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40 things

#39 — Destroying Frescoes of Happiness

Friday 29 March 2013

The tendency to spread evil beyond oneself

In 1715, officials transferred Rembrandt van Rijn’s The Night Watch from its location at the Kloveniersdoelen, which served as rehearsal grounds for local militia, to the Amsterdam Town Hall. These officials wanted to place the painting between two columns.

The problem was, it wouldn’t fit. So they did the obvious. They trimmed it.

17th century copy with indication of the areas cut down in 1715. || Image from Wikimedia

Such a cavalier attitude toward art is completely unthinkable today. Modern cultures value historical works of art and go to great lengths to protect and preserve them.

Taliban destruction of Buddhas of Bamiyan || Image from Wikimedia

When the Taliban dynamited the Buddhas of Bamiyan in March 2001, the world decried the destruction of art of such historic value — an artifact of the world cultural heritage. Prior to the destruction, a delegation offered something of a ransom for the statues, offering to pay the Taliban not to destroy them.

I am horrified at these acts of destruction, but how often do I commit worse acts with my words? Weil writes,

The tendency to spread evil beyond oneself: I still have it! Beings and things are not sacred enough to me. May I never suely anything even though I be utterly transformed into mud. To sully nothing, even in thought. Even in my worse moments I would not destroy a Greek statue or a fresco by Giotto. Why anything else then? Why, for example, a moment in the life of a human being who could have been happy for that moment? (49)

Cutting someone down with a comment or a gesture is infinitely easier and quicker dynamiting statues or trimming canvases, and what I’m cutting when I do that — a soul — is vastly more precious than even the most beautiful creation of humanity. Why am I so willing to do this while I’d never think of destroying this or that painting, this or that sculpture? Perhaps it has to do with the ease and the lack of immediately visible consequence. An injured soul reveals itself only in the eyes, in the tone of voice, in a slumped posture, and it can skillfully hide the injuries behind a mask.

#38 — Imagination and Void

Thursday 28 March 2013

Parched

Parched by BenedictFrancis

The imagination is continually at work filling up all the fissures through which grace might pass (62).

Augustine famously said of God in his Confessions, “You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are rest-less till they find their rest in you.” Others have simply reformulated this as the “God-shaped hole,” the “terrifying bottomless abyss opening up inside us which we would do anything to fill” (Source). Yet perhaps Weil’s vision is a little more apt: it’s not a single hole, but a series of fissures that permeate our whole existence. That goes a long way in explaining why we’re so apt at blocking the various graces that we experience on a daily basis. We’re like kids with buckets of mud after an earthquake, trying to seal this crack, that fissure with something completely inadequate.

As alluded to earlier, Father Robert Barron rightly compares the substitutes with which we fill these holes to addictions. The analogy couldn’t be more apt. Addictions control us; we react without thinking through our conditioned addictions, and that false consistency — always “knowing” how to respond — gives us some sort of emotional comfort that accompanies the physical or psychological “comfort” that most addictions provide. And yet it is our addictions that close us off from so many positives in the world. Indeed, addiction in its severest form can become our world, at which point I suppose we’re living our whole life in a small little crack through which grace could enter.

#37 — Void and Evil

Wednesday 27 March 2013

The world must be regarded as containing something of a void in order that it may have need of God. That presupposes evil (56).

The problem of evil for many is the single most convincing argument for an atheistic stance. Dr. Peter Kreeft, of Boston College, writes, “The problem of evil is the most serious problem in the world. It is also the one serious objection to the existence of God.” He continues,

More people have abandoned their faith because of the problem of evil than for any other reason. It is certainly the greatest test of faith, the greatest temptation to unbelief. And it’s not just an intellectual objection. We feel it. We live it.

Standford’s Encyclopedia of Philosophy summarizes it thus:

  1. If God exists, then God is omnipotent, omniscient, and morally perfect.
  2. If God is omnipotent, then God has the power to eliminate all evil.
  3. If God is omniscient, then God knows when evil exists.
  4. If God is morally perfect, then God has the desire to eliminate all evil.
  5. Evil exists.
  6. If evil exists and God exists, then either God doesn’t have the power to eliminate all evil, or doesn’t know when evil exists, or doesn’t have the desire to eliminate all evil.
  7. Therefore, God doesn’t exist.

The problem of evil has a mirror image, though I didn’t see it for many years. For many years, I encountered only the standard responses about the limits of human knowledge and “the best of all possible worlds” argument. Then there are the theodicies, which all reduce down to the proposition that freedom of will necessitates the option to do evil. But the flip side of the problem of evil is the problem of good: if things are the result of atheistic chance, why is there beauty, and relatively speaking, so much of it? Indeed, humans seem obsessed with the creation of beauty, though we don’t always agree with the definition of “beauty” — especially in the case of modern art.

