“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.” – Carl Jung.
Jung.
27-Apr-10Wake-Robin.
27-Apr-10
Trillium Erectum, just coming into bloom on Wildcat Mountain.
Kung v. Benedict.
18-Apr-10Kung comes across as just as stuck in his ways as his opposition – the old boring liberal vs. conservative battle the Church has borrowed from the culture – but he’s smart of course and says some very perceptive things in this open letter to the bishops. And the conclusion? Call a council.
Jung on the Law versus Grace.
18-Apr-10I was struck by the diocese of New York removing from the Easter Vigil the reading of Abraham sacrificing Isaac; presumably because the story scandalizes nice good people who want religion to look hunky-dory and sweet. But obviously, if God cannot work through horror and crime and sin and cruelty then He can’t be terribly relevant to this world. But this sort of religion is not for the weak. I let Jung take over:
So that was it! I felt an enormous, an indescribable relief. Instead of the expected damnation, grace had come upon me, and with it an unutterable bliss such as I had never known. I wept for happiness and gratitude. The wisdom and goodness of God had been revealed to me now that I had yielded to His inexorable command. It was as though I had experienced an illumination. A great many things I had not previously understood became clear to me. That was what my father had not understood, I thought; he had failed to experience the will of God, had opposed it for the best reasons and out of the deepest faith. And that was why he had never experienced the miracle of grace which heals all and makes all comprehensible. He had taken the Bible’s commandments as his guide; he believed in God as the Bible prescribed and his forefathers had taught him. But he did not know the immediate living God who stands, omnipotent and free, above His Bible and His Church, who calls upon man to partake of His freedom, and can force him to renounce his own views and convictions in order to fulfill without reserve the command of God. In his trial of human courage God refuses to abide by traditions, no matter how sacred. In His omnipotence He will see to it that nothing really evil comes of such tests of courage. If one fulfills the will of God one can be sure of going the right way.
God had also created Adam and Eve in such a way that they had to think what they did not at all want to think. He had done that in order to find out whether they were obedient. And He could also demand something of me that I would have had to reject on traditional religious grounds. It was obedience which brought me grace, and after that experience I knew what God’s grace was. One must be utterly abandoned to God; nothing matters but fulfilling His will. Otherwise all is folly and meaninglessness. From that moment on, when I experienced grace, my true responsibility began.
The above emotions might very well have been the emotions of Abraham, “our father in faith.” And it is in general fitting that a man writing in German after the two world wars (though just to be clear, Jung himself was Swiss) should realize that evil rarely comes out of a deep rule-flouting obedience to one’s own nature, but instead out of massive pyramids of obedience which reduce the individual will to irrelevance. When the greatest evils are committed it is because massive numbers of people have merely “done their duty.”
Simplicity.
16-Apr-10“At times I feel as if I am spread out over the landscape and inside things, and am myself living in every tree, in the plashing of the waves, in the clouds and the animals that come and go, in the procession of the seasons… I have done without electricity, and tend the fireplace and stove myself. Evenings, I light the old lamps. There is no running water, and I pump the water from the well. I chop the wood and cook the food. These simple acts make man simple; and how difficult it is to be simple!
At Bollingen, silence surrounds me almost audibly, and I live ‘in modest harmony with nature.’ Thoughts rise to the surface which reach back into the centuries, and accordingly anticipate a remote future. Here the torment of creation is lessened; creativity and play are close together.” – Carl Jung.
From Jung’s astonishing autobiography, which I picked up and now can’t put down. The quotation marks – ‘modest harmony with nature’ – refer apparently to the title of a Chinese landscape known to Jung.
Beardism.
15-Apr-10A study on how beards affect the credibility of those who wear them, in marketing terms. Apparently, it’s a positive for anything not sexy. Seems about right. I think having a beard has changed the way I think about myself too. I’d planned to shave it off with the end of winter, but we’re well into spring and I am still barbatus.
Taqqiya.
