Contemplation

Further Negating

 

It may be a stretch, yet I see this unique scene from the master filmmaker Fellini in his masterpiece ‘La Strada’ as an encounter with the supernatural.  As with everything involving Fellini, the smallest details must be observed.  A craftily detail oriented filmmaker, all things matter: the background painting conducting court in this scene.  The magic of the entire film plays in my perception of the scene attaining a unique level of meaning.  The simplicity of the film, coming on the heels of Italian neo-realism: movies such as ‘Rome Open City’, ‘The Bicycle Thief’, and ‘Umberto D’ assisting Europe in recovering from the ravages, dramatics, and sensationalism of World War II through simple, survivalist filmmaking, aligned solely in reality, the telling of films in a loving humanistic manner, valuing individuals over circumstances, mass-movements, and worldly concerns.  The symbolism of Fellini is astounding: Gelsomina introduced back dropped by the immensity of the ocean, children always flocking to the wide-eyed Gelsomina, Gelsomina tending to wear hats, Zampano a strongman always smoking, the loquacious fool introduced with wings upon his back—at night, upon a high wire, talking too much, This scene with the sick boy represents for me Gelsomina’s personal supernatural moment, a moment of being caught off guard by God.  God presenting His ways mystically, immediate, yet relevantly vague, cryptic, and in reference to secular concerns insane.   The scene hypnotized the first time I watched.  It seemed so peculiar  Looking back, my first impression was the boy was a water-head, an extreme character of physical deformity.  Now viewing, my first take was incorrect.  He appears sickly, yet not grotesquely deformed as I interpreted during my first viewing.  I am not sure why the scene marked me so much as a young man, representing the experiencing of the extraordinary, the supernatural encountered.  Maintaining integrity, I bring the words of St John of the Cross, doctor of the church, into matters, stressing his severe warning regarding the supernatural in ‘Ascent of Mount Carmel’.

The spiritual man incurs the risk of five kinds of evil if he pays heed to, and reflects upon, these forms and ideas which are impressed upon him by the things which pass through his mind in a supernatural way. 

The first is that he is frequently deceived, and mistakes one thing for another. The second is that he is like to fall, and is exposed to the danger of falling, into some form of presumption or vanity. The third is that the devil has many occasions of deceiving him by means of the apprehensions aforementioned. The fourth is that he is hindered as to union in hope with God. The fifth is that, for the most part, he has a low judgment of God. 

Reducing dramatics, I would like to stress a common theme of my therapist.  Dr. Nitcha, above being a thoroughly educated psychologist, is also a man who spent over ten years studying in the seminary.  He administered a personality test, convincing me I was an introvert/sensory type, not an introvert/intuitive type.  I need facts, defined situations and people, in order to proceed most efficaciously.  Just the facts please!  Speculation, what could be, might be, or what God possibly intended truly confuse me, escalating me in in useless analysis (over-analysis=paralysis).  Ambiguities allowed uninterpreted, I must focus upon certainties.  The personality test results were a bit of shock.  I thought of myself as a person centered upon intuition, the creative and heartfelt extra sensory perception.  I am now pleasantly sold on the idea that I need facts, schedule and routine, in order to live most abundantly.  It relieves me.  There was a bit of a misconception about myself throughout my life.  I thought I was someone I truly was not.  It fits so well with my concentration upon my natural life in order to pursue my passion of contemplation to a higher degree, aligned perfectly with my spiritual companion’s constant driving home that the natural level is my spiritual downfall.  Due to an over concentration on the spiritual and my upbringing, I became lost in daily practical life, thus always causing a spiritual collapse.  My spiritual life consisted of extreme peaks and valleys.