Thus, in a sense, Weil’s words constitute a kind of theodicy in miniature. Evil has often been described as a void, as a privation of good — and thus, having no real existence. It’s the absence of good. That does little to explain why a loving God wouldn’t do something about the evil that seems to suffuse the world, but it does reframe the issue in a way that puts evil in the proper relation to good: a void.

#36 — Elevation and Abasement

Tuesday 26 March 2013

It’s a great paradox of Christianity, and though it has its roots in Heraclitus, it echoes throughout the history of Christianity (and other religions).

Elevation and abasement. A woman looking at herself in a mirror and adorning herself does not feel the shame of reducing the self, that infinite being which surveys all things, to a small space. In the same way every time we raise the ego (the social ego, the psychological ego, etc.) as high as we raise it, we degrade ourselves to an infinite degree by confining ourselves to being more than that. When the ego is abased (unless energy tends to raise it by desire), we know we are not that.

A beautiful woman who looks at her reflection in the mirror can very well believe that she is that. An ugly woman knows that she is not that (79).

T. S. Eliot, in Four Quartets, phrases it, “The way up is the way down.”

I sometimes wonder if that is what Krishna meant-
Among other things – or one way of putting the same thing:
That the future is a faded song, a Royal Rose or a lavender spray
Of wistful regret for those who are not yet here to regret,
Pressed between yellow leaves of a book that has never been opened.
And the way up is the way down, the way forward is the way back.

He similarly begins one poem in the quartet with the line “In my beginning is my end” only to end the poem with its reversal, “In my end is my beginning.”

Arthur Bennet phrases it still differently:

Let me learn by paradox that the way down is the way up, that to be low is to be high,
that the broken heart is the healed heart,
that the contrite spirit is the rejoicing spirit,
that the repenting soul is the victorious soul,
that to have nothing is to possess all,
that to bear the cross is to wear the crown, that to give is to receive,
that the valley is the place of vision.

Of course, it all has its roots in the Gospels. John 3:30 sums up the proper relationship succinctly: “He must increase, but I must decrease.” Yet it’s not just in this one short passage that we see this paradox that the way down is the way up.

Amen, I say to you, that you, who have followed me, in the regeneration, when the Son of man shall sit on the seat of his majesty, you also shall sit on twelve seats judging the twelve tribes of Israel. And every one that hath left house, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands for my name’s sake, shall receive an hundredfold, and shall possess life everlasting. And many that are first, shall be last: and the last shall be first. (Matthew 19:28-30)

In case we didn’t quite get it, there’s a repetition a few verses later: “So shall the last be first, and the first last” (Matthew 20:16). And in Mark, we read a negative re-statement: “Rather, whoever wishes to be great among you will be your servant; whoever wishes to be first among you will be the slave of all” (10:43, 44).

Yet what is appealing about this? Why do almost all religions include a sense that the way to true greatness for humanity is abasement? Perhaps it’s because it’s one of the hardest things to do as a human.

#35 — Beauty and the Soul

Monday 25 March 2013

Beauty captivates the flesh in order to obtain permission to pass right to the soul.

At the very core, all forms of beauty are the same. A lovely painting, the smile of a child, a moving piece of music, an animal in motion, gripping poetry, a bright orange sunset, fluid dance, and all other forms of beauty act upon the human heart similarly. Even in the most fleeting beauty, there’s a sense of timelessness and eternity. That paradox explains why we simultaneously assume the beauty is eternal and feel a pang of remorse from the nagging sense that it can’t possibly last.

My daily experiences with the beauty of my children are an incarnation of that paradox. They seem always to be changing, and the beauty of that moment is always so short as they learn more, master more, question more.

#34 — Chance and Meeting

Saturday 23 March 2013

“We want everything that has value to be eternal.”

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“Now everything that has a value is the product of a meeting, lasts throughout this meeting, and ceases when those things which  met are separated.”

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“That is the central idea of Buddhism (the thought of Heraclitus). It leads straight to God.”

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“Meditation on the chance which led to the meeting of my father and mother is even more salutary than meditation on death.”

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“Is there a single thing in me of which the origin is not to be found in that meeting? Only God. And yet again, my thought of God had its origin in that meeting.”

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And looking at our children, I have to think it was more than chance that led to my and Kinga’s meeting, but doesn’t every parent think that?

