Life can be a bit like the 'underside' of a tapestry at times

“Immediately, something like scales fell from Saul’s eyes, and he could see again.” (Acts 9:18)

“Acquire the Spirit of peace. And thousands around you will be saved.” (Saint Seraphim of Sarov)

“Everything I love is born unceasingly/ Everything I love is always at the beginning.” (Odysseas Elytis)

“The impatient idealist says: ‘Give me a place to stand and I shall move the earth.’ But such a place does not exist. We all have to stand on the earth itself and go with her at her pace.” (Chinua Achebe)

“To know how much there is to know is the beginning of learning to live.” (Dorothy West)

“His gaze and yearning are way outside the loop. His pilgrimage has lots of holes in it. See him wandering alone Beaming to himself.” (Michael Leunig)

“In the dark one can sometimes see/ so much more clearly than in the day.” (David Brooks)

Hold fast onto your dreams

September 17, 2011

Christina Hotel, Bucharest, Romania

You tell me you want to see your name in one of my stories. I really don’t know why. Perhaps it is more of encouragement, that you like the few things I have read to you. I am not who you think I am. I am an ordinary man. I do write, yes, but more than likely what I scribble down will be lost or deleted, or at best dismissed of little or no value. So, okay, my dearest Alina, consider yourself amongst my lost and found. Hold fast onto your dreams and never betray the fairy tale in your heart which makes you hop, skip, and jump when you serve my breakfast in the morning. And remember, if you should ever happen to fall into quicksand the mistake is to panic and to fight it. The secret, they say, is to relax best you can and slowly waddle yourself out. Other times, you will know when, think of the jet pilots who must go full throttle when landing on the flight deck lest they miss the bands and drop into the water.

Then there are those heartrending times

Like magnets which point in opposite directions to push apart and repel for the field lines cannot join up, there are souls, too, which are incompatible. There are times when we seem to know it as if by intuition, like a parent might instinctively know when something is bothering their child. In other instances it could take longer. We might hurt a little for we have given something of our heart to the other, yet after some time has passed, we move on. We learn from the experience and take down ‘notes’. Then there are those other desolating times, when we have given, it would seem, all of our heart and spirit to the other [and sometimes this might be to an institution we have dedicated our lives to] and we find much to our shock and disbelief that when it really mattered, we were incompatible. There was no harmony. The one was not consistent with the other. This is when it gets very hard and moving on will not happen quickly as we might wish. Invariably, “the deepest wounds”, as the Greek philosopher and Eastern Orthodox theologian Christos Yannaras has said, are those of an “unfulfilled relationship”. But it also from here, from this high place which marks the wound, that we have the better view of the landscape which is still ahead.

Our own communities might reject us too

Organizations to a large extent help shape identity which makes individuals definable and recognizable. How much more faith-based institutions or similarly based workplaces with their overwhelming references to community and fidelity. We might be belittled and made to feel unwelcome, and whatever gifts we might possess, they are neither recognised nor acknowledged. We could consider that “it has all been such a dreadful waste”. Already in the grip of that horrible feeling of having the life sucked out of you, now left with nothing: an empty shell, you think. There is a marvellous title to one of Philip Roth’s books that describes this perfectly. The Humbling. Consider the first line: “He had lost his magic.” What to do when you have been made to feel you have lost your magic? Do not stop believing in your talents and capabilities. Ever. To do otherwise would be your adversary’s greatest victory, and your life’s most serious loss. You might often feel defeated, maybe even vanquished, but your mere presence is the sign that your “seed” is not yet done. There are the many lessons of this resilience in nature herself. Think of the lotus seed that slept in a dry lake bed in north eastern China for more than 1,000 years to sprout in our lifetime like its modern sibling. It resisted the drought. It waited. It is the plant which has come to symbolize rebirth.

