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I am not talking here about people who get rich. I am not talking about people who possess a lot of power and subdue others under authority. I am talking about those people we admire, the real people who make history. Those whom we admire because they stood the storm-- we have watched them so calm in the midst of harrowing vissicitudes in life, we have seen them unwaering before the truth.
They are the men who believed in themselves. Chesterton would tell me that such men are in Hanwell orin lunatic hospitals. Maybe he was talking about a different breed of men. To believe in oneself is to believe in the justice of life and of God... Life and God are generous and just. They never give us less than we need, and they never give us excess than we can manage. Wise people know this and they set themselves up to cultivate what they have received from God and nature.
I was talking to a newfound friend. And our conversation came to a point where we were talking about conistency and fidelity in the choices we make in life.
"I am afraid about deciding on..."
"And why are you so afraid?"
"Because things change. Time and seasons change, and people change with them."
Time never changes. It offers us its seasons that we may have vacation... that we may not grow old. Time never changes. It gives us its seaons that we may become wise and mature with our choices. People break up in a relationship, say marriage because they did not give the only thing that is worth giving, the only thing that must be given; they always remember the only one thing that must be forgotten: themselves.
Great people are those who have learnt this lesson. The weak ones gloat and recriminate over little things. Mature men, I mean those who write their name on the face of life do not complain. They see every little thing as a gift. And where there is change, they seize it as a moment of enrichment.
I was born in a culture where people are so pessimistic and cynical about life that they easily give in to despair. We complain about the monotony of our work, yet we are uneasy with the changing seasons of life that reel through every hour's recall. We have willed to have a day off from this monotony, but we would bear cheerfully the rest that sickness demands of our bodies...We are not yet settled down than we begin to desire to change. Our hearts are always restless, there is always something wanting wanting to move out of us. Because we long for something perfect. We long for a home. Within our hearts, there is that nostalgia for a lost home. I consider the touch of grace within our heart. This touch leaves us unsatisfied with anything ephemeral, we want the fullness of life. And where is that life?
I have come to deal with this problems in two ways.
1. I am continually sustained by the conviction that I am just a wayfarer here. Viatore sum. That brings me to remain in touch with my spiritual depth. There is peace, not in the world around us, but within. That space within is the space where we name things. This spiritual depth is continually nourished and rendered fruitful by the bourn of love.
2. Hope which does not take us out of reality but brings us to endure and overcome it. Faith and hope are two virtues that move together. They take our gaze higher, directing it towards a wider and higher horizon.
I have been reading my mails and re-read the publisher's note communicating to me the ISBN number for words Lost in the Wind. I do not know what it particularly signifies, but reading the lay-out of the book, there is that current of elation that passes through my veins... I am happy, but I can't tell why. I do not worry much about the success of the book: one thing assures my peace, even if i do not succeed in the literary marketplace, at least, i had tried-
I have come to discover two things that often underlie our success and apparent good moral and intellectual strength.
- The feeling that we are loved, that someone values us, that someone needs us, that someone recognizes us. This love that we receive draws a lot from us, leads us to realise our hidden talents- inspiring as it is, it may become our point of focus: we are guided by its light. We know deep inside us that we have something to work for, we have someone leaning on us or to whom we lean on. A man never gets tired when he thinks of his wife and kids, it is an untold joy for a man to have his love reciprocated by the only person who means much to him....
- The realisation that something we have dreamt of for years was possible. Walking up the steep, the slippery road along life's lane, we come almost to the height, and look down at the panorama underneath: yes, we are happy, it was worth the pain. The feeling of having come thus far gives its inspiration and moral strength.
This is particularly what I feel on through the monotony of life. The love I receive and the road I have walked through until now. This is a force not generated within an individual. We can never attribute it to some stoic attititude of mind pulling us along. The inner nergy that defies fear is generated from simple smiles, simple gestures of encouragement from people around us, a tap on the back which seems to say, you are meant for something higher. It builds the energy within, it restores hope, it renews self-confidence.
I am reading emails, and lots of people are sending me notes of congratulating for the published book, others are anxious to read. It does not make me feel proud, but rather, I feel that i am a part of a living environment where people are united by the invisible thread of love. And i can move forward, leaning on the weight of human relatios.
