Well Said - Our Fear of Emptiness

"We are afraid of emptiness. Spinoza speaks about our "horror vacui," our horrendous fear of vacancy. We like to occupy-fill up-every empty time and space. We want to be occupied. And if we are not occupied we easily become preoccupied; that is, we fill the empty spaces before we have even reached them. We fill them with our worries, saying, "But what if ..."

 "It is very hard to allow emptiness to exist in our lives. Emptiness requires a willingness not to be in control, a willingness to let something new and unexpected happen. It requires trust, surrender, and openness to guidance. God wants to dwell in our emptiness. But as long as we are afraid of God and God's actions in our lives, it is unlikely that we will offer our emptiness to God. Let's pray that we can let go of our fear of God and embrace God as the source of all love."

 

- Henri Nouwen

Particular Hearts, Universal Bones

He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.

Until he relearns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. 

[...]

...The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. 

- William Faulkner – Nobel Banquet speech, 1950. Emphasis mine.

It felt as though the entire West was holding its collective breath on Monday, watching the people of Paris as they watched the great Lady of Paris, the Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris, be engulfed in smoke and flames. Pictures of the bystanders reflected our own expressions back at us--awe and a kind of futile incredulity. Notre Dame Cathedral has been part of the Parisian landscape since the 12th century, and part of the landscape of the Western imagination for almost as long.

The fire itself, the pathos of the hymn-singing Parisians, the bravery of the firefighters, the small consolations as one treasure after another was announced to have been recovered, all of it made a compelling story filled with vivid images and characters--the firefighter priest, the Crown of Thorns, the warped but intact rooster weathervane.

With every photo, I compulsively scanned for some sign of the fate of the famous rose windows. I'm not sure why. No, that's not true--I do know why. It's because in the back of my mind, I always assumed that some day I would make it to Paris to stand in the dappled light of those glorious windows.

Some day, I assumed, I would reach through the centuries to feel fellowship with men and women long-dead, all of us gaping at the grotesqueries and buttresses, all of us, lifted by the glory of her arches and the wonder of her windows, touching something transcendent.


Tuesday and Wednesday brought unexpected joy and relief at the news that Notre-Dame will rise again. President Macron vowed to rebuild. The rose windows were found to be intact; the arches still solid. The roof burned and melted away, but photos of the interior showed spots so untouched by the inferno that even the candles remained unmelted.

But this is an age when nothing beautiful or unifying--not grief and not joy--can be allowed to stand unchallenged. And so we have the following piece of misanthropy masquerading as virtue.

[Image: Meme showing the Great Mosque of Aleppo before and after bombing. Facebook text reads: "Ethnocentric bias pointed out. 'The world's selective outrage sickens me ...like trained brainless fucking monkeys crying on cue'"]   

Leaving aside the assumption that those of us upset at the burning of Notre Dame were untouched by the destruction in Aleppo--which is indicative of the poster's selective attention and focus more than anything, I suspect--is it "ethnocentrism" to grieve some things in a more personal and particular way than others?

A friend of mine responded by passionately pointing out that ethnocentrism is an inescapable feature of humanity, not a character flaw,

"Ethnocentric (or rather, spiritually-centric, you bigoted idiot, big fucking difference) bias is a neurological reality of being alive. The things that effect you and your group are going to elicit a greater emotional response. It’s not a mystery, and it doesn’t make you a failure as a person."

This is, of course, true. It's natural to feel more strongly about those things that affect you more closely, and it is normal to be more closely affected by things that happen to familiar places and people.

It's no more strange that a Westerner would be especially affected by the burning of Notre Dame than it is strange that a woman should grieve especially deeply for her own mother. 

A friend of mine has been driven to anxious distraction today by a health crisis in her husband's family. No reasonable person would think to scold her for being more heartsick over an in-law than she would be over a distant friend's cousin's neighbor's brother. That much grief and worry over every suffering person would be unsustainable. It would be paralyzing. The only way to equalize them would be to remain as faintly and distantly dismayed by the family member's illness as we are over the distant acquaintance's injuries.