The first thing is to accept this ‘time frame’

The first thing is to accept this ‘time frame’, that is, to understand that no amount of anguish or anger will make the hurting “go away” any quicker. It helps immeasurably for someone we trust, who has travelled in among those fields, to tell us to endure and that the suffering and pain we are feeling at the moment will decrease in intensity, that is the one certainty. You learn to carry it. To then become a wound which has healed and which only we ourselves can re-open. The potential for hurt will remain. Some fortunate few will be able to discard it once its purpose has been served. Like the larvae which shed their old skins. But if you accept this wound as a ‘pearl of wisdom’ for your soul, on that day when you are able to receive it as such, you need not see it as a wound but as a piece of history marked on your body, a period in your ‘book of life’. We write the story as we go. We might not be able to go back and delete the pages, but we can to a large extent determine how the next chapter is to be written and what goes into it. The German-born Swiss author and painter Hermann Hesse whose writings reveal a detailed search for identity and self-knowledge, has perfectly said [summarising the ancient philosophical lesson]: "Each man's life represents a road toward himself." So we not only discover ourselves by going on this great adventure, but we are at the same time participating in creation.

Some people are frightened by this actual possibility

Some people are frightened by this actual possibility. It is either too difficult to imagine or too great of a responsibility to accept. Sartre was wrong in this, that “hell is other people”. We need not be forever trapped in other people’s perceptions and judgements of who we are. Rather our neighbour might very well prove to be our salvation. The comprehension that our freedom can determine who we are or can be, should not be a source of anguish.  Rather it should be an acknowledgement to the reality of our potential [from the Latin potentia ‘power, might, or force’]. To be sure, we do not control the future, but we can go a long way to determine what we put into it. More often than not, it is this alone which makes the difference. And to a large degree determines the results of our providence. We find this disclosure in the earliest of our literatures, including in Homer’s two epic poems the Odyssey and the Iliad. Later generations find this same truth reiterated in Constantine Cavafy’s unforgettable Ithaka. It is the most famous of his designated “Homeric poems”:

“Ithaka gave you the marvellous journey/ Without her you would not have set out/ She has nothing left to give you now/ And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you/ Wise as you will have become, so full of experience/ you will have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.”

Life can be a bit like the ‘underside’ of a tapestry at times

https://www.heirloomtapestries.com/tree-of-life-tapestry-light.html

‘A tapestry is made by repeatedly weaving the horizontal (weft) threads over and under the vertical (warp) threads, then squishing (or tamping) those horizontal threads down so they are very close together, thus completely hiding the vertical threads from view.’

Tapestry is originally from Old French tapisserie, it means “to cover with heavy fabric, to carpet”. In the medieval period they were valued even more than painting, the more intricate were highly prized and sought after. Two of the most beautiful and incredibly intricate as examples of this now much underestimated art form are the 100m “Apocalypse Tapestry” (1377) and the mysterious suite of seven tapestries with the ‘AE’ monogram which comprise “Unicorn Tapestries” (1500). Even a tapestry of average quality can amaze us when we contemplate not only the intricately created image before us, but also astound us at both the patience and endurance of the creator. But pause for a moment and consider the back of this creation, that is, the “underside”. What might you find? It can appear to be a mass of contradictory and haphazard movements of thread. Overlapping and going in all manner of direction, it has very little of the cohesion and beauty of what you see on the ‘other side’. But that’s exactly what was required to create this astonishing impression in the first place. Life can be a bit like a tapestry at times. It might not always look good or appear to be going in the right directions, but it’s a splendid design in the making. For the community of believers the image of the Creator as the Potter comes to mind: “But now, O Lord, you are our Father; we are the clay, and you are our potter; we are all the work of your hand.” (Is. 64:8)

