Second Terrace

And back again

A concatenation of odd July deluvian rains and hobbled knees cut two days off my planned seventy-mile trek.

Returning home last evening, my brother and I ended up making good on nearly fifty miles of it, counting all the side trails to the adirondack shelters and the rusty water pumps.

Yesterday, after an ascent that limned new resonance to my readings of Purgatorio, we stumbled through the last tunnel through the cool green trees arching over the sandstone-littered path, and broke abruptly into the glaring hot grey of Route 31. I had traveled this road many times before, and had always thought it pleasant and out-of-the-way. No longer: its very straightness, hardness, hotness and loudness make it out-of-place.

So we were back in the world, it seemed. Mom and Dad had just pulled into the Park Office driveway, and were hailing us on the cellphone and waiving their arms. I felt like a teenager again, coming home on the holidays from school.

Now we're home. My brother has his knees wrapped and I hope they're fine. I, for one, am happy that I am out of the rains, which continue to fall in the Laurel Highlands. I am a little sad that we did not make it to Ohiopyle at the southern terminus. I wish I was sadder and even distraught, because that would seem more preux chevalier. But my ankles and shoulders and hips and back are relieved and comforted, and are resting in a little Sabbath.

Besides, October is a better time for the southern completion.

I learned a few things:

First: I did not see a vision. I did not ask for one, nor did I seek one. I do not look for new outlooks anymore: it is better to better learn the old ones. I wanted neither enthusiasm nor ecstasy. For the first time in my life, I eschewed a mountain-top-experience, despite the fact that I was on one.

What I did instead was prayer. The Jesus Prayer became a lifeline. I will not brag here and say that I was anywhere near anything approaching mortal extremity. But there were many moments when my face was sixty degrees from the ascending path ahead of me, with fifty pounds thumping on my shoulders and lower back: and in those moments, I prayed the Jesus Prayer out of abject weakness and even desperation --

"Lord Jesus Christ" ... gasp ...

"Son of God" ... gasp ...

"have mercy on me" ... gasp ...

"a sinner" ... gasp ...

In those moments, I had no difficulty at all agreeing to the self-incriminating word "sinner." The torrid extremities of life, so ably signified by backpacking trips on difficult trails, scour away all pretense and every vain self-definition that falls short of soul-poverty and meekness.

I had no difficulty in asking for mercy. "Mercy" became a blank check that I asked God to sign, and to write in the amount, for in my burning lungs and crawling through the rains that turned mile-long laurel thickets into a silver maze of torrential mirrors, I had no idea what to pray for, how to amend the situation, how to fix the problem, how to lead some of my confused friends out of the existential dilemmas into which they had placed themselves, how to heal my prayer list (immediate physical healing? or the best healing of all?), how to protect my wife and daughters, how to protect their future and their eternity, how to lead my foolish crazy and insane immediate world into wisdom, how to make fools slow down and practice wisdom and charity.

I had no idea. I still have no idea. But I prayed for mercy with burning, aching breath, and I wonder if there were a symphony, a synergia going on at that moment, an inspiration with my labored work, ora et labore.

Mercy is mystery. It is a surrender of a particular mind to the infinity of good providence. The blank check covers all, and is drawn from Heaven. I will never know the amount. But I have to give it up, beyond my understanding.

I prayed for everyone I could think of, in the ascents and descents. In the Jesus Prayer of my personal and extra-personal supplication, I found riches through poverty, the heart at center through extremity.

Prayer became my step and breath.

I learned some other things. I learned what a mile really means. The automobile, on concrete highways, have made a fantasy of distance. But hiking in the Laurel Woods restores all meaning to the concept of the mile.

I learned the importance of a hiking stick. If you go backpacking, you cannot go without one (or two). My stick became a balance to my hunched over back. It prevented me from stumbling down descents. It steadied my step, after a stumble on loose stone. I scared away chipmunks and field mice who were trying to purloin food from my pack at night in the shelter. My stick held up my pack when I removed it ever hour from exhaustion. Colin Fletcher writes that he used his stick to hold up a tarp to protect him from the rains and the sun: I am not that accomplished.

In any case, bring a hiking staff.

I learned the importance of water. Even in the cool days of the Laurels, I drank 100 ml a day and then some. We ran out of water on Tuesday, and look for water in one dry stream bed after another. Finally, we descended a valley into a dank, mosquito-infested, muddy rivulet called "Card Machine Run." I took out my filter and we drank like paradise, drunk on the icon of grace.

I really didn't need a map. The trail was well-marked by yellow blazes. It took exertion to stick to the trail. It also took a resistance to temptation to leave it. There were many moments, when I looked at my topological maps, when I thought that the trail was needlessly descending into hollows. With every descent, there must come an ascent, I knew: the topological map -- the "meta-narrative" if you will -- revealed a happier, easier way that avoided the descent/ascent dyad.

