Communion: Words for Good Friday

I wrote this collection (would it be called a collection?) of reflections last summer in response to a prompt on communion.  I was reading Williams at the time [Shadows of Ecstasy] and (as tends to happen when reading Williams) my writing seems to have been shrouded in obscurity and abstraction.  

But these pieces still burn bright for me, even if they're rather inexplicable to others.  I post them today in honor of Good Friday and a dying God.  

Under the Mercy (as my dear friend would say).   

______________________

candlelight flickers

through gentle darkness, warm

mystery embraced

awash in chanted scripture

echoing soft

harmonies fall

and rise back

into the death of god

and all else fades

but the common union

between man and god and god and man

bread and body, wine and blood

as symbols and sacraments blur

and all is one and in one

and every breath

is holiness

______________________________

That which is, becoming that which it is not.  The mundane becoming sacred.  Barriers breached.  Between man and God.  The physical and the eternal.  Not union – the blurring of all into one, the destruction of difference, the swallowing up of self – but communion, the joining of that which is disparate, of symbol and reality, mystery and clarity, temporal and divine.  “Neither is this Thou, yet this also is Thou.”  Lewis states that, other than our neighbour, it is the holiest reality we will ever experience.  Yet it is holy in exactly the same way that our neighbour is holy.  The mystery of fellowship.  Of joining.  Of being one, and not one.  It is humanity taken into God, for it is a taste of the Trinity, and the sacred mystery that undergirds existence – the One that is Three.  It is real when the priest transmutes the elements into body and blood and the incarnation takes on flesh once more – expressing the lengths that Christ will travel for his beloved.  It is real when the Protestant partakes of the symbol – grape juice and saltine – and the spirit is set free to worship God in truth, deep calling out to deep.  And it is real when the Quaker rejects shadows and shells, attesting to the fullness of that which is, was, and will be – the sacred humanity of her neighbour and the God who dwells among them.  And when we are ready, it is real in the strange bright mystery of co-inherence – the bound togetherness of all things. 

______________________________

I read a book recently, in which there is a scene.  A scene in which seven siblings, standing beneath a sacred tree, link hands to pit the fullness of their spirit—their united selves—against the evil which threatens them.  There are sacred rituals that take place, sacred symbols that are exchanged, but the reality behind the sacrament’s shadows is the reality of seven hearts that beat as one.  Seven spirits who would each, unhesitatingly, exchange themselves for the other.  Seven children who feel the pain of the other as their own. 

The great horror of this story, the great and unabidable hurt, is that this circle is broken.  Evil wreaks its havoc, and the siblings lose themselves within their own isolated battles for courage and hope.  The generations turn, but nothing is ever the same.  The wholeness that was is no more. 

And I think it was this loss that broke me.  This loss that made me weep long into the night of the book’s ending.  For I had tasted—I had touched—the world as it should be, and it had been torn asunder by forces of decay.

Is it sacrilege to say that this is what Christ came to restore?  This unity of heart and mind.  This sacred circle of brothers and sister, bound by name, and blood, and every feeling of the heart.  This communion of the saints.    

I now travel INTO THE WILD

"And I trust for him that everything he is doing has to be done. This is our life."

My brother and I watched Into the Wild last night.  It's a movie that makes one long for life, and the courage with which to really live.  Since the movie first came out, I've been a little afraid to see it.  Afraid of the ending I knew was coming; afraid of the sorrow and loss.  But this isn't a movie about death, it's a movie about life.  About truly experiencing the moments we're given.  So that even at the end, when a 23-year-old boy dies alone in a bus in the middle of the Alaskan wilderness, it's hard to experience anything other than joy.  Joy and longing.  And maybe pain for the people he left behind.

When Chris/Alex finds the "magic" bus, near the start of the film, I was overwhelmed by the sense of what G.K. Chesterton calls treasure.  The experience of being a castaway on an island where a shipwreck washes up, and every ordinary, every-day item becomes something precious to be cherished, rather than scorned.  In his book Orthodoxy, Chesterton speaks of loving Robinson Crusoe for this reason, because it reminds him of the true nature of life -- that everything is treasure.  And I long for that right sense of things and their worth -- a worth that only seems graspable when one owns nothing, and therefore has nothing to lose and everything to gain.  The delight that sees the world as precious.

It's a truth I knew well as a child, when torn pieces of cloth, abandoned on the sidewalk, could hold my imagination for hours.

The hardest part of the film for me to reconcile is the story of a sister left behind.  She says, in one of her many moments of narration, that unlike her parents, who have been purposefully cast off, she receives no word because he knows she doesn't need it.  He knows she loves him enough, and is certain enough in his love, to live on in his absence.