Dr. Nitcha extends the sensory approach to life, the mindset of dealing strictly with facts, to the spiritual.  I have a friend Jenet who comes to mind.  She is a sweet soul, dedicated to the Rosary, Daily Mass, and the Divine Office, proficiently knowledgeable in all matters Catholic, yet she thrives on sensationalism.  Her heart races nervously when a certain woman is around.  Mysterious, bordering on miraculous, coincidences are always occurring around her.  Constantly alert for their appearance, signs and marvels she has known all of her life.  It becomes mildly annoying and distracting.  Another friend from daily mass, Sharron is constantly experiencing the baby Jesus, often riding a white horse, in her dreams.  She is another admirable woman, inspiring to share communal prayer with, however her affection for spiritual dramatics borders on the absurd, make her appear spiritually immature.  As Dr. Nitcha would respond if he were asked for input, ‘maybe what she says is true, and maybe what she says is fabricated.  It does not matter.  You are learning to deal with facts, rejecting supposition, possibilities, and fascination with the fabulous.  Jesus appearing as an infant, riding a horse, means nothing to you.  That what you cannot reduce down to fact and practicality abandon.  Grounding yourself humbly and simplistically in faith, hope, and charity, ritually committing to the sacraments and a passive, intense prayer life, remain in reality.  Doctor turns most of his direction to John Paul II, stressing that as one of the greatest of mystics, he thrived in practicality, a master of daily reality, the nondramatics of dealing with complex matters as Pope efficiently and realistically.  As a contemplative, I praise the ordinary in order to advance closer to God.  The rejection of pride, intellectualism, and egotism is not enough.  Intimacy with God occurs through a further reduction, negating my way through imagination, and especially flights of fancy, a tendency toward the supernatural.

The benefits that come from voiding the imagination of imaginary forms can be clearly observed in the five evils aforementioned which they inflict upon the soul, if it desires to retain them, even as we also said of the natural forms. But, apart from these, there are other benefits for the spirit — namely, those of great rest and quiet. For, setting aside that natural rest which the soul obtains when it is free from images and forms, it likewise becomes free from anxiety as to whether they are good or evil, and as to how it must behave with respect to the one and to the other. Nor has it to waste the labor and time of its spiritual masters by requiring them to decide if these things are good or evil, and if they are of this kind or of another; for the soul has no need to desire to know all this if it pays no heed to them. The time and energies which it would have wasted in dealing with these images and forms can be better employed in another and a more profitable exercise, which is that of the will with respect to God, and in having a care to seek detachment and poverty of spirit and sense, which consists in desiring earnestly to be without any consoling support that can be apprehended, whether interior or exterior. This we practice well when we desire and strive to strip ourselves of these forms, since from this there will proceed no less a benefit than that of approach to God (Who has no image, neither form nor figure), and this will be the greater according as the soul withdraws itself the more completely from all forms, images and figures of the imagination.

The reality of Gelsomina witnessing the large headed sick boy, the supernaturally calling sadly through the natural, before the painted Blessed Mother and child Jesus, saints adoring, ends with a nun scolding, threatening with a stick, berating the children and Gelsomina for trespassing into areas that are strictly off-limits.  Gelsomina is chased from the forbidden supernatural and back to life with Zampano, a life where choices exist.  Gelsomina must learn to make choices, discernment, a thing the adorable one of innocence never accomplishes.  The story of her life in trying times, for all time is trying, is a sad one, a tragedy played out.  The Christ like Fool waiting to steal her heart and wonder, offering wisdom and a kind gentle soul for loving, constructive adventures of accomplishment, a figure destined for a self-proclaimed young death, she is unable to couple with, to advance a meaningful relationship due to her dependence upon the nonreciprocating brutish vice pursuing meathead ways of Zampano.  A state of innocence, purity in intent and behavior, is not enough to bring about fulfillment. Being a good person is not enough. Life demands more than being a victim.  The story is a sad one too many times.

