Dorothy L Sayers, "On Forgiveness"

A number of years ago I took part in a convention of the Dorothy L. Sayers Society, in York, England, where I read a paper on an essay by DLS written during the Second World War, "Forgiveness". I actually had no title for my paper, or any intention of giving it a title, until I was asked just moments before "curtain" what my paper was called. They wanted to project the title on the screen behind me. I frantically shook my imagination into action and came up with the title as you see it below. The "friend" referred to is Charles Williams, whom I quote several times--and indeed afford him the final word--and the reference to Sayers being "at her weakest" should explain itself in the paper itself... or else I have miserably failed to convey my idea. 

ON FORGIVENESS: SAYERS AT HER WEAKEST (WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM A FRIEND) 

by Ken Sears

There’s a reason why Dorothy Sayers never indulged in a mental experiment to show how all human creativity reflects its first source in the gods of Hinduism. She didn’t believe it. She was certainly imaginative enough to have done it, and well, had she wanted to. But she was too honest to. Not to mention too busy to waste her time, and ours, on anti-reality.

Mary McDermott Shideler, in her introduction to Charles Williams’s Arthurian poetry, writes, “All man’s concerns are rooted in the question of what is real” [emphasis mine]. C.S. Lewis says that what makes you a man instead of a rabbit is that you want to know what is real, not just what you might get by with. In Mind of the Maker Sayers writes, “We must not… try to behave as though the Fall had never occurred nor yet say that the Fall was a good thing in itself. But we may redeem the Fall by a creative act.”

Her categorical “must not” was rooted in a reality in which Sayers believed,  passionately. Only passion could have generated all her plays illuminating the truth of Christ.

Now, Sayers denied the sort of thing I’m saying. “Nothing would induce me,” she wrote, “to set down my ‘religious beliefs and convictions.’  Setting down what I understand to be the Church’s beliefs and convictions is a different matter.” And in another place she insists that she writes only “the opinions of the official Church, which you will find plainly stated in the Nicene Creed, whether or not you and I agree with it.”

Sayers clearly preferred this stance; dare I say it’s the role she liked best in matters religious. She played the role unevenly, however. Mind of the Maker explores – and asserts – things not quite “plainly stated in the Nicene Creed”, and her essay “Forgiveness” speaks to a far more compelling crisis than a failure to accurately register Church teaching “whether or not you and I agree with it”. Her “nothing would induce me” seems, laudably, to stop short at her passion for creating and the horror of world war.

Even in Creed or Chaos? she writes, “It is fatal to let people suppose that Christianity is only a mode of feeling; it is vitally necessary to insist that it is first and foremost a rational explanation of the universe.”

“Fatal”. “Vitally necessary.” “Insist.” “Explanation of the universe.” This isn’t the vocabulary of someone who’s playing it coy with her personal convictions. Moreover, no principled person could insist that the story of a crucified man who rose from the dead was “a rational explanation of the universe” unless she happened to believe it was the rational explanation of the universe. Let alone suggest that getting it wrong was in some way “fatal.” Even if she only meant “fatal” to the Church as an institution, why should she care?

          Also from Creed or Chaos?: “The brutal fact is, that in this Christian country not one person in a hundred has the faintest notion what the Church teaches about God or man or society or the person of Jesus Christ.”

Again, why should she care?

She cares because she believes. And in “Forgiveness” she publicly, transparently, cares and believes that people engulfed in a real cataclysm really need to know the forgiveness rooted in the real structure of the universe.

Sayers’s friend Charles Williams wrote his own book on forgiveness during the war and he says, “If there is one thing which obviously is either a part of the universe or not – and on knowing whether it is or not our life depends – it is the forgiveness of sins.”

Sayers’s friend Williams will accompany us on our way to a weak conclusion. Weak, why? We’ll come to that, but let the wartime words of British Catholic Caryll Houselander serve as adumbration. She declares that, longing for the “redeeming of the world, the healing of the wound, the making new… no one… need be appalled by the vast size of the world’s tragedy, or by their own obscurity, littleness or limitations, because

He hath put down the mighty from their seats

And hath exalted the humble.”

“Forgiveness.” I counted seven parts in this essay (fortunately not seventy times seven). The first part discusses what forgiveness isn’t, and Sayers quickly dispenses with the most obvious: forgiveness isn’t non-forgiveness. If you hope never to see so-and-so’s face again, though of course you forgive him – you haven’t.

The next is even worse, what Sayers calls hypocritical, self-interested forgiveness. “Well of course I forgive Ted for being such a louse. He does sign my paycheck, after all….” (Not forgiveness!)

Then Sayers goes after “priggish” forgiveness, the superior kind that’s gratified at vindication and absent compassion for the repentant. It’s humiliating to take “forgiveness” from someone to whom your grief isn’t also a grief but a triumph. Sayers warns that that kind of forgiveness may provoke the offender back to his crimes.

Then comes conditional forgiveness, which says: relationship with me is possible only if you feel good and dreadful for what you did, and it never happens again. Which leaves two perplexing questions gaping wide like a great gulf fixed: how dreadful is dreadful enough, and, how long is “never”? More to the point, how do you determine it’s “never” happened again until “never” has come and gone? Isn’t that pretty much the same as saying “I will never forgive you”?

Sayers writes, “We are forced to remember that no man is so free from trespass himself that he can afford to insist on condition.”

Which implies that… God can. So, does He?

Via words from William Blake, Sayers seems to say “no”, that God forgives because He simply forgives (just like He tells us to).

Blake: “Doth Jehovah forgive a debt only on condition that it shall be payed? …That debt is not forgiven! …Jehovah’s salvation is without money and without price, in the continual forgiveness of sins, in the perpetual mutual sacrifice in great eternity… [T]his is the covenant of Jehovah, ‘If you forgive one another, so shall Jehovah forgive you; That He Himself may dwell among you.’”

Interesting that Sayers quotes Blake on forgiveness because so does Charles Williams, though Williams cautions that Blake was a heretic. Williams also admits he wishes Blake had sometimes explained what he meant! I agree, particularly on the phrase “perpetual mutual sacrifice”.

In any case, just as Sayers appears to be making it as-simple-as-that, she turns around and says, “The whole teaching of the New Testament about forgiveness is haunted by paradox and enigma and cannot be summed up in any phrase about simple kindliness.”  And she illustrates with Jesus’s healing of the paralytic:

“Whether is easier: to say Thy sins be forgiven thee or to say Arise and walk? But

that ye may know that the Son of Man hath power on earth to forgive sins (then

saith He to the sick of the palsy) Arise, take up thy bed and go.” The irony is so

profound that we are not certain which way to take it. “Do you think forgiveness

is something glib and simple? To be sure – it is as simple as this. Does it seem to

you formidably difficult? To be sure, so is this – but you see it can be done.”

Far from simple kindliness, the Son of Man’s competency to forgive correlated to His power to heal the paralyzed man.

