Now during the octave of Easter, the time of the resurrected Christ, in remembrance of the time before the assumption of Christ, I want to reflect upon the previous week. I have a holiday from work, enjoying a day of leisure.
My personal life has undergone drastic changes, the exhuming of what I once recognized as my spiritual partner included. The differences between us became conflicting to the point of absolute abrasiveness. My mind went to a story that shaped me as a young man, Herman Hesse’s ‘Demain’. In the turn of the century novel, the idea of outgrowing someone spiritually is tenderly dealt with when Sinclair becomes aware it is proper to leave his scholarly, musically skilled, instructor/confidant Pistorius behind. Overcoming sentimentality, overcoming the urge to devalue himself for the sake of protecting another, he realizes in order to mature he must leave behind one who no longer can supplement growth.
Identifying the coarse faults of another, with a nonjudgmental calm cool compassionate heart and mind, consequences must be rendered. Paths must be divided and God must remain forefront. I think of my time leaving the friary. I undertook matters in an improper manner, simply and stealthily slipping out through a back door, yet there was consultation with a spiritual guide before the abrupt act. A time of parting, detaching is necessary when spiritual intimacy creates stagnation and corruption. When temporal brokenness supersedes holiness matters must be confronted.
I am a passionate man. I embrace the fact, aspiring for my violent nature to strengthen my resolve to grow spiritually. I have lost all concern for justification, parting from another with a mind of righteousness means nothing. I remember speaking to a friar after leaving the friary, the sincere brother attempting to figure out exactly what happen. I imparted the message for the brother not to concern himself, to think of me as a bad guy. If resolution existed within making me a bad guy, I was willing to assume the role. I cared nothing for advancing matters to the point I needed to walk about as if everything meant nothing to me due to the fact I was so righteous. I understood the ignorance of being immersed within a conflict and not to assume personal responsibility and accountability. To distance myself from a conflict while subtly portraying a clear conscience is an abomination, selfish and shallow, unembracing, lacking the penetrating vision of Christ. I advance embracing the emptiness of offering sorrow to God, pleading for discernment, offering myself as an unworthy servant. Scripture speaks, beckoning truth, Ecclesiastes: But all this I laid to heart, examining it all, how the righteous and the wise and their deeds are in the hand of God; whether it is love or hate man does not know. Everything before them is vanity,
The Hesse novel ‘Demian’ was important to my formation as a young man. Words and sentences in the novel etched themselves in my consciousness, at the time of reading seemingly alive as absorbed. Yet Hesse was an author I learned to move past. There was a self-consciousness to his writing, a lack of interior self-effacing truth that did not allow me to view him as enduring. Lacking profound humility, he was a man always in his own way. Important, essential, I had to move through him to penetrate Christ. Overall, Hesse increased myself, thus not allowing an increase in Christ. Older, I find influences that properly decrease myself through strengthening and confidence produce the cleansing of the vessel necessary for the filling of God.
Pistorius stagnated for several reasons, one of them being his attachment to scholarly learning simply for the thrill of accumulating knowledge, the ‘sweet consolation’ of being a learned man meant everything to him. The increasing of himself took priority. My former spiritual partner lost her way in pop psychology. The concentrating upon childhood, previous, experiences to a point of accumulated years and obsessive mental warping. Never establishing the discipline of an authentic prayer life, she attempted to vanquish demons through psychological introspection. A woman of remarkable intellect and strength, she never really stood a chance of going further with the implementation of inferior ways. Unable to open her heart and mind through prayer, never nurturing charity, she has been abandoned to a life dominated by self-will, arrogance and delusion desperately sheltering the core of her being. Today, I felt her in mass, determined to form and shape everything into victory for herself, enduring mass lacking the ability to commune with God, a soul existing impurely through self-will. She never stood a chance of truly turning her life and will over to the care of God by attempting to do everything herself, unable to surrender through, with, and in prayer.