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Jan182015

Holy Presence

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If a statue which the sculptor had niched in the gallery of some great prince were endowed with understanding, and could reason and talk; and if it were asked: O fair statue, tell me now, why art thou in that niche?—It would answer,—Because my master placed me there. And if one should reply,—But why stayest thou there without doing anything?—Because, would it say, my master did not place me here to do anything, but simply that I should be here motionless. But if one should urge it further, saying: But, poor statue, what art thou the better for remaining there in that sort? Well! would it say, I am not here for my own interest and service, but to obey and accomplish the will of my master and maker; and this suffices me. And if one should yet insist thus: Tell me then, statue, I pray, not seeing thy master how dost thou find contentment in contenting him? No, verily, would it confess; I see him not, for I have not eyes for seeing, as I have not feet for walking; but I am too contented to know that my dear master sees me here, and takes pleasure in seeing me here. But if one should continue the dispute with the statue, and say unto it: But wouldst thou not at least wish to have power to move that thou mightest approach near thy maker, to afford him some better service? Doubtless it would answer, No, and would protest that it desired to do nothing but what its master wished. Is it possible then, would one say at last, that thou desirest nothing but to be an immovable statue there, within that hollow niche? Yes, truly, would that wise statue answer in conclusion; I desire to be nothing but a statue and ever in this niche, so long as my master pleases, contenting myself to be here, and thus, since such is the contentment of him whose I am, and by whom I am what I am.

O true God! how good a way it is of remaining in God’s presence to be, and to will to be, ever and forever, at his good-pleasure! For so, I consider, in all occurrences, yea, in our deepest sleep, we are still more deeply in the most holy presence of God.

–St Francis de Sales ‘Treatise on the Love of God’.

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Jan152015

Omnipresence

“I have ascended to the highest in me, and look, the Word is towering above that. I have descended to explore my lowest depths, and I found Him deeper still.”  ― Bernard of Clairvaux

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Jan142015

Repose into the Ordinary

After a strong contemplative declaration posting, my first studies led to cautionary reading. In the past, I abused the spiritual life through escapism. Unable to cope with the world, unable to truly humble myself, suffering from the existential neurosis of feeling misunderstood, adrift and self-deceived as different, I shunned the world. Wounded, broken and hurt, I isolated. Meditative prayer is a natural tendency, a place I easily recede to. I can sit silent, quiet before the Eucharist hour upon hour. However, there is a perverse form of selfishness through such efforts. What I read by Abbot Lehodey, declared personal concerns.

“Repose and tranquility are eminently conducive to regular observance and the interior life. They give us an opportunity of attending at leisure to our own souls and of keeping ourselves uninterruptedly united to God. We may become inordinately attached to them, so that we feel a certain difficulty in renouncing them when we have to fulfill the duties of our office or devote ourselves to the service of the community. The love of repose and tranquility, very legitimate in itself, is then excessive, has degenerated into a selfish egoism. It is no longer disinterested or devoted. Consequently, it extinguishes the flame of true charity and renders us useless alike to ourselves and to others”. –Abbot Vital Lehody

Dom Vital Lehody

For myself, the difficult part is working within the world. There lies my true challenge: to abstain from alcohol, to be small, humble, and happy with and in the world. To dialog, interact, to be open and giving, equates to spiritual effectiveness. Over the last several months, I have returned to playing basketball at fifty with a remarkable group of men over sixty. Intensely, twice a week, every week, we compete on the basketball court like teenagers. The competition, camaraderie, and exercise have become essential to my well-being. The natural life is where my spiritual life can expand or stagnate. Remaining unattached, I vigorously make myself vulnerable to my surroundings, delighting in humiliation and struggle rather than glorification and advancement. Answers to real life problems, not to be a character, extreme, weird or awesome, not to withdraw and isolate while not seeking attention, to reveal practical solutions, contentment in consistency through routine and schedule, to live an ordinary life through ordinary achievement is where my spiritual life is truly nurtured.