The topological map did not show the presence of game-refuge fences and other hazards. The trail was right, it turns out, at every step of the way.

I learned also the importance of brotherhood. My brother and I travel a similar path in which we are unhappy with most conventions and all boorish cliches. We know that civilization is changing, probably declining. So we decided to hike together. We saw few views, for this very green July occluded most -- if not all -- the good spots to get inspired from (the rains made hiking up Beam Rocks, the best place on the LHHT for perspective, an impossibility).

But we saw exertion and grace, and the meaning of fellowship on the path. We saw and felt and trusted in the ropeline, the belay, of brotherhood. We approached the full exegesis of "Where two or three are gathered in My Name."

And it was good.

Out and about

Summer's here, and (on top of the visitations and services and sessions, class lectures, conferences and meetings -- of which I am a peevish fan), it's brought the verdant offerings of herbs and roses and the annual sojourn to the Shore.

Today I will throw a little library into a raffish bag (usually prohibited, by my wife, from public appearance). Into it will go my poetry anthology and prayer book, and my moleskine cahier. Joining these will be John Brown's Body (couldn't resist the intentional ambiguity), Edwards' The Book of Ebenezer Le Page (since it's been commended so highly), Eusebius, Maximus and Patrick Leigh Fermor. I am considering either Douglas' South Wind or Waugh's Scoop.

As you might have guessed, I do not like meetings (whether they are called conferences, consultations, plenary sessions, or conventions). In fact, I prefer church banquets over any meeting. Retreats with prayer and presentations, and conversation, are perfectly defensible. I wonder how much the church suffered when it coopted (or got coopted by) the corporate system of committees, commissions, conventions, and the animal-farm-frisson of sophomoric parliamentarism.

As I languish in reeking hotel halls (which, the night before, hosted connubial mass rituals, and whose carpets are permeated by watered-down drinks and various smears from instant mashed potatos and regrettable stuffed mushrooms), and as I attempt to understand financial reports (which, I suspect, are intended to mystify, or at least filter out the notice of skeptics) and attend to the interminable sonorities of summaries of goals chosen and how they've been reached and how the recession has wrecked damage on accounts and billfolds ...

... as I sit uncomfortably under the cold refrigerator flourescence in a hall that's either stuffy or clammy, I think of a high summer's day going on, happily, somewhere outside. I think of my prism nexus diving and rocketing on Jockey's Ridge, my church school kids running relays at the parish picnic and my friends pitching horseshoes, my girls dancing in the surf, my marjoram spreading green and luxurious in the bed, my wife reading under the fair pavilion on the strand, and my brother and I looking out at the horseshoe bend of the Youghiogheny, with backpacks made lighter by a week's travail.

That is what summer's for: pilgrimages, earth and sea, sun and affection, friendship and prayer, gardens and voyage to mountain and shore.

Not conferences.

See you.

A Motto from Koblenz

Glaub, was wahr ist;
Lieb, was rar ist;
Trink, was klar ist.

This New Year's resolution is from A Time of Gifts, by Patrick Leigh Fermor. This bright little narrative, along with its companion volume Between the Woods and the Water, constitute Fermor's 1933 trek from the hook of Holland all the way through the girth of pre-WWII Europe to Constantinople.

Here are the circumstances that surround this glittering pearl:

... simply by sipping one could explore the two great rivers below [i.e., the Rhine and the Mosel which converge at Koblenz] and the Danube and all Swabia, and Franconia too by proxy, and the vales of Imhof and the faraway slopes of Wurzburg: journeying in time from year to year, with draughts as cool as a deep well, limpidly varying from dark gold to pale silver and smelling of glades and meadows and flowers. Gothic inscriptions still flaunted across the walls, but they were harmless here, and free of the gloom imposed by those boisterous and pace-forcing black-letter hortations in the beer-halls of the north.

And the style was better: less emphatic, more lucid and laconic; and both consoling and profound in content; or so it seemed as the hours passed. Glaub, was wahr ist,* enjoined a message across an antlered wall, Lieb, was rar ist; Trink, was klar ist.

One simply cannot write better than this. When I grow up, I want to write like Fermor: "less emphatic, more lucid and laconic; and both consoling and profound in content."

*Believe what is true; love what is rare; drink what is clear.

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.

A bag of necessities

In my black leather travel bag of necessities, I carried (or lugged) to New Rome an unnecessarily-tabbed notebook for journaling, in three sections, bon mots from the Conference (joined with less eloquent commendations or refutations). In the third section were scrawled the notes for a little story or essay, whichever form the mass will take. And in the second was for something called “impressions” – that grievous sort of loose unlucid thought released by Proust like Pandora’s box. I think Proust did something nasty to consciousness and its relationship to Time, but I don’t know what. Yet. I’ll think of something.

