God Church World Michael Bolerjack

The Story of a Soul In her best-selling auto-biography, St. Therese of Liseux has some peculiarities of style. She uses frequent ellipses, exclamation points, capitalization, in ways that a professional writer let alone a professional theologian and Doctor of the Church most often does not. I think there must be some reason for it. One might compare her style with another book of that period, Nietzsche’s Anti-Christ. In that work he is shrill, hysterical, and I have read critics who reconcile this logically, philosophically. If it can be done for him, I think Therese deserves similar consideration. This is not the place to analyze these marks of her style, but to generally assert that they are amateurish, girlish, enthusiastic, naïve, or at least they seem to be so on the face of it. At the same time I must say this is not a bad thing, not a faux pas on her part, but something essential to who she is and what her message is. T.S. Eliot said that when a new writer is included in the canon of literature, the entire canon undergoes an adjustment. The same can be said of the relationship between this new, unique Doctor of the Church and the body to which John Paul II promoted her for the consideration of the faithful. We need not be skeptical about his decision. Nor needs we be too sentimental, the thing I think Rahner abhorred about devotion to the Little Flower. What occurred in the life of the Church when Therese was included among the ranks of her most prominent theologians has yet to be realized. However, I might say that these earmarks of her writing style indicate something new that as Rahner said will need much explication. The inclusion of Therese must change the shape of theology in catholic circles, making it in a word “littler,” more feminine, child-like. I think it may help in what I have said is the thing that the Catholic Church needs the most, and that is its de-capitalization. I think we need to look at her, and at the faith of the virgin martyrs, as unexampled. There are plenty of theologians, and they come and go, and publish their needless tomes, soon forgotten, but Therese and the other Teresas and the virgin martyrs remain, and remain at the heart of the Church, despite its masculine hierarchy. I think Therese will be heard in time. Her message will get through. It is the message of Mother Teresa as well. It is simply gospel. We do not need historical methods in our theology, but a practical theology, that is, one that can be practiced by everyone. Therese, in theory, is that key to the future theology of the “little c” catholic church. The Portable Nietzsche In a postscript to a late margin, Nietzsche writes of his Ariadne, Cosima Wagner, that “from time to time there is magic.” Now, this magic took the form of insanity. In our day it is an irrationality,

an otherness lodged at the heart of being that being or the same cannot assimilate and is its pain, its disease. Many wrote of this from the 1960s on, Levinas and Derrida, as well as Paz and Machado. All over the world in these late days of arrival the otherness of the whole became apparent. What was excluded demanded to not be ignored. We do not truly know what this other is. We do not know whether it is good or evil. Or Autrement. It is transcendent and yet immanent, at work or play in the very numbers and letters that we use or that use us. I think we have had an illusion of being control, what we call consciousness, and that this is for good or ill passing away. I think a new mind is being born. Science sees many changes in the human brain the last 100 years that we do not know the goal of. More is happening than we know. We may perhaps be being prepared for the apocalypse, which may not be so much the catastrophe as the unveiling of what has hitherto remained hidden. Otherness must have something about it of the divine, the super-natural, what people call magical, because it exceeds the human notion of holiness and the sacred. God is greater than any partial explanation, any religion, and if he creates both good and evil, as the prophets say, and is beyond all of the polar oppositions by which we perceive what we call reality, then God is just incomprehensible. Perhaps everything that is in-comprehensible somehow is an attribute of the Divine. “From time to time there is magic.” As Celan said, the light compels, light was salvation, you be like you, ever. God ever is and is our compulsion, our pressing, our need. Truly magic is not the attempt of men to manipulate the gods, but something other that is like a force flowing through us, ordering and disordering the time, and our minds. Imagination is what the poets called it, the genius that apprehends more than cool reason comprehends. We need not worry about the rejection of morality and faith by Nietzsche, or his de-struction of man’s reason in favor of the body, but read him as symptom, not cause, of the transformation now underway. I believe that God wants us to let go of all that we cling to of humanity’s tradition and precept and hold him in pure faith, which is irrational, a pure will that relies not on the concept, but on trust in the mercy of God, which flies in the face of reason. To trust in his mercy despite the catastrophe unfolding all around us. To believe despite ourselves. I may reach the point where all I have to hold onto is the bare name of Jesus, all my thoughts stripped away, unable to believe that said by Popes who may be anti-Christ, to know that every person has let me down, that the real world is but illusion, that I cannot even depend on me, but only on God, whom I do not know but love and trust in the mystery of mercy. I believe God is at work in the world and in me, and in these books I have written. If they seem magical, stand back and realize that all things and ideas are forms of the divine, modifications of the divine substance, which is all that there is. Everything else is mere opinion and seeming. From time to time there is magic. Some call it grace or miracle or the sacrament, but I do not know if our categories suffice to comprehend an infinite and eternal truth greater than we. I stand in the middle of things, in the middle of the epic, in the middle of the age, for perhaps we are not late, and perhaps the arrival is not a late tale, after all, but only the advent,

