People who are fire
Garvey, John
(2) Harry S Truman sent a secret army from Burma into China, involved the United States in the Greek civil war, supported the French in Indochina, and sent hundreds of thousands of U.S. soldiers...
...leaves enough rmssiles and warheads in place to reduce the world's cities to something resembling downtown Berlin in May, 1945...
...It could be that a lively understanding of this is not at all peripheral, but essential to religious understanding...
...His The Way to Christ is part of Paulist's series, and it is good to see it there: Boehme's influence extended to William Blake and John Milton, among other people...
...Julian of Norwich's Showings is better known to most readers as Revelations of Divine Love...
...It's natural that the Republicans should be organizing to run against Carter, that's the nature of the system...
...The word asks for it, carrying as it does all' those whiffs of mysterious knowledge and secret understanding...
...Carter has been a good president, and he even seems to be a good man...
...What has Carter done to deserve rejection and defeat...
...What has Kennedy done to justify a giddy Democratic rush to embrace him...
...Reading the newspapers was one long agony from February, 1965 until August, 1974...
...SALT II, as we all know, xt...
...A quiet front page, it seems to me, is a sign of public health and a call for rejoicing...
...If a man is drowning in a river he makes all kinds of motions to try.to save himself...
...Look up then lightly and say to thy Lord, 'That that I am, Lord, I offer unto Thee, for Thou it art.' And think nakedly, plainly, and boisterously, that thou art as thou art...
...in the opinion of his critics, the "fight kind" of religion should be private --"like button collecting," as Lenin used to say...
...After his Harvard address Alexander Solzhenitsyn was accused of mysticism for pointing out the public effect of living in a spiritual void...
...The word "mysticism" has a pejorative meaning lately...
...JOHN GARVEY Commonweal: 618...
...It is easy tosee why a bishop would be upset when Meister Eckhart referred to "the godhead which is higher than GOd...
...It does nothing to make war less likely, unles~ the negotiation of successive treaties, with a promise of further agreements to come, makes war less likely...
...At the close of the Tractatus Wittgenstein says that the mystical is not to be found in what the world is, but that it is--an echo of The Cloud of Unknowing, whose anonymous author spoke of finding "a blind feeling of thine own being...
...The Hasidic tradition is full of stories...
...and Julian's visions were not simply her private fancies, but God's way of making points which matter now to how we live...
...The fight seems to consider him as the reincarnation of Joseph Chamberlain, giving away the Panama Canal and surrendering to the Russians...
...Is it something all religions have in common, or are some more prone to it than others, the way certain families exhibit a tendency toward male pattern baldness...
...Here is her vision of the whole of creation: "He showed me something small, no bigger than a hazelnut, lying in the palm of my hand, and I perceived that it was as round as any ball...
...Paul writes of words "so secret that human lips may not repeat them...
...One interesting thing about all these books, separated as they are by centuries and traditions, is that they involve a level of discourse which our culture does not take seriously enough...
...Instead, they turn for help to the array of therapie s which promise transformation, or, more seriously, they turn to Easternmystical traditions...
...it is rather the burning desire of your heart that rises like smoke toward heaven...
...The center appears to be plain bored, and I am confused...
...Lyndon Johnson sent troops to Vietnam and the Dominican Republic...
...Some things can't be stated, but can only be indicated or drawn forth in signs and symbols...
...I was amazed that it could last, for I thought that it was so little that it could suddenly fall into nothing...
...If Carter was too bold and hopeful of disarmament when he entered the White House, he has been sober and steadfast in its pursuit ever since...
...soldiers to Korea...
...The Life of Moses is an illustration of Gregory's belief that "he who desires to behold God sees the object of his longing in always following him...
...the experience is in a sense totally beside the point, apparently, and there is an insistence that 9 the self which seems to be lost comes into its own, and is only truly itself, in this encounter...
...I like the way these selections, on facing pages, move from something direct tO something which might at first seem less concrete...
...The price of each volume is $9.95 in cloth, $6.95 in paper...
...But mystics have also pointed out the danger of seeking experience...
...Dwight D. Eisenhower sent the Marines into Lebanon, approved four major attempts to topple foreign governments with the CIA, and elected to replace the French in Indochina...
...Still, it is a haunting presence, since it forms an undeniable part of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism...
...Many of the architects of these old adventures, using all the old arguments, strongly urged Jimmy Carter to intervene in Ethiopia, Iran and Nicaragua, but he would not do it...
...And I was answered in my understanding: It lasts and always will, because God loves it, and thus everything has being through the love of God...
...The left describes him as a creature of the moneyed interests and a secret enemy of the poor...
...I looked at it and thought: What can this be...
...And I was given this general answer: It is everything which is made...
...If your prayer consists only of words and letters, and does not contain your heart's desire--how can it rise up to God...
...In Heaven in Ordinarie (Templegate, $14.95) Noel Dermot O'Donoghue refers to "the way of the contemplative transformaffon of doctrine, the way into those depths of which dogma is but the surface...
...This is not a time for others to laugh...
...His enemies--and on this point Kennedy is not one of them-- see this as a weakness, and if they succeed in defeating him the next agreement--if there is a next--will be a great deal more difficult to negotiate, sign and ratify...
...Maybe he's just' lucky...
...This desire for safety isn't enough for many people, who recognize obscurely that a truly human life requires radical transformation...
