a double bind. If any unhealthy eruption comes, the official response--perhaps a clampdown--can be justified by saying, "see we told you they were dangerous".
"The soul has to make a choice, and the outcome will either break it into pieces or enable it to sail to it's destination in God. And the choice comes down to this: will the soul accept or reject suffering?"
- Archimandrite Aimilianos of blessed memory
F_S- This is a beautiful quote. I am pondering at the moment how this not only plays out in our own inner lives but also in the trajectory of modern civilization. I think the choice is the same. Are we capable of seeing this let alone making the difficult choice? I am not an optimist. But nonetheless, each of us in our hearts can make the difficult choice and live it out as best as we are given.
Thank you for the quote. -Jack
Excellent. Thank you.
And regarding footnote 5: 'Tragedy is the inevitable consequence of adherence to any ideal.' (the verbal emphasis was on 'any').
I wish I could find the author of this quote, from a philosopher on a BBC TV programme many years ago. But even unattributed, it holds true. There is no ideology that is correct in all circumstances. Ideologies are not truth. Truth is beyond words and is known by its fruit, as shown in your quote from John. (This is why we speak of 'method' and not 'technique' in Tao when we speak of the Way.) The ideology of the avoidance of all suffering and difficulty, in which the Machine schools us, inexorably leads to greater, bone deep suffering. Lacking a common framework to suffer difficulty together, such as communal pilgrimage or fasting, Moderns are cut off from a deep source of sustenance, a truth my Muslim neighbours experience every year when the entire Ummah observes Ramadan.
Caroline- To be a follower of the Way, in the broadest sense, is to seek and live the unfathomable, inexpressible truth beyond all contractions of human ideology. Even if, in some sense, we still use such contractions. We shouldn't be used by them--though we often are. As I noted in other comments compassion is to "suffer with" or to "undergo together" such as, as you note, in fasting and pilgrimage.
The Machine is the absence of compassion where we lean on the system and its ideology to bear us up rather than each other. It is well said to see how this only increases our suffering that we could bear together to a "bone-deep" suffering done in isolation. No technique will return us to the Way. The more we try the further away it gets, and yet the Way is always right here now. But we can practice the art of suffering and suffering fruitfully with one another. In loving one another Love will abide in us which allows us to love one another. This, I think, is the only Way.
Thank you for your comment. -Jack
Jack, you are hand-in-hand with the other substackers -- Peter and Paul. Good food for us readers!
I share a quote from my dear George MacDonald:
"No words can express how much the world owes to sorrow. Most of the Psalms were born in the wilderness. Most of the Epistles were written in a prison. The greatest thoughts of the greatest thinkers have all passed through fire. The greatest poets have "learned in suffering what they taught in song." In bonds Bunyan lived the allegory that he afterwards wrote, and we may thank Bedford Jail for the Pilgrim's Progress. Take comfort, afflicted Christian! When God is about to make pre-eminent use of a person, He puts them in the fire."
Since we are talking of fire I will repost the lines from Eliot I shunted off to the footnotes. The choice Eliot gives is not whether we will consumed by fire, but which fire. Or perhaps for what purpose do we suffer?
The dove descending breaks the air
With flame of incandescent terror
If which the tongues declare
The one discharge from sin and error
The only hope, or else despair
Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre
To be redeemed from fire by fire.
Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamilar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.
We only live, only suspire
Consumed by either fire or fire.
Little Gidding. The Four Quartets.
I've heard a theologian once say that there's only one fire, and that is Divine Love. Resist it fully, and you experience it as the tormenting fires of hell. Both open to it partially and resist it partially, you experience it as the fire of purification (purgatory). Open/align oneself fully to the fire, and you experience it as the light of heaven.
I think that is the best way to read Eliot's lines.
Clara- It is interesting. I purposefully did not read Paul's or Peter's subtacks until I had finished my own. And then we all say similar things. I really wrestled with this one (though I often do) and it wasn't what I set out to write. But there is an odd logic playing itself out that many of us are trying to fathom. The dark outline of which is easy to both dismiss it as kookery or become anxious and overly zealous.
The work for all of us, I think, is to try to see it soberly and carefully. In this it is easy to miss the mark. Miss by an inch, miss by a mile.
Thank you for the MacDonald quote. It hits the mark. As for being put in the fire, I will add the related story from the desert fathers:
Abba Lot went to Abba Joseph and said to him, “Abba, as far as I can I say my little office, I fast a little, I pray and meditate, I live in peace and as far as I can, I purify my thoughts. What else can I do?” Then the old man stood up and stretched his hands towards heaven. His fingers became like ten lamps of fire and he said to him, “If you will, you can become all flame.”
It will be interesting to see where this all goes. -Jack
Hello Jack, Clara, Peter,
Thank you for this conversation! In my limited understanding of Christian history it certainly appears that the saints are more abundant in eras of persecution and hardship - it seems the fire of conscious suffering, with love, purifies the soul. I see echoes of this in this beautiful quote from George MacDonald. Thank you all.
Mark- There is a sense that we are entering--have entered--into such a time. I have begun listening to the podcast of your latest posts. I listen while I do my morning exercise, so I am only part way through. But the topic of loving one's enemies is particularly crucial for us now, though it is perennial. Thank you for helping me clarify my thoughts. My investigation of the thought of Rene Girard resonates with what you are saying. Particularly in our tendency to create scapegoats. -Jack
Good food indeed! We are wonderfully well nourished, of that there is little doubt.
Who is the Peter you reference? I’m guessing the Paul is Kingsnorth.
And I should have included Mark from Metanoia of Vermont whose latest looks to be related also, though I haven't read it yet. Maybe Jack could change to John or Bartholomew even? Then the list would sound quite biblical!
My given name is John. Though I've always been called Jack.