If we don’t let go of those darker dispositions

If we don’t let go of those darker dispositions, we can ourselves become that which has hurt us. That is, we can begin to associate too closely with our pain. Even to risk returning the same negativity that we receive, and so mirroring that very soul we were incompatible with in the first place. This is a form of transference. It remains one of the deepest flaws in the presentation of atheistic existentialism, to not see the other as a possibility for your restoration. Compare this against the teaching of Jesus Christ: “Love your neighbour as yourself” (Mk. 12:31). This concept of ‘self-love’, which is also vital in Buddhism, is “not be confused with narcissism or selfishness”, but as it has been expressed in the Udana of the Pali canon as an act of self-compassion which results in not hurting others; or as it has been elsewhere said, we are not punished for our anger, but by our anger. ‘Letting go’ makes us lighter. It makes it much easier for us to move, to not remain anchored in the wrong spaces. And to get on, with what Heidegger might say, our “unfinished business”.

We are always chasing that ‘elusive’ something

We are always chasing that ‘elusive’ something. And our obsessions or unreal expectations can lead us onto paths of self-destruction. This was one of the fundamental lessons behind what has been called “the great American novel”, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. Whether Captain Ahab was chasing after ‘god’ or he was simply ‘possessed’ by his own nightmares is not necessarily the point. The overriding message is that a ‘life purpose’ based on revenge or driven by pure animalistic instinct can only lead to destruction, not only for ourselves, but also for those who are “on board” with us. The history of nations, let alone those of individual examples, are replete with such ruinous conclusions.

“...all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it.” (Herman Melville)

Sometimes we can never wholly forget

Sometimes we can never wholly forget. This is only normal. We can grow to accept our history and be at peace with its providence. This comes with the knowledge our memories are here to stay. They will not be wiped away. We use them best we can, to become stronger and wiser in this test [Old French teste “an earthen vessel, especially a pot in which metals were tried”], as we plough on through, and deeper into the fields of life. I will sometimes catch myself thinking back to my ancestral home and to the days before my father died, when I was absent in New Zealand to miss him by a few hours. It is like Joyce who was desperate to leave Dublin but never could, Faulkner who mistakenly thought he could escape Lafayette County, or Sylvia Plath who would never break free from Winthrop. But we do not stay there, in those old neighbourhoods, for too long. We cannot, for invariably that would be to our own peril. There is also a lesson to be learnt from the Old Testament story of the wife of Lot who looked back to turn into a “pillar of salt” (Gen. 19:26). To be sure, we keep what is good from our old places, to then move on the best we can. For each one of us there is a time and place of restoration, this is where we come closer to our truest identity.  Sometimes it is in times and ways where we might least expect. The marks of pain like the signs of ageing on our body are what make us human. "Our days may come to seventy years, or eighty, if our strength endures; yet the best of them are but trouble and sorrow, for they quickly pass, and we fly away" (Ps. 90:10). The novelist Marie Bostwick has put it very well: “I don’t know what tomorrow will bring. None of us does. That’s why we get up and go on because, until forever comes, you can’t stay where you are.”

Degrees of distance diminishing and dissolving

In brass instruments the act of blowing by the instrument player makes the air in the tube vibrate and produce a sound. As the notes get higher and higher, they get closer and closer, for the air in the tube vibrates in smaller and smaller ‘packets’. Brother Raphael, who used to be  a lead trumpet player with a philharmonic “somewhere” [on account of their humility they never do tell you where], would explain such things to me as we would make the long trek down the mountain to the orchards. What he said in this instance made me think of the affection we share and experience in the company of our loved ones. The more time we spend with each other the closer we grow one into the other. Degrees of distance diminishing and dissolving. Individuality is not lost for each member is still master and remains in control of his or her own pitch and timbre. This proximity is what creates context and permits us to explore the dynamics of relationships. The French chemist Michel-Eugène Chevreul has demonstrated to us that the manner in which a colour is perceived is influenced by the other colours surrounding it. In the context of the Holy Trinity, theologians speak in terms of ‘perichoresis’ [or a “rotation”] as to the relationship and movement of the love of the three persons in the triune God:

"May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all."  (2 Cor. 13:14)