            From what forgiveness is not, Sayers moves to what forgiveness does not. First, it does not wipe out consequences. “It is scarcely necessary”, she writes, “to point out that when a debt is cancelled, this does not mean that the money is miraculously restored from nowhere. It means only that the obligation… is voluntarily discharged by the lender.”

            I made the same point once to a shop lady in Jerusalem, saying that if I were to maliciously destroy her merchandise, but she chose to forgive me, it wouldn’t end there. There’s still the cost of the merchandise. By forgiving me, she’d have chosen to absorb the loss herself.

            I made that point, too, also in Jerusalem, to a university professor. In a lecture he had made the not-so-subtle hint to us Christians in the audience that God’s telling Abraham to spare Isaac showed God wouldn’t allow an innocent person to be sacrificed for others (get it?). I went up to him after the lecture and said, “That’s why the Incarnation is intrinsic to the Atonement.” He stared at me blankly and said, “Why?” “Because”, I said, “only the one who’s been sinned against can absorb the full brunt of the offense – that’s what it means to forgive. If God asked someone else to do it – you’re right, it would be unfair.” The professor grew very still and said, “I never thought of it that way before.” I couldn’t help but think, “You are a teacher of the Jews and you don’t know these things?” God is the shop owner who eats the loss, the Lord who is also Lamb.

            But Sayers provocatively nuances this principle with the following: “[I]f you are forgiving and I am repentant, then we share the consequences and gain a friendship.”

Bravo. If forgiveness eventuates in reconciliation, sharing of consequences is inevitable, for the consequences have reshaped the terrain which the reconciled must walk together.

The word “terrain” helps perhaps to follow Sayers’s exegesis of the Parable of the Unmerciful Servant: “that”, she writes, “forgiveness is not merely a mutual act, but a social act.” She speaks of injuries being “forgiven all round”, lest presumably unforgiving Law dominate the terrain. Now Sayers still hasn’t mentioned the war outright, but no one could fail to note how the present emergency nuanced her biblical exegesis.

Which is a good thing; if Scripture can’t speak to the exigency of the moment, what good is it?

Unfortunately, there were those who wondered what good Sayers’s essay was in the current crisis! For those inhabiting the historical context of “murdered citizens, ruined homes, broken churches, fire, sword, famine, pestilence, tortures [and] concentration camps” the question may well have been, “How dare you talk of forgiving all round?”

It’s not what the newspaper editor wanted to hear, so he rejected the essay. Sayers explains in her foreword: “[T]he Editor of a respectable newspaper wanted (and got)… Christian sanction for undying hatred of the enemy.”

The second thing Sayers says forgiveness does not, is remit punishment, at least not “primarily”. This is difficult, because her analogy of the lender swallowing the debt and her talk of “forgiving all round” seem to argue precisely the opposite! But she notes how this works in child-rearing, where you surely forgive, and love, your naughty child – but you punish him, too, because he needs to learn a lesson. I’m just not sure how to extrapolate grounding your 13-year-old for a week to hanging the convicts of Nuremburg. One might say, you can’t, because the first is all about a personal, nurturing relationship while the second is about social justice. But, didn’t Sayers say forgiveness was a social act?

All I can say is, I heartily agree with Dorothy Sayers when she says, “Forgiveness is a difficult matter”!

And it doesn’t get easier when Sayers turns to what forgiveness is. I want to focus on two assertions that make for a slight logical muddle in this essay. First: “Forgiveness is the re-establishment of a right relationship” – in short, reconciliation. To be very precise, it’s not. It may lead to it but they are two different things, which is why we have two words for them.

That may sound picayune, but slighting that distinction is what immediately leads the engine of Sayers’s logic ever so subtly to stall. That’s in the next assertion. If you listen carefully you’ll recognize that she must have felt something was “off” but she fixed it, as a writer, stylistically more than theologically. She says, “[I]t is impossible to enjoy a right relationship with an offender who, when pardoned, continues [in short, willfully to be your enemy].” But of course, if forgiveness is reconciliation, you can’t logically adduce that forgiveness obtains where reconciliation is absent. No, not even by replacing “forgiven” with “pardoned”! It’s only here, significantly, that Sayers suddenly gets writer’s scruples about overusing the word “forgive”. After this foggy patch it’s all “forgive” again.

Now that second assertion by Sayers was quite right – you can forgive, from your heart, your recalcitrant enemy –  precisely because her first assertion was not quite right; forgiveness isn’t essentially reconciliation, though it hopes for it.

And of course Sayers knew that, one benignly imprecise formulation notwithstanding. She says, “[W]hile God does not, and man dare not, demand repentance as a condition for bestowing pardon [forgiveness], repentance remains an essential condition for receiving it [reconciliation].” So my only criticism is that that first, “not quite right” assertion together with the needless introduction of the word “pardon” could lead one to the notion that God magnanimously bestows some judicial sort of pardon-without-condition, but another, heartfelt, “relational”, dare I say cathartic sort of “forgiveness” materializes only upon repentance.  I would dispute that. The forgiven may know the catharsis only upon repentance, but the forgiver has already substantiated it in forgiving.

One day I came to a new understanding of this that changed my life. I could talk about this for two hours, except that I must not talk about it for two hours! In brief, it dawned on me that, far from minimizing an offense, or concluding that you somehow deserved it – what I call the Gospel of Extreme Niceness – real forgiveness meant calling a crime a crime. That’s why Charles Williams called his book The Forgiveness of Sins, not The Forgiveness of Unintended Inconveniences. It’s a naming that liberates, that means your pain is perfectly justified. Forgiveness means judgment.

For that reason Charles Williams writes, “Love, we have been told, is slow to anger; it is, as a result, slow to forgive, for it will not be in a hurry to assume there is anything to forgive.”

Next, forgiveness means suffering. There’s the paradox: you suffer for the crime you’ve judged, drinking its pain to the dregs, never hoping the offender can undo it. He can’t, anyway: who can turn back time? So you let the vain hope die in you. Forgiveness is a kind of death, a small Golgotha.

Sayers’s words in Creed or Chaos?, though not on forgiveness per se, fit perfectly here all the same. She writes of “the vigorous grappling with evil that transforms it into good, … the dark night of the soul that precedes crucifixion and issues in resurrection.”  C.S. Lewis said that “in reality every real Christian is really called upon in some measure to enact Christ.”

Enacting Christ. A small Golgotha. Crucifixion that issues in resurrection. Forgiveness means resurrection. Having embraced the pain to death, you’re free. That’s the great and tragically secret secret of forgiveness: that before anything else, it’s for the forgiver’s sake first. “Forgive us our debts, O God, so that You might be free of them!” And so He did.

And so must we. Charles Williams writes of Christ’s atonement: “He as Man would forgive thus, because men also should not merely be forgiven but also, in every corner of their natures, forgive.” Our union with the risen Christ makes us not only Forgiven Man, but Forgiving Man and in like fashion: “Forgive one another just as God has forgiven you in Christ.”

