Sojourn as a Foreigner

The award for shortest and profoundest book may go to Giorgio Agamben’s The Church and the Kingdom. If you take away the photos (which are quite effective at de-centering you as fragmented images), the text may only be 40 pages long. The gist of the book makes you come to grips with time and our relationship to it. The bigger critique is where the Church stands in relationship to it, and how it may have lost its vocation. 

Agamben says, “The Church has lost the messianic experience of time that defines it and is one with it. The time of the messiah cannot designate a chronological period or duration but, instead, must represent nothing less than a qualitative change in how time is experienced.”

He contrasts the messianic notion of time with that of the apocalyptic. The apocalyptic can only point to the end of times–which will certainly happen sooner or later depending on how much patience you have. I’m not so presumptuous to think it will happen in my lifetime, although I see challenges ahead. More likely, it may be when the sun burns out while a bunch of AI’s are running the show. The posture Agamben brings in is not to wait for a historical dialectic of progress, or for the Messiah to come and redeem. As such, the focus of the Church should not be on the imminent ultimate, but the transcendent penultimate: thus transforming the experience of time to live in the Eternal NOW!

He says, “To experience this time [in this way] implies an integral transformation of ourselves and of our ways of living.”

He even points to Paul’s position on this view,

It is with this in mind that Paul reminds the Thessalonians, 'About dates and times, my friends, we need not write to you, for you know perfectly well that the Day of the Lord comes like a thief in the night' (1 Thess5.l-2; 262).1 In this passage 'comes [ercheta] is in the present tense, just as in the Gospels the messiah is called ho erchomenos, 'he who comes'- that is, he who never ceases to come. Having perfectly understood Paul's meaning, Walter Benjamin once wrote that, 'every day, every instant, is the small gate through which the messiah enters.'

Time takes us to the end, and yet we can end our customary image of time and liberate ourselves from it. What interests Paul (and Agamben) is not the last day or the end of time, but the time of the end—the inner transformation of time that the messianic event has produced!

Agamben says in another related book,

The paradox of the Church is that, for the eschatological point of view, it must renounce the world, but it cannot do this because, form the point of view of the economy, it is of the world, which it cannot renounce without renouncing itself. But this is exactly where the decisive crisis is situated: because courage…is nothing but the capacity to keep oneself connected with one’s own end.

This lack of courage creates a bland humanitarianism that delegitimizes the messianic vocation of the Church and overemphasizes bureaucratic legalism of the institution. The Church becomes supernaturally dry, aimless in its ontological moorings, and fragile from internal corruption like most secular institutions. In kneeling before the world, it begins to fall from religious relevance. 

I’m reading another terrific book on The Idol of Our Age (which by the way is not Taylor Swift—not yet anyways—but secular humanitarianism) in which the author makes this relevant point,

The Christian God is both transcendent and incarnate. He promises something much more precious than bread and circuses, or even social justice, which in its quasi-socialist forms is inseparable from an excessive passion for equality, and even an encouragement of envy. We must not confuse sincere love of the poor, an undeniably great injunction of the Gospel, with a humanitarian or socialist political project to bring about heaven on Earth. That is the dangerous path pursued by Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, who remains so far from the authentic spirit of the Gospel.

The heaven on Earth project, as noted by Agamben, should not be a political one but a deeply spiritual one. By severing our ties with messianic time, we undermine our sense of reality and capacity to be enchanted with temporal reality. We attempt to control the temporal at the expense of given freedom of the Eternal. We sojourn as disembodied beings buffered by time and space, instead of foreigners always available to inhabit our true home.

It's Always An Inside Job

Writing is sometimes difficult while marinating in Being. I feel words can get in the way of something they point to. And I am always trying to point to THAT on this blog. Many today are searching for purpose and meaning through words without realizing the paradoxical nature of this search. Often purpose and meaning is turned into a conceptual story for the self, which becomes more about self-absorption and mere self-expression. This keeps us away from the immediate experience of the NOW, and theo-drama of the ETERNAL. It is only through our surrender to THAT, where purpose and meaning expresses itself as YOU in RELATION to the NOW and ETERNAL. 

There are always obstacles in the way, which is always THE way. These experiences can “feel” soul crushing, but they’re anything but that in Reality. I was amused by Allen’s test for a dying soul. I have felt all these things at moments, now seeing they are all reactions to a conditional self exhausting its own limits to Truth.

Is Your Soul Dying?