Peter, Paul, Mark, and John. There it is. Maybe the fragment of Christendom that has made these names so popular for so long is re-kindling?
And I am going to start listening to Mark's podcast of his latest post today. The topic is, I think, an essential one.
Yes, Paul = Paul Kingsnorth.
Peter writes Pilgrims in the Machine. https://peterofbasilea.substack.com/
This is helping me cope with cancer and chemo. Thank you for writing.
I am praying for you.
Be well. -Jack
Great essay, thanks!
I just happen to be reading the last work of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (which was called "Citadelle" but translated into English as "The Wisdom of the Sands"), which is a sort of quasi-Nietzschean treatise or monologue, told by a fictional desert ruler and mostly about what it takes to create and grow solidly rooted people and thus solidly rooted communites.
This little piece will give you the vibe:
"If something opposes you and hurts you, let it grow; for this means that you are taking root, engendering a new self, and welcome are these pangs if they enable you to bring yourself to birth. For no truth is proved, no truth achieved, by argument, and the ready-made truths men offer you are mere conveniences or drugs to make you sleep.
Thus if you ask me, “Should I rouse that man or let him sleep on and be happy?” I would answer that happiness signifies nothing to me. “Yet,” I would add, “if an Aurora Borealis kindled in the skies, would you let your friend sleep on? Surely none should sleep when such a wonder may greet his eyes. True, that friend of yours is enjoying his sleep, nay, wallowing in it; yet you would be kinder to wrench him from his happy torpor and hale him outdoors, so that he may become."
CP- Thank you for this quote. I have been reflecting on it this morning. Particularly, "the ready-made truths men offer you are mere conveniences or drugs to make you sleep." The drug of ideology eventually wears off unless we continually increase our dose and become fanatics. Something we see going on all around us.
Solidly rooted communities are the antidote to the false drug of ideology. Our technology allows us to have things entirely our own way, but the cost is increasing isolation. I think of Sebastian Junger's little book, Tribes. Basically his idea we are made to heal from trauma. The real problem for combat soldiers, for example, who experience trauma is that upon returning home, they find only isolation. Those who return to the fullness of love in community do much better.
Thank you again for your comment. -Jack
Thanks right back to you!
Not only do you and I seem to be on the same wavelength, but I think this book I mentioned (written during WW2, obviously another time of immense upheaval where all meaning became unmoored) is also hitting some very apt nails on the head. (I really just love writing that deals with the eternal and heavenly and mostly ignores the ephemeral and human.)
I mentioned it was quasi-Nietzschean but it also has a real Old Testament vibe.
Will leave you with this:
"And for the first time I perceived that the whole greatness of prayer lies in the fact that no answer is vouchsafed it, and into this exchange there enters none of the ugliness of vulgar commerce. And that the lesson of prayer is a lesson of silence; and love begins there only where no return may be expected. Thus love is, primarily, the practice of prayer, and prayer the practice of silence.
"For God is the supreme meaning behind men’s language, and your words take meaning only when they show you God. If a little child’s tears move you, they are windows opening on the vastness of the sea; for not those tears only, but the whole world’s tears, are quickening your compassion, and that child is but one who takes you by the hand and shows you the sorrows of mankind.
“Nothing is lacking but that divine knot which holds things together—and then all is lacking.”
Cheers!
That is really good. Thank you again.
have a great day!
Wonderful quotes CP, I need to sit and ponder on those, most definitely.
This is a beautiful thought provoking essay. I am all ways late on New Year’s resolutions, and I don’t even really think of them as such, but I’m going to bookmark this as a bit of inspiration for when it feels right to consider what the “theme” of this year is.
Siochana- When and if that theme becomes apparent feel free to share it should that seem good to you. Often I don't see the theme for a year until the year is long over.
I hope you are well. -Jack
Thank you for the many thought-provoking points you make!
What l do believe, though, is that l am part of nature, or should l say Nature. And l am a part of Nature that is developing some self awareness - enought to, like a toddler, believe that l know it all and that if l throw a hissy fit or tantrum, l will get my way. Hence suffering. Hence the concept of suffering.
But. We're doing well, l think. All these mistakes and cock ups are part of Nature becoming more and more aware of herself, more and more conscious. And to that end, how can anything be a mistake? I do believe that we're part of the expanding universe, we are agents of expansion. Tools, in so many meanings of the word...insensitive, destructive nutjobs, perhaps, but we still help life unfold in every possible direction - destructive at times, constructive at others.
P.S
When l say Nature, l do mean both the physical aspect of nature but also Spirit, God or whatever Divine fuse it is that drives us forth...
Anna- This reminds me somewhat of a quote from The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius:
All fortune is good fortune; for it either rewards, disciplines, amends, or punishes, and so is either useful or just.
and, famously, St. Julian of Norwich:
All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.
To which one could add, all shall be well--all *is* well--not *despite *that which rewards, disciplines, amends, or punishes...but precisely *because* of it.
Thank you for your thoughts. It is worth meditating on it further. -Jack
I'm thinking along the lines of humans being a link between Nature and nature. Buiding blocks made from dust; carbon, oxygen, iron, helium created life forms that have become animated and self aware. Reaching up from the swamps towards the stars. Pure spirit fill and animate souls incarnated in lumbering lumps of clay until we have transformed these crude building blocks themselves into light. And meanwhile, as we transform ourselves, we inform Nature, our Father and Mother, about what it is like to watch a sunset. Fall in love. Get drunk and experience a hangover. Feeling lost and a long way from home. What the colour blue feels like. Etc. Stuff Nature has no clue about. I believe the information goes in both directions, see? And as we suffer and rejoyce we enrich the universe.
Thank you, Jack - love and suffering as two faces of the unified Way. Beautiful!