Also pocketed into the strata of paper and nylon dividers was my trusty but cruelly tattered and water-logged Immortal Poems of the English Language, anthologized by Oscar Williams. It is now sheathed by mailing tape ever since it was baptized by a rogue Atlantic wave at Sandbridge years ago. I found Yeats, Byron, and Omar Khayyam to be trustier guides than the party-head stuff supplied by the Lonely Planet (a name, by the way, prophetic of the new third world -- “third,” I mean, in the Rieffian sense, not in the warm fuzziness of the United Nations).

Along with these were my volume of The Hours of Prayer (my diocesan book of canonical devotions); and, signaling my attempt to be current on things Istanbullian, Orhan Pamuk’s book, eponymously entitled The Black Book. A book which shall join many others on my shelf, glaring at me with reproach for having failed my vow to better my cosmopolitan sensibilities.

Lastly, the shabbiest of my bibliographic companions was The Path to Rome, by Hilaire Belloc. I took this wretchedly-edited book (the hardpress.com edition, if one can burden the word “edition” with such a bankrupt accident or particular manifestation as this instant) because I thought it diverting and gnomic to read of his path to the old Rome, whilst I wended my way to the New.

Laying aside, for a short while, my complaints about the illiterati at hardpress.com (what is meant here by “hard”?), I look now upon the scraggly lines of blue and unfortunate pink (I took up this cursed highlighter over the Alps when the blue ran out) that have overlaced the pages of my now-favorite interlocutor. Providentially, the second half of Chesterbelloc prepared me well for Constantinople.

It is good to cathect, or interject, the images of geography into memory, as the soul needs these solids to ride on and to reside in. That is what travel does, from place to place: it breaks the constant temptation to stop, fantasize, and demonically fabricate one’s own little Hadian world. This is why little pilgrimages are needed, even if one only went to Church on a Sunday, because his own mundane procession of images and feelings are not really home, but a sedimentation of falsifications. Travel is needed, pilgrimage is called for, to go to a difference and a sacrament, to grasp the stuff of Time, and thence to return, to achieve Home, for pilgrimage is only and ever a story of Homewardness, never merely a soliloquy of musing outward-bound.

It is sad that the university world (and also the adolescent universe into which we have all been damned, temporarily) has rejected home, pilgrimage and paradise. Here are a few words of Belloc on this theme, in which he treats of that favored Chesterbellocian story of the “Return” – their unwitting term for the inevitable direction of Faith toward Orthodoxy, had they known better:

What is it, do you think, that causes the Return? I think it is the problem of living; for every day, every experience of evil, demands a solution. That solution is provided by the memory of the great scheme which at last we remember. Our childhood pierces through again … But I will not attempt to explain it, for I have not the power; only I know that we who Return suffer hard things; for there grows a gulf between us and many companions. We are perpetually thrust into minorities, and the world almost begins to talk a strange language; we are troubled by the human machinery of a perfect and superhuman revelation; we are over-anxious for its safety, alarmed, and in danger of violent decisions.

And this is hard: that the Faith begins to make one abandon the old ways of judging. Averages and movements and the rest grow uncertain. We see things from within and consider one mind or a little group as a salt or leaven …

[We think] of this deplorable weakness in men that the Faith is too great for them, and accepting it as an inevitable burden …

There was to be no more of that studious content, that security in historic analysis, and that constant satisfaction of an appetite which never cloyed. A wisdom more imperative and more profound was to put a term to the comfortable wisdom of learning. All the balance of judgment, the easy, slow convictions, the broad grasp of things, the vision of their complexity, the pleasure in their innumerable life – all that had to be given up. Fanaticisms were no longer entirely to be despised [blogger note: now that’s something to be swallowed, like asafoetida, by neo-Christian euro-academicians], just appreciations and a strong grasp of reality no longer entirely to be admired.

The Catholic Church will have no philosophies. She will permit no comforts; the cry of the martyrs is in her far voice; her eyes that see beyond the world present us heaven and hell to be confusion of our human reconciliations, our happy blending of good and evil things …

Yes, certainly religion is as tragic as first love, and drags us out into the void away from our dear homes.

Home again

Airports are not at all like the ports at sea used to be. Now those were proper ports, sandwiched by a long storied journey on the starboard side (a journey that ran rather much as a decent narrative should), and on the other port side, an unknown amorphous tale of the future, chaotic and psychically void (except, of course, for the eschaton).

In the port itself is an interval, where farewells are made to the sea, and wagons are loaded for land. One stops, breathes, sets down to a table of conviviality (an unknown word these days), trades if he must, and goes to the library for maps.

