Loving the Impermanent
(5/3/23)
[“Oh, to love what is lovely, and will not last! . . . to love what is mortal; / to hold it / against your bones knowing / your own life depends upon it; / and, when the time comes to let it go, / to let it go” (Mary Oliver, Devotions, 180 & 390, resp.).]
O Lover,
Why is it that the Christian tradition’s way of holding the created cosmos seems to require repeated attention, indeed, correction? How is it that the Roman Catholic Church, its deepest Judaic roots in Your sevenfold declaration “it was good” of Genesis 1, has variously flirted with physicality-depreciating gnosticism, material/spiritual dualisms, and the present pelvic fixation of restorationist United States bishops? Why was Matthew Fox, OP driven from our communion for insisting that Your heílsgeschichte (“salvation drama”) begins not with original sin, but Original Blessing, the title of his 1983 book?
But, alas, O Lover, the above Charybdis is countered by an equally menacing Scylla: a materiolatry which denies the reality of You, whether in morals, cosmology, or spirituality, acknowledging as reality only that apprehended vis sense, cognition, or empirical verification. Here the material cosmos is all there is.
It is my experience that the impulses in the above two paragraphs feed off against, indeed, seeming require, each other, and in the process both close themselves off to the cosmic implications of Your enfleshment M.O., one shorthanded by the name Immanuel (“God with [and for all of] us” [Mt 1:23]). So then, how do we humans both love Your creation amidst its evolvings, surprises, and impermanence, and yet become practitioners of a gelássenheit (“releasement”) which neither clutches at creatures, whether animate nor inanimate, nor idolatrously confuses any of us with You? Although a fellow traveler across recent decades, that question has become even more pressing in this my December.
On the one hand, I long to experience as never before the goodness, beauty, and truthfulness embodied in the work of Your co-creatorship with us, whether the splendor of a Michiana snowfall, Andromeda on a moonless night, human intimacy in its myriad expressions, a culinary feast celebrating familial flourishing, listening to Mahler’s Symphony #8, or glimpses of that defying any description at all. I am aware that emerging from the pandemic I find myself more cautious, more reclusive, than I want to be. Although the relinquishing of powers is proceeding on all fronts, I want to live, live and love well and to the full, until I die, for there is indeed life before death!
On the other hand, none of these loves is or can be forever. All of them, however dearly won, precious, and transformational, are impermanent. The granting of ultimacy status to any of them is simply not allowed. None of these loves escapes the centrifugal scattering of transitoriness, entropy, and death. “It is appointed unto humans [and all else finite] once to die. . . .” (Heb 9:27).
So what is life like in the throes of the delicious tension between loving passionately the transitory and wagering all in You alone (Tu Sólus)? First, all having being are the work of Your hands; we cannot both despise Your work and reciprocate Your lavish love for us all. Otherwise stated, the totality of the finite sphere is sacramentally translucent to Your ubiquitous tabernacling (Jn 1:14; Apoc 21:3). The Incarnátio is the showcasing of Your encompassing and irrevocable intermingling of the finite and infinite.
Second, the two, creaturehood and You, O Creator, are profoundly and irreversably interrelated so that our penultimate experiences of (impermanent) beauty, harmony, and love serve, among other things, as tutorials to loving You, the Ultima. The two, not entirely dissimilar, might be said to be analogous. Our emerging awareness of the thirst for You thus unfolds amidst our penultimate loves, perhaps particularly in the tawdry ones.
And third, the Christian historical tapestry includes a vivid strand, one grounded in Scripture and further orchestrated by both Neo-platonism and many of the Christian mystics, of the cosmos, having emanated from You (exítus), as returning to/into You (redítus). This strand, of which the Christ is precursor, exemplar and epiphany (e.g., Jn 14), augurs for monism rather than dualism, union than fragmentation, consummation than entropy.
O Lover, while unburdening me of the notion that “forever” is a precondition for the penultimate loves of my life, free me as well to be more aware that You, Inextinguishable Furnace of Love, burn brightly both within and beyond each of them.
