Gravity and Grace

You've written on these pages, foolishly and flippantly, about monasticism, asceticism and religion in general when, truth be told, you haven't got a clue. There's even a childish sense of pride in saying you haven't got a religious bone in your body (except, maybe, your funny bone). You can read about these things, know something of the history, but still know next to nothing of the experience of it. It's somewhat delusional to think one can be religious-or even comment on religion- from the outside, as it were, without any set of sustaining practices.

Do you see a pattern here? Same with all that jumbled up reading and the half-hearted attempt at being an academic. Not a double life; rather: half a life.

Not that you want to be religious, or an academic, or anything like that (though these do seem to be good professions: plenty of food and lazing around). Old loyalties do mean, however, that you want to defend religion against those who hate it. Well, not most of the time since it's a terrible arrogance to think one can convince another person of anything (more to the point: it requires too much energy).

Came across this line which I think Bob would like a lot:

"In the end we are saved by things that ignore us".

Sounds incredibly harsh and what could it possibly mean? Time ignores us. Are we saved by it? Saved? This plays such a small role in your thinking and your life. There's that wonderful story in Imam Jafar-al-Sadiq's Lantern of the Path where Jesus says to a disciple: my people are not those who pray to go to heaven, or to avoid hell but, rather, those who pray out of the love of God.

Time. The body. As it is. Unredeemed, frail, broken. To know this, to understand it, would mean, surely, that we have some sense of what is beyond these things, what outlasts us and is most of the time indifferent to us (Rumi's: he who knows himself knows his Lord as 'he who knows the finite knows the infinite'). What prevents such an awareness? The idea that we can readily attain grace or understanding on our own, without any effort, without any suffering; that we are whole, complete already, or have no need of wholeness, or that the fragmentary is all there is; to believe that the bridge is the thing, or that we can get on without bridges.

There's a kind of peace to be had sipping a cup of piping hot tea, listening to Berlioz's Les nuit, and yet...I ask Ubo: can I have five minutes of peace. "You can have ten," he replies. Hard to distinguish his joking from his natural and sublime characteristic of always giving. Yesterday we were watching Only Fools. He was greatly impressed by what appeared to be a throwaway line by a mad man: "I like losing; no-one wants to compete with a loser". And just the day before you recall reading a line-and you only managed a line before being attacked by little r- by Rebecca West, saying how she'd attempted something in "her own demented way". Sounds very modern to our ears, but was demented really just another word for eccentric? And this definition of idiot which in Greek means, literally, a 'private person'.