I’m not an Episcopalian, or even particularly religious, so it’s a bit of a surprise to me that one of the books I most enjoyed this year was Alan Jacobs’s The Book of Common Prayer: A Biography (Princeton University Press, 2013). It turns out that the story of the Anglican prayer book is a great yarn: a tale of theological dispute and refined prose style against a backdrop of the mafia-like power struggles of England’s royal families. Jacobs is a tactful historian, who doesn’t assume that his readers know much about English history or religious doctrine. But I imagine that even a reader who knew a great deal would enjoy the snap of Jacobs’s telling, as when he describes an early disavowal of transubstantiation as “palpably crabby.” If you’ve ever wondered why the Church of England has failed to substantially revise its prayer book since 1662, or what the jokes in Victorian novels about church candlesticks are really about, this is the history for you.
There is no guarantee of redemption-through-love: redemption is merely given as possible. We are thereby at the very core of Christianity: it is God himself who made a Pascalian wager. By dying on the cross, he made a risky gesture with no guaranteed final outcome; he provided us—humanity—with the empty S1, Master-Signifier, and it is up to us to supplement it with the chain of S2. Far from providing the conclusive dot on the “i,” the divine act rather stands for the openness of a New Beginning, and it falls to humanity to live up to it, to decide its meaning, to make something of it. As with Predestination, which condemns us to frantic activity, the Event is a pure-empty-sign, and we have to work to generate its meaning. Therein resides the terrible risk of revelation: what “Revelation” means is that God took upon himself the risk of putting everything at stake, of fully “engaging himself existentially” by way, as it were, of stepping into his own picture, becoming part of creation, exposing himself to the utter contingency of existence.
In general, it is extremely foolish … to suppose it should really be such an easy affair with faith and wisdom that they just arrive over the years as a matter of course, like teeth, a beard and that sort of thing. No, whatever a human being comes to as a matter of course, and whatever things come to him as a matter of course, it is definitely not faith and wisdom.
One can, of course, and perhaps even should, question Rorty’s account of the various ways in which people are socialized into assuming the existence of non-contingent patterns. After all, it is also possible for one’s socialization to pull the other way – away from a recognition of pattern rather than towards it. I know of no more powerful illustration of this point than the concluding pages of V. S. Naipaul’s An Area of Darkness, a memoir of his first visit to his ancestral homeland. “The world is illusion, the Hindus say,” and Naipaul reflects that while he was in India he had come close to the “total Indian negation”: during the year that he lived on the subcontinent it had very nearly “become the basis of thought and feeling.” But, back in Europe, he can no longer find that “basis,” no longer share that “negation” – yet he is not sure whether he has recovered the proper orientation to his life or lost it: “And already … in a world where illusion could only be a concept and not something felt in the bones, it was slipping away from me. I felt it as something true which I could never adequately express and never seize again.” The possibility that people born and educated in the West in our time might be culturally formed in such a way that contingency is what they “feel in their bones” — so that a belief in the world as illusion, or in the providence of a just God, is at most a mere “concept” — is one that people like Rorty never take seriously, even if their theory obliges them to an acknowledgment of it.
When you’re homeless and you’re spending your days in the local park, sleeping off the previous night’s alcoholic binge, or just trying to get some rest, inevitably someone from a local social service organization will come by and attempt to interest you in its services. The truth is, these centers really only track or monitor the homeless; they offer few services designed to change a person’s life. This is especially true if you are living outdoors, eating what you can and when you can, putting all of your energy into survival, and trying to maintain at least some degree of good hygiene.Believe me, personal hygiene—which so many people take for granted—is not a simple thing for a homeless person. Finding a place to shave, take a shower, or just brush your teeth can take up much of your day. The social service organizations inevitably emphasize personal hygiene, but their facilities are always filthy and overcrowded. It can take hours to get cleaned up. Often, I simply choose to go without, or I do a birdbath sort of cleanup in a public washroom. Even this is difficult; people tend to frown on seeing a homeless person try to wash up in the sink.
Everyone frowns at the sight of a homeless person. And it’s this that really gets to you—the awareness that you are being judged immediately, without consideration for contributing circumstances, by everyone you pass, everyone who sees you in the crosswalks, everyone who pretends not to see you. Even when they turn away, in avoidance or disgust, they are judging you—for your clothes, your lack of hygiene, or the bag of supplies and clothing you carry with you. Very few affordable public storage spaces exist. It becomes easier to simply carry the things you need. Yet this bag, these bags instantly identify you as a homeless person. And it’s always the same look, the one that you know holds the same thought: “There goes another one of those homeless people. Something should be done about them.”
Gjertrud Schnackenberg, "Supernatural Love"
My father at the dictionary stand Touches the page to fully understand The lamplit answer, tilting in his hand
His slowly scanning magnifying lens, A blurry, glistening circle he suspends Above the word ‘Carnation’. Then he bends
So near his eyes are magnified and blurred, One finger on the miniature word, As if he touched a single key and heard
A distant, plucked, infinitesimal string, “The obligation due to every thing That’ s smaller than the universe.” I bring
My sewing needle close enough that I Can watch my father through the needle’s eye, As through a lens ground for a butterfly
Who peers down flower-hallways toward a room Shadowed and fathomed as this study’s gloom Where, as a scholar bends above a tomb
To read what’s buried there, he bends to pore Over the Latin blossom. I am four, I spill my pins and needles on the floor
Trying to stitch “Beloved” X by X. My dangerous, bright needle’s point connects Myself illiterate to this perfect text
I cannot read. My father puzzles why It is my habit to identify Carnations as “Christ’s flowers,” knowing I
Can give no explanation but “Because.” Word-roots blossom in speechless messages The way the thread behind my sampler does
Where following each X, I awkward move My needle through the word whose root is love. He reads, “A pink variety of Clove,
Carnatio, the Latin, meaning flesh.” As if the bud’s essential oils brush Christ’s fragrance through the room, the iron-fresh
Odor carnations have floats up to me, A drifted, secret, bitter ecstasy, The stems squeak in my scissors, Child, it’s me,
He turns the page to “Clove” and reads aloud: “The clove, a spice, dried from a flower-bud.” Then twice, as if he hasn’t understood,
He reads, “From French, for clou, meaning a nail.” He gazes, motionless,”Meaning a nail.” The incarnation blossoms, flesh and nail,
I twist my threads like stems into a knot And smooth “Beloved”, but my needle caught Within the threads, Thy blood so dearly bought,
The needle strikes my finger to the bone. I lift my hand, it is myself I’ve sewn, The flesh laid bare, the threads of blood my own,
I lift my hand in startled agony And call upon his name, “Daddy Daddy” — My father’s hand touches the injury
As lightly as he touched the page before, Where incarnation bloomed from roots that bore The flowers I called Christ’s when I was four.
[gallery] unapologetic-book:
Advent calendar 5: Sinterklaasavond, ‘St Nicholas’ Eve’.In the Netherlands, Sinter Klaas arrives by steamboat from Spain today, accompanied by his assistant Zwarte Piet, ‘Black Peter’, who has been recoloured and refigured in various ways in recent years to try to make him less offensive, but who remains very identifiably an African slave, circa 1600. Together, Sint and Piet distribute chocolate letters of the alphabet to good children.
Then, presumably, the saint flies westward across the Atlantic to New Amsterdam. In a Manhattan phone booth (if he can still find one) he removes his mitre, lays down his crook, and snips the crosses off his red and white robes, before emerging as Santa Claus.
[gallery] banning Milton, via John Overholt on Twitter
