We have arrived at the scene of a terrible, deadly accident. Whatever skills we have, we must immediately put them to use in any way we can to help those who are hurt. This isn’t a time when we think about examining the fine points of other people’s lives, criticizing their life choices, or their taste in clothes, or their religious affiliation; our hearts go out to them and we simply want to help them in any way we can.
Every time you speak to someone about spiritual things — about the things of God, if you want to say it more robustly — you’re right in the midst of such an accident, an accident of cosmic and historic proportions, unless you’re blessed to be with a saint, in which case, God help us, I hope you have the perspicacity to listen rather than speak. (A saint or a wild animal, perhaps I should say.) And consequently, any time you reach that tremendous, wakeful, tender place of the Spirit in dialogue with another person, it is time for your heart to open. Because they are wounded, desperately wounded, cast adrift, orphaned, lost.
How is this so? I am not speaking here of something as doctrinaire as the notion of “original sin.” I mean this: we are all in the situation of Black Elk as he describes the catastrophe of Wounded Knee:
I did not know then how much was ended. When I look back now from this high hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people’s dream died there. It was a beautiful dream. And I, to whom so great a vision was given in my youth,— you see me now a pitiful old man who has done nothing, for the nation’s hoop is broken and scattered. There is no center any longer, and the sacred tree is dead.
I am not one of those to accuse European peoples of being uniquely guilty of such historical sins; far from it. I want to recall a remark I once read, that the first nation colonized by the English was England.
What Black Elk describes above is the final physical manifestation of a long process, and that process is the destruction of the world of tradition in all its forms. This is what modernity is about. Modernity is about destroying spiritual vision and replacing it with nothing, with no “vision” in the spiritual sense at all. It is about destroying the house in which we lived — “we” meaning all the peoples of the earth — and replacing it with nothing, leaving us homeless.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Any sense of the world’s life — and of course by that I mean a resonance more to do with the Anima Mundi than with “biology” — has been taken from us. Those of us on the fringes comfort ourselves, desperately striking flint and tinder to the little fuel left that we’ve gleaned from the old stories, from written remembrance of the old ways, from the handful of God-drunk sages of our own time, from the liturgical riches that miraculously survive, from music, or from the spirits of the land and our ancestors, whom we can almost but not quite hear in our moments of greatest ecstasy or grief. Or we have given up on all forms because “the sacred tree is dead” and we have stripped ourselves down to the naked, wordless prayer of the heart that God will indeed arise, that His enemies will indeed be scattered, and that the tree of our spiritual crucifixion will be revealed as a new and living tree. Perhaps this is all that is left us.
But what an endeavor this is — it is an askesis that makes the physical askesis of the old hermits and desert dwellers seem slightly absurd.
The sacred tree is dead. The holy world has melted into air. The environing myth is mocked. And as a consequence, we are all of us unmoored and rudderless. And we are simply doing the best we can.
Any person who opens his heart to you on spiritual things is doing the best he can. He is, in essence, trying to build a world by himself. This is an impossible task, one that human beings were never meant to do. But the sacred tree is dead, and there is nothing else to be done.
I remember an image I saw from Gaza just before I decided that I could no longer bear a constant awareness of that war and stopped looking at any news and gave myself to prayer. I saw a father digging through the rubble of a building to find his young children. Utterly hopeless, of course — he didn’t have even a shovel, he had only his hands. There was no hope they were alive, and he couldn’t move the rubble anyway — but he dug, and groaned, and cried “Ya Allah!” I know there is abundant fakery that goes on in all war coverage, that a propaganda war is underway at all times — and I also know that what I saw was real. It was not staged.
The hopelessness of the task of building a living myth for ourselves to inhabit after modernity has set us all adrift on an ocean of absurdity and death is equally insurmountable. And every spiritual seeker you encounter is in some stage of grappling with that reality. Even if much time has passed — and I pray that some day, that bereaved father will once again be living a daily life that includes bread, olives, and whatever measure of joy may be possible for him — even if they don’t seem in anguish, they are mantled in the common anguish of mythically, religiously, spiritually, theologically disenfranchised mankind. They are doing their best here in this place that is no longer even really a place.
Therefore be kind.
Therefore listen with a loving heart.
Therefore before you tell them that they are wrong, or set out to rearrange their mental furniture, enquire: how are they building themselves a house in this wasteland? What star is guiding them over the trackless ocean? Where are their eyes and ears trained and straining to catch a glimpse of a distant shore, to catch a strain of the old music, to find a path, to open a hidden door, to work some magic?
If indeed you are a believer, can you feel God’s Presence in the midst of their impossible labor? Perhaps more: can you really feel it in your own?
If indeed you are a believer, how can you help them attend to that Presence? Perhaps more: can you really attend to it in your own?
This post was written without using AI.
The pain is overwhelming. What use is God to us when our prayers fall into silence as our children die?
I did not want to bury her.
Does the Father in heaven suffer His own Gethsemane? Always there is this notion of a distant Father in heaven, detached from His sons suffering. All that matters in so much of Christian thought is the satisfaction of the justice of God. As if He sits on the sidelines of His Son's great suffering, a great stern figure, immovable in His austerity, and gives a very masculine nod of approval. "Suck it up, Son. The work is almost done."
I don't think I could not break at the loss of a child either. If the Son is sympathetic in His suffering to our own, the Father also, surely, at the loss of His Son. He desires us all as His children. He sent His Son not to condemn but to liberate the world.