#33 — Is and Is Not

Friday 22 March 2013

If God is, then everything else is not, writes Weil:

If we find fullness of joy in the thought that God is, we must find the same fullness in the knowledge that we ourselves are not, for it is the same thought. And this knowledge is extended to your sensibility only through suffering and death (84).

If God is, then everything else — including our suffering and death — is not. It’s a paradox of monotheism in general and Christianity in particular: when we speak of “God being,” we’re not using the verb “to be” in the same sense we do when speaking of our everyday reality. God’s “is” is not the “is” of the book that “is on my table.” God’s “is” is the “is” — the ground of every other “is,” and perhaps more appropriate written “Is.” Thomas Halik, explaining Meister Eckhart’s thought, expresses it thus:

He is “nothing” in a world of beings, because God is not a being among beings. And Eckhart goes on to declare that you must become “nothing” if you wish to encounter him. If you want to be “something” (that is, mean something, have something, know something, in short, be fixated on individual beings and the world of things), then you are not free to encounter Him (Night of the Confessor, 22).

God’s “is” can only be thought to be “nothing” in terms of our “is” because His is outside ours, the grounding of ours, the “Is.” Thus God gives Moses the name, “I Am.”

#31 — Monstrous Trinity

Wednesday 20 March 2013

Money, mechanization, algebra. The three monsters of contemporary society.

I was never really all that comfortable with math. One would think, given the turn my theological predilections in my mid-twenties, that I would eventually have changed my mind on the topic. Not so. Math and I simply don’t get along.

Conceptually, it’s very appealing: no gray, all black and white. No maybes in math — unless there’s uncertainty in abstract math, which I can paradoxically both imagine and not imagine. The suggestion that it could be a monster of contemporary society strikes me as perhaps the first (coming 95% into the book) and only joke in the entire work. That it comes so late and stands alone as the sole example of humor makes me think perhaps she wasn’t joking.

One could argue that there is a clear line between the three in contemporary society: complex math leads to greater mechanization, which leads to a greater divide between the human producer and the money produced. That’s a very Marxist filter, though, and I’m not sure Weil would approve: she became increasingly critical of Marx as she entered her thirties.

And quite frankly, as I was last night, I’m too tired to think more of it. Oh for the end of Lent and 40 things…

#30 — Transposition

Tuesday 19 March 2013

Weil on transposition:

We believe we are rising because, while keeping the same base inclinations (for instance: the desire to triumph over others), we have given them a noble object. We should, on the contrary, rise by attaching noble inclinations to lowly objects.

My thoughts — bed…

(Yet another cheat…)

#29 — Divided Intents

Monday 18 March 2013

I’m certain that somewhere, in all the notebooks she kept, Simone Weil wrote something applicable to today, something that I could pair with the pictures of the Boy and the Girl playing on the kitchen floor, the Girl pretending to teach E how to bake.

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Perhaps she wrote something about the importance of play, the relationship of siblings, or something equally profound. She does seem only to write about profundity in the journal excerpts collected in Gravity and Grace. With a title like that, though, one could hardly expect much frivolity. And considering her biography, it’s hardly surprising.

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Still, it would have been convenient to look at the topical index and find “Play” instead of just topics like “Evil” and “Illusions” and “Self-Effacement.” How can I find any suitable quote from such topics to go along with the day’s pictures?

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Perhaps if she’d had kids…

#28 — Chance and Good

Saturday 16 March 2013

Beauty is the harmony of chance and the good.

The element of chance in our lives would probably overwhelm us if we knew its extent. A decision not to go with a newly-founded school’s students on a field trip to the Baltic might lead to a chance invitation to a bar where one meets a new friend. A chance meeting of one’s student with the friend’s neighbor might get you both invited to an eventual wedding, where one suddenly discovers that the friend is really someone more wonderful than one imagined.

And from that string of chance — or is it more? — comes good. And so beauty.

A chance walk on an uncommonly warm February day might lead to a meeting that leads to a dear friend.

#27 — Monotony of Evil

Friday 15 March 2013

Monotony comes in many forms.

Monotony of evil: never anything new, everything about it is equivalent. Never anything real, everything about it is imaginary.

It is because of this monotony that quantity plays so great a part. A host of women (Don Juan) or of men (Celimene), etc. One is condemned to false infinity. That is hell itself.

This is becoming one of those forms.

#26 — Eternity

Thursday 14 March 2013

Stars and blossoming fruit trees: Utter permanence and extreme fragility give an equal sense of eternity.