I was once a xaverian and did my Novitiate in RDC. The memories are still fresh in my mind; the long hours of quietude, of silence and prayer. You had to walk in that space within where you meet no one but the void, vast and stunning, the obscurity of your thought and the uncertainty of the call of God. I remember particularly one beautiful afternoon after our beginning of year Retreat, the Rector announced that we would be having an exercise which he called Memore de soi. It had to do with getting into contact with our history--
I have no history. I thought to myself. I have no achievement: I am just a jumble heap of sins. But then, for the first time, the thought occured to me that that was myself, my history... I did not have a history because I did not like to look at it....
For three days, I betook myself to linger under the bowers of trees that shade the the house, feeling the soft, carpetted grass under my feet... It was the cry of street children that recalled me back to time. Introspectively, i journeyed into those hidden chambers of memories: how beautiful and rich. I saw my life differently, I saw t as a composite whole where every element was a thread, every episode (good or bad) a stepping stone.... It was a journey towards something i did not know...
There were those faces, sweet, sad, beautiful, sorry hue...there were friends and foes... there were woes and joys... deceptions and fidelities... there was the pain that made me grow... the darkness that always meant a light shone somewhere... the deaths that taught me wisom knowing the shortness of our life... friendship and laughter.... there was a lot, lot more of that which steeped me into life. But did I have to regret where I stood?
No! there wa nothing to cry over. There have been losses, but they were compensated with richer gifts. I was always riding on the storm, but the benevolent wind rode me to a safer and ever richer harbour...
I learnt from this day on that God works in our lives in mysterious ways. He touches us in many ways, but hardly ever in obvious ways. that is why I have come to believe most firmly in Divine Providence. Nothing is placed on our path for nothing... i never despair when the weather fades and evening calls at the door. God is inside, leading me to where I am supposed to be. When I look back, i can only have sentiments of gratitude, the present, I receive it as a gift of love, the future calls me to trust.
The question of the meaning of life can not find a complete answer without being associated with the experience of God or the transcendent... We can never answer this question completely because it is the search for God and we cannot fully possess Him. That is why, life becomes a continual search... and the moment we think we have got the answer, that very moment our life becomes filled with the sense of the absurd, that is when we start losing everything because we are no longer in contact with the hunger that feeds us...
The quest to understand and to love become, so to say, insatiable longings that maintain the dynamism of life. We are not content to know little, to love little, and the more we know or the more we love, the more the object of our love or knowledge eludes the grasp of our heart or our mind. Life is a gift that is so immense in its manifold expressions: the heart must open up larger and larger to receive daily this mysterious gift with gratitude and wonder.
You could not imagine what it means to fall in love, and to fall in love with a woman so beautiful and fair. falling too soon just to realise that beneath the veil of that dazzling beauty, there is a tinge of sorrow abounding.
I watched her as she worked. I watched her in her dance. i watched her in every move she made, every step she took. all was gracefully done... watching her was like a vision, it was like dropping into ecstasy. They say that people are poetic the way they say things, somethings-- that is, the way they allow symbols to speak through them. She was herself a symbol, and she was music, and she was a poem at the same time.
"No" she said to me when I told her she was beautiful. "No, you can't mean it. You can't fall in love for me."
"No, but why not?"
"I am useless, reeling with filth and eaten up all."
"But you are so beautiful..."
She uttered a very dry laughter that echoed the shrill cries of a thousand voices, it seemed to come from a mirage of a world beyond.
"No. Look for someone else."
"But it is you I definitely want."
there was some silence and she semed to understand that I was getting way too serious. Then she spoke in earnest...
"If you know what I am you will never talk to me. I have been used by two hundred men and more. I have lost the count. Some callous, others with an evident vice of easy flattery-- the pent was wayward, slopping down, and i slipt with it. I was not abused. I gave in to them all. i gave in without thought, without denial. Because i was beautiful. i could wield the power in me and its charms and get what i wan."
there she paused. and I intervened:
"And what has that got to do with me?"
"Well I am damned, that is what it all got with you."
"I am damned too."
She does not seem to find a replique so quick for that. But she won't give in.
"I am all but pieces broken up and scattered everywhere." It struck me to the heart and i had the cunning humour of telling her it was what she was meant to be; a relish in all eyes. But how would i claim that i will love her, and own her?