Finally, forgiveness means an open door. It invites reconciliation. But (!), authentic forgiveness will not be held hostage to repentance. There’s an audacity, if not ruthlessness, to forgiveness: “I will forgive, whether you like it or not!”  While we were his enemies Christ died for us….

Now I must add a word about humility, because all this “I will forgive you no matter what you feel about it” can sound rather like the priggish forgiveness Sayers criticizes.

It’s not.

To the soul that really passes through that small Golgotha, there’s no place left for arrogance, but only a redemptive compassion. Charles Williams depicts this so well in “Percivale at Carbonek”:

In the red saffron sun hovered the Grail;

Galahad stood in the arch of Carbonek;

The people of Pelles ran to meet him.

His eyes were sad; he sighed for Lancelot’s pardon.

Joy remembered joylessness; joy kneeled

Under the arch where Lancelot ran in frenzy.

The astonished angels of the spirit heard him moan:

Pardon, lord, pardon and bless me, father.

Galahad the sinned-against, to angels’ astonishment, begs forgiveness of Lancelot the guilty, the miserable, the joyless. “Joy remembered joylessness.” Perhaps this approaches what Blake meant by “perpetual mutual sacrifice”….

            Sayers addresses the mutuality of forgiveness, which can’t have won her any points with the newspaper editor. She writes, “It is very difficult to forgive those whom we’ve injured”, and, “no man living is wholly innocent, or wholly guilty.” So, if every act of forgiveness is a small Golgotha, it is also an imperfect, remotely approximated one – and that on an individual level. How much harder, then, for Sayers to recommend this unsatisfying act to a whole, deeply aggrieved nation? Her answer to this difficulty is: “[F]orgiveness is the establishment of a free relationship.” Free. You can’t nickel-and-dime forgiveness; who owes whom more…. Just as you can’t be slightly dead, you either die to the offense or you don’t. Charles Williams says, “Forgiveness is… a thing to be done… easily or with difficulty, but there is only one alternative to its being done, and that is its not being done. … The Christian has no doubt of his duty, though he may have every difficulty in fulfilling it. … The phrase ‘things that cannot be forgiven’ is therefore to him intellectually meaningless.”

            “But are there not crimes,” Sayers seems to argue back, “which are unforgivable, or which we, at any rate, find we cannot bring ourselves to forgive? At the present moment, that is a question which we are bound to ask ourselves.” And here, about five-eighths through the essay, Sayers explicitly addresses the war for the first time.

“It is here especially”, she says, “that we must make a great effort to clear our minds of clutter.” The “clutter” being, as Williams put it, “the massacres, the tortures, the slavery, which have appeared in Europe of late.” How callous it seems to call it clutter. But just as a young mother in London couldn’t allow fear of the next bombing to paralyze her from giving the baby its next meal or bath – the bath must overcome the bombs – so forgiveness must overcome manifold evil. The bath doesn’t excuse the bombs, nor does forgiveness minimize atrocity. It defeats it. 

            Looking forward to the enemy’s hoped-for defeat, Sayers asks, “When the war comes to an end, is there going to be anything in our minds, or in the minds of the enemy, that will prevent the re-establishment of a right relationship?” She’s still wrestling with the question of the unforgivable. And she will conclude it exists. But first, she points out one “monstrous, shattering paradox”, that is, that the worst sin of all, the “deliberate murder of God”, is forgiven… “for they know not what they do.” If the worst sin is forgivable, how can anything be unforgivable?

As we’ve seen already in this essay, it’s never quite that simple.

The ones, Sayers contends, who knew not what they were doing, were the Roman soldiers who really thought, at first, they were executing a criminal, but whose hearts were not “impenetrable to light”.

It was the others, “who had seen the healing power of God blaze in their eyes like the sun; they looked it full in the face and said that it was the devil.” That’s what she calls the “ultimate corruption”. Ultimately corrupt, unforgivable men engineering the murder of the Innocent…. Now that part might have been more to the newspaper editor’s liking, had not Sayers immediately followed with, “I do not know that we are in any position to judge our neighbor. But let us suppose that we ourselves are free from this corruption (are we?) and, that we are ready to greet repentance with open arms….”

What if it’s not there? Worse, what if we meet a fundamental absence of conscience and all possibility of its recovery? Here lies the unforgivable. Not in what someone’s done but in what he’s become. It’s not the scale of the sin but its direction. You can forgive the Holocaust before you can forgive Mein Kampf because, one way or the other, your soul can somehow survive Auschwitz. But Hitler cannot survive Hitler. And his self-destruction is not for you to forgive.

But what of the others, the millions of minds the monster infected, those Sayers calls “the innocents”? Where do you begin with them? Sayers’s suggestion:

For whether is easier: To say, Thy sins be forgiven thee, or to say, Arise and walk?

But that ye may know that the Son of Man hath power on earth to forgive sins, (then

saith He to the warped mind, the frozen brain, the starved heart, the stunted and

paralyzed soul) Arise, take up thy bed and go to thy home.

If you think you can’t forgive them, the throngs who hailed the monster while millions perished – alright, set that aside for now. Think of healing them instead. And perhaps in the healing, you will find that you are forgiving, that you have forgiven.

            And with that we arrive at Sayers’s disturbing conclusion. Disturbing, because the usually mightily convinced and awfully persuasive Sayers concludes ominously inconclusively. Ominously, because the weakness of her conclusion reflects her anxiety for the future:

            We, as a nation, are not very ready to harbor resentment, and sometimes this means

            we forget without forgiving – that is, without ever really understanding either our

            enemy or ourselves. This time, we feel, forgetfulness will not be possible. If that is

            so, and we make up our minds that no right relationship will ever be possible either,

            I do not quite see to what end we can look forward.

            It’s as if she uncharacteristically runs out of steam. Perhaps hope. This is an ending in weakness. Sayers could be categorical, the master of her medium, on how her plays were to be done, or a mystery crafted, or Church teaching not diluted. But here the medium is out of her hands. It is the private space of men’s hearts, and it is the future. With unaccustomed wistfulness she seems to say, “I know we need to find it in our collective heart to forgive, or worse horrors may await us. But I fear we just… won’t… manage it…. And, that whatever I say won’t, finally, make any difference….”

            Charles Williams writes, “It is easier to write a book repeating that God is love than to think it privately. Unfortunately, to be of any use, it has to be thought very privately and thought very hard.” Not surprising, then, that Williams’s work on forgiveness ends with what Williams called “a lame conclusion”.

            Crystal Downing writes how Sayers “relished role-playing”. Does the fragility of this essay come from Sayers’s having no role – at least not a comfortable one – in which to speak these lines? Real forgiveness – giving it, begging it, advising it – admits of no role-playing.

            Nor of academic distance. Sayers doesn’t exposit forgiveness as an article of Church doctrine but urges it on her wounded and aggrieved nation, commends it as of the order of reality – Reality in which the Creator concretely consummated forgiveness in His own sacrificed Person. She believes it.

Paradoxically, when Sayers’s belief is most interiorly constitutive, her adducing of it is most couched in weakness. For the Christian this is no surprise. The supremely convinced apostle Paul tells his flock, “I came to you with weakness and fear and in much trembling.” And his Lord tells him, “My strength is made perfect in weakness.” There is a helplessness and an imperative in commending forgiveness. Williams writes, “Can any writer lay down such rules, for himself and for others? No, and yet, without those rules, without that appalling diagram of integrity, there can be no understanding of the nature of the interchange of love, the truth that the fact of forgiveness is absolute. Immanuel… by his life as forgiveness…showed it as an absolute.”

Sayers, with Williams, wrestled with the appalling weakness of the Unimposable Absolute. As did the Lord of lords when He summoned men, “Come, follow Me”, and they said “No”. The frustration is only compounded in commending an intensely personal and Christian imperative to a very mixed and traumatized nation.

Williams says, “Vengeance then is forbidden; …justice is impossible; what remains? …forgiveness? The thing possible between men and women individually is almost impossible communally. …It is a very lame conclusion. Mortal ones are apt to be. Only divine conclusions conclude.”

CHRISTMAS THOUGHTS

A few thoughts about "The Christmas Story" that threaten to shatter your cherished "manger scene" image, so stop here if that image is sacrosanct to you!

Okay, I warned you. Here we go:

It is quite possible, maybe even probable that Joseph and Mary were not hunting around for a "hotel" (i.e., "inn") with vacancies. Rather, the text can be taken to mean that when it was time to have the baby, they had to go out to the "stable" (more like a "mud room", probably) because there was nowhere in the house--not "there wasn't a room in the inn", but "there wasn't room in the house"--appropriate for such a process...because the house where they were staying (with Joseph's relatives--after all, they went there because it was his family's hometown!) was perhaps crowded, perhaps small and, in any case, you could hardly just lie down and produce a baby right there in front of all the relatives.

This also rather lets poor Joseph off the hook, as the traditional picture we conjure up is of Joseph hauling his poor wife, already in labor (!), around town on a donkey, inquiring at inns for vacancies--dear Joseph, that was certainly bad timing on your part! The reality is far more likely that they got to Bethlehem in plenty of time and there was no last-minute "donkey ride in labor" around town.

Then there's the beautiful but entirely fallacious notion that three wise men followed a star from the distant east to Bethlehem, showing up on the night Jesus was born.

Wrong on every count.

The Magi (we don't know how many there were) saw the star "in the east", i.e., they were in the east when they saw it--the star appeared to them, therefore, to be in the west, not "a star in the east"--at the time Jesus was born. The Magi, likely Persian astrologers, were thus very far away, nowhere in the neighborhood, and entirely incapable of posing for a "manger scene" the night Jesus was born. And no star led them to "the manger" that night! Way out there in Persia they saw a star that night... or that week... or that month--the Scripture doesn't actually tell us when precisely, except to make it clear it generally coincided with Jesus' birth.

And then... this "star" (which is a word describing its appearance, not necessarily defining what it was, and it almost certainly wasn't a "star" in the usual sense) disappeared.

Now, the Magi needed no star in the sky to lead them to Palestine any more than you need a star in the sky to lead you to Trenton, New Jersey or Warsaw, Poland. They knew perfectly well where Palestine was and, moreover, it was no star in the sky that told them the King of the Jews had been born. The star signalled an event of tremendous significance, but it was upon their own further research (probably taking many months or even close to two years) that they concluded the event was the birth of the King of the Jews, the promised Messiah. The "star" was long gone by this time.

About two years after the event, they finally made their way to Palestine, and naturally they headed to the capital to ask where this King of the Jews was--the most commonsense thing to do. All they know is, a king has been born: where better to seek him than in the capital? They have no other means for locating him--remember, they haven't been following a star!

After their encounter with Herod, during which he ascertained from them that they had seen this "star" two years previous (hence Herod's ordering the killing of all the boys from two years old down, "according to the time he found out from the Magi"), the Magi, heading to Bethlehem according to the advice of the Jewish Torah experts, suddenly saw the star again--now this was a stark, stunning re-appearance of the sign they had seen two years before, manifestly supernatural and local (stars way, way up there in the sky don't lead you to a single house and then stop above it), which is why the scriptures indicate that they were utterly astounded and flabbergasted. This was when, in fact, they "followed the star," like the carols proclaim and the Christmas cards depict... more or less. And the Magi--probably a huge caravan including dozens of people and many pack animals--followed it indeed directly to the house where the Child lived.

Personally, I suspect that this "star" was the very presence of God, the Shekinah glory that appeared in the Temple.

So it's a wildly, radically different set of circumstance from the sentimental, traditional image of all the shepherds and Magi showing up at a stable, which made up for the lack of a hotel room, the night Jesus was born.

Also, the casual but definite mention of "the house" (suggesting we have already been talking about it, i.e., in the account of His birth) where the Child lived suggests this is, in fact, the very same house (the "Joseph" family homestead) where Jesus was born two years earlier. Which further argues against the "stable out behind the inn" tradition.

And the fact that Joseph and family were still there two years later (why hadn't they gone home, after all, to Nazareth, once the census was complete?) suggests to me that, upon reflection, they had decided it would be better to settle down for good in Bethlehem, rather than go back to Nazareth where there were a lot of nosy neighbors, and rumors, and gossip.... On the whole, the family enjoyed a far more "stellar" (pun intended) reputation in Bethlehem, what with stories of angelic choirs heralding the birth of "the Lord's Christ" (Yahweh's Anointed One). It would be typical of "local religion" for the villagers to consider Jesus their good luck charm.

The Slaughter of the Innocents would have brought all such notions to an end. Even with Herod dead and gone, Bethlehem would no longer be a friendly environment, to say the least. "It's your fault Herod killed our sons!" So there was no going back to Bethlehem after their "retreat" in Egypt. In fact, the Scriptures never mention that Jesus stepped foot in Bethlehem again ever.

At the risk of self-contradiction, I wouldn't hesitate, all the same, to put a "manger scene" under my Christmas tree with all the traditional cast of characters--the shepherds, the Magi, the angels, the star, the cows and sheep, and of course the Holy Family. It may not be historically accurate, but you only get one Christmas a year! So I'd look on my manger scene as an "historical synopsis". There was, after all, a stable (or "pen" or "back room" of some kind--as I understand it, it was essentially just a part of the house where one might expect animals to be bedded down, perhaps something like what we'd call "the mud room") and a manger, and shepherds that night... and the Magi did show up two years later, so I'd call my manger scene a "time-telescoped synopsis"... or just plain "poetic license"!

We tend to imagine the entire Christmas Story as a single supernatural fabric sustained with glorious background music...and "real life" can seem a very dull, disappointing thing by comparison--and so we do a disservice to both "the Christmas Story" and "real life".

The events of Jesus' birth, to outward appearances, were primarily commonplace, even harried and humiliating...and without the benefit of a Hollywood orchestra...except for the jarring punctuation of the shepherds' arrival with news nobody was expecting about angels out there in the fields--angels nobody but the shepherds actually got to see! That can hardly have been persuasive to many, except for Mary and Joseph. They had a reason already, in their hearts, to grasp the shepherds' news as an astounding, external confirmation of what up to then had been known only to the most intimate circle (Joseph, Mary, Elizabeth, Zachariah...others?) and truly inexplicable an un-demonstrable to anyone else--a glorious secret that was painfully secret! They themselves didn't see the angels, or in fact the "star" the Persian magi saw from the distant east, and they never imagined a caravan of these Persians would be showing up two years later.

Basically, it was "life as normal" punctuated with the rarest, vivid flashes of the "beyond", but sustained by a profound inner awareness of the greater dimension running through everything. It doesn't sound so different from our lives, does it. Of course, it was different in that this was Christ the Lord born into the family...but born precisely in order to live that mundane, muddy, harried, soundtrack-less life real people live in the real world. That's what it means that "the Word became flesh"--not just that the Uncreated became the Created, but that He entered the tedium, boredom, the unremarkable, the dirty, monotonous, anonymous, lonely, stifling, dragging haul of it all. And glory was in it, because of the "khesed"-heart-bond with the Father. As the saying goes, ay, there's the rub. There's the mystery--and we're supposed to enter it. That's why it happened:  "And I and the Father will come to him, and make our home in him."

Some have suggested that Joseph and his family were far from poor, contrary to the commonly unquestioned assumption. As, possibly, a stone mason, not a carpenter--a view that seems to be gaining in credence--Joseph certainly could have had what we'd call a going concern, a thriving business. It has been suggested that when Paul talks about Jesus making himself nothing, there is less a metaphysical/theological point being made, i.e., about the Incarnation, than a simple statement that Jesus, having every opportunity to live a comfortable, successful life in the world on worldly terms, gave it all up and, quite literally, became one of the poor. I can't say, of course, whether that is true or not, but I feel sure of this much: if it is the case, it certainly doesn't (how could it?) detract in any way or diminish the divine grace disclosed in the "Christ-Event", the whole essence of Jesus' appearing and redemptive feat. Whatever "the real case" is (which we'll know only at His coming) it will turn out to be the peak and unsurpassable summit of grace and divine self-giving.

Are We There Yet?

This is a variation on the "Fixed and Moving" theme. 

"Are we the-e-e-re yet?" 

That's what we children always asked when on a long trip in the car. Of course, this constant "Are we the-e-e-re yet?" drove my parents crazy! "Stop! Enough! We'll be there when get there, so no more are-we-there-yet!"

Ten minutes later: "Are we the-e-ere yet?"

Parent: "I said not to ask that anymore!" 

Child: "Yeah, but that was a long ti-i-ime ago-o-o-o!" 

One day, after one of my siblings had yet again posed the eternal question "Are we there yet?", I, being the oldest and, of course, considering myself quite clever, announced, "We will never be there!" In answer to the predictable why's and what-do-you-mean's, I elucidated: "We'll never be there because no matter where we are we're always 'here'! So even when we get there, we'll say, 'We're here!' And that's why we'll never be 'there', only 'here'!" And I felt very smart and wise as only an 11-year-old boy can. 

And now I want to ask you: Are you there yet? Have you arrived? Completed the journey? Finished the race? No, I don't think any of us will say, "Yes, I'm there." 

But I don't worry so much over whether we're "there"; I worry more about whether we're here--really and genuinely here. Because, you see, while it is a given that we're all here physically--wherever we may find ourselves at the moment--it's far from a given that we are perfectly here in the critical realm of spirit and soul--truly, vividly present. Are we present to God, or are we spiritually absent? Are we vitally open and accessible to Him, to His will and love? Are we "here" in obedience and sensitivity to the Spirit of God. That's what it means to be "here", present in the presence of God. 

No, of course none of us is entirely "there" yet....

Paul says, in Philippians 3:13, "I do not consider myself to have attained, but forgetting what lies behind and pressing forward I strive toward the goal, to the high calling of God in Christ Jesus." 

There's the issue: whether we're pressing on to the goal defines whether we're genuinely here for God right now. Truly here, now, fully, for God. Where are you? 

I think the most vivid analogy, especially for young people (and not only) is the whole matter of falling in love--when a person only wants to be in the company of the object of their all-consuming affections, and every moment with them, every scintilla of a moment, is permeated with electric reality. At those moments a person's attention doesn't wander; he's completely there on every imaginable level of his being, utterly alive in the moment. 

Where are we in our lives with Jesus Christ? Completely here on every imaginable level? How can we be here for Him? 

John 14:15 - "If you love me, you will obey my commandments."

John 15:10 - If you obey my commandments, you will remain in my love, just as I have obeyed my Father's commandments and remain in his love."

"If you love Me, you will keep My commandments...." 

Notice that the Lord directly ties love to obedience. Why? He says, "If you love Me...." It depends on love! Because it is love itself that spurs, that stimulates and moves us to do what He says, that makes us want to see His will made real. Only if we're convinced to the bottom of our souls that His ways and will are just perfect and magnificent (you see, that's how we feel if we love Him!) will we strain with irrepressible, in-suppressible desire and alacrity to realize His design and aims, because we know there's nothing even conceivably better. 

Of course, such an internal "vision" isn't possible at all if we don't spend serious time with God in the intimacy of prayer and contemplation of His word. 

Where are you in that respect? It's a safe bet that none of us is where we know we ought to be.

Here is an encouraging word: the most glorious fact of the matter is, God is merciful: "His mercies are new every morning". And He loves each of us, and waits for the cry of our hearts and the appeal of our spirits so that He might respond with a manifestation of grace unveiled and the power of Life. We can always, always, always say to God, "Yes, I'm here, now, totally, for You. Receive my spirit's cry, Lord."

"If you love me, you will obey my commandments." Which commandments? The Ten Commandments? The Beatitudes? Or the command to sell all we have, give it to the poor and go and follow Him? Which commandments? It's not such an easy question. So which commandments: the commandment to attend church? To read the Bible? We want to know the answer because we want to love the Lord in practice and completely "be here", present and alive to the Lord, at every moment. So, Lord: which way should I make sure I know your real will, every day of my life? 

The Lord says, "I am the way, the truth and the life."

It's a simple but not an easy answer. We ask, we demand, a list of rules and regulations; instead, our Savior responds by presenting nothing less than Himself. 

A list of rules can be memorized but a living Lord can only be known--and all the more and deeper with every step of life--because in Christ the opportunity is ceaselessly present to be present, now, completely for Him. 

Where are you? 

Somebody might, I suppose, object, "But I still need some kind of firm law, a set of guidelines, to give my life a reliable framework." 

