Wednesday, June 11,2003
At suppertime, I ask myself if I am getting bored on Iona. “I don’t think so, but I haven’t much experience in doing nothing. Not that what I do usually amounts to anything, but it does fill the time. Here, I have been letting the time go, as the three hours I spent on the hillside this morning. It is as if I had nothing to do, nowhere to go, no one to talk to, no project underway, for the first time in my life. Not true, but as if. I am more distracted by routine customarily than even I knew.
“But my life has somehow passed me by! And what would have filled it better? Family? Perhaps family was not quite the obstacle it seemed – but it certainly seemed obstacle enough. There wasn’t much of intentional me there.”
Later, “This supper will mark the end of two days here. Is it being a success? The evenings have dragged because I have gone to bed too early. I could find a bench by the sea and continue reading The Cloud of Unknowing, as I was doing a while ago this afternoon. Perhaps tomorrow I will take a boat ride around the island. I wouldn’t want to miss seeing so much that I don’t think I would be able to, else. But I didn’t come here for the scenery, did I? Not in that sense. I came to be transformed by it. Is this occurring? Can it? Could it?
“I intend self-transformation. The anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing would argue that one is transformed by God, if at all. We on earth can only – only! – add willingness, or refuse it. And he would have warned against pride, and rightly so. It is so clear that he knows what he talks of; that he intends to help his readers, even those unknown. (Could he have dreamed, would he have cared, that he was actively speaking to readers 700 years in his future?) He saw everything strictly within the Christian belief. Is he right that it is everlasting? Or is it true that the passing of the Age of Pisces means eventually the passing of the age of Christianity, and the birth and development of new forms and perhaps new content? I wish I could find a way to reconcile the truths of the different systems of understanding and belief.
“Why me? Well, who else is interested in doing it? Perhaps there are many, as anonymous as I, but if only by virtue of that anonymity, I know of them not. It seems to me I am alone.
“In Robert I saw the man of dreams, who finds God speaking to him; whose life was saved by dreams, by attention to dreams. In Michael I saw the passionate, angry crusader for social justice, the man who projects out of body routinely, the dissenter from all traditional religions. In Findhorn I saw the intentional community seeking to marry social activism with transcendent spirituality, again separate from Christianity. Inverness seemed to me only commercial activity, though of course I could not expect to meet anyone of spirit even if they were there on all sides. At breakfast that day I saw Swedes who were, it seemed, so unaware of alternative forms of Christianity as to describe themselves as Christians rather than Lutherans. And I see here a young minister-to-be, very pleasant, apparently open – yet his church insists on a Saturday Sabbath as an important point, which tells me that for him, for them, it all rests on their interpretation of God’s commands as stated (if only sometimes by implication) in the Bible.
“And then there were those lives of saints: Brendan, Cuthbert, and the one I’ve scarcely started, Wilfred. And Merton, and the Iona Community, and The Cloud of Unknowing, and in the background of my mind the readers of Magical Blend magazine, and Neale Walsch’s readers, and the varied readership of Hampton Roads.
“Perhaps it is as simple as ‘all paths are good.’ Perhaps there is no task here needed to be accomplished. Or perhaps the path to set out for people is The Pathless Path, following their heart; living, or striving to live, in love. But I do not yet know. Perhaps in a couple of days it will come clearer.”
At 8:30 I ask myself why I am going to bed so early here, and decide it is because there is nothing to do but read or go outside; I hope to be contacted by dreams or other experiences, and I am tired from active days. So I go to bed. But I’m up again half an hour later to record something I’d forgotten, and then I wind up reading some of Merton, and one thing leads to another. At one point, I play around trying to find a good acronym for the seven deadly sins of pride, anger, lust, envy, covetousness, gluttony and sloth, with no good result unless you count LEG CAPS, rather like kneecaps, but different. (Some people have too much time on their hands, says I!)
It consoles me, though perhaps it shouldn’t, that Merton had so much trouble with his life. If he did, why should I not? But he had done so much, so early, and died at only 53. But I am struck by his incessant reading and pondering. (Sound familiar?) Yet some of his concerns seem so unreal. For instance, what is meant by “the wrath of God?” Does God have a bad temper? Does it mean that he can’t stand what he’s seeing, even though he has restricted himself from interfering? What does it mean? Anger is one of the seven deadly sins, is it not?
The theology Christians take for granted, and build upon, or dispute about, seems so far not only from our stupid materialist society’s superstitions and irrelevancies, but from any honest searching that proceeds independently of churches. Yet if rooted in reality such concerns must have their translation somewhere. Where? The wrath of God – what does it mean, outside Christian thought? And if it means nothing, what does this reflect on? Christian thinking? Non-Christian thinking? Language? Translation? Where is the Perry Miller [a famous historian] who will hack a couple of trails into this forest?