How can utter fragility provide a sense of eternity? I’ve sat and thought about that for a while, and it seems one of those things that I understand intuitively but am unable to put into words. The fact that it could pass out of existence at any moment fixes it firmly to that moment, but eternity doesn’t seem to be about moments — it appears to be the opposite, in fact. Yet the usual way of thinking of eternity is to imagine it as infinite moments, one after another, in a never-beginning, never-ending line. Indeed, a line in the strictest geometrical definition. That’s the paradox of eternity: it’s every moment in a never-ending moment.

It is a succession of spring blossoms under an unchanging blanket of constellations.

#25 — Conditioned Choices

Wednesday 13 March 2013

Man is a slave in so far as, between action and its effect, between effort and the finished work, there is the interference of alien wills.

Dear Terrence,

I’ve heard that a reputation is permanent, that once you teach people how to treat you — and we do teach others how to treat us — people will always treat you that way. Once people come to expect behavior x from you, they will always expect behavior x.

In my own educational experience, this certainly rang true. I had a good reputation; I was trusted among my teachers; I made sure I rarely got in trouble. As a consequence, I could easily ask to go to the restroom and roam the halls for a little if I so chose. And every now and then, I did so choose. When confronted by a teacher, I could simply make up a quick convincing story and move on. No one ever asked me for a pass because no one ever suspected I was up to no good, even when I was. My reputation saved me, and I used that to my advantage — especially during my senior year in high school, when my best friend and I sneaked off campus almost every day during lunch.

You, though, have the opposite problem. Even when you’re trying to do the right thing, you’ve taught most everyone — teachers and administrators — to doubt your sincerity, to suspect you’re up to no good. Quite frankly, you often were at the beginning of the year.

So now you find yourself in this dilemma: you’re at risk of receiving an administrative referral for something that, even if you did it, probably doesn’t really deserve that level of action, especially if, as you say, one more referral will get you expelled. But because of your reputation, there’s little you can say or do to talk your way into a less serious consequence.

You planted seeds that are now beginning to sprout even though you’re trying to prevent it. But the seeds are there; your reputation is set. No matter what you do, you’ll receive the short end because you’ve lost the trust of those around you. In fact, those seeds — your reputation — have taken such firm root that a teacher could lie about some encounter with you, could say you cursed her and walked away with a huff, and even if it’s all a fabrication, the administration would believe the teacher. Why? Because it sounds like something you would do. Let’s be frank: it sounds like something you’ve already done, several times.

So what can you do about it? The truth, at this stage in the school year, at this stage in your middle school career, is simple: not a whole lot. If you kick a dog every time you walk into the room, pretty soon that dog will get up and leave the room every time you enter; if you habitually deal with your frustrations in negative, disruptive, destructive ways, those around you will come to expect that from every counter, and their support for you walk get up and walk out with the hypothetical dog.

All that being said, there is some good news: you’ll be going to high school next year. (Let’s be honest: having already failed one grade, you’re not at risk of being retained even if you fail every single subject, which you currently are.) At high school, you get to start over. You get the great academic reset. All counters are returned to zero. Your reputation is a blank canvas upon which people will begin to paint their expectations of your behavior as you begin to teach them what to expect. In other words, you have a chance to start over and put it all behind you.

I hope at the very least you take that opportunity seriously.

Concerned as always,
Your Teacher in Room 302

#24 — Time and Incarnation

Tuesday 12 March 2013

There is always a relationship with time to be taken into account. We must get rid of the illusion of possessing time. We must become incarnate.

The desire to possess time and the realization that it’s an utter impossibility is one of the marks of the transition to adulthood we all go through. It was a troubling time for me, as it is for most, because it means, on some level, the relinquishing of the idea of eternal youth. Perhaps that’s what the acceptance of one’s on mortality is about in some way.

It’s just this desire to possess time that Adam Duritz sings about in “A Long December,” a song that haunted me as I thought about things past that would never return.

And it’s been a long December and there’s reason to believe
Maybe this year will be better than the last
I can’t remember all the times I tried to tell myself
To hold on to these moments as they pass

We can’t hold on to these or any other moments, and the continual effort to do so would only be a sign that we’re not maturing, emotionally or spiritually.

#23 — Creation

Monday 11 March 2013

Creation: good broken up into pieces and scattered throughout evil.

