Rieffian Notes from the Strand

Well, back from Sandbridge, one of the many places in Creation that gives irrefutable evidence, or rather, manifestation of God's presence/presents.

Here are a few notes from my cahier, watching the waves.

1.  I'm getting older, and I know this because I am drawing comfort from familiar, even shabby things (like beach sandals frayed and beat up, over seven years old). I look, like a jackdaw, for shiny things still to line the nest of my mind. But I don't look for new things with power buttons and brain chips. I look for wild flashes of silver rocketing through the surf in exultation, the Sun rising golden from baptism at Dawn. A million croakers, like so many silver dollars, flopped in the waves, casting an indigo shadow in the shallows inshore, and a pod of bottle-nosed dolphins, laughing for the sheer fire of being, leaped and snatched, midair in a pirouette, their luncheon that eternal noon. These, now, are the shiny things, whilst manmade things I like old, well-worn, like writing in notebooks instead of PDA's, comforted by the satin paper of my beatup moleskine and shamefully dingy once-black attaché, pleasingly lined with taffeta and a whiff of Borkum Riff. I used to be one of those people who would have waited in line for the new iPhone, and would have displayed it to callow admirers. Now, I let others do the impressing. I'll take the pen, the pipe and the pint, the hearth and heart.

2.  Time brooks no unreality, nature admits no lies. That is the simple reason why sin must tend toward death. Time is Realization, and as such it is of Grace. Time is not Space at all, and is certainly not a dimension (sorry E.), but it is Grace, and Grace is more, much more than Time. Because of this one fact, the Christian can Hope.

3.  Consciousness, if cathected to fantasia (see my upcoming article in Again) -- a blasphemy against Time -- will shatter into fragments. This, of course, is made explicit in Hades, and made permanent in Hell. Perdition is exactly the explosion and scattering of all unity -- i.e., consciousness and community.

4.  Christ did something irreversible to philosophy -- after Christ, true reason must always journey toward the Logos. True philosophy has been utterly theologized, and to not say so requires deliberate refusal, or deconstruction.

5.  Is there an "uncertainty principle" governing the relationship of Time and Space that follows the contours of the relationship of momentum and location -- that one may know when he is, but not where, simultaneously? And to extend this proposition, is it impossible to thus "prove" reality? As it is impossible to prove this moment in this place, or this place in this moment?

6.  Is there a wave function that is an image of the dyad of Divine Ordinance and Human Freedom? Does this wave function collapse when the event occurs?

7.  A sacrament is the intersection of Spirit with the World -- there must be the intersection of Sacrament for the soul to act in history. This is why we pray "Thy Kingdom come, Thy Will be done on earth as it is in heaven." Every Sacrament is an invasion of the eschaton into this God-beloved, but God-rejecting world.

8.  There is no greater mission, or raison d'etre, for a Christian than to pray. Every prayer is a redemption. Every prayer is a deliberate rebuttal of determinism. Every prayer is accompanied by "Lord have mercy," and is confirmed by the only possible Christian existentialist expression, which is, what we will all understand when we finally grow up, "Amen." Thus we pray for my 18-year-old altar boy with cerebral palsy, my friend who is a brittle diabetic, my parishioner who aches for her departed husband, my daughter who is about to enter Malone College tomorrow, and the grandmother of the Ochlophobist, and many others. If you pray with editorial reserve, wondering whether God is big enough or if your requests are too sentimental, insignificant or transgressive of calvinistic dogma, then you have built your mountains higher than God is tall, and you have made of Him a mere constituent force, like a corporation, instead of a Person, like a Father, Who sent His Only-Begotten Son and His Spirit, Who makes of prayer an Eschatological Revolution, not a mere sentiment signed on Hallmark cards.

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[FrGregACCA]

From the marquee of a Baptist Church:

"Thy will be done' is always the right prayer"