We passed through a succession of airports, which -- like so many things these days -- are not like their types. Ataturk Airport in Istanbul reminded me more of Monroeville Mall than Turkey: it is an icon of what some people in Turkey would like Turkey to be -- certainly they do not want it to be Byzantine, because that milieu is shot through with Christianity; and they do not want it to be Ottoman either, because that is simply too Islamic, and it is contrary to the faddish finance Euro-capitalist myth (I like my rich people to be honestly aristocratic and simply despotic, like a pasha bey, instead of bloodless individuals who hide behind holding companies and portfolios).

Charles de Gaulle, somewhere (we were told) near Paris, also looks like a mall in its better moments. We swept through on Monday in one of those. Near our gate was erected a new ageish orange-pink cloud of Big Sur non-music caramelized with wafts of Chanel No. 5: this I noticed as I wandered into the men's room, whose sinks were mere dimples in the white corian, framed by silver statuary that emitted lukewarm water, hot air and pink detergent if you waved your hands in the proper occultic manner. On the other side of Charles de Gaulle, the side we entered the previous Tuesday, the side in construction -- i.e., the side populated by devils and blueprinted by Kafka -- there was, you might say, nothing pink or corian.

JFK is itself.

Pittsburgh International is a proper airport, because it has, standing side by side, statues of Franco Harris in a Steeler uniform, and George Washington in his French and Indian War British uniform. Pittsburgh doesn't deny that it is an airport, and it embraces its cute pledge to welcome everyone into the most livable city.

I saw nothing of Paris. I believe this is customary of layovers in Charles de Gaulle. For irony's sake, I sent 2 postcards home: one of the Eiffel Tower and the other of the Arc de Triomphe, if only to show what I did not see. It is possible, for all I know, that Charles de Gaulle is nowhere near Paris, but is still in New Jersey.

I did not need to see New York on this trip, though I really like the place.

I live in Pittsburgh, and I love my home. But this little essay is not about home, but about a destination. It is about Istanbul, or, as some of us sentimental church-besotted cranks like to call it, Constantinople.

My ten companions and I (one of them is my 18 year old daughter) did not go to Constantinople for a pilgrimage, so I cannot frame the story of our journey, or any of my reminiscences, in the classic terms of peregrination. We traveled to a conference, and a Youth Conference at that. You, fair reader, must know by now from wading through the tide pools of these posts, that I am not at all a good Conference attendee. I get drowsy too much, and my head nods to the rough procession of iambs and dactyls of fairly decent, but sometimes howlingly funny, earphone translation. One can see the author himself in the soft grip of Morpheus: our can-do diocesan webmaster thought it was a moment of profound reflection -- my family knows that this is an impossibility by definition.

My companions and I went to Constantinople to receive the blessing of his All Holiness, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, and to see the cradle of the seven ecumenical councils. We went to meet Orthodox Christians from around the world: Greece certainly (and predominantly), but also Brazil, Australia, England, Germany, Finland, Estonia, Belgium, France, Ukraine and the Bahamas.

And we went to see the ruins. Some were ruins in states of decrepitude. Others were ruins in states of defacement. Hagia Sophia was a ruin with both.

I wanted to run into Hagia Sophia on Sunday afternoon and kiss the stone floor of the nave. I was prevented, of course, by the press of the crowd, and by Khalil, who insisted, before we got in, since he was the guide of the 5000 people in my guidance party, on telling us all what an icon was. I told my daughter, who with me might never see Byzantium again, that I could tell her myself what an icon was but didn't need to since she knew that sort of thing from infancy, and that we might as well take ourselves on our own tour, so we escaped into the sacred space of Justinian, who used the stones that used to echo the holy complaints and fire of Chrysostom.

We stepped out by the scaffolding, under the calligraphically encrusted dome, and heard the echoes of contemporaneity silently fall to acoustic velvet in the dark, beautiful sorrow.

Wisdom, I whispered, let us be attentive, I wondered, peace be to all, I remembered, in fear of God with faith and with love, I came forward to the ancient solea, and imagined the nine hundred years of faithful who became each one an icon of Christ, because they received Him in faith and substance, and passed starboard into the future of the world.

Hagia Sophia is an old proper port.

The famous image stands, still, of Christ flanked by the Theotokos and the Forerunner, they in supplication, He in grace. The icon, as you might know, has been stripped away, though the Faces remain.

The Patriarch, too, still stands in the Phanar: he calls the situation of the See of Andrew the "Crucified Church," and it is. During the Conference, I remember a passage of mind, in which I thought, "Well, now, if he wants to stay under the Turkish yoke, and if he rejects the thought of gold and power when other potencies call him deficient, then I will no longer pray for his removal to New York, but will pray with him and for him in his place."

My Patriarch rules from under oppression. He has no country, no flag, a little throne. There is no worldly reason for the other patriarchs or hierarchs to answer his call. The Empire lies in ruin: he remains.

His throne,  like Hagia Sophia, might be defaced. But it is still, like Christ in a new third and deconstructed world, in place.