God is unique. During mass today, a couple sat directly behind me. Their presence prayerfully joining me in participating, Christian fellowship, no agendas existing, self-consciousness and self-awareness humbled. The previous week they sat next to me as we were asked to represent disciples for the celebratory washing of feet. I ran into the woman at an Italian deli also the previous week, waving to her husband as he sat in the car waiting for his bride. Sincerely surrendering to faith, hope, and charity, God provides people of like minds. It is the fundamental structure of the Church. We do not go about our spiritual life alone. We do not shun those of the Church, while embracing secular individuals for entertainment. We must treat one another through the example of Christ: Father, I honor the Sacred Heart of Your Son, brutally corrupted by my deeds, yet symbol of love’s triumph, pledge to all that I am called to be. Teach me to see Christ in all the lives that I touch, offering to My Lord living worship through love-filled service to my brothers and sisters.
Herman Hesse’s “Demian’
We were lying before the fire…he was holding forth about mysteries and forms of religion, which he was studying, and whose potentialities for the future preoccupied him. All this seemed to me odd and eclectic and not of vital importance; there was something vaguely pedagogical about it; it sounded like tedious research among the ruins of former worlds. And all at once I felt a repugnance for his whole manner, for this cult of mythologies, this game of mosaics he was playing with secondhand modes of belief. “Pistorius, ” I said suddenly in a fit of malice that both surprised and frightened me. “You ought to tell me one of your dreams again sometime, a real dream, one that you’ve had at night. What you’re telling me there is all so–so damned antiquarian”. He had never heard me speak like that before and at the same moment I realized with a flash of shame and horror that the arrow I had shot at him, that had pierced his heart, had come from his own armory: I was now flinging back at him reproaches that on occasion he had directed against himself… He fell silent at once. I looked at him with dread in my heart and saw him turning terribly pale. After a long pregnant pause he placed fresh wood on the fire and said in a quiet voice: “You’re right, Sinclair, you’re a clever boy. I’ll spare you the antiquarian stuff from now on”. He spoke very calmly but it was obvious he was hurt. What had I done? I wanted to say something encouraging to him, implore his forgiveness, assure him of my love and my deep gratitude. Touching words came to mind–but I could not utter them. I just lay there gazing into the fire and kept silent. He, too, kept silent and so we lay while the fire dwindled, and with each dying flame I felt something beautiful, intimate irrevocably burn low and become evanescent. “I’m afraid you’ve misunderstood me”. I said finally with a very forced and clipped voice. The stupid, meaningless words fell mechanically from my lips as if I were reading from a magazine serial. “I quite understand”. Pistorius said softly. “You’re right”. I waited. Then he went on slowly: “Inasmuch as one person can be right against another”. No, no! I’m wrong, a voice screamed inside me–but I could not say anything. I knew that with my few words I had put my finger on his essential weakness, his affliction and wound. I had touched the spot where he most mistrusted himself. His ideal way “antiquarian”, he was seeking in the past, he was a romantic. And suddenly I realized deeply within me: what Pistorius had been and given to me was precisely what he could not be and give to himself. He had led me along a path that would transcend and leave even him, the leader, behind. God knows how one happens to say something like that. I had not meant it all that maliciously, had had no idea of the havoc I would create. I had uttered something the implications of which I had been unaware of at the moment of speaking. I had succumbed to a weak, rather witty but malicious impulse and it had become fate. I had committed a trivial and careless act of brutality which he regarded as a judgment. How much I wished then that he become enraged, defend himself, and berate me! He did nothing of the kind–I had to do all of that myself. He would have smiled if he could have, and the fact that he found it impossible was the surest proof of how deeply I had wounded him. By accepting this blow so quietly, from me, his impudent and ungrateful pupil, by keeping silent and admitting that I had been right, by acknowledging my words as his fate, he made me detest myself and increased my indiscretion even more. When I had hit out I had thought I would strike a tough, well-armed man–he turned out to be a quiet, passive, defenseless creature who surrendered without protest. For a long time we stayed in front of the dying fire, in which each glowing shape, each writhing twig reminded me of our rich hours and increased the guilty awareness of my indebtedness to Pistorius. Finally I could bear it no longer. I got up and left. I stood a long time in front of the door to his room, a long time on the dark stairway, and even longer outside his house waiting to hear if he would follow me.
