Monthly Archives: January 2019

T.S. Eliot, George Eliot, Hope, and Despair

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Hope comes when we have lost hope.  “Loss” is the beginning of life, as in the teaching of Jesus…to paraphrase, “Find your life only in losing it.”  And that brings immediately to my mind the almost inscrutable Jacques Lacan who noted that nothing of any significance in life takes place without the experience of loss.  And the consummate summation of this wisdom is the words of Jesus on the cross, “Father, why hast Thou forsaken me?”

It is really hard to lose.  It is hard to lose even in a simple game of checkers, or chess, or a football game with our “local sports team” but even more so in an existential crisis when our soul and spirit are on the line, especially when our “soul and spirit” are infused with the immaturity of ego.  In those moments our ego demands that we “dig in” and cling to our self-deceptions, our “well-worn words and ready phrases that build comfortable walls against the wilderness” (Conrad Aiken).

The loss I am presenting here is the gateway to humility, that which T.S. Eliot described as, “a condition of complete simplicity, costing not less than everything.”  This is particularly challenging for those of us who are “spiritually” inclined for it often involves realizing just how “the flesh” has dominated our spirituality which we then realize was intrinsically ersatz.  And, therein, I must plead, “Mea culpa.”

The anguish of this realization is here captured in a couple of quotations from George Eliot:

“But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.”  And elsewhere she noted, “There is no despair so absolute as that which comes with the first moments of our first great sorrow, when we have not yet known what it is to have suffered and be healed, to have despaired and have recovered hope.”

“Self-Deception” is Not All That Bad!!! ‘Tis But Human.

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Terry Eagleton, in a review of Rita Felski’s book, “The Limits of Critique” in the London Review of Books (January 2017) noted, “The closest one can come to the truth is a knowledge of one’s self-deception.”  The observation of this literary critic is not unrelated to the observation of the Apostle Paul who noted, “We see through a glass darkly.”

This observation is personally relevant to me as I’m now realizing just how much I’ve lived my 66 years (67 tomorrow!) in self-deception.  But it is increasingly nice to understand that this is the human predicament and the lot of us all.  Therefore, when others who are so “stupidly” inured in their own little “bubble” appear on my radar, I am made to realize, “Hmm.  There am I, but by the Grace of God.  And, even with that Grace, ‘There am I.’”  It is not possible to escape the human dilemma that we view the world, including ourselves with a skewed vision, that we see the world, “through a glass darkly.”  This is the world from which Jean Paul Sartre noted, in his play, there is, “No Exit.”

It takes humility to accept this human fate.  But “humility” is so often a commodity that is rife with arrogance and pride.  I prefer the notion of “humility-ization” as the process in which we spend the rest of our lives being disabused of the certainties in which we have smugly been ensconced.

Vulnerability, Faith, and “Opiate of the Masses”

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Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, observed in his book, “The Edge of Words: God and the Habits of Language” that self-awareness is a very subtle and  often misunderstood phenomenon.  According to him, “Imagining that we have arrived at a satisfactory level of self understanding is clear indication that we have not in the least.”

Self-understanding is the process of becoming conscious.  And this is a task that we never finish completely though it is so comfortable to convince ourselves that it is.  The resulting certainty allows us to function in the smoothly-oiled social machinery of day to day life but only at the cost noted by W. H. Auden, “We have made for ourselves a life safer than we can bear.”  At some point in life we need to be able to challenge the smug certainties that we are ensconced in and tippy-toe into the risky domain of faith where we deal with the vulnerability that makes us human.  Otto Brown noted, “To be, is to be vulnerable” and until we have learned to live with some degree of vulnerability we have not become human. But use of this word “faith” is risky territory as it brings to mind religion and often there lies one of the most pernicious traps available to mankind.  For, “god” which often is the key figure in faith can often be merely another escape, a veritable opiate as in Karl Marx’s observation, “Religion is the opiate of the masses”