Christmas

A better Christmas than I could have dared to imagine, or hoped to have had.

For the will of God will never lead you where the grace of God cannot keep you.

Duino Elegies

The First Elegy
by Rainer Maria Rilke
__________________

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels' hierarchies?
and even if one of them pressed me suddenly against his heart:
I would be consumed in that overwhelming existence.
For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure,
and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.
Every angel is terrifying.
And so I hold myself back and swallow the call-note of my dark sobbing.
Ah, whom can we ever turn to in our need?
Not angels, not humans, and already the knowing animals are aware
that we are not really at home in our interpreted world.
Perhaps there remains for us some tree on a hillside, which every day we can take into our vision;
there remains for us yesterday's street and the loyalty of a habit so much at ease
when it stayed with us that it moved in and never left.
Oh and night: there is night, when a wind full of infinite space gnaws at our faces.
Whom would it not remain for—that longed-after, mildly disillusioning presence,
which the solitary heart so painfully meets.
Is it any less difficult for lovers?
But they keep on using each other to hide their own fate.
Don't you know yet?
Fling the emptiness out of your arms into the spaces we breathe;
perhaps the birds will feel the expanded air with more passionate flying.

Yes—the springtimes needed you.
Often a star was waiting for you to notice it.
A wave rolled toward you out of the distant past,
or as you walked under an open window, a violin yielded itself to your hearing.
All this was mission. But could you accomplish it?
Weren't you always distracted by expectation, as if every event announced a beloved?
(Where can you find a place to keep her, with all the huge strange thoughts inside you
going and coming and often staying all night.)
But when you feel longing, sing of women in love; for their famous passion is still not immortal.
Sing of women abandoned and desolate (you envy them, almost)
who could love so much more purely than those who were gratified.
Begin again and again the never-attainable praising; remember: the hero lives on;
even his downfall was merely a pretext for achieving his final birth.
But Nature, spent and exhausted, takes lovers back into herself,
as if there were not enough strength to create them a second time.
Have you imagined Gaspara Stampa intensely enough
so that any girl deserted by her beloved might be inspired by that fierce example of soaring,
objectless love and might say to herself, "Perhaps I can be like her?"
Shouldn't this most ancient of sufferings finally grow more fruitful for us?
Isn't it time that we lovingly freed ourselves from the beloved and,
quivering, endured: as the arrow endures the bowstring's tension,
so that gathered in the snap of release it can be more than itself.
For there is no place where we can remain.

...

Of course, it is strange to inhabit the earth no longer,
to give up customs one barely had time to learn,
not to see roses and other promising Things in terms of a human future;
no longer to be what one was in infinitely anxious hands;
to leave even one's own first name behind,
forgetting it as easily as a child abandons a broken toy.
Strange to no longer desire one's desires.
Strange to see meanings that clung together once, floating away in every direction.
And being dead is hard work and full of retrieval before one can gradually feel a trace of eternity.
Though the living are wrong to believe in the too-sharp distinctions which
they themselves have created.
Angels (they say) don't know whether it is the living they are moving among, or the dead.
The eternal torrent whirls all ages along in it, through both realms forever,
and their voices are drowned out in its thunderous roar.

The Serenity Prayer

by Reinhold Niebuhr
__________________

God, grant me the serenity
To accept the things I cannot change;
Courage to change the things I can;
And wisdom to know the difference.

Living one day at a time;
Enjoying one moment at a time;
Accepting hardships as the pathway to peace;
Taking, as He did, this sinful world
As it is, not as I would have it;
Trusting that He will make all things right
If I surrender to His Will;
That I may be reasonably happy in this life
And supremely happy with Him
Forever in the next.

Amen.
_______

"The darker the night, the brighter the stars.
The deeper the grief, the closer is God."

- Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Comfort

Comfort, comfort my people,
says your God.

Speak tenderly to Jerusalem,
and proclaim to her
that her hard service has been completed,
that her sin has been paid for,
that she has received from the Lord's hand
double for all her sins.

A voice of one calling:
"In the desert prepare
the way for the Lord;
make straight in the wilderness
a highway for our God.

Every valley shall be raised up,
every mountain and hill made low;
the rough ground shall become level,
the rugged places a plain.

And the glory of the Lord will be revealed,
and all mankind together will see it.
For the mouth of the Lord has spoken."

Who has measured the waters in the hollow of his hand,
or with the breadth of his hand marked off the heavens?
Who has held the dust of the earth in a basket,
or weighed the mountains on the scales
and the hills in a balance?

To whom, then, will you compare God?
What image will you compare him to?

Do you not know?
Have you not heard?
Has it not been told you from the beginning?
Have you not understood since the earth was founded?

"To whom will you compare me?
Or who is my equal?" says the Holy One.

Lift your eyes and look to the heavens:
Who created all these?
He who brings out the starry host one by one,
and calls them each by name.
Because of his great power and mighty strength,
not one of them is missing.

Do you not know?
Have you not heard?
The Lord is the everlasting God,
the Creator of the ends of the earth.
He will not grow tired or weary,
and his understanding no one can fathom.

He gives strength to the weary
and increases the power of the weak.

