Be Careful

Be careful. Be certain that your expressions of regret about your inability to rest in God do not have a tinge of self-satisfaction, even self-exaltation to them, that your complaints about your anxieties are not merely a manifestation of your dependence on them. There is nothing more difficult to outgrow than anxieties that have become useful to us, whether as explanations for a life that never quite finds its true force or direction, or as fuel for ambition, or as a kind of reflexive secular religion that, paradoxically, unites us with others on a shared sense of complete isolation: you feel at home in the world only by never feeling at home in the world.

By Christian Wiman, “My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer”

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Dear Alex,

For a while the rain relents overnight, grass twinkling, a jab of joy in gloom.

Early this morn I walk my dog round the same loop with the same stare of houses. She tugs on leash at crudely the same spot, paws poking on grass to stake out her lot in manicured wilderness, a whiff of moss, a bite of Eden.

A sudden in all, the sullen wind butts our lips. My dog knows and cares not about the lush of twilight and limelight rounding from Old to New and forth to back around the homes, homebodies and humdrum. Irrelevant. Irreversible. Tombstone or touchstone, impeached or preached, she is indifferent. Her days and mine spin in lobes of will and fate.

A “bright abyss” brews anxiety. It just feels ridiculous and riddles you. You look for the nature of light in the nature of your darkness, “deep dark eyes, almost all black with no sclera”.  The really sad part is you look but see nothing - not in the “Godfather” trilogy, not in triple grins, not under 30 or 3 decades more.

You never feel quite at home in a world of grins that shut the bright abyss.

My dog won’t budge on grass now. No regret or ambition. Safe spot for her. She sees no use to go. Then back comes the rain. A white flaunt in woe, she bolts to the hub of downpour.

Yours, Kate

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Dear Kate,

Yesterday I found myself in a cathedral and Jesus staring at me, and I thought about the scene from "Andrei Rublev" when Kirill first speaks to Theophanes the Greek about Andrei and his work:

"He's like brother to me.  They praise him, that's right.  He puts the paint in thin layer, very delicately, very skillfully.  But something is missing...  Fear is missing.  And faith!  Faith that comes from the bottom of one's heart."

When Theophanes the Greek subsequently asks for Andrei instead of Kirill (as Theophanes first proposed and promised) to work with him to decorate a cathedral in Moscow, out of jealousy Kirill leaves the monastery in anger and ruthlessly beats his own dog to death when it wants to leave with him.

Jesus looks.

Yours, Alex