This, you see, is where this impersonal universalism inevitably leads us: to the corrosion of our humanity. Because, of course, the truth is that my friend does not love the friend's cousin's neighbor's brother less for loving her own father-in-law in particular. The reverse is in fact observably true: her compassion for strangers is enriched by her love for those closest to her. She sees her lost brother in every addict; she sees herself in every motherless daughter.

By knowing and loving particular people, she has learned better how to love people in general. And there is no better way to begin to love Humanity than knowing that it is made up of individual humans, each of them a person as deeply real as we are ourselves.

A wise man said that the family is "a school of deeper humanity." Mother Teresa, the little Albanian nun who left her home and community behind for a life of service to the poor and suffering people of the streets of Calcutta, has been quoted as saying, “If you want to change the world, go home and love your family."

Meanwhile, our modern Mrs. Jellybys preach about Aleppo to neighbors grieving for Notre Dame, but they give their hearts to neither. 

How can our erstwhile critic enter into the communal grief of the people of Aleppo if she holds herself apart from the communal griefs of her own cultural community? Her griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars.

She writes as though she is standing apart, watching the end of man.

Nobody is obligated to feel deeply, emotionally moved by the immolation of Notre Dame--or any other loss or tragedy. But when you are struck more fiercely by some one particular grief or joy or fear or hope than another, you should know it for what it is--a tutorial on the passions and movements of your own heart, and an opportunity to grow in understanding and compassion for the hearts and lives of others.

Westerners treasure Notre Dame in part because her artistry, like Faulkner's, reminds us of "the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice" that made up our past.

It will rise to do so again.

Until then, let us strive to let the particular grief of this moment teach us to recognize the "universal bones" of human grief, love, and loss, wherever and in whomever they may be found.




***

A sidebar, because it was tickling at my brain and finally clicked. As I was writing this post, I had a vague sensation I had read some other quote that bore thematic similarities to the Faulkner passage I opened with, but I couldn't put my finger on it. Just now, I realized that it was from an interview with Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski that a friend and fellow fan sent me yesterday. In the interview, JMS compares the universe he envisioned with what he saw as the much more antiseptic utopia of Star Trek's Federation. "The Star Trek universe," he said, "seemed to say that for us to go into the stars, we have to leave behind important parts of ourselves, the good and the bad: our vices, our avarice, our commercialism, but also our faith and our beautiful fractures." 

The image of leaving behind "our beautiful fractures" had evoked Faulkner's "His griefs grieve no universal bones, leaving no scars"--which then burst to the forefront of my consciousness when I sat down to write about the particularity of love and grief. So there you are--a bit of insight into the web-like way my brain makes connections. Babylon 5, Faulkner, Mrs Jellyby, JPII and Mother Teresa. And Notre Dame. And you and I. All connected by the universality of our particularities. 




[*** I'm back to blogging for Lent! And I'm not the only one. Check out the list here. ]

Seven Quick Takes - Blogging Around

I've been enjoying reading everyone else's blogging so much, I've yet to finish any of the half dozen posts in my drafts folder. So instead, here's a taste of what I've been reading.

1. 

One of my favorite news pieces this week. Believe it or not, this headline is not from The Onion.

Man angry his photo was used to show all hipsters look alike--then learns it wasn't him

A man threatened to sue a technology magazine for using his image in a story about why all hipsters look the same, only to find out the picture was of a completely different guy.

The story in the MIT Technology Review detailed a study about the so-called hipster effect — "the counterintuitive phenomenon in which people who oppose mainstream culture all end up looking the same."

The inclusion of a version of a Getty Images photo of a bearded, flannel-wearing man, tinted with a blue and orange hue, prompted one reader to write to the magazine: "Your lack of basic journalistic ethics in both the manner in which you 'reported' this uncredited nonsense, and the slanderous, unnecessary use of my picture without permission demands a response, and I am, of course, pursuing legal action."