A dear friend always stresses that the spiritual life is not my challenge. The natural life is where my deepest battle exist, where ultimate victory is to be attained. Ordinary life is very difficult for me. In my young adulthood, I thrived in dramatics, chaos, and efforts of grand artistic statements. Everything had to be sensational and orientated toward grandness. Restless, irritable, and discontented, life was boring, while lived to the extreme, an existential puzzle manipulated by my schemes and dreams, accountability never a factor due to my unique status as a man of distinct credible insight. Yet strangely through all those years of self-negating, figuring out who I was not, I loved God. I truly did. Misguided, it was not of my doing. All glory goes to God. I will also note Our Blessed Mother truly watched over me, tolerating my wandering, making herself known in a manner I could never refute. She never allowed me to immerse myself too deeply or irretrievably into mortal sin. She assisted in establishing decades of chastity, purifying in areas I was willing to engage temptation. Left to my own devices, I would have wrecked havoc onto my soul, complexly for the sake of experiencing the world as an intellectual artist. I can never deny Her, eternally I am Her’s. The Queen of Heaven is powerfully majestic and tender, a mightily merciful dispenser of grace.

Lyrics from a rock song, ‘The Wake Up Bomb’ by REM come to mind. Astray, a dangerous mind wounding himself in an effort of trying too hard at things that should never be achieved-he stomps, sings, and dances about in places angels fear to tread, and still, reflecting, Michael Stipe possesses a soul wrenching ability to express himself. Something I am convinced of regarding the modern artistic mind is its embracing of the ideology that the end justifies the means. A pop culture icon like Jimi Hendrix is revered when in truth his life is a tragedy, possibly leading to eternal damnation. We are more than children playing with the gift of life. I am always marked by the fact that walking through a museum the artwork becomes grotesque, lacking beauty, complex and convoluted as one advances in centuries. The more we center into the modern mind the more everything beautiful is destroyed. Observe the popularity of piercings and tattoos, the level of ugliness individuals are willing to descend to in order to be unique, to establish an identity. In modern times, it is conformity to be different and extreme. Everybody is doing it. Satan runs riot in the modernistic mind. Beauty and artful presentation give way to self-conscious individual attempts at revelation. It is more important to be somebody, rather than to become something authentic and profound. If one’s creative effort destroys one’s peace of mind, the state of the soul, one’s appreciation for true beauty, all is for naught, simply glorified exercises in errant behavior, a perversion. The idea of genius being tortured, Van Gogh cutting off an ear, is a perversion of ideology, perilous for self-conscious ambitious sensitive immature minds. It is a personal conviction, yet I am of the mindset that self-consciousness is even more dangerous than pride. So many are ecstatic to be famous when they should be content with being nobody. The overwhelming desire to establish identity annihilates. The truth may be the two, pride–the greatest of sins and self-consciousness, are so closely intertwined lines of demarcation do not exist. The recovery world perfectly tags the cliche: ‘ego maniac with an inferiority complex’ Self-consciousness is living in a state of insecurity, low self-esteem that forces one to be in constant collusion with the world. If one attains power under such aberrant conditions they only become more confusion in a confusing world. The noise level only increases. It is evident in religious circles, amongst those striving the most strenuously toward holiness, the obstacle self-conscious individuals present. Prevalent in attack mode minds, these individuals instantly criticize others, desiring to prove how wrong others are, or more accurately trying to establish their righteous identity by the smashing of all other identities. Opposite of submitting to trust, reliance upon Divine Will–faith, hope, and charity; honest, open, and willing when sharing with others, willing to be wrong, self-conscious individuals are forced to struggle with the infliction of personal will. If those I support and encourage are only those who promote my delusion I curse myself. That all said here are Michael Stipe’s lyrics.