15-Apr-10One of my minor fascinations/horrors is the Islamic concept of taqqiya – which I also see spelled taqiyya – “religious lying.” It is associated mostly with Shiites, who were a minority in much of the Islamic world, and hence concealing their religion when asked about it point-blank was at times prudent. Of course once this is justified – and indeed it seems human, which is justification enough when it comes to religion – it entered the realm of theology, and in the hands of various theologians could be embroidered or expanded. In this sense it could be a one-word description of the whole philosophy of diplomacy, with its combination of honesty, secrecy, and deceit governed by “prudential considerations.”
The relation of this concept to the Catholic Church is obvious enough. In fact an interesting topic of exploration might be looking at certain Christian theological concepts and evaluating them more closely by looking at their manifestation in Islam.
But one way or another, I’m not a fan of lying, or even diplomacy, really. The more I delve into these things, the more I think that honesty – even horrible honesty, because God is sometimes horrible in this way – is the “one thing necessary” in all matters spiritual. Without it there is only emptiness.
But shameless lying pays dividends in the world, in a way that never stops being mysterious. Look at this example from Bill O’Reilly, a man a lot of people I know consider an American hero. In this way I can see how the idea of a holy lie could emerge: if God has something to do with the make of the world, and the world loves falsehood, how could God not love it too? And if God promises good to those who love him, what better means could be contrived for the prosperity of believers than habitual and conscienceless dishonesty?
This on the final day for filing tax returns.
More Ruins.
15-Apr-10Along the line of the Detroit Safari postings before, a list of some of the world’s best modern ruins. With excellent pictures and some links. Some of the images of Detroit call to mind Piranesi, and the ones of Gary suggest Caspar David Friedrich.
http://www.thecoolist.com/abandoned-places-10-creepy-beautiful-modern-ruins/
Neighbears…
14-Apr-10From the Phoenicia Times:
A Sullivan County man shot and killed a large adult black bear that was menacing his daughter at her home Sunday, the state DEC has reported. The woman was inside with her four children when the bear attempted to break into a bedroom window of the home and swatted at their dog on the porch. DEC and State Police were called to the scene, but before they arrived, the woman called her father, who came over. He fired a warning shot, but the bear did not budge, so he shot and killed the animal. DEC officials later said the bear was tagged and had been a nuisance to others before. No charges were filed against the man who shot the animal.
I have not seen my friendly neighborhood bear this spring so far, which makes me slightly nervous – I figure he’s going to come around soon, so I’d rather not have my back turned to him when he shows up, so to speak. Yesterday I was bent down to the ground scraping paint, with my back to the woods, and I became aware that the robin, who had been singing in the cherry tree, had been silent for a bit too long. I turned around in terror, but I was quite alone. The robin was apparently just taking a break, and started singing again.
And have you ever really heard a robin sing in springtime? I’ve seen them all my life, but I have never heard them sing, really. Here every twilight I get a serenade that lasts a good hour, and is full of beauty and variety. When I got out my binoculars and hunted out the singer, I was shocked to find that it was “just” a robin.
Have to put in this link…
16-Apr-10… just for the page title that comes up in your browser.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/apr/16/obama-bowing-to-the-world/
Just for the record, where I come from, bowing can be a sign of respect just as much as a sign of obsequious bootlicking. Bowing to women, for instance, is no humiliation to the bower. And humility is a virtue which adorns any office, and the act of self-effacement freely offered is an act of nobility. The humiliation would be when the American president would have no choice but to go to China and bow – when we would truly be subject to them. And perhaps that day is coming, but it won’t be here for awhile, I think. And so far as I can tell the first rumblings of fixing the broken “free trade” system China operates has come from Obama.
But anyway the above article by my perhaps-distant-relative just seems petty, though this is true: “The very notion of ‘American exceptionalism’ is repugnant to him – as it is to most multicultural progressives.” And, I will add, to conservatives. And educated people. And especially classicists. All the people who take humility as a virtue and know we’re not exempt from the laws of history.
And this all strikes me as relevant: