HAUNTED BY THE HOLY GHOST

"Reality would burn. And I do not like it much"

 

 

 

Because you're not what I would have you be

I blind myself to who, in truth, you are.

Seeking mirage where desert blooms, I mar

Your you. Love, I would like to see

Past all delusion to reality

Then would I see God's image in your face,

His hand in yours, and in your eyes his grace.

Because I'm not what I would have me be

I idolize two Ones who are not any place,

Not you, not me, and so they never touch.

Reality would burn. And I do not like it much.

And yet in you, in me, I find a trace

Of love which struggles to break through

The hidden lovely truth of me, of you.

 

 

From: The Irrational Season By Madeleine L'engle

 

 

Photo-key to heart By nikaa

…What, what will give me back my faith?

Father Zosima from Dostoevsky's "Brother's Karamazov":

“…What, what will give me back my faith?
Though I believed only when I was a little child, mechanically, without thinking about anything…
How, how can it be proved? I’ve come now to throw myself at your feet and ask you about it.
If I miss this chance, too, then surely no one will answer me for the rest of my life.
How can it be proved, how can one be convinced? Oh, miserable me!
 I look around and see that for everyone else, almost everyone, it’s all the same,
no one worries about it anymore, and I’m the only one who can’t bear it.
 It’s devastating, devastating!”                                                               
“No doubt it is devastating.
One cannot prove anything here, but it is possible to be convinced.”

“How? By what?”

“By the experience of active love.
Try to love your neighbors actively and tirelessly.
The more you succeed in loving, the more you’ll be convinced of the existence of God
and the immortality of your soul.
And if you reach complete selflessness in the love of your neighbor,
the undoubtedly you will believe, and no doubt will even be able to enter your soul.
This has been tested.
It is certain.”

PHOTO:MUCH LOVE

ABOVE PHOTO:ANGER IN WINTER

Beauty in this fallen world is like the sun hidden behind a cloud......St. Ephrem

 
 "Beauty in the Garden"
 of The Fragrance of God

 

From my current reading:

The Fragrance of God

by Vigen Guroian:

    And to Adam he [God] said: "Because you … have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, 'You shall not eat of it,' cursed is the ground
because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life.
    Genesis 3:17, RSV

I once said that gardening began when God expelled Adam and Eve from Paradise.
I was wrong. What I should have said is that after the first couple greedily consumed beauty,
gardening got inextricably mixed up with labor and survival, and farming came into existence.
Adam's son Abel was "a keeper of sheep, and Cain a tiller of the ground" (Gen. 4:2, RSV).

Farming is a noble activity, but it also is a necessity,
whereas there is no need to garden.
Thus we may distinguish gardening from farming.
Yet in a fallen world, farming and gardening are ofttimes commensurate.
I cannot conceive that the activity of farming will ever completely be divorced from the vision of beauty, even in the most mechanized and industrialized farming, for flower and fruit are beautiful
in and of themselves.

In spring, I cultivate the perennial bed with the magenta petals
and sweet citrus fragrance of the rugosa rose in mind.
In excitement, I wait also for the green bouquet of the broccoli plant and
the calm, clean scent of the cucumber.

This was not always so.
In the beginning, in my first garden in Richmond, Virginia, I farmed for food
on the table.
But in Charlottesville, Virginia, in Eldersburg and Reisterstown, Maryland, and last, here in Culpeper, the garden has finally reformed my disposition toward it.
It has entirely transfigured my vision of life.

St. Ephrem speaks for me:

    Paradise raised me up as I perceived it,
    it enriched me as I meditated upon it;
    I forgot my poor estate,
    for it made me drunk with its fragrance.

    I became as no longer my old self,
    for it renewed me with all its
    varied nature. …

    In its fair beauty I beheld
    those who are far more beautiful than it,

    and I reflected:
    if Paradise be so glorious,
    how much more glorious should Adam be,
    who is in the image of its Planter,

    and how much fairer the Cross,
    upon which the Son of its Lord rode.

   

Hymns on Paradise, 6:4, 5

Here in Culpeper, I have divided my vegetable garden into raised beds of triangular, rectangular, and square shapes.
Shape, size, texture, and color matter to me as much in the vegetable garden
as in the perennial beds.
For the sake of beauty, I gladly leave the ruffled red cabbage to grow long
beyond its time for harvest.

I let the mustard reach high with bright yellow bouquets.
I cultivate carefully the asparagus row not just for the taste of its buttery spears but also for the verdant fern foliage that shoots up after the spring cutting.
I let volunteer sunflower, cosmos, and cleome seedlings grow where they choose.
And I sneak orange nasturtiums into the hills of sweet-potato vines.

If we modern people thought of our world as a garden, if we gardened more,
then I think all the other creatures
and things that grow in the ground would be so much better off.
Beauty can save the world!
But that depends on how much we love beauty and seek it in our lives.

Gardening is not only making the world around us beautiful once more but letting beauty transform us.
Gardening grows from our deep longing for salvation, so that beauty fills our lives.

"Beauty," writes Berdyaev, "is God's idea
of the creature, of man and of the world. …
The transfiguration of the world is the attainment
of beauty"
(The Destiny of Man, p. 247).

In my garden, I take hope from Jesus' promise
to the repentant thief on the cross that he will be with his Lord in Paradise.

I know that the sweat of my brow and tears of penance bring
Paradise near in my backyard.
For a garden is a profound sign and deep symbol of salvation, like none
other, precisely because a garden was our first habitation, and God has
deemed it to be our final home.

Beauty is the aim of life. God imagined it so.
God spoke the Word, and his invisible Image of Beauty became a visible garden.

"The fertility of the earth is its perfect finishing," writes St. Basil of Caesarea,
"growth of all kinds of plants, the up springing of tall trees,
both productive and sterile, flowers' sweet scents and fair colours,
and all that which … came forth from the earth to beautify her,
their universal Mother"
(Hexaemeron, homily 2).

Beauty will transfigure the chaos and deformity of our wounded world
 into the peace and harmony of a cosmos that God, from the beginning,
proclaims to be good and beautiful.

I know that the beauty I aim at in the garden lies hidden within the innate potentiality of the earth and the seeds that the sun and the rain bring to life.
I must divide the ground to fit the needs and the habits of the plants that grow.
I must prepare the soil and supply it with minerals and nutrients.
I must sow the seeds in an orderly way and thin the seedlings so that they have room to spread and capture the light of the sun.
And I must cultivate the earth to let in the air and the water.

Alas, the garden has taught me that beauty is both gift and accomplishment.
As gift, I accept it humbly and without pride, gratefully and not greedily.
As gift, beauty comes from above and beyond my poor power to bring it into existence or to experience it.

 

St. Ephrem writes:

Paradise has … clothed itself
in terms that are akin to you;

but it is not because it is impoverished
that it has put on your imagery;

rather, your nature is far too weak
to be able to attain its greatness,
and its beauties are much diminished

by being depicted in the pale colors
with which you are familiar.

Hymns on Paradise, 11:7

Yet Paradise, Ephrem insists, is not so far distant from us
that we cannot approach it.
Indeed, we draw nearer to it with each and every effort to make our own
selves and the world around us beautiful.

Beauty in this fallen world

is like the sun hidden behind a cloud. 

Our ruined "eyes" see just the shadow of its brightness.
When, however, we are transformed by our love for it,
beauty illumines our whole being, much as on Mount Tabor
the bright glory of God enveloped Peter, James, and John.

In the Kingdom of heaven, light, life, and beauty are one.
Light engenders life in the garden and beauty everywhere.
From the Father of Light issues the
Spirit, who gives Life and the Only-Begotten, who is Beauty itself.
The Three are One God.

 

photos #1 and #2 by malupina!
phote #3 by serni

TELLING STORIES....

, originally uploaded by nikaa.

"But any walk within fictional worlds has the same function as a child’s play. Children play with puppets, toy horses, or kites in order to get acquainted with the physical laws of the universe and with the actions that someday they really will preform. Likewise, to read fiction means to play a game by which we give sense to the immensity of things that happened, are happening, or will happen in the actual world. By reading narrative, we escape the anxiety that attacks us when we try to say something true about the world.

This is the consoling function of narrative–the reason people tell stories, and have told stories from the beginning of time. And it has always been the paramount function of myth: to find a shape, a form, in the turmoil of human experience."

from “Possible Woods” by Umberto Eco

Memory is Holy

 

“All true art tirelessly teaches that the whole world
rests upon the individual.
That is its central point, whether it remains caught up with it
or sets forth from it towards society or metaphysical space.
The individual, with his own face and proper name,
will always be the great subject matter of art.

“When people challenge me and ask what is the place of art in
that sphere of death and horror,
I reply: who can redeem the fears, the pains, the tortures,
and the hidden beliefs from the darkness?
What will bring them out of obscurity and give them
a little warmth and respect, if not art?
Who will take that great mass which everyone simply calls
the `dreadful horror’and break it up into those tiny, precious particles?”

Photo/Flickr:INTERMEZZO by nikaa

The Israeli novelist Aharon Appelfeld was born in 1932 in Romania. Eight years later the Nazis seized Czernowitz, his home town, killed his mother and deported Appelfeld and his father to a concentration camp in the Ukraine. He escaped and remained a fugitive for three years before joining the Red Army. Read some of the details in The Story of a Life, his emblematic chronicle of 20th-century horrors narrated by a voice as quiet and oblique as the voices in his novels.Even when his narrative is dry and factual, a mist clings to his words. I can’t think of another novel in which so much is left so eloquently unsaid as Badenheim 1939.