Well, I'll agree in this sense: life without law is no life at all. Imagine life without any laws! For example, without the law of gravity! Or the law of cause-and-effect! Not only would the coffee refuse to pour into your coffee cup simply because you were tipping the coffee pot, but even if it did, it wouldn't stay there! Or, on a more abstract level, but no less meaningful by any means, imagine life without the "law" of love, or of justice. Ultimately, laws are the principles of reality, the framework of everything that is. No "laws", no reality! 

But here's the most amazing thing, and a very problematic thing for us Christians. The highest law of our life is Jesus Christ Himself, Who says, "I am the way, the truth and the life; no one comes to the Father except through me." The Lord also says (John 8:32) "And you will know the truth and the truth will make you free. 

There's your law for you! You will know the truth and the truth will set you free! 

In the Epistle of James, James develops the essence of this truth: (1:25) "But the one who peers into the perfect law of liberty and fixes his attention there, and does not become a forgetful listener but one who lives it out--he will be blessed in what he does", and (2:12) " Speak and act as those who will be judged by the law that gives freedom."

You will know the truth, the truth will make you free, and you will be judged according to that law of freedom. The life of Jesus Christ in us, His presence and power, the power of His resurrection and eternal life, this is the "law of freedom" operating in us and establishing the framework of authentic and full-fledged life: if we really remain, stay rooted, wherever life takes us, fully present, fully "here" to the Lord. 

Galatians 6:2 says, "Carry one another's burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ." That's the law of Christ in you! If He truly lives in you, then there is no law that can conceivably take precedence to the law of Christ living in you! And if that's the case, then what Paul says at Galatians 4:6 depicts with crystal clarity the living, dynamic force of this all-encompassing law of our lives:  "And because you are sons, God sent the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, who calls, "Abba! Father!" 

Precisely the same essential reality echoes in 1 John 3:1--"See what a love the Father has bestowed on us: that we should be called God's children--and indeed we are!"

Children naturally demonstrate the character traits of their Father, and these naturally demonstrated characters traits, in the lives of God's children, are what Paul calls the "fruit of the Spirit": "...[T]he fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law."

Why does Paul, to begin with, mention this "fruit", and, in the second place, point out that there's no "law" against it? Because certain Hebrew-Christians from Jerusalem, most likely former Pharisees like Paul, had come to Galatia and, even though they believed in Christ, insisted nonetheless on exact, rigorous, scrupulous obedience to the Mosaic Law as the true way to enter into the people of God and their blessings. We can encapsulate their position this way: while we know that the law was given to lead us to Christ, their view was the opposite, i.e., that Christ was given to lead the world to the Mosaic law! 

And so these false brethren, as Paul calls them, were telling the Christians in Galatia, "It's good, of course, that you have received the Messiah Jesus, but only Moses' Law will reveal to you how you should live and how to get rid of everything in your lives that doesn't please God." 

And what does the apostle Paul say? Galatians 5:18-25

"But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law. Now the works of the flesh are obvious: sexual immorality, impurity, depravity, idolatry, sorcery, hostilities, strife, jealousy, outbursts of anger, selfish rivalries, dissensions, factions, envying, murder, drunkenness, carousing, and similar things. I am warning you, as I had warned you before: Those who practice such things will not inherit the kingdom of God!

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Against such things there is no law. Now those who belong to Christ have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. If we live by the Spirit, let us also behave in accordance with the Spirit." (NET Bible)

If I may paraphrase the apostle, what he is saying, in other words, is this:

"You have no need anymore for a law that tells you how bad all these things are! You know it perfectly well! And if you live in harmony with the Spirit given to you by God, then the holy life of God's kingdom will naturally come out in you! To repeat: if you simply live in harmony with the Spirit given to you by God, then the holy life of God's kingdom will naturally fulfill itself in you--in love, joy, peace, patience and the like. And what's the point, then, of any set of rules, when such a life is already working perfectly well without them? What purpose would such a law serve? To tell you not to live that way?" 

When is the "Law of Christ" displayed in action? Not "then" and "there" but "here" and "now"! The constant question is, is the Spirit of God manifesting in my life, here, now, fully, for God? 

In Romans 1:5, Paul speaks of the "obedience of faith". Faith itself is an act of obedience, and it fully materializes in obedience to this core, central, intrinsic law of Christ. Standing before Pilate, the Lord boldly declared, "For this reason I was born, and for this reason I came into the world - to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice." This is the essence of the law of Christ at work in our lives, our vital link to the truth that sets us free, free from everything that resists the unimpeachable life of God that will not be governed or regulated by an inferior law. There is no law that can compete with a life charged with this vision: 

Compete well for the faith and lay hold of that eternal life you were called for and made your good confession for in the presence of many witnesses. I charge you before God who gives life to all things and Christ Jesus who made his good confession before Pontius Pilate, to obey this command without fault or failure until the appearing of our Lord Jesus Christ – whose appearing the blessed and only Sovereign, the King of kings and Lord of lords, will reveal at the right time. He alone possesses immortality and lives in unapproachable light, whom no human has ever seen or is able to see. To him be honor and eternal power! Amen. (1 Timothy 6:12-17; NET Bible)

Whatever our age, whatever our education, whatever our nationality, however long we have been following Christ, and whatever our dreams in life may be, we are all the recipients of this charge and supreme calling from the Throne of Heaven! 

And we all have the same spiritual need: that God be here, fully, now, for us, in His love. 

He will; His own love compels Him. 

He will surround, enfold and indwell us, and endue us with everything we need--at every moment, in every place--to live in the holy freedom, by the holy law, of Christ, as the victorious children of Christ's resurrection... all the way....  

Until we're there. 

Fixed and Moving

This sermon was inspired by three consecutive daily entries in my other blog, Serendipitous Intersections--October 3rd, 4th and 5th (Year Two). The headings for those days' entries are: 

3   Fixed and Moving: our position is determined by our direction, our insistent metamorphosis defined by our unfolding stasis

4   The merciless spark: we stand without excuse before glimmers and hints, whispers and hues of the Kingdom--how much more, then, before the Eternal Expression  in Jesus Christ? 

5   Disobedient prayer is spirit's self-exile and no prayer at all; rebellious faith is disbelief; but surrender to deliverance is Glory's concrete entry and Forgiveness enfleshed 

Concepts of movement, responsibility and reconciliation converged to evoke the following sermon from me, which I presented in chapel at our Bible college a few days after my return from an extended stay in America. 

A linguistic note: because I was preaching to a Russian-speaking audience, I needed to explain the two nuances of English "move", since the Russian verb "move" is not used to express emotional response ("I was deeply moved by your words") as the English verb is. Interestingly, both Russian and English use the verb "touch" in this emotional sense.  

The concept I want us to contemplate today can be summed up by these two words: "fixed" and "moving". It may seem to us, sitting here in this auditorium, that we are more or less fixed in our places, sitting quietly in our chairs, if you don't count a little bit of shuffling around in our seats. Here we are in a fixed, still room, in a building firmly rooted to its spot, in this city, in this country, on this continent, on this planet--but oops, wait: the planet is spinning! 

