Saturday, June 20, 2015
VI Easter May 10, 2015
VI Easter
May 10, 2015
Holy Trinity & St. Anskar
You have prepared for those
who love you such good things as surpass our understanding… which exceed all
that we can desire.
.
+In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity
What God has
prepared for us surpasses understanding. We can’t even imagine it and so we
can’t desire it. God’s promises outdo
our knowledge and our love. They exceed all that we can desire, insofar as
desire is the longing to get
something. As I desire to get the lilacs, blooming now in their fragile glory.
I want to pick them and take them home.
The lilacs also make me think of Frankenstein’s monster. We
err when we think of the story and the movie as comical. It is natural to laugh
at what might otherwise terrify us, but what is really frightening about
Frankenstein is what the monster reveals about humanity. Mary Wollstonecraft
Shelly’s story is entirely serious: a horrifying look at human nature.
I have always felt sorry for the monster – at least as
portrayed by the great Boris Karloff. The monster himself is pitiful. He is
innocent. He is trying to do his best. He is trying to become human – as each
of us is, unless we have given up to depravity. He is also a blank slate, free
of sin. He knows nothing. Imitation is the fundamental human trait, and the
poor monster is trying to become human by imitating humans. He sees a little
girl. He immediately loves her beauty. He wants to relate to her as a human
being relates to delicate, beautiful things. He desires to be like her. What is he to do? He sees that this
perfectly innocent and beautiful creature is picking flowers and throwing them
into the lake. (Innocent though she be, she is not free of original sin. She desires the beautiful flowers, so she
picks them.) Imitating her, the monster does the same. He grabs the little girl
and throws her into the lake.
This is tragedy. This is our predicament – at least in part.
The monster is, in a way, better than the little girl, because he doesn’t want
to possess her – he want to be like her; he wants to imitate her humanity. She
is a flower – more beautiful even than the flowers she is killing and throwing
into the lake – and he does as she does.
But the little girl – the little human – desires the flowers in
the sense that she wants to get
them. To get them and to have them
just as I want to take the lilacs home. This is her response to beauty; in her
desire, she ends up killing the beauty that she loves, and she teaches the
monster to do the same. That is what is wrong with desire.
Desire in this sense is the urge to fill up something we feel
we lack. Desire is also our response to beauty: our longing to unite with it,
to be it. One way to do that is to
try to possess it and to devour it, which doesn’t work. I want to pick the lilacs and take them home
and put them in a vase, in which I know they will be beautiful only for a
couple of days. But I still want to do it. I want the lilacs. This desire to possess and to devour and consume
the beautiful is what the ancients called eros.
Socrates said the lover, in this sense, is always needy. We desire what we do not have. We don’t desire what we DO
have, but what we don’t have: what we need. In colloquial English, we use the
word want to mean both: what we lack and what we desire.
But when we try to fulfill our desire, we find that we
cannot. Satisfaction is a let-down, as Mary Shelly’s friend, John Keats,
observed, telling his skylark,
…thou lovest, but ne’er knew
love’s sad saiety.
Sad satiey. So-called fulfillment of desire is not
fulfillment at all, but a disappointment. Then the desire – the need – returns
and pretty soon we are on the road to addiction. That’s what Frankenstein is
about, among other things. We can understand that. We have all experienced it.
What we cannot understand is what God has prepared for us:
such good things as surpass our
understanding, exceeding all that we can desire. If we could desire them, in
the erotic sense, they would disappoint. To obtain these unimaginable promises
is not to get them, to snatch them and devour them, as our
first parents snatched the forbidden fruit, as the little girl snatched the
flowers, as the monster snatched her
in his attempt to be like her, as I
want to snatch the lilacs; to obtain the promises of God is to love in another
sense that does not know “love’s sad satiety,” to love in the sense of caritas or agape, which is to say self-forgetful, self-giving love. What the Neo-Platonist
fathers of the Church called the attraction of like to like.
According to Plato, opposites do not attract, as in a magnetic
field, but like attracts like. We are, in our deepest reality, the image and
likeness of God, Who is perfectly beautiful – Who indeed, IS Beauty, and so we are
attracted to God – not as I am attracted to the lilacs, desiring to possess by
devouring and thus to slake my desire, but to become one with God in some
other, unimaginable sense, by self-giving, self-transcendence.
This is to obtain the promises that exceed all that we can desire.
But it is not something that can be done
in the sense of being accomplished or
completed. We cannot ever obtain union with God in the sense of getting it, for God is infinite. The
more we behold of the Divine Beauty, the more we are capable of enjoying it,
world without end. God is infinite and we are finite; but God has made us
capable of infinite growth. God has prepared for us such things as pass our
understanding. That is the great insight of our holy father Gregory of Nyssa.
Who saw eternal life – in prayerbook language – as endless growth in the
knowledge and love of God. Here is what he relates from his dying elder sister,
Macrina, in their dialogue on the Soul and the Resurrection:
Our rational nature came to birth for this purpose… a kind of
vessels and voluntary receptacles for souls were fashioned by the Wisdom which
constructed the universe, in order that there should be a container to receive
good things, a container which would always become larger with the addition of
what would be poured into it. For the
participation in the Divine Good is such that it makes anyone into whom it
enters greater and more receptive. As it
is taken up it increases the power and magnitude of the recipient, so that the person who is nourished always
grows and never ceases from growth.
Since the fountain of good things flows unfailingly, the nature of the
participants who use all the influx to add to their own magnitude (because
nothing of what is received is superfluous or useless) becomes at the same time
both more capable of attracting the better and more able to contain it. Each adds to the other: the one who is
nourished gains greater power from the abundance of good things, and the
nourishing supply rises in flood to match the increase of the one who is
growing. Those whose growth is not cut
off by any limit will surely continue to increase in this manner. Then, when such prospects lie before us, do
you complain because nature proceeds by the road which is ordained for us
towards its proper goal? Otherwise our
course cannot reach those good things, if we have not shaken off from our soul
this heaviness which weighs us down (I mean this earthly burden).… But if you have some fondness for this body
and you are sorry to be on yoke from what you love, do not be in despair about
this either. For although this bodily
covering is now dissolved by death, you will see it woven again from the same
elements, not indeed with its present coarse and heavy texture, but with the
thread respun to something subtler and lighter, so that the beloved body may be
with you and restored to you again in better and even more lovable beauty.
Alleluia! Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down
death by death, and giving life to all in the tombs. Alleluia!
