Thursday, December 8, 2022
5:10 a.m. I’m out of touch with you, guys, which is strange, given that I’m spending much of each day editing past entries from 2021. It’s a subtle difference, but I can feel it, and it even conceals, or spotlights, an important psychological process, I think. Care to expound upon it?
Yes, we do. It will turn out to be a simple distinction, but getting to the simplicity of it may require some work.
We’ve seen that, often enough.
It is the difference between being something (doing something, it will often seem like), and thinking about, or even imagining being or doing that something.
I already have the sense of it, but I couldn’t phrase it yet.
Suppose you spent all your time daydreaming about being an electrician, or a military man, or an artist of some sort. That is, suppose the idea of being one of these things was at the center of your intellectual or emotional or imaginal life. That isn’t quite the same thing as spending your day actually being an electrician, or a military man, or an artist of some sort. For one thing, one’s imaginings never exactly capture a reality, but even if they could and did, imagining is not the same as living. (Put an asterisk here, but leave it for the moment lest we distract ourselves.) For another, even if one imagined – or remembered, say – to an exactness, still one would be doing one thing, but considering oneself to be doing something different. Imagining or remembering may come with a flavor so similar to the original as to mislead.
We’re going to need a solid example.
Suppose a young priest: pious, sincere, overwhelmed perhaps by his new priesthood. He became a priest for the purest reasons of wanting to serve God. Careerism, material advantage, prestige, etc. did not enter into his calculations. Indeed, he did not calculate, he followed the calling that said to him, “This is the life you were created to live.”
All right. I have known two. [One, a fellow schoolboy, the other, a native Irishman who came to this country as a young priest, whom I met in my 30s.]
That young priest is living a communion with God that is not miraculous in the way people commonly think of miracles, as exceptions to the natural order. Instead, his everyday reality is miraculous in its interpenetration of mundane and sacred interior space.
He is living his priesthood.
Yes. Not his ministry, his priesthood. There is a distinction to be drawn here.
Priesthood – at least as you are using it, I don’t know if this is how anybody else would define it – meaning his being an intermediary between sacred and temporal. Ministry meaning, what he as priest does. Priesthood is who he is, ministry is what he does.
Yes, and don’t worry if our definition matches that of anyone else in the world. The distinction is to help clear up the point at issue. That young priest is living his priesthood in a pure willing servanthood that few older men would find possible. Older men may become wiser, or corrupt, or intellectual, or lax, or tired, or disillusioned – all manner of attitudes may accompany the attrition of years, either paring one down to greater purity of being or scattering one’s intensity, or allowing the flame to be smothered by mundane cares or lusts or distractions. In no case will 3D leave one unaffected, for, after all, the priest’s life will be a life of choosing, just as anyone else’s. But we are looking at the initial intense flame of a young man’s devotion, the equivalent to other young men’s first love.
Such intensity cannot be maintained at an even flame, like a gas range. Life assures that one’s emotions, one’s intensity, one’s focus, fluctuates. Consciousness – we have said many times – fluctuates by nature, by design.
Well, if you come to think that a moment of intensity is (or ever could be) an unwavering state of being, at some point you are going to realize that this is not what you are experiencing. Perhaps you think you have fallen; perhaps you think, “A lapse; I must do better”; perhaps (forewarned by your training in seminary) you say to yourself, “Can’t be helped and it doesn’t mean it is the end of anything, but the honeymoon is over.” No matter how you respond, you are living in one state, remembering (perhaps longing to return to) another.
The situation may be uncomfortable, but as long as you are conscious of the distinction between what you are experiencing and what you did experience but are not currently experiencing, all is well. It is only when you lose the distinction that you run the risk of living by going through the motions.
Ah, I get it, and I get the specific application to me. I sensed it, but it wasn’t exactly clear.
State it, then, for possible amendment.
If I spend the day rereading past conversations, editing them toward a more polished form (“Life More Abundantly,” my current fantasy), but do not actually stay in conscious touch with you, I am doing one thing, thinking I am doing something quite different.
And nothing necessarily wrong with that state of affairs, with one big proviso, as you know.
Yes. Be conscious of what I’m doing.
This is one simple example of what Jesus said in Thomas: If you know what you do, you can do anything safely. If you don’t, it can destroy you.
I recognize that you deliberately retranslated that to make it unfamiliar, to help us actually hear it.
That is exactly what we did, and do often. Familiarity may or may not breed contempt, but it often lulls one’s intellect to sleep.
Now, there is a wider application to this simple distinction that may not immediately come to mind. Any occupation, any preoccupation, any way of being or doing or thinking or even of aspiring, may become like a desert river that finally runs into the sands and disappears.
Any source of inspiration may run dry, you mean?
Yes, but not quite only that. You know how some people feel that their life has failed them? Not, exactly, that they have failed, but that what they had invested their faith in had turned out to be an illusion, or, at any rate, had failed to be the support they had assumed it would remain?
We call it giving up on life, I suppose.
It comes from putting your faith in things that cannot possibly give you what you want, because you mistake their nature. Money, fame, love, achievement, dedication, whatever – nothing wrong with any of them (and, as we often say, a good deal right with them). But they cannot deliver what is not in their nature.
Thoreau said even carrying messages from heaven incurs the curse of trade.
His elliptical, allusive style was suited to the necessities of his time and audience, and proceeded from his classical education. Your time calls for plainer, if less elegant, statements.
But it comes to the same thing. There’s no use expecting a purity that cannot survive contact with ever changing 3D conditions. (This, regardless if that is what Thoreau consciously meant!)
When your source of inspiration runs dry, you may be sure that this is a sign that you have attached your hope to a symbol rather than to the thing is symbolizes. Life never disappoints.
“Always there is life, which, rightly lived, implies a divine satisfaction.”
Do you think it means anything that you were taken by the sentence at age 24 and remembered it periodically all your life?
Coincidence, no doubt. Have you said what you need to say, or is there a final summing-up?
Remember, amid whatever doing, what you intend to live, being.
Our thanks as always. Theme?
“Living consciously,” surely.