And not only is the planet spinning, it is circling the sun in our solar system, and the solar system is riding a spiral tail of our galaxy, and our whole galaxy is floating through the universe!

So all of us, right here and now, are moving in all those ways, even as we sit very still and quiet in this room. 

Moreover, it is because we are moving in all those ways that we are fixed in a precise location. If we weren't riding the tail of a floating galaxy on a planet circling the sun and spinning around, we would not be here right now. The one is dependent on the other. 

The same can be said of our spiritual life: we are fixed and moving at the same time, and the one is dependent on the other...because where we're moving to determines where we are located right now, constantly and continually. 

Let's read John 3:19: "Now this is the basis for judging: that the light has come into the world and people loved the darkness rather than the light, because their deeds were evil." (The NET Bible)

This is the basis for judgment, because this has happened, the fact is accomplished, it is a fixed reality that leaves all people without excuse: LIGHT HAS COME INTO THE WORLD; THE WORD BECAME FLESH AND HAS DWELT AMONG US. 

Actually, I believe that man is and has always been without excuse before God, not only because of the Incarnation of Christ but because we inescapably sense the whispers of Truth, we feel the deep rumblings of righteousness like distant thunder, we catch the fleeting glimpses of the eternal Kingdom and we are, consequently, responsible for our choice, whether to listen (or at least try) or to tell ourselves, "No, there was nothing there--I didn't hear anything, I didn't see anything." 

And if that's so, then how much more is Man without excuse before God when the Word has become flesh and dwelt among us? This is no hint or whisper merely from God; this is an explosion of heaven's light into the world in the face of God's Only-Begotten Son; this is the the Light of the World, this is a fixed, inescapable fact of human history. The God Who once said, "Let there be light" has become one of us, full of redeeming grace. 

This fact is fixed and it must move us. 

In English, our verb "move" has a nuance that it doesn't have in Russian. In Russian we say that a story was very "touching", meaning that we were emotionally affected by it. In English we say that same thing! "That was such a touching story." But in English we can also say, literally, that that was a very moving story--the story moved me, and here the verb "move" has the same meaning as "touch". It's as if I felt my heart shift inside me, as if I was drawn, pulled, by the story; this is why we say "I was moved" to mean that I was "touched" or deeply affected emotionally. 

Now, the Greek philosophers, trying to figure out Creation and cosmology, came up with a concept of God as the Fixed, or Unmoved, Mover; they pictured the Creator as one who is still and unmoving and causes everything else to move, because movement is a necessary quality of all created things, but not of the Creator. To move is to change, and the Creator neither moves nor changes. 

But when we English-speakers hear that phrase "Unmoved Mover" we quite possibly misunderstand the sense of the word "move". We take it in its usual sense, that is, to push things around this way and that. So we imagine this Greek Unmoved Mover shuffling the pieces of creation around on his playing board. But the philosophers had, arguably, the other sense of the word "move" in mind--the sense that is very close to the notion of being "touched" emotionally, that is, to be drawn, pulled, deeply affected. Picture this Unmoved Mover "moving" the whole universe precisely because the whole universe is deeply moved, by love, to come closer and closer to the Creator. This Fixed Mover doesn't shuffle pieces around on any playing board; rather, he "moves" the whole creation simply by being there and attracting it. 

Remember, I am talking here about pagan philosophy, about the concepts Man has conceived by the lesser lights of the visible creation and his God-given intuition--but doesn't the apostle Paul tell us in the first chapter of Romans that even such "Natural Revelation" possesses a compelling degree of validity and, crucially, leaves Man without excuse? 

Far from neutralizing and obliterating the valid aspects of the Natural Revelation and Greek notions of an Unmoved Mover, the Christian Revelation transcends and subsumes them. If an Unmoved Mover is conceptualized as "moving" us towards itself, by something like love, then how much more are we to be moved by this: 

"THE LIGHT HAS COME INTO THE WORLD"

Are we moved? Are we touched? Are we pulled and drawn?

Every person is moving somewhere, both physically and spiritually, whether they are conscious of it or not. All people are moving, either towards the Light of the World or away from it. And it is their direction that determines their position before God. We are, all of us, always FIXED and MOVING, and the one depends on the other. 

Christ says, "And this is the judgment." It is a fixed, certain, unwavering judgment: the light has come into the world. It is the axis of history, of time and eternity. Let's read on, John 3:20-21: "For everyone who does evil deeds hates the light and does not come to the light, so that their deeds will not be exposed. But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what they have done has been done in the sight of God." (NET Bible)

The Lord unveils the true spiritual dynamic behind all human action. No matter what the historian tells you, or the psychologists, or the sociologists, or the politicians, in actuality the one motive force behind all human action is this: we are either coming to the Light of the World, or we are retreating from it, hiding from it, rejecting it. 

In fact, this was the condition--the fluid, tentative, precarious condition--of the human spirit even before the Incarnation of Christ. If we understand that, then we can appreciate even more what incomprehensible grace is ultimately unfolded in this EVENT:"For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life." 

For all who want to come to the Light, for all who are willing to hear those whispers of righteousness, for all who choose not to recoil from those fleeting glimpses of the eternal kingdom, for them and their hearts there is a home, there is a "Son Given", there is a destination, a place to be and a place to move to in love. 

Unlike the Unmoved Mover of Greek philosophy, the true God moves and He is moved, in the English sense of the word. God so loved the world; the Son of Man came to seek that which was lost; Jesus wept over Jerusalem and before his friend's grave; we do not have a high priest who cannot be touched by the feelings of our infirmities.... Contrary to Greek philosophy, Heaven's true revelation discloses a God Who is continually moving towards His children in self-giving love, so that our hearts can find their true, fixed home forever. 

Where am I right now? That depends entirely on where I'm going right now. 

I want to leave you with one small phrase employed by the apostle Paul, for you to consider it in the light of the other things we've thought about so far. In his second epistle to the Corinthians, Paul writes: "God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people's sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation." (2 Corinthians 5:19, NIV Bible)

Notice that Paul doesn't say "the ministry of forgiveness"--because forgiveness belongs to God; it is God's business, and God has accomplished it in absolute perfection. 

Notice that Paul doesn't say "the ministry of repentance"--because repentance is the responsibility of each sinner himself. 

Paul says "the ministry of reconciliation" because his task and ours is to persuade, even beg people to move, to turn, to come into the true place and the true direction eternally appointed for their God-created hearts. 

God has done everything necessary, and that's a fixed fact, and when we evangelize we must never doubt that. The Light of the world, revealed in the face of Jesus Christ, is the human heart's true home, and when we evangelize we must never doubt that. 

Our confidence in God's answer to the human crisis must be fixed and unmoving, so that we might be moved, touched, compelled by God's love to hold out that answer to human souls hurtling towards eternity. 

