earth and heaven embrace as facts and faith join hands...

NOTE: For the past week, I've been laboring over this post; it always starts out the way I want but quickly descends into snark or judgment. IMHO, there's way too much of both these days. So, I kept editing, waiting, and trusting that at the right time, the right words would arrive. Tonight I am getting closer.

When the brilliant Annie Dillard passed from this life to life everlasting just about one month ago - a mere two weeks after Wendell Berry's farewell - my friend and one-time professor, M, sent me a note asking: Have you read Dillard's For the Time Being? Truth be told, I hadn't - so I immediately found a decent used copy which, then, sat by my bedside for a good month. I was already immersed in Liz Moore's 600-page thriller, The God of the Woods, and couldn't put it down. I'd heard Moore interviewed on Fresh Air with Terry Gross and was intrigued by her depth and grit. I was particularly curious about her penultimate novel, Long Bright River, about two very different sisters: One becomes a cop, the other a junkie sex worker in Philadelphia. It was rendered into a TV miniseries on Peacock with a vibe like HBO's Task with Mark Ruffalo or Mare of Easttown with Kate Winslet. (I'm a sucker for shows and novels that expose the underbelly of the American Dream without sentimentality, cynicism, or prurient excess. To portray real people making hard decisions about how to get through another day when the cards are stacked against them is heroic to me and worthy of my time. Think Springsteen's "Reason to Believe" that closes Nebraska.) Her exploration of gender and class remains insightful.

Two weeks ago, I settled down with Dillard, who, early on, shares an observation about life in these barely United States that mirrors my own perspective: while we may think these are exceptional times ... they are not!

Are not our heightened times the important ones? For we have nuclear bombs. Are we not especially significant because our century is? Our century and its unique Holocaust, its refugee populations, its serial totalitarian exterminations; our century and its antibiotics, silicon chips, men on the moon, and spliced genes? No, we are not and it is not. These times of ours are ordinary times, a slice of life like any other. Who can bear to hear this, or who will consider it? Take the bomb away and what are we? Ordinary beads on a never-ending string. Our time is a routine twist of an improbable yarn. We have no chance of being here when the sun burns out. (S0) there must be something heroic about our time, something that lifts it above all those other times. Plague? Funny weather? Dire things are happening. In fact, we are witnessing a mass extinction of animals. According to Oxford's Robert May, most of the birds and mammals we know will be gone in four hundred years. But there have been five other mass extinctions, scores of millions of years apart. People have made great strides toward obliterating other people, too, but that has been the human effort all along, and our cohort has only broadened the means, as have people in every other century. Why are we watching the news, reading the news, keeping up with the news? Only to enforce our fancy - and probably a necessary lie - that these are crucial times and we are in on them.

Humbling, yes? Honest, unsentimental, and gritty, too. Like one of my church leaders periodically says to me: Deal with it, ok? Just deal with it. I detest whining and carping but apparently need to be reminded to practice what I preach. Dillard clearly comprehends the truth Frederick Buechner, the Bard of Vermont, regularly proclaimed: Life is beautiful - and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid. This has likely always been vital for us to internalize, but as All Hallowtide ripens - that long-forgotten sacred triduum of autumn that honors the charisms of death just as the Lenten triduum of spring that culminates in Easter celebrates the mysteries of new life - deserves a fresh hearing.

First, the journey from All Hallows Eve through All Saints' Day into All Souls' Day insists that no one is special. "From dust ye came, and unto dust ye shall return," we say repeatedly on Ash Wednesday. Yes, we're each uniquely formed by the Creator, just a little lower than the angels, as the Psalmist sings. And, at the same time, the historically first but chronologically second creation story in Genesis tells us that we are also fundamentally mud people as well. It's one of those sacramental paradoxes where both are true at the same time. Having lost touch with this truth, our culture is saturated with hubris, banishes humility to the dustbin of history, and revels in dishonest exceptionalism while gleefully genuflecting before the idols of comfort and excess. (I know, I know, tell us what you REALLY think, James!) I've long been a fan of Rabbi Simcha Brnim, a Hasidic master who taught that we should keep two notes, one in each pocket:

One pocket should hold a note saying: "I am but dust and ashes," so humility might bring balance when you feel proud, arrogant, or full of self-importance.
The other pocket should hold a note saying: "I was created just a little lower than the angels" as a reminder of God's love when we feel discouraged, worthless, or depressed. 

Our current obsession with self shouldn't surprise us, ok? Having spent decades reading the fathers of dialectical idealism and materialism - Hegel, Feuerbach, and Marx who each, in their own way, claimed that we are what we eat ("Der Mensch ist, was er ißt" (“Man is what he eats.”), it's true that we are essentially the product of the ideals, values, experiences, habits, rules, morals, rituals, and guidelines of our culture. Yes, there are nuanced differences in any passing moment; but when our autopsies are performed, we are all fundamentally the product of what we've eaten and digested. Expecting anything less now that the USA has become one massive slot machine might be called naive: we are, indeed, all that we have consumed.