"A thing of beauty is a joy forever" thus said Keats opening a beautiful epic story. A thing of beauty is a joy forever; when we do not behold its shadows. There is a sorrow in every crown of beauty. My friend, my holy whore was to make me know this. She had grown through pain in her own flesh, pain suffered because she was beautiful.... and after so much debauchery, does she lose anything of her beauty?
I would gladly go back in search of her soul. she had lost almost everything, but not the light that comes from awareness. She had stood in her dark night; those men were nothing but passing shadows, some were stars lighting up her vault, others were nightmares-- but at the dawn, she had come to the conclusion that "nothing endured" She had said hers was a crippled soul in a beautiful body, but I said hers was a beautiful soul in a crippled body. If you remember the gold that is tested in the furnace before it becomes burnished with splendour, you would understand me..
It happens in our life. It is a question of vision and how God plays his cards... (I need to continue this later...)
Faith?
It is a hard word.
Reason?
I can understand. There are things we do with certainty because we can see their end, we can at least measure the magnitude of their consequences.
Faith?
We do not see where it leads us. That makes it harder, the more harder. We just have to give an accent, it is like jumping off the cliff. We do not know where the landing spot lies, it may be in the gyre, it may be in the gore of oblivion or disillusionment....
Faith?
I had preached it as a Seminarian, and I had held it as my precious treasure. It is like living in the world of Cinderella... of J.K Rowling's Harry Potter... faith is going back into the ethics of Elfland which Chesterton describes as "the sunny country of common sense."
Faith is more than mere common sense. It is the most logical thing to hold. It is logical to believe in what I do not have, what I do not see now; if it turns out not to be true, I would be losing nothing, but supposing it turns out to be true and I did not place my hope in it, I would definitely be the loser. That is the way pascal argues. But I look at it even deeper--
The crisis of faith in modern times is explained by a fact that needs to justify it. Science dominates, we are losing the ancient instinct of wonder and the sacredness of life because science explains a lot of things to us and reveals us to ourselves. The things we looked upon as mysterious have become banal because we can explain them... but there, there is a point of mystery; our science hasn't explained death... it hasn't gone beyond the infinitessimal limits of the molecules or cells that constitute our frame... beyond all speculation, there is still something that escapes our grasp, it eludes us... there is this feeling that no matter how many gadgets we have, how many recreational tools, how much we know, there will always be that feeling of insatisfaction, of our finitude eating us from within. What does science call this dire longing for life, this fear of death, this frenzy for solace, this desire for something new, consistent?
The answer is not in the internet. The answer is not in astrology. It isn't in medecine. The answer is in the fairy tales where impossible things happen. Where "fate" guides the steps of heroes into some bounty, some haven, some triumph. It is believeing that angels are watching who stole our apple, that the one who insulted our grandma will trip on his path-- it is not a path of superstition, it is the trust in the unknown that is always benevolent: that is why like tennyson, i could trust him...
Strong Son of God, immortal Love,
Whom we, that have not seen thy face,
By faith, and faith alone, embrace,
Believing where we cannot prove;
The more it becomes obscure and difficult to trust, the greater the reward... I will trust, especially in dark moments. Faith never fails.
On the Dry Wood, I will be waiting for you. There juts Springs of life from the dead body of a God.
I take my breviary in hand. I open the office. I try to say my lauds, with attention and devotion than I never did for the past two years. My mind is listless. My heart is calm. Prayer is trust. Prayer is love. Prayer means an awareness of how much we have been loved.
Do you understand me, God? Even when I do not know what I am saying?
How would you say it if I did not first put it in your mouth? What thoughts could inhabit your mind that were not already seen in the light of my love? I see you, I penetrate your thoughts, I inhabit them... 'cause you are mine...
How can I be yours? The weather unpleasant, my pain scathing... where are you? how do u possess me?
In your pain I recreate you. I work on you like a sculpture shaping an image out of work. The painful moments of silence are moments of your regeneration.... I am the God of your night, the God of your desert, the God of your death-- Today is my day, and I precede you to Galilee. You will meet me there... It is your day of Hope!!!!
the endings are always new beginnings--
when we fall in love, we keep its fire
by constantly returning to its beginnings:
eacth death commences a new life birth,
and our gains are where we seem to lose.
except you lose everything, you gain nothing,
and he who loses all, gains all--
Before I have been preoccupied about the things I produced. It was work that mattered, that is the things I transformed-- I hardly thought about how they affected me.