Nothing really seems remarkable. You can go whole days without ever being astonished.

You have very little curiosity. You’re interested in novelty, food for the restless me, but genuine curiosity, and discovery of the genuinely original, this is not something you seek or experience very often.

You don’t notice much, and therefore you don’t recall very much. Nothing is very vivid, so nothing really impresses itself into your depths. You remember facts with your surface mind, particularly the useful ones, but there are few qualities to recollect in your heart.

You don’t sing and dance. You can go days, weeks, without wailing with joy or throwing absurd shapes. You don’t draw, either, or write poems, or make beautiful and difficult things, a bit of craft perhaps, dib-dab, dib-dab, but just as a hobby please.

You laugh infrequently. The last time you cried with laughter, holding your sides, begging it to stop — when was that?

Your love life is problematic at best, disastrous at worst. Probably tamely okay, alright, you know, can’t complain! Love affairs occasionally inject some excitement into your life, some romance, but it soon fades, after six months usually, sometimes after a few minutes.

In fact opportunities for love, for opening your heart, seem to be rather thin on the ground. You cannot tear yourself open at school or at work, that’s for sure, but your friends and family are not that interested in your soul either.

The days pass slowly, the years quickly. Nothing really happens, and so time concatenates into the few vague happenings the year offers.

Your mind constantly returns to the same subjects. You go over and over the same old junk. You love to complain, and you love even more to get together with others who love to complain, so you can all wank yourselves up into a lovely big lather of moaning.

Anxiety rules you, or, the cannibalistic indulgence of the moribund soul, despair. These two feelings never touch the intensity of profound self-contempt and shattering horror at the grim condition of your existence, because that would mean real change.

You are becoming numb. Bright lights, loud noises, clashing colours, violence and porn do not cause you great pain. Indeed you seek them out.

You cannot be alone without stimulation; without chatter, shopping, televisual entertainment, giddy excitements. You are afraid of looking into the cellar of your heart, and seeing the dead body you’ve got hidden down there.

If you're aware of this, then THAT which is aware is gently nudging you from the futility of this posture. You have to move toward THAT, or you continue to fall down into the despair. The separated thinking mind has become the false guide, allowing you to be contracted from the Real. 

So where can we find the living soul that is uncontracted from life? That's the inside job that is always available moment-to-moment beyond the divided mind. I just discovered a beautiful book by Clarise Lispector. It reads like one raw sutra wholly with immediate experience. Near the end of it she reveals,

Now—silence and slight amazement. 

Because at five in the morning, today July 25th, I fell into a state of grace. 

It was a sudden sensation, but so gentle. The luminosity was smiling in the air: exactly that. It was a sigh of the world. I don’t know how to explain just as you can’t describe the dawn to a blind man. It is unutterable what happened to me in the form of feeling: I quickly need your empathy. Feel with me. It was a supreme happiness. 

But if you have known the state of grace you’ll recognise what I’m going to say. I’m not referring to inspiration, which is a special grace that so often happens to those who deal with art.

The state of grace of which I’m speaking is not used for anything. It’s as if it came only for us to know that we really exist and the world exists. In this state, beyond the calm happiness that irradiates from people and things, there is a lucidity that I only call weightless because everything in grace is so light. It’s a lucidity of one who no longer needs to guess: without effort, he knows. Just that: knows. Don’t ask me what, because I can only reply in the same way: he knows.

There is much JOY with being with a LOVER that never leaves. I often take some time during the year-end to seek out any noted “best-of” films in culture that may be worth exploring. I recently saw the film Past Lives, and loved it for the simple masterpiece that it is. It is special, and in the same vein as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Linklater’s Before Sunrise/Sunset, Lost in Translation and Once. All these films were some favorites of mine in the last few decades, and I notice a common theme that ran across all of them. On the surface, they appear as well-crafted love stories that don't fall into conventual Hollywood tropes. Digging deeper, we see these films echo the pull toward the Eternal through the beauty of pathos in human longing, authentic and magical connection, and providential synchronicities that come from vivid beings relating-in-love. We all yearn to genuinely relate with another that offers some promise of perfection; and yet at some point we also come up against the finite realities of our fallen natures. It is only when we can see where this points to—beyond the object of our desire—that the momentary beauty of the instant is where our soul truly comes alive! The LOVER that never leaves verses the one who can only point to THAT.

That instant can never truly be found in the external world, but perhaps touched upon through these sacramental guideposts that may send us within. Just look!