that all has been but prologue, and that in the end is our real beginning. There is magic, and what that is I do not know. We suspend our disbelief in times of poetic utterance to let art be. We stand back and let it all be, and cease interpretation and the negotiations of finance and textuality in order to be grasped by the truth, which we trust that, if it is truth, alone can grasp us and will surely not fail there to. Finnegans Wake The end of this book, which really does not end, implies something that is there and not there at the same, a kind of prayer. I have shown the supplicatory aspect of the Yes at the end of Ulysses and now would like to de-monstrate the conclusion of the Wake as the perfection of this prayer. The last lines of the book can be read so many ways. Usually one says the final “the” is referring to the opening riverrun, to circle things back. I think it does this and something else as well. Joyce proclaims that the keys to are given. He has said Finn, again. He has said Till thous-endsthee. Now I think that this ends thee. The “the” of the end is to be said not as slack “the,” definite but open, but precisely THEE. The Keys to. Given! Given to whom, but to THEE. Not a way a lone a last a loved a long a…but the, because you are it, I AM IT, we are it, as the auditors of Prospero in the epilogue of Shakespeare’s final act, his prayer for forgiveness. Given? Key? It is the forgiveness of THEE. to. then. endsthee. Lps {please} long the […] long thee, he longs but for THEE, to then ends, THEE. Thou, ends, thee. It ends with us, we are the one for whom and in whom the work arrives and Joyce affirms not one definitely but all infinitely. It is a way of saying YOU and YES at once: the THEE. THEE I said THEE I Will THEE, then you and I are in truth the arrival of the text, that the secret is that it is we who hold the keys, keys of Peter, keys of the see, to forgive, to forgive all good thieves, whom writers to write must be, saying, But softly, thee, remember me, till thou ends thee, that we never ending be, as love does not end, for thee given, never ending, thou art the key, the text is thee (se). The text is these, thee’s, the signature effect is here comes everybody, and all along HCE was THEE, was all of us, it was written to you and you and you and yes to thee.

Glas Derrida’s book is all about theft, the thief Genet, the journal of the thief, stealing from both him and Hegel, because if language is the house of being, and if a language brings along with it a whole of metaphysics and onto-theology, then the theft of texts and words requires redemption, for it is our very being, something essential, that has been stolen. My stop Glas, if it be, was a double redemption, of the last words of the two works of Joyce, the YES from Ulysses, which Derrida appropriated, and the final supplication of THEE from Finnegans Wake. It may seem blasphemous to say that Yes I have redeemed Thee, to You and you, but not your souls, only two prayers of James Joyce, the endings, the thresholds, where everything is grace, two points, yes, thee, on which everything else depends, for given, given time, counter-fitted texts, thefts, Glas of glory, gloss of glossalalia, Embabbled language, it is the life of our tongue, O Father, that I have redeemed, and the word, perhaps The Word, which had been stolen, and with it religion. Let us now celebrate not mystery but yes Lord, Thee, as we say “yes thee.” Your fiat Lord, in Genesis and the fiat of Mary, too, must always be seconded by our own, and a yes on our part must follow Your yes, as that of Mary did. If we do not say yes to Thee Lord, it does not matter what else we say. Sermon on the Mount Jesus said, Therefore be perfect, as your heavenly father is perfect. For he causes the rain to fall and the sun to shine on both the just and the unjust. How can we be perfect? To make the one affirmation that He commands. To love all, every one, no matter what they have done or who they are. And how do we translate that into the vocation of the writer? That would be to compose a work that encompasses all of the oppositions, and make them one, that is, return the many to their origin in God. For God is not complex, he is simple, and if contradiction is the truth, it must not be as complicated as Derrida said, but rather simple, as the title of my work is simple and yet says two opposite things at the same time. The Bible always says opposite things at the same time, for all these contradictions are contained in the one book, and are therefore at once. Both faith and works save. Be perfect, and though we are sinners, and must admit this, yet we must not sin again, ever. How? By grace, by mercy, not by our own will and effort, yet seek, yet ask, and ye will arrive, ye will find the end of all your asking and searching and that in a more marvelous way than supposed. Since God is beyond all He must include all, even what we think is to be excluded, and Jesus did not come for the righteous, in the Church, but for the lost ones, the sinners, the stray,