Even youths grow tired and weary,
and young men stumble and fall;
but those who hope in the Lord
will renew their strength.
They will soar on wings like eagles;
they will run and not grow weary,
they will walk and not be faint.
___________________
Isaiah 40

The comfort Christianity provides to the troubled modern man lies not only in the breathtaking promise of eternal life and perfect bliss for the believer at the end of time and all earthly things, but also in the rousing sensation of gratitude for the here and the now, through the poignant reminder that there exists a single reason for contentment that renders all other dissatisfactions hollow and worthless. In times of tribulation, agony and intense suffering, Christianity teaches us not to be sorrowful but to be grateful; this is the sudden astonishment of joy Christ bequeaths to his follower in his moment of misery.

Identity and Violence

In his book "Identity and Violence", Amartya Sen describes the dangers of identity-affiliation, arguing that the politics of global confrontation is the corollary of religious and cultural divisions in the world. He declares that "underlying this line of thinking is the odd presumption that the people of the world can be uniquely categorized according to some singular and overarching system of partitioning", and this false but commonly-held notion is in fact irreconcilable with the less discussed but much more plausible notion that we are "diversely different".

In a nutshell, Sen argues that we have "inescapably plural identities", and that the hope of harmony in the contemporary world lies to a great extent in a clearer understanding of the pluralities of human identity, and in the appreciation that they cut across each other and work against a sharp separation along one single hardened line of impenetrable division. This line of divisive identities, Sen concludes, tends to "crowd out...any consideration of other, less confrontational features of the people on the opposite side of the breach, including, among other things, their shared membership of the human race."

Sen's ideas about identity and violence are fascinating and uniquely paradigmatic, but I find it difficult to concur with the notion that the removal of classificatory priority that "[places] people firmly inside a unique set of rigid boxes" will lead to the end of the cultivated violence associated with identity conflicts. He makes reference to numerous examples of such conflicts, including the situations in Rwanda and the Congo, the aggressive Sudanese Islamic identity, and Israel and Palestine, all of which "continue to experience the fury of dichotomized identities ready to inflict hateful penalties on the other side".

Sen states, quite reasonably, that the same person can be, without any contradiction, "an Asian, an Indian citizen, a Bengali with Bangladeshi ancestry, an American or British resident, an economist...a strong believer in secularism and democracy, a man, a feminist, a heterosexual, a defender of gay and lesbian rights, with a non-religious lifestyle...", and any of these categories can influence and be used to describe this person. This list of characteristics seems to me to be manifestly carefully chosen. Central to what I think is flawed about Sen's argument is the presumption that religion is just another category that can "move and engage" a person, inasmuch as a shared occupation such as carpentry or a common interest such as fishing can. Religion is powerful and influential on the human psyche and on human life in a way that requires little elaboration, not least of all because it makes authoritative decisions in so many other classifications, or identity-affiliations, that a person may belong to. A deep believer in the Islamic, Christian or Buddhist doctrine, may naturally have to be classified in a huge number of other distinct categories apart from religion, by sheer virtue of his faith — as a vegetarian, a conservative, an anti-abortionist, an ardent opponent of euthanasia, the death penalty, stem cell research, in vitro fertilisation, homosexual marriage etc. All these are categorisations that ostensibly can have great import on a person's decisions, and significantly impact his life. Religion subsumes so many other classifications under its doctrinal wing, and it would be simplistic to treat it as merely another membership category.

Sen laments the "neglect of the plurality of our affiliations and of the need for choice and reasoning [that] obscures the world in which we live", arguing that "many of the conflicts and barbarities of the world are sustained through the illusion of a unique and choiceless identity". He emphasises the folly of imagining that we have little choice over our identities, labelling this a "conceptual disarray", and concludes that "the prospects of peace in the contemporary world may well lie in the recognition of the plurality of our affiliations and in the use of reasoning as common inhabitants of a wide world... What we need, above all, is a clear-headed understanding of the importance of the freedom that we can have in determining our priorities." Sen's statement makes compelling clear his secularist assumptions, and perhaps reveals also a lack of understanding about the forceful authority behind religion — the belief in an omnipotent God whose word it is a sin to disobey, and whose laws and commandments are the highest authorities and the most transcendent truths. The "freedom that we can have in determining our priorities" must be tempered by religious doctrine, and stilled if it conflicts with divine decree. Followers of faith, once they come to hold their belief, see conservative values as truth, not as choice. The "broad commonality of our shared humanity" must retreat with head bowed, as with all earthly things, once the divine will has been broached. To ask devotees to embrace the glorious "use of reasoning", and the freedom to disregard categories in which they believe the anointed single right answer has been authoritatively chosen by an entity higher than man, is in effect to require them to cast away their original faith in favour of a secularist ideology. Sen's description of the painful illusion of "choiceless singularity" when applied to the religious theme therefore approaches a contradiction in terms.

convalescence

People come and go like visiting doctors; they meet you with smiles, give you hope, feed you a dose of the best medicine, then leave you with advice. And a while later, you fall sick again.

Above All

Above all powers, above all kings
Above all nature and all created things
Above all wisdom
And all the ways of man
You were here
Before the world began.

Above all kingdoms, above all thrones
Above all wonders the world has ever known
Above all wealth
And treasures of the earth
There's no way to measure what You're worth.

Crucified, laid behind a stone
You lived to die, rejected and alone
Like a rose, trampled on the ground
You took the fall, and thought of me
Above all.
______________

Perhaps what strikes me so deeply and uniquely about this song is its last line — how one so mighty, and clearly above all earthly powers and kings, could take the fall for another so clearly unworthy, and consider him above all.

This is what sets God "above all". This is also how imperfect Man is made perfect by God alone.