...Catherine of Genoa described it as "the union of He who Is with she who is not...
...Richard Nixon invaded Cambodia...
...It is not the words themselves that ascend...
...In the West, the churches have viewed mystics with suspicion...
...Prayer is never repeated: the quality of each day's prayer is unlike that of any other...
...Law's influence was, like Boehme's, important...
...Paulist Press deserves a great deal of credit for doing something about this...
...Like a satisfactory definition of poetry, a satisfactory definition of mysticism is probably impossible...
...The editors (Arthur Green and Barry W. Holtz) have selected" provocative and exciting quotations f-rbm a number of Hasidic masters, and th.eir arrangement is a helpful one...
...Your Wordls Fire tells us, "Do not think that the words of prayer, as you say them, go up to God...
...A definition of "mysticism" is difficult...
...John F. Kennedy authorized a secret invasion of Cuba and committed the United States to the military rescue of South Vietnam...
...The people his spiritual direction and writing touched include John and Charles Wesley, and Samuel Johnson...
...No other leader who has them has ever suggested such a thing...
...His worst enemy is a kind of public ennui...
...They attack Carter as if he were as dangerous as his predecessors, but better disguised...
...Your Word Is Fire closes with a dark and deliberately unexplained parable...
...This edition offers two authoritative texts, one long and one short, of a classic which is fascinating for many reasons, not the least of them Julian's attention to "God, our Mother...
...I have seen six volumes of Paulist's Classics of Western Spirituality series, and all are worth having...
...The over- and under-tones of mystery rub us the wrong way...
...This is the inner meaning of the Mishnah's words: 'He whose prayer is rigid prays without supplication.' This can be seen even in the thoughts which distract us from true prayer;, they too are different every day...
...We like our dogmas safe and sure, and the people who remind us that they are fire make us uncomfortable...
...The mystics are not undogmatic, but they know that dogma is about something which is more than dogma...
...A religion which is merely ethical and dogmatic can't begin to transform us or work at the depths of the heart...
...This may sound like an obvious ide~,, but it's not...
...The emphasis in The Life of Moses is upon God's limitlessness, and the impossibility of reaching a limit of perfection as we grow toward God...
...He referred to "Sophia" (in his writing this was not only the Wisdom of GOd, but the revelation of "God in his depth") in feminine terms...
...Human perfection is not a goal, but a process in which we participate...
...Gregory of Nyssa's Life of Moses is a good example of the rich Eastern Christian approach to scripture, where symbols are seen lurking behind every tree and bush, an approach which can appear unnecessarily burdened with allegory, until it suddenly bursts into a point so overwhelmingly effective that you wonder whether you haven't been missing something all along...
...You can say what you like about the military initiatives of Carter's predecessors, but he is the first American president since Herbert Hoover who has not ordered American soldiers to kill or be killed in faraway places...
...It is common to f'md it defined as "an experience of one-ness with God," something which involves a radical loss of self...
...The wildness of 9 November 1979:617the language unsettles people used to precisely formulated doctrines...
...SALT II is an imperfect step, but it's better than standing still, and its opponents seem to be advocating an about-face march fight back into the heart of the Cold War...
...RECOVERING MYSTICISM T HERE HAS been a debate for years over the place of mysticism in religion--is it central, or an aberration...
...THOMAS POWERS Of several minds: John Garvey PEOPLE WHO ARE FIRE...
...3) Carter negotiated and signed the second Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty and has even advocated ridding the world of nuclear weapons...
...But why does his own party seem so ready to abandon him...
...In that case, go with a winner...
...The contemplation of his face is the unending journey accomplished by following directly behind the Word...
...it cannot be "arrived at" (any more than we can find limits to the life of God), but consists in a movement forward...
...and of course they have to do with one another: "Do not laugh at someone who moves his body, even violently, du/ing prayer...
...Several observers have complained-legitimately, I think--that the abandonment of church and synagogue has come about, at least in part, because of Christian and Jewish inattention to the Western mystical tradition...
...Jacob Boehme, the Lutheran mystic, also wrote of the female aspect of divinity...
...Gerald Ford sent the Marines in to recapture the crew of the May aguez and secretly tried to involve the United States in a civil war in Angola...
...The "story element" in many of these books works on the assumption that symbols indicate real things: what happened to Moses can be spoken of in a way whichhas directly to do with what happens to us...
...They don't look to the churches or synagogues for guidance these days...
...Nahman of Bratslav-The Tales presents the stories which contain the teaching of Rabbi Nahman, an early Hasidic master of prayer, and a modem Jewish mystic is represented inAbraham Isaac Kook: The Lights of Penitence, Lights of Holiness, The Moral Principles, Essays, Letters, and Poems...
...There can't be many people who really miss Johnson and Nixon, but quite a few, it seems, find it hard to abandon the political tone appropriate to struggle, crisis and confrontation...
...His work was a major influence on the Anglican mystic William Law, represented in the series by A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life, and The Spirit of Love...
...I can't think of a good answer to either question, and I suspect that when the time comes to vote, the public won't either...
...Not part of the series, but also a Paulist Press book, Your Wordls Fire ($1.95) is a tightly edited introduction, frankly devotional, to the Hasidic tradition of contemplative prayer...
Vol. 106 • November 1979 • No. 20
