I follow a number of 'conservative' sites to keep my game up, a couple of which are Catholic. The misunderstandings there are rife so I'm inventing a new religion, a takeoff on Catholicism, which is right on many things. This will be a Catholicism that embraces the distinction between immanence and transcendence radically and in a new way. Meaning, no afterlife. No resurrection. No heaven or hell.
And, no god. But, all God. (I foresee droves of converts.)
Transcendence is beyond space and time. We have no admittance there. It's a matter of faith. Immanence puts us in a place of necessary discipline and structure (that or chaos, the anti-logos) where we can glimpse the truths of transcendence and have them guide us, sometimes realizing the transformation. True spiritual traditions have to come to terms with this divide and dichotomy. They do so in varying ways.
Such as using stories (parables) or metaphors.
For example, any talk of the eschaton is not about an event in time. It's about an event over time, our eschaton. Every day we live is one less day we have. This is not a parable, I know. I cite it because it's a huge mistake to take it literally. Put it in space-time. The point is to convey urgency in a situation that couldn't be better designed for complacency, apathy and ennui. Life. The point is that life is a gift.
However mixed.
One not to be taken for granted. We live in an ongoing emergency, that of our mortality, which is hard to grasp. But the key is to grasp it well enough to live with love and joy while we can, as best we can, if not celebrating our mortality through radical acceptance, having a death-bed perspective all the time or as much as possible. The utility of end times talk is to convey that our lives are always ending.
Slipping through our fingers. This same reasoning applies to everything. Literalism is heresy. In the Bible, or wherever there is truth. The Catholic Church was accused at one time of being stuck in the Middle Ages, a time of illiteracy. Right on. The Church had assumed the complete immersion of the laity in corporeality in an uncontrollable world, providing no abstract understanding to back up the rules.
Take sin, mortal and venial.
The Church gave us rules. No end of rules and lists. Which is insulting to people who can understand the abstract difference. That a venial sin is a goof and a mortal sin is denying that life is intelligible, a challenge to the existence of God, or even a direct denial of God's existence. Rules weakened the Church. And the delusion of purity in isolation or quarantine, in this case the purity of the clerisy, was in effect.
So the Church sowed the seeds of its weakness because the polarity is not there. Having a weak laity took down the clerisy which took down the Church, notably in the 1960s when literalism took hold. I miss the Latin which was a real loss but also a symbolic one. The Church had always rejected literalism, which is a structure of containment, and embraced symbolism, which is art, which is infinite if inscrutable.
Inscrutability or paradox is the idea, an expression or acceptance or embrace of human inadequacy and limitation. Maybe a celebration of insufficiency because, well, it's all we've got. It's all I've got. Party down. Back to that uncontrollable world. The big change is there, in control. The strides have been immense. So much so we're sometimes indignant when we can't control things. But then there's death.
We want this to be as convenient as possible. I want mine to be as convenient as possible, determining how it happens since I can't control that it happens. Thank God for morphine. A gift of God. Anyway, I can't fault myself or anyone for this but what have we lost? What have we lost in our resulting arrogance? I think the Brit aristocracy played polo to practice war skills when there was no war, an infrequent thing.
And hunting. I think we need to work to stay familiar with our limitations. As an antidote to arrogance. Humility becomes us. I've glimpsed the transformation and it's all love. The big embrace. And all humility. But nothing describes it. Which is what I'm trying to convey. It's a matter for art. Art, broadly, is uncontainable. Literalism, biblical or constitutional 'originalism' or whatever, are death and anti-art.
As in the 'Antichrist.' Literalism is utopianism, perfectionism, hypocrisy and death. Death to humanity, kindness and decency. And, usually, actual killing since it makes life meaningless and nothing but a struggle for power and control in an ultimately uncontrollable world. We don't need an afterlife, a reward, to celebrate creation or feel good about life. We don't need a judgment day to behave.
Has it worked so far? I don't think so. We know transcendence because the seeds of it, as the good books rightly say, are within us, but needing some cultivation. We don't need anything else. Some discipline and an openness to inspiration are all. The head and the heart, working together and oriented to the higher things. None of the Bible works in space and time. Heaven is a state on earth. Not a state like that.
You know what I mean. A condition. Containment is not a condition for love. It's antithetical to love because it seeks power. Containment of people, above all. Individually we're temporal beings. Maybe collectively, since we seem to be choosing to destroy ourselves. Because we're disappointed, presumably, about life. But that's a choice. And a bad one. Choose life. Create the day, as I say to myself.
It's an increment of time I can handle. Beyond that I often don't do well. Many people don't do well in this odd space-time thing we're stuck in because we all need help. And helping one another is why we're here. All we need is love. We want to think we're inherently different from animals. But we're as different as we behave. The good news: we can do it. It's not hard. Which is what's so sad about failing.
. . . (ongoing)
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