whom he especially loves, which is a contradiction, since one thinks He would especially love the ones who do His will perfectly, but there is more joy in Heaven over one who returns, than over the 99 who never left. God bless you Prodigals, you Magdalenes, you saints to be. The work I have written, written by a sinner, by one on the margins of the Church, yet somehow in heart at one with God, is a work that in a way that is literally incomprehensible expresses in writing what it means to fulfill the injunction to be perfect. That is to say, it is more mystical than moral. The splendor of truth is the moral beauty I found along the way, but the truth of splendor is the mystical God who perfected the work. Derrida said that writing must literally mean nothing. No. Far rather, nothing must be literally writing, but in the letters and numbers of our writing abides a living presence of God that is the spiritual nexus of our just combinations, a being both moral and mystical that gives meaning to bare writing, so that all that is written is implicated in Scripture and all we write are explications of the text of the Word of God. Everything has been commentary on his Book. If we seem belated, it is because we can never be first, but are in a state of ever secondary literatures, tried in faith and by our works. Be perfect and be perfected. One cannot be otherwise, one cannot but be. Kabbalah and Criticism The “theory” of the present work, has many aspects, of which some of the more salient are the idea of arrival, and the synthesis of dialectic and de-construction, or the reform and renewal of Catholicism based on a revived dialectical logic. But I want to say at least once in a way that I nowhere else explain, that the work, late in the writing and editing of it, went through a penultimate stage in which it was based on the abstruse relations of the book of fabled “magic,” The Kabbalah, which I read in several versions, but which late in the composition and editing of the work came to me with peculiar efficiency through Harold Bloom’s little Kabbalah and Criticism. In his work, I quickly perceived the shape of my own, which over the next few days, with minor adjustments, achieved a form that was crucial to the ultimate redaction. In that previous shape, there was a larger “icon” of ten volumes and a shorter “icon” of ten chapters. Ultrastructure or Meta-signification of the numbers three, four, seven, twelve, was combined with the Pythagorean 1, 2, 3, 4, and the similar scheme of The Kabbalah, more detailed than that of the Greek. I believe it is God’s mercy that the world’s mysteries can be seen to converge and “arrive” in the different religions and philosophies viewed through the shapes hidden in this text.

The Anxiety of Influence It would be remiss of me to not acknowledge as well my indebtedness to Harold Bloom and his theory about the relationship between writers and their precursors. My “agon” was with Jacques Derrida, who can be denied or ignored, like the gospel of Christ, but must be taken seriously and either affirmed or transformed, for it is no longer possible to simply reject deconstructive logic, as it has taken hold in all areas of life, even in the post-modern Church, with mega-congregations, media-popes, and what seems to be an un-comfortable level of corruption throughout the religious world. I struggled with Derrida in the 1980s just to grasp what the hell was going on, which I picked up in the details of the text’s explications, but not in the moral implications. I had not yet converted to Christ. Samuel Southwell, a great teacher of mine, who also converted about the time I did, told me we were both driven into the catholic Church from different directions by Derrida. I thought by about 1996 I had pretty much worked-through deconstruction, when I became aware of the turn to religion that had occurred in that philosophy and then I had to deal with that, too. But it was a fortunate thing for both me and the work, because I had not yet understood at the level I should have about the logic of Derrida. I got his attack on purity, but I had not yet seen the play of impossibility, which I have outlined in the preceding pages. My almost final word on the French philosopher is found in the fourth part of the treatise on logic, The Yes. There I redeem the affirmation as such from the hands of the deconstructionist and return it to Joyce, taking the yes from Derrida’s late appropriation, which he always said as “yes, yes,” and showing the aspect of the final word of Ulysses which is unexampled, and in so doing showed the fallacy of taking examples and samples, of replication, as opposed to the supplication, thereby establishing again the possibility as such, which Derrida had made impossible. In principle, I have overcome Derrida and deconstruction, and I did this by accepting and rejecting parts of the project of postmodernism, and placing what I took in a new order. As Bloom said of Plotinus, everything is always hierarchical. As he also said, the point of departure of the Kabbalah de-fates the trace. Shakespeare: Invention of the Human The book that I used most often in graduate school, other than the Bible itself, was Bloom’s late best-seller on the Bard. My teacher Clinton Brand said that he probably makes too much of the basic distinction between Falstaff and Hamlet. However, I have found it instructive. I was talking