But, thankfully, that's not the whole story: materialism is powerful and normative, but grace always trumps karma. Call it faith, mystery, or a cosmic encounter with the creative love built into the core of creation: we are not only the product of culture and consumption, but also God's beloved. Reformed philosopher and novelist Marilynne Robinson unpacks the evidence for the sacred grace built into nature in her 1998 essay, "Dawinism," in her book The Death of Adam. Carefully and persuasively, Robinson writes about the remains of ancient human beings who literally and figuratively carried their wounded and deformed members along with the rest of the tribe until their natural deaths. The weaker ones were not sacrificed on the altar of expediency, but bound all the more closely to the community. They were, she insists, messengers of the holy, evoking our deep-seated capacity for compassion with a relevance greater than the survival of the fittest. This was a conscious choice well beyond the logic of evolution, the survival of the fittest, or the confines of the marketplace. This was a choice beyond the obvious in support of the numinous. 

In other words, to use Kris Kristofferson's poetry: we are walking contradictions, partly truth and partly fiction. We are what we eat - a fact that might humble us - as well as homo sapiens who honor a love greater than our limitations which is truly a holy paradox. In 1934, T.S. Eliot articulated what was likely to evolve given our obsession with convenience and zero-sum thinking

The Eagle soars in the summit of Heaven,
The Hunter with his dogs pursues his circuit.
O perpetual revolution of configured stars,

O perpetual recurrence of determined seasons,
O world of spring and autumn, birth and dying

The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,
All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to GOD.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Bring us farther from GOD and nearer to the Dust.

Fr. John Swales of the United Kingdom adds a sacred addendum: what he calls a holy ache within us all, that promises healing and transformation.

The Holy Ache - Epithymía
She was there
when the ruach of God
stirred the dust,
a whisper of desire,
a holy ache,
woven into the soul.
Before the fall,
before the shame,
before the grasping,
there was longing.
A pull toward the Other.
A hunger not of lack,
but of love.
In the cool of the evening,
they walked with God.
Naked.
Unashamed.
Every ache was an invitation.
Every desire,
a direction.
But we forgot.
We traded wonder for knowledge,
mystery for mastery.
We left the garden,
not just with thorns in our heels
but with a dislocated hunger
gnawing in our bones.
Now,
we chase shadows in neon temples.
Scroll.
Swipe.
Consume.
We feed on illusions
and call it satisfaction.
Even our prayers feel
packaged.
Predictable.
Safe.
We do not wait anymore.
We click.
And so desire,
that once holy ache,
becomes compulsion.
We light incense to the
gods of dopamine
and name it freedom.
We ask the algorithm to soothe us.
We drink,
not because we thirst,
but because we cannot bear the silence.
But still,
something stirs.
A deeper ache,
a quieter hunger.
It comes in the stillness,
between breath and breath,
between grief and grace.
It comes when the addict
lights a candle instead of a pipe.
When the lonely one
lifts bread to her lips,
not to fill the stomach,
but to remember love.
Every ache is an altar.
Every hunger,
a bell,
calling us not to indulgence,
but to the slow Eucharist
of being known.
We lift our hearts.
We bring our ache.
We say with trembling lips:
Lord, I am not worthy,
but only say the word.
For this is no shameful thing,
to long,
to yearn,
to ache.
It is the soul’s memory of Eden.
It is the ember of glory
still glowing beneath the rubble.
And so I offer this ache
not to the market,
not to the screen,
not to the dragon
in the pixel,
but to the One
who kissed dust into life,
who became flesh
to bear our ache in his own.
O Beloved,
I have desired with desire,
not always rightly,
not always gently,
but I bring it now
as offering.
Let it burn holy.
And one day,
when time is torn
and all things made whole,
when the ache gives way
to the Answer,
we will feast.
And longing will sing.
And the fire of our ache
will become
the flame of communion,
joy without end.
—
Holy One,
in the depths of our restless longing,
teach us to hold desire with grace,
not as a hunger that devours,
but as a flame that illuminates the path to you.
Turn our compulsions into worship,
our restless ache into patient hope,
our shadowed cravings into the bright fire of love.
Come, kindle in us a desire for justice,
a yearning for mercy,
and a holy ache for your kingdom.
Until that day when all longing is fulfilled,
walk with us in the silence between breaths,
and let our hearts be restless only for you.
Praise be to you,
Jesus.
Creation groans.
Our hearts yearn.
For your return.
Amen.

All Hallows' Eve reminds us that the market will continue; we will wage war upon one another, take the easy way out, and continue to plunder Mother Nature. At the same time, All Saints' and All Souls' Day shows us that some among us will nevertheless be lured beyond self by our better angels. We will nourish the beauty beyond the terrible things and return thanks for the chance to strengthen compassion. It is always both/and, not either/or. As Psalm 85 reminds us:

Steadfast love and faithfulness will meet; righteousness and peace will kiss each other.
11 Faithfulness will spring up from the ground,  and righteousness will look down from the sky.