But it wasn't actually him. 

2. 

In all the fun of laughing at the hipster who couldn't tell that a generic picture wasn't actually him, I don't want to miss pointing you to the original piece the picture ran with, titled The hipster effect: Why anticonformists always end up looking the same, which concludes,

Hipsters are an easy target for a bit of fun, but the results have much wider applicability. For example, they could be useful for understanding financial systems in which speculators attempt to make money by taking decisions that oppose the majority in a stock exchange. 

Indeed, there are many areas in which delays in the propagation of information play an important role: As Touboul puts it: “Beyond the choice of the best suit to wear this winter, this study may have important implications in understanding synchronization of nerve cells, investment strategies in finance, or emergent dynamics in social science.”

Go and read it, and then, if you find the topic at all interesting, go pick up this fun little novel by Connie Willis, which plays with chaos theory and group trend patterns in highly entertaining fashion, sweetened with a dollop of romantic comedy.

3.

I don't even remember how I stumbled across the following blog, but every once in a while the pseudonymous Latin scholar/medievalist author of A Clerk of Oxford points to some weird and wonderful piece of the past that resonates across the centuries. For example, this piece on the demon Titivillus, who collected sinful words.

From a glance at the Middle English Dictionary's entries for jangler and janglen, you can see that this concern about harmful words was a very wide-ranging one. It covers all classes of people, from bishops to schoolboys, and all kinds of destructive speech: snide carping, drunken boasts, unnecessary arguments, ignorant gossip, and many forms of excessive, wasteful words. Since the onslaught of email and social media in the past few years, it has sometimes felt as if our culture is drowning in words - billions of words, most of them of no lasting good to anyone, and many of them actively doing harm. (Appropriately, you can see in the MED entry that one of the uses of jangle was to refer to birds' chatter, to which noisy human speech, then as now, was often compared, and so 'to twitter' is in fact one of the definitions of the word.) But perhaps it felt the same in the Middle Ages.

And a few pieces from my fellow bloggers:

4. 

From DarwinCatholic, some thoughts on Earth's "hopeful monsters": us.

We should see each person, not as another problem, but as another solution to the problems which face humanity.

5. 

This whole blog renewal thing had me catching up with some of the backlog on my feedreader, including this next piece that Erin from Bearing Blog wrote last month, pointing to St Francis de Sales as a guide to true self-care.

I love St. Francis de Sales's tender regard for the human self, not a kind of disappearance of the self in favor of the divine, but recognizing the value of the human person as a creature that can be taken up to participate in the divine.   

6. 

My friend Deirdre wrote on grief and grieving:

Burying the dead is a corporal work of mercy. Praying for the dead is a spiritual work of mercy.  Life is pain, and anyone who tells you anything different is trying to sell you something. (Hey, it’s  canonical work of scripture now, right?)   Instead, we live in a world that has rejected the rituals of mourning from ages past. The Victorian rules may have been elaborate, but they had a point. 

7. 

The last panel in this Wondermark strip sums up my productivity problems fairly well. 

Happy blogging!

Kate

Well Said: "we are addicted to contempt"

From Arthur Brooks, "A Culture of Contempt":

"As satisfying as it can feel to hear that your foes are irredeemable, stupid and deviant, remember: When you find yourself hating something, someone is making money or winning elections or getting more famous and powerful. Unless a leader is actually teaching you something you didn’t know or expanding your worldview and moral outlook, you are being used.

Next, each of us can make a commitment never to treat others with contempt, even if we believe they deserve it. This might sound like a call for magnanimity, but it is just as much an appeal to self-interest. Contempt makes persuasion impossible — no one has ever been hated into agreement, after all — so its expression is either petty self-indulgence or cheap virtue signaling, neither of which wins converts."