We can say to them, "Come with us, and dwell in the Father's kingdom, where there will always be somewhere farther to go in His constant, unwavering love."  

Art or Guessing Game?

I have no time for the so-called “poetry” that is nothing more than a guessing game, i.e., “here’s an incoherent pile of words, now you try to guess what I mean”.

It’s astonishing how many people buy hook-line-and-sinker into the tripe that goes: “You should never ASK what a work of art MEANS, because that just shows you have no powers of appreciation and want somebody to hand you the meaning on a silver platter.” Thus, so-called artists get away with foisting no-talent rubbish on the public… a blank canvas except for a red spot in the middle… a “sculpture” consisting of, say, a thousand wads of chewed bubble gum smushed together in a blob… or a poem that goes, say:

l IF e it
IS
4398279468
it?

And we’re supposed to “ooh” and “ah” at the iconoclastic genius… yawn….

It’s really amazing how MUCH can be produced when none of it has to mean anything or requires any true “art” (effort, finesse, creative tension) AND the public is too chicken to stand up and recognize that the emperor has no clothes on.

Genuine art can STAND UP to explanation. That’s precisely what MAKES art more than a guessing game. If the only thing that’s meaningful about a work of art is “What was the artist THINKING of?”, it implies that, if indeed you could get said artist to TELL you, the work itself would have ipso facto exhausted its raison d’etre. That hardly speaks well of the work, does it! But if you research, for example, any number of the great orchestral works of the 19th century, you will find that the composers weren’t shy in the least about explaining in great detail what their works meant to them, what concepts and feelings provoked and generated their creations—never, apparently, considering that they were somehow ruining their own art by doing so, or catering to “philistines”. Indeed, I imagine that, had anyone responded with, “Well, now that you told us, you’ve RUINED it!”, that’s the person who’d have richly earned the epithet “philistine.”

I remember a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon from years back, where Calvin invites Hobbes to play a guessing game. Hobbes agrees. Calvin says, “Okay, I’m thinking of a number. You guess what it is.” Hobbes looks slightly ferhoodled at this notion, but gives it the old college try: “Uh… two?” “Nope! Guess again!” “Er… 849?” “Nope! Guess again! Isn’t this fun?!” Hobbes gives the audience that Oliver Hardy stare of exasperation and walks away. Calvin stares after him in perplexity and concludes that Hobbes just doesn’t like to play games.

The analogy to my topic here is obvious!

Now, if the game had been, “Guess the number I’m thinking of between 1 and 5, and if you guess right on the first try, you get a Snickers bar,” well, then, there’s some form and definition, parameters and also a motivation. But just, “Guess what number I’m thinking of…”, means, “Try to read my mind… simply because I like it when people try to read my mind… because it makes me feel my mind is important….” Sorry, but nobody’s THAT important. And to invite people to do that implies more than subtly that you doubt they themselves have anything more significant to do with their lives than to stand around trying to guess what you’re thinking. In art, that’s called disrespecting an audience (not to mention thinking far more of yourself than is healthy). It’s precisely what’s going on when the painter, asked what his red spot in the middle of a blank canvas means, sneers, “If I need to EXPLAIN it to you… then it’s probably not worth it….” Well, I’d have to agree on the “not worth it” part—indeed, nothing about the spot on the canvas is “worth it”--but I imagine his main reason for not explaining is, there’s nothing there TO explain, and admitting it blows his cover.

Back to poetry…. When the poet isn’t AFRAID to be comprehensible (which means, having something to say and respecting his audience enough to let them hear it), and at the same time is a master of the art form itself, the result can be as shattering as any great piece of music.
The art form is a fascinating one, aimed at transmitting vivid concepts with the most economical and aesthetically effective use of language. Reading an extended work—like, for instance, Paradise Lost—demands real commitment, patience and “two ears”, i.e., an ear for the content and an ear for the form… and perhaps a third ear that synthesizes the two into a single experience.

At the moment, I’m reading Dorothy L. Sayers’s translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy (Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso); I’m in the final book now. Dante was, in his own way, an iconoclast (I don’t mind “iconoclasts” if they actually represent SUBSTANCE, and not simply “nothing” in place of “something”), daring to produce his life’s major work in Italian rather than the expected Latin. Moreover, I think I’m accurate in saying he invented the particular poetic form used in the Divine Comedy, i.e., the “terza rima” form, by which the rhyming end-words follow this pattern: A-B-A, B-C-B, C-D-C, etc. Sayers was very ambitious, some might have said crazy, in setting her mind not only to translate the “sense” of Dante but actually to reproduce the “terza rima” form in her English version.

(I remember, by the way, reading a PROSE translation of the Inferno when I was in ninth grade—which strikes me now as utterly bizarre—and that I really liked it—which strikes me as even bizarrer!)

The thing about poetry that requires patience—or, at least, ONE of the things that require patience—is its syntactical freedom (freedom in word-order). The verbs can come in FRONT of the subjects; the adjectives can come AFTER the nouns; the direct object can come in FRONT of the verb, etc. What’s funny is how we accept such “non-English” under the guise of poetry when we’d immediately reject it as “ordinary speech”:

Lilies three gave she me

Here are the opening two triplets from the 10th canto of Dante’s Paradiso in Sayers’s translation. The order of words and concepts defies the “ordinary” pattern of English, though not as radically as “Lilies three gave she me”!

The uncreated Might which passeth speech,
Gazing on His Begotten with the Love
That breathes Itself eternally from each,
All things that turn through mind and space made move
In such great order that without some feel
Of Him none e’er beheld the frame thereof.

In “regular talk”, what this passage is saying is:
The uncreated Power (God, specifically the Father, Whose Being cannot be expressed in human language), as an outgrowth of His contemplating the Son in the love that ceaselessly flows between Them, has launched everything that exists, whether physical or “abstract”, into motion so exquisitely that nothing created can ever truly be perceived without some consciousness of God Himself.

To appreciate poetry means taking the time to think out WHAT is being said, and then go back and enjoy, dive into, the powerfully “aesthetic” WAY in which the poet said it, because his/her “way” of saying it has also, in the process, created new, indeed multiple, levels of meaning.

I think it is this multiplicity of meaning inherent in all genuinely great art, and the fact that no one ELSE can discover all those meanings FOR you, or create YOUR entire experience of the work—I think it is THIS that, on a cringingly nebbish, humbug-ish level, the makers of vapid, uncreative, just-stand-there-and-guess “art” are trying to capitalize on, to use as a kind of weapon to fend off all uncomfortable inquiry: “Art has MANY meanings, so don’t DARE ask me what it means!” Well, dear “artist”… if art, as you say, has “many meanings”, then surely you wouldn’t ruin our experience of your work by suggesting one? At least to give us a start? Particularly when this… thing you’ve made says NOTHING to ANYBODY? To argue that “art has many meanings” is no compelling reason for us to assume that this bit of… well, NOTHING that you’ve slapped together means… SOMETHING! It wasn't the little boy who called the emperor naked who was the “philistine”.