Jean Amery, Tadeusz Borowski, Paul Celan, Primo Levi – have chosen suicide, and who is to condemn them? Appelfeld not only went on living but thrived. His friend Philip Roth has written that Appelfeld possesses the “playfully thoughtful air of a benign wizard,” and I observed the same quality. In the Radov Lectures he delivered at Columbia University in 1991, published as Beyond Despair, Appelfeld says:

My favorite opening line from any book...missing her already...Pie Jesu Domine, dona eis requiem sempiternam.

"There are dragons in the twins' vegetable garden,...."

From Madeleine L'Engle's "A Wind in the Door"

Close Second:

“It was a dark and stormy night,...."

From Madeleine L'Engle's “A Wrinkle in Time.”

Madeleine L’Engle, Children’s Writer, Is Dead - New York Times:

Days out of joint, stretching forward without end...

An insightful meditation on Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich: A Novel over at Father Freeman’s bog, "Glory to God for all Things:A Day at a Time

“...Such moments - even such a day - is like the fulfillment of Christ’s commandment to “take no thought for tomorrow.” It is not that tomorrow is unimportant but that it always threatens to capture us and take us away from today. There is a sense in Solzhenitsyn’s novel that one day is much like another. I could well imagine that would be so under such conditions. There is not really a tomorrow to consider - not without tempting insanity.

But there is also something insane about the tomorrows of our own existence - insane in its original meaning - not healthy. Tomorrow, when imported to today pushes aside the possibility of peace and recollection and replaces it with anxiety and a that cannot be a place to live...“
(my emphasis).
Read the rest here

Illustration:
Dante starts his journey to eternity
Salvador Dalí

And being dead is hard work

Duino Elegies - From The Tenth Elegy

Someday, emerging at last from the violent insight,

let me sing out jubilation and praise to assenting angels.

Let not even one of the clearly-struck hammers of my heart

fail to sound because of a slack, a doubtful,

or a broken string. Let my joyfully streaming face

make me more radiant; let my hidden weeping arise

and blossom. How dear you will be to me then, you nights

of anguish. Why didn't I kneel more deeply to accept you,

inconsolable sisters, and, surrendering, lose myself

in your loosened hair. How we squander our hours of pain.

How we gaze beyond them into the bitter duration

to see if they have an end. Though they are really

our winter-enduring foliage, our dark evergreen,

one season in our inner year-, not only a season

in time-, but are place and settlement, foundation and soil

and home.

Rainer Maria Rilke

From 'Ahead of All Parting:

The Selected Poetry and Prose of Rainer Maria Rilke'

Edited and Translated by Stephen Mitchell

To you alone, who have known me so long, and who love me so well, could I venture to offer a trifle like this....

...and other thoughts must be let to range through your breast, other emotions must spend themselves, before you are prepared simply to rejoice, exult, and glory in the lifeless form which lies before you. You are upon a brave work, but your heart is torn while you set hand to it, and you linger before you begin.

It was in the pride of her earthly beauty, and the full vigour and elevation of her mind, that he last had seen her. It seemed an age since that morning, as if a chasm ran between the now and the then, when she so fascinated him with her presence, and so majestically rebuked him for bowing to that fascination. Yet on his memory every incident of that interview was fixed, and was indelible.
O why should the great Creator shatter one of His most admirable works! If the order of the sun and stars is adorable, if the laws by which earth and sea are kept together mark the Hand of supreme Wisdom and Power, how much nobler perfection of beauty is manifested in man! And of human nature itself here was the supereminent crown, a soul full of gifts, full of greatness, full of intellect, placed in an outward form, equally surpassing in its kind, and still more surpassingly excellent from its intimate union and subordination to the soul, so as almost to be its simple expression; yet this choicest, rarest specimen of Almighty skill, the Almighty had pitilessly shattered, in order that it  might inherit a higher, an eternal perfection. O mystery of mysteries, that heaven should not be possibly obtained without such grinding down and breaking up of our original nature!
O mysterious, that principle in us, whatever it is, and however it came there, which is so antagonistic to God, which has so spoilt what seems so good, that all must be undone, and must begin anew! "An enemy hath done this;" and, knowing as much as this, and no more, we must leave the awful mystery to that day when all things shall be made light.

From:Callista Chapter 35. The Corpo Santo
John Henry Newman From the Dedication: To you alone, who have known me so long, and who love me so well, could I venture to offer a trifle like this. But you will recognise the author in his work, and take pleasure in the recognition.
J. H. N.

Photo:flickr AuntieP

BEDTIME STORIES AND FRAGMENTS

"The Great Hall of the Palace of Justice Three hundred and forty-eight years, six months, and nineteen days ago, the good people of Paris awoke to the sound of all the bells pealing in the three districts of the Cité, the Université, and the Ville.