I had to knock a few buildings over
I make an ugly mess
I had to blow a gasket
Drop transmission
I had to decompress
I had to write the great American novel
I had a neutron bomb
I had to teach the world to sing by the age of 21
I wake up (I wake up)
I wake up (I wake up)
I threw up when I saw what I’d done

As I celebrate extraordinary achievement through the astonishing Philippe Petit, let me also reign matters in, by recognizing my need to settle lovingly, comfortably within the ordinary. My friend, Ann Marie, always points out that Saint John of the Cross, my dearest saint, was known as an ordinary religious, unassuming in appearance with his diminutive size. A man I saw as the mystics of all mystics was in daily appearance and behavior a very ordinary man. A man who experienced within himself the superessentially extraordinary was in all practical matters extremely ordinary.

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Jan142015

Contemplation Declaration

I cannot tolerate vacillating faith. We have moved beyond that, strong in our convictions. The vacillating also includes those constantly discovering new approaches; different paths, ways, and means always being introduced or explored. To the best of our abilities, we know who we are: simple contemplatives living humbly in the world. We have stopped seeking and explaining ourselves, passively allowing God full control of our lives and our will. Some of us have received personal revelations, irrefutably solidifying truth. We dismiss the supernatural, grounding ourselves in the virtues. We firmly reject sensationalism, sentimentality, and emotion. We have advanced beyond feelings, needing rewards. There is no turning back. Nothing else possesses meaning. There are no alibis. Focus and concentration forefront, we cleanse, opening ourselves in prayer, mass being the greatest of prayers. We are becoming vessels prepared for proper filling. The Eucharist our guiding light we settle into stillness, doing nothing obvious, hidden in authenticity, surpassing self-consciousness-a foe subtler than pride itself. Our left hand is hidden from our right hand. Adoring, love infused, we become sources of grace, our love always reaching out to be of service to God, and our brothers and sister, those with and without Christ.

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Jan132015

Dionysius the Areopagite (post 5)

CHAPTER II

The necessity of being united with and of rendering praise to it that is the Cause of all and above all.

We pray that we may come unto this Darkness which is beyond light, and, without seeing and without knowing, to see and to know that which is above vision and knowledge through the realization that by not-seeing and by unknowing we attain to true vision and knowledge; and thus praise, superessentially, it that is superessential, by the transcendence of all things; even as those who, carving a statue out of marble, abstract or remove all the surrounding material that hinders the vision which the marble conceals and, by that abstraction, bring to light the hidden beauty.

It is necessary to distinguish this negative method of abstraction from the positive method of affirmation, in which we deal with the Divine Attributes. For with these latter we begin with the universal and primary, and pass through the intermediate and secondary to the particular and ultimate attributes; but now we ascend from the particular to the universal conceptions, abstracting all attributes in order that, without veil, we may know that Unknowing which is enshrouded under all that is known and all that can be known, and that we may begin to contemplate the superessential Darkness which is hidden by all the light that is in existing things.

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Jan132015

Jesus I trust in You

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“0 eternal Mercy, You who cover over Your creatures’ faults! By Your mercy we were created. And by Your mercy we were created anew in Your Son’s blood. It is Your mercy that preserves us. Your mercy made Your Son play death against life and life against death on the wood of the cross. In him life confounded the death that is our sin.

“I see Your mercy pressing You to give us even more when You leave Yourself with us as food to strengthen our weakness, so that we forgetful fools should be reminded forever of Your goodness.

“Who was conquered? Death! And how? By Your mercy! You temper Your justice with mercy. In mercy You cleansed us in the blood; in mercy You kept company with Your creatures.

“O mad lover! It was not enough for You to take on our humanity, You had to die as well! Nor was death enough: You descended to the depths to summon our holy ancestors and fulfill Your truth and mercy in them. I see Your mercy pressing You to give us even more when You leave Yourself with us as food to strengthen our weakness, so that we forgetful fools should be reminded forever of Your goodness.

“And what has done this? Your mercy. O mercy! My heart is engulfed with the thought of You! For wherever I turn my thoughts, I find nothing but mercy!”  

–St Catherine of Siena

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