Some days, I hate my job. That’s nothing new, I guess, but some days, working with over a hundred eighth-graders and dealing with all their hormone-driven nonsense, feeling that the evil — for lack of a better term, though it is hyperbolic — vastly outweighs the good, pondering whether teaching is not “good broken up into pieces and scattered throughout evil,” I want to stand up and say something like this:

I don’t care. I don’t care who called you a name. I don’t care who’s tapping a pencil and bothering you. I don’t care if you left your pencil in your last class. I don’t care if you didn’t have a pencil to begin with. I don’t care if you think last night’s baseball game was great. I don’t care if you’ve lost your book. I don’t care if you like someone. I don’t care if someone teased you about your haircut. I don’t care if you forgot to do your homework. I don’t care if you left your book at home. I don’t care if you don’t like someone. I don’t care if someone beside you passed gas. I don’t care who’s spreading rumors about you. I don’t care if the person seated behind you is tapping your desk with her foot. I don’t care if someone told you shut up. I don’t care if you’ll forget what you were going to say if you don’t say it now, to someone seated on the other side of the room. I don’t care if someone made a comment about your shoes. I don’t care if someone threatened to pour milk on your head. I don’t care if you wanted to talk to him. I don’t care if you don’t want to work with him or with her. I don’t care if someone made a joke about your grades. I don’t care if you needed some attention and so continually cut up in class. I don’t care if someone threw your book in the garbage on the way out. I don’t care about any of your childish, kindergarten problems.

All of these statements have been true. Sometimes many of them have been true at the same moment; at other times, only a handful. Usually, the moment passes and I remember that I do care. Of course, some of these things are so trivial that my concern matches their triviality, but I think you’re still too young to understand that fully. Still, the moment most of them become true most of the time or, heaven forbid, all of them are true all of the time will be the moment I realize I must leave teaching.

I thought for a moment this afternoon that that was the case.

#21 — Filling and Creating Emptiness

Friday 8 March 2013

To harm a person is to receive something from him. […] We have gained in importance. We have expanded. We have filled an emptiness by creating one in somebody else (50).

Perhaps the best example of filling an emptiness by creating one in another is bullying. Working at a middle school, I’m witness to many major and minor instances of bullying on a daily basis, and it seems to be getting only worse. Statisticians tell us that’s definitely the case, but even if they weren’t providing empirical evidence, I get enough anecdotal evidence daily to make a strong case.

As a teacher, I find I have to walk a thin line. On the one hand, we’ve seen the headlines of recent years, this or that tragic suicide traced back to prolonged bullying, actions that have created situations in which some people feel suicide is the only alternative. Bullying, then, is literally a deadly serious, and as the authority figure in the room or hallways, I have a responsibility to put an end to it when I encounter it. Yet most bullying today is not like the bullying I occasionally encountered. Today’s bullying, ban and large, is verbal. Indeed, there is a whole category of bullying that could be only mental: cyber bullying. In other words, a lot of bullying is of the type “Sticks and stones will break my bones but words will never hurt me.” Yet the truth is, words do hurt. Still, we need resilient, self-assured kids who can take care of themselves and who know how to avoid internalizing the stupid little comments they hear and will hear, in one form or another, throughout life, so I don’t want to help kids become dependent on me — or anyone else — to swoop in and save the day every single time says something mean and bullying.

And so when I do encounter something that I judge to be relatively minor but still behavior that could be considered “bullying,” I try to strike a balance. I deal with the individual who said the hateful words, but I spend more time talking to the person to whom he or she directed the words. (That was a long way to get around saying “victim.” It was a conscious choice.) I tell her that there are individuals who only feel good about themselves when making others feel bad. To quote Weil, these individuals have “gained in importance,” but only in their own mind.

#20 — Evil as Remedy

Thursday 7 March 2013

We must accept the evil done to us as a remedy for that which we have done.

“That’s not fair!”

As a teacher who works with fourteen-year-olds — that strange beast that has a hyperactive, hyper-sensitive notion of justice and fairness — I hear those words all the time. Yet to be honest, we all react that way at some point or another, and sometimes it really isn’t fair.

Yet more often than we’d like to think, we’ve probably been on the dealing end of injustice (or its petty cousin unfairness). Weil suggests that we must accept one as payment for the other.

Injustice as justice — the ultimate paradox.

#19 — Refusal

Wednesday 6 March 2013

Weil writes,

God gave me being in order that I should give it back to him. It is like one of those traps whereby the characters are tested in fairy stories and tales of initiation. If I accept this gift, it is bad and fatal; its virtue becomes apparent through my refusal of it. God allows me to exist outside himself. It is for me to refuse this authorization.

It’s not something I pretend to understand. Even with a conversion to Catholicism and resulting reading and studying, the whole reason for a deity to create anything confuses me. If God is perfect, why create anything? What does that provide a perfect being that said being doesn’t already possess?