The sixth of January, 1482, was, however, a day that history does not remember.....If we could, mortals living in this year of 1830, imagine ourselves mixed up with those fifteenth-century Parisians, and if we could enter with them, shoved, elbowed, hustled, that immense hall of the palace so tightly packed, on the sixth of January, 1482, the sight would not be lacking in interest or in charm; and all that we should see around us would be so ancient as to appear absolutely new.....
At doors, windows, garret windows, on the rooftops of the houses, swarmed thousands of calm and honest bourgeois faces gazing at the palace and at the crowd, and desiring nothing more; for most of the good people of Paris are quite content with the sight of the spectators; a blank wall, behind which something or other is going forward, is to us an object of great curiosity.

Around the first four pillars are shops, glittering with glass and jewelery; and around the other three, oak benches worn and polished by the hosiery of the plaintiffs and the gowns of the attorneys.  Along the lofty walls, between the doors, between the windows, between the pillars, is ranged the interminable series of all the kings of France ever since Pharamond: the indolent kings with pendant arms and downcast eyes; the valiant and warlike kings with heads and hands boldly raised toward heaven....It was almost entirely buried in dust and cobwebs in the year of grace 1549, when du Breul still admired it by tradition.

It is certain that if Ravaillac had not assassinated Henry IV there would have been no documents of his trial deposited in the Rolls Office of the Palace of Justice, and no accomplices interested in the destruction of those documents; consequently no obligatory fire, for lack of better means, to burn the Rolls Office in order to burn the documents, and to burn the Palace of Justice in order to burn the Rolls Office; therefore, there would have been no fire in 1618.
The old palace would still be standing with its old great hall; and I might then say to the reader, “Go, look at it,” and thus we should both be spared trouble, myself the trouble of writing, and the reader that of perusing, a banal description.
This demonstrates the novel truth—that great events have incalculable consequences...

Whatever one may think of this threefold explanation, political, physical, and lyrical, of the burning of the Palace of Justice in 1618, the fact of which we may unfortunately be certain is that there was a fire. Owing to this catastrophe, and, above all, to the successive restorations that have swept away what it spared, very little is now left of this elder Palace of the Louvre, already so ancient in the time of Philip the Fair...Where is the chamber of the Emperor Sigismond? That of Charles IV? Or that of Jean sans Terre? Where is the flight of steps from which Charles VI announced his edict of amnesty?
The slab upon which Marcel murdered, in the presence of the Dauphin, Robert de Clermont and the Maréchal de Champagne?
And the wicket where the Anti-Pope Benedict’s bulls were torn into pieces, and from which those who had brought them were seized, coped, and mitered in derision, and carried in procession through all Paris?
And the great hall, with its gilding, its azure, its pointed arches,its statues, its pillars, its immense vaulted ceiling, broken up by and covered with carvings? And the gilded chamber?
And the stone lion at the gate, kneeling, with head lowered and tail between his legs, like the lions of King Solomon’s throne....What has time, what have men, wrought with these wonders? What has been given to us, in exchange for all this—for the history of the Gauls, for all this Gothic art? For the heavy, low arches of Monsieur de Brosse, for the clumsy architecture of the main entrance of Saint-Gervais?  So much for art!"

The Hunchback of Notre-Dame
by Victor Hugo
Excerpt from Chapter 1

Photo by Aelle/flickr

BEDTIME STORIES AND FRAGMENTS

  "Thus came Aragorn son of Arathorn, Elessar, Isildur’s heir,
out of the Paths of the Dead, borne upon a wind from the Sea
to the kingdom of Gondor;
and the mirth of the Rohirrim was a torrent of laughter
and a flashing of swords, and the joy and wonder of the City
was a music of trumpets and a ringing of bells.
But the hosts of Mordor were seized with bewilderment,
and a great wizardry it seemed to them
that their own ships should be filled wit h their foes;
and a black dread fell on them, knowing that the tides of fate
had t urned against them and their doom was at hand . . .
But before all went Aragorn with the Flame of the West, Andúril
like a new fire kindled, Narsil re­forged as deadly as of old;
and upon his brow was the Star of Elendil."

JRR Tolkien "The Lord of the Rings"

Photo:extrabnoise/flickr

JUST A LITTLE BIT MORE CHARLES WILLIAMS

"The beginning of Christendom is, strictly, at a point out of time. A metaphvsical trigonometry finds it among the spiritual Secrets, at the meeting of two heavenward lines, one drawn from Bethany along the Ascent of Messias, the other from Jerusalem against the Descent of the Paraclete. That measurement, the measurement of eternity in operation, of the bright cloud and the rushing wind, is, in effect, theology."

Charles Williams
Descent of the Dove

PHOTO:JUDE/flickr