Is that the great secret of existence, in this world of separation and loss?  The great test of truth?  That there are relationships that flounder and die with distance, but real love, as Charles Williams might argue, knows no limits of space or time?  Ruth Haley Barton, in her book Sacred Rhythms, says that the life-giving significance of solitude is that it allows us to experience the reality that all things "irreconcilable are somehow reconciled through Christ.  Everything is already one through the person and work of Christ in the timelessness that is God."  Ultimately, God holds the presence of those we love within God's self, and when we are with God, the perfect Wholeness, separation is impossible.  This may seem like spiritualist mumbo-jumbo, but I think the opposite may be true -- that it is simply spiritual truth, that we are often too earthbound, and transient, to experience.  But when we live truly, and cease sheltering ourselves from the present moment and the God who indwells it, I think all physical boundaries must burst.

Shadows of Ecstasy: a review of sorts

Shadows of Ecstasy by Charles Walter Stansby Williams
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I love Charles Williams' books.  Everyone who knows me knows this.  Others may think them strange or obscure, but I find them pulsing with life and power.  They remind me, in language that transcends knowing, what it is that I'd forgotten I'm looking for.

Honestly, though, I didn't know what to do with this book.  Normally I like Williams' ambiguity -- I think it's part of his stories' power.  I wouldn't say that I DIDN'T like it this time, only that it left me perplexed and confused, shaken and unsure.

Is Considine an antichrist or a returned messiah?  Does it even matter?  To some degree, it seems irrelevant to the story's point.  A story that is about living in an ambiguous world, where no morality is certain, out of the necessity of your own being.  Living the life you have to, in the face of the choices you can't control.

The problem with this is two-fold: 1. Is evil and goodness truly such a matter of relativity?  Is physical action, such as murder, truly irrelevant if the perpetrator burns with what, for lack of other words, seems terrifying similar to the Joy of the Lord and the Glory of God?  And while it's easy to thrust this back into our black and white understanding, and declare "NEVER!" what do we do with those Old Testament passages in which the prophets, and the God that they serve, seem to burn with just such joy, and act with just such a terrifying mix of innocence and violence?  2. Most of Williams books, the scholars agree, are ultimately about coinherence -- the beautiful mystery of unity.  What does one do with a book, thrust in the middle of this collection, that seems to be about the necessity of living first and foremost for oneself?  Of turning everything that is experienced inward, for personal power and gain?  And the one antithesis to this -- Isabel who lives only for the other -- encourages her husband down its path, because it is what his soul craves.  Yet if he were to succeed in his quest, it would separate him from that which makes him whole.

Who is the hero, who the villain?  Who's path is righteous, who's selfish?  Who makes the right choices, who the wrong?  And what ending are we supposed to hope for?  Williams doesn't tell us, and sometimes I wonder, does God?

View all my reviews >>

The Greater Trumps

I am reading Williams again, and, like fire, he is pulsing in my blood. May we all "rise to adore the mystery of love" (108).

There had come into her life with the mystery of the Tarots a new sense of delighted amazement; the Tarots themselves were not more marvelous than the ordinary people she had so long unintelligently known. By the slightest vibration of the light in which she saw the world she saw it all differently; holy and beautiful, if sometimes perplexing and bewildering, went the figures of her knowledge [. . .] and she too, in a dance that was happy if it was frightening. Nothing was certain, but everything was safe--that was part of the mystery of Love. She was upon a mission, but whether she succeeded or not didn't matter. Nothing mattered beyond the full moment in which she could live to her utmost in the power and according to the laws of the dance. (191)

"By the slightest vibration of the light in which she saw the world she saw it differently . . . holy and beautiful" -- this reminds me of Lewis and Tolkien's argument for the power of fantasy: we see the world transformed into the mystery it truly is.

Essays Presented to Charles Williams

". . . nearly always on Thursday evenings in my rooms and on Tuesday mornings in the best of all public-houses for draught cider, whose name it would be madness to reveal."
-C.S. Lewis, preface to Essays Presented to Charles Williams, viii-ix

"He was ready to accept as a revealed doctrine the proposition that existence is good: but added that it would never have occurred to him, unaided, to suspect this. . . It is one of the many paradoxes in Williams that while no man's conversation was less gloomy in tone--it was, indeed, a continual flow of gaiety, enthusiasm, and high spirits--no man at times said darker things. . . . But that was only one side of him. This scepticism and pessimism were the expression of his feelings. High above them, overarching them like a sky, were the things he believed, and they were wholly optimistic. They did not negate his feelings: they mocked them."
-Lewis, preface, xii-xiii

"No event has so corroborated my faith in the next world as Williams did simply by dying. When the idea of death and the idea of Williams thus met in my mind, it was the idea of death that was changed."
-Lewis, preface, xiv

"Creative fantasy . . . may open your hoard and let all the locked things fly away like caged birds. The gems all turn into flowers or flames, and you will be warned that all you had (or knew) was dangerous and potent, not really effectively chained, free and wild; no more yours than they were you."
-J.R.R. Tolkien, "On Fairy-Stories" from Essays Presented to Charles Williams, 75