Being Between the Passions and the Void

I make my way to finding my love for God in circles--in circles because meeting Him directly is impossible. I will be met by the Void, and the Void negates all life.

We must look at passion at its extremeties, that is, where passion tires to transcend the boundaries of the everyday, where it tries to give the body or the spirit a fuller expression of life.

I want to examine a perspective on the Christian religion that my heart wants to rejects from time to time, not knowing if it's the true perspective. My heart shrinks at the idea of faith that makes a wasteland out of our living world, one that turns anything that might gives us pleasure into just another vanity of vanities, distracting us from the task of waiting for a death that will set us free. I shrink from a relgion that turns this life into a desert. But Jesus was intimate with the desert--that harsh, unforgiving landscape, where wide empty horizons made the idea of one God easier to accept. I do not want to become intimate with the desert, but I will if I have to.

Is not Christianity a desert religion, as all the other Abrahamic relgions that were created in the desert? A contemporary poet, Rae Armentrout, wrote a poem called "Extremeties" which had the following lines: "Going to the desert is the old term"..."landscape of zeros." Yes, in the solitude of one's own mind one goes to the desert, into that landscape of zeros, a landscape that negates all passions in life, giving the material world zero-value, for a positive meaning in death. Mortal life becomes a prison, a veil of tears. St. Teresa of Avila's most famous poem is called "Vivo sin vivir en mi" (I live without living in me) and the famous refrain from the poem is "muero porque no muero" (I die because I do not die):

Oh, how long is this life!
How hard is this exile,
This prison, these irons,
In which the soul is in!
Even waiting for escape
Causes such great pain
that I die because I do not die.

Must faith be a prison of the soul? Can life, the life I live here and now, not be redeemed through the moral vision of faith? Is taking any pleasure in the mortal world a sin?

For about three weeks I attended meetings of the Religious Society of Friends, also known as the Quakers, at Haddonfield, New Jersey. At their general meetings on Sunday's, the congregation would sit in this bare rectangualar room with these thick wooden pews facing each other on all foor sides. For about an hour we would sit in silence, deep in meditative thought, interupted about two or three times each meeting by a member who felt as if his or her inner light had something to say to the congregation. The Quakers were partly inspired by psalm 46:10 which says, "Be still, and know that I am God."

In that silence I tried to quiet my mind and reject thoughts of the life around me, both my past and future. The passage from Ecclesiastes always came to mind, "Vanity of vanities all is vanity...What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun." I would try to think my way through the vanities but I'd always end up at the Void, at nothingness. I would try my hardest to comtemplate the Void. But nothingness is lack of thoughts or things. There's nothing to contemplate, just absence and non-being. I would recall Buddha's thought, "That which is void is precisely form, and that which is form is precisely void." I suppose this means that even the forms present to us are already part of the void, because all things are in the active process of going from void to form, and back again in the Eternal Circle of Process, which contains all the states of everything, from black to white, from good to evil and from being to non-being. So a flower blooms and wilts an infinite number of times when you look through the veil, or your death is already part of Eternal Circle of Process, so why bemoan death when it's in a sense already happened?

But this will not do. My mind makes its dialectical turn. It wants to love God with all its heart, mind and soul and Michael Grafals will keep loving and meditating till he finds that love. It is not the Universe of Process that he wants to love, it's a personal God because That is where he will be fulfilled in his love. In the dialectical turn, I try to feel the importance of emotions in climax. For me, emotions at full force almost always takes the form of movies. Still at the Quaker meeting, I would think in montage terms. A black-and-white shot of a young rebel woman at the top of a belfry, bashing a large bell with a steel hammer. Another black-and-white shot of a mass of people rushing through the streets, crying out in joy at the death of their oppressors. Tchaikovsky's "1812 Overture" blares in my mind at full blast while I see a vision of fireworks bursting in all colors, joined in by the sound of people's chanting, competing with the explosions. Images of such passion! The body reacts and impels the feelings on. A couple in full embrace sink into bed sheets that billow and flow like the waves of a sea. A small child giggles, chasing the autumn leaves that chopper to the ground. Images of life pulsating!

If this was all there was to life, this would correspond to the art-religion of those 19th century aesthetics--Walter Pater and Oscar Wild. Pater, at the end of his book on the Renaissance says:

"Some spend this interval [between ones life and death] in listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest, at least among 'the children of this world,' in art and song. For our one chance lies in expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time. Great passions may give us this quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise, which come naturally to many of us. Only be sure it is passion–that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness. Of such wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for its own sake, has most. For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake."

Art for art's sake, a pleasing religion, in every sense of the phrase. The only sin this religion knows of is the sin of boredom. But it knows it's a religion of surfaces, a dance from one surface to the next that ends in oblivion. Becuase it sees nothing underneath, nothing that should be conserved for eternity, it does not strive to express this. The only thing eternal (can we even say this?) is art itself and the fleeting emotions it expresses.

But I enjoy this art purely for the senses. If this montage of feelings was for the sake of the love of God, if it was some sort of divine propaganda for our need for eternity, what paradox, and how sublime! But would the aesthetic manipulation of the senses be an honest way to express one's love for God? Would it simply be an art of decorative lies, something that aesthetics like Oscar Wilde thought poetry was, especially in his bold statement, "All bad poetry is sincere."

So there I am at the Quaker meeting, my thought process dragging itself round and round--the passions and the Void, the spirit and the blood. On a window that looked out of the meeting house, I remember a bare winter branch that would rock itself up and down with the cold winds. I was restless and I could not hardly wait to leave the meeting house to find my answers in the cold.