After a few years of labouring, of doing the same stiff work, I have come to the conslusion that it isn't alone the things we break or transform in the domain of work that matter. One thing is very essential: how our work affects us, how it forms and shapes us from within.
We are continually transformed by what we do. Sometimes, we hardly notice the transformations taking place within us, the way we feel, our vision on life, on ourselves and others. There is that world that work opens up within us. We need a certain awareness to rejoice in its growth....
Today, it is no longer work that matters to me. But how it enlarges the world within me....
and I laughe without cause
why did you think there must be cause
for loose laughter
than this response to the throb of life within?
and I laugh aloud like Budha
transported by the very mystic breath
of life; great men feed on the humour
that breaths within things before them...
like meeting a childhood friend after a thousand wanderings
and detours; like finding just a penny
tucked to some corner of an unused troussers
or farting alone in one's room--
when I look around, I feel like laughing
everything is fun; and when I am weary
and feel like I can't dare any longer,
My solemn laughter crowns the gloom of all my effort.
Death. The thought f imminent annihiliation, the thought that all things can finally come to nothingness, breathless, numb and void, without life. We hardly think about death, and our defense mechanism is so structured in a way that we always put this thought of; death will come, we know it, but let us not think about it now. Life is so good to be saddened with thoughts of annihilation. No, death will strike, but not now, maybe not next year, yes, it will come in some far off future.
There is an accident, the neighbour's child is dead. A hundred people are dead in a plain crash. A ship has drown and many people have lost their lives in the demise... we listen to the news, but it doesn't touch us enough. We do not want to think much about it. Well, death comes easily to others, our mind refuses to admit that our turn is coming soon, maybe today.
I remember Socrates' teaching that philosophy is learning how to die. For him, life was a school where we learn to die. Yes, through a slow process of effacement and detachment.
Today, I have to admit this fact that I will die soon. I do not need to fight with this idea... I have to triumph over it. It must not make me sad, but help me see each day as a present, look to the past with gratitude and move towards the future with hope. I should not put myself in the center of things, and act as though I was indispensable: I will leave those things someday, and someone else will take over....
The only idea that stirs my mind is not having done enough. But I trust that life is fair, I do not need to accomplish all my dreams, some dreams make me move on; some are nourisment, others are the stuff with which I build my personality but constantly forging them and making them come true. I would like to write four books in a year, I have sketched them out... but if I can't, I should not regret as though life were reduced to the mere though of accomplishing things. Its logic sometimes escapes and eludes our comprehension-- but we must not despair, it has its fulfilment, because it opens up as a gift into which we are absorbed. We fail by trying to absorb it...
As I write that line above, the idea of being born upside-down of Chesterton hits me once again and I think of my being Christian. I think being a christian has given me reason over the absurd, death is no longer an annihiliation. It becomes life for it absorbs us into its plenitude. The more I don't try to control it, the more I rejoice in it. It is faith that should guide me and illuminate my reason, it is not the other way out, ie. reason illuminating faith.
I do not know--
you may not know;
the unknown gazes at us
its stare, a horrid spell.
a step beyond darkness,
would you dare it with me?
when the lights are out
and fortune's star gleams no more
in the vault?
what does one need
to see gem that lies in what eye doesn't see?
a heart of Vikings!
Spirituality of the poet? How does a poet live his vocation as celebration of life?
There are two things that I consider important:
1) A poet is part of the cosmos within which he lives his existence. He participates in its pains and joys, he recollects its cry of decay and ultimate death, he captures its thrills and pangs of birth. He is a keen observer who measures the depth of every reality with the pulse of his heart...
2) A good poet is a visionary: by this, I do not mean a charlatan, a word so often spoiled with connotations. By visionary, I mean clear perception, the capacity to look beyond what merely flits before our gaze....
This, speaking subjectively, had been my singular joy of life. To discover things by naming them. In this lies the beauty of the written word, for it becomes life.
I continue writing the "Night without a Star", been thinking about the title, it carries something of that sombre look at life and events, but I ultimately intend to make it a story of hope, of the light that is concealed by the shadow of the night. a lot of things happen in the night, but the night definitely becomes the intsrument through which the day receives its value and significance...
This is one of the books, or the very first book written in the first person singular (aprt from the poems of course), I intend to maintain its pulse in the present tense- I feel the hope that I will push with it to the end, even if I have decided to kill the dazzling character of Fleur de Lys...