with my wife and her parents this summer. My in-laws had come from Mexico for a day or two. My father-in-law has been sick this year and was expecting a dangerous surgery, which fortunately for now has been postponed. On the Sunday morning they returned home and I saw him for what may be the final time, I told Sabino and his wife Maria and their daughter Marinela, my wife, my hypothesis based on Bloom’s theory. I am like Hamlet and Sabino is like Falstaff. I think too much, make soliloquies, which I think are prayers but which any good atheist would say are delusions, and feel called to set right a time out of joint. Sabino, on the other hand, likes his drink, laughs like Mozart, plays dominos with his friends, and has fathered four children and eight grandchildren while I have produced only my books. When I pointed out the contrast, he laughed loudly. His wife and daughter did not understand, because of their different culture, but he got it immediately. I think each of us, my father-in-law and I, are only parts, we are not whole men. We are not great, and no one is good but God alone. But we are men, of different natures and ambitions, different projects as one might say, but still men, and this is what we are, what we will be we do not know. Somehow, by way of Bloom’s interpretation of Shakespeare, I understood myself and my father-in-law. By recognizing him, I saw me. Hamlet too could be funny, as Falstaff was, but it was a mad game, though with method in mind, and Hamlet goes through his trans-formation and fulfills his mission. In that respect, I think I have arrived. I am not a saint, but for now I am a man closer to the man I have prayed that God would have me to be. An Icon for the Church on the Mercy of God That deconstruction depends on asserting multiple conflicting interpretations of a text is well-known. The deconstruction can only proceed by application of the logic of Aristotle, the law of non-contradiction. However, in my work I have moved to a point removed from that tradition, and as early as 1995 asserted the irrationality of the contradiction as true. The whole truth must be contradictory to be the truth. As this applies to my work itself can be seen at a natural starting-point, the title of this note. In it is the strange true exemplification of the theory. The explicit reading has to do with religion, icons, mercy, Church, God. But the hidden meaning is another thing altogether, that is, the word MAGIC appears when the anagram in the title is seen. Implicit, hidden in the title and in the work as a whole, It may be that there was something itself “magical” about this anagram, for I did not intentionally place it there, but once having seen it, decided not to revise it, because it makes a weird kind of sense, based on my theory of the truth of contradiction. And the plan of the work itself had a “magical” aspect as to its hidden structure based on the Kabbalah, an aspect I denounce openly in different points in the work, as in my

papers on alchemy and Greek tragedy, in polemic with university professors who openly proclaimed magical beliefs. And in the postmodern milieu there is much of this, as in the magic realism of Borges and others. But I must be at peace with myself and with my work, trusting that God knew what he was doing when he had me contradict myself. At least it proves the logical theory of the work. Also it may say something about the Real, that reality is more than one partial account can render, which is why there are four gospels, two accounts of creation in Genesis, and such things in the Bible. If Scripture itself does this, perhaps this aspect of what I call Ultrastructure is at work everywhere. We can view it as the struggle between good and evil going on at even the level of the alphabet, or effract the merely moral and see a comprehensive mysticism of the letter and the number that is always and everywhere at work. This does not absolve anyone of moral obligations, but allows art to be what it is. The Visionary Company Bloom’s early work on the English Romantic poets contains an insight into Samuel Taylor Coleridge and creative genius. Bloom says that STC became scared of his own genius and backed-off after only a few years with the muse. It puts me in mind of just what “genius” is and what my own consists of. It was once thought to be spiritual, then something in the unconscious mind. No one knows but God. Blake said the poetic genius was the real man, Jesus Christ, the eternal imagination. That suits me fine. I like to think that after all my hours of prayer that indeed Christ is the source of the work in me and on the pages. I believe as they say that God is in control, as Einstein thought, as Newton did as well. I do not believe the truth is to be found in uncertainty, but that the contradictions of physics indicate not a lack of the deity but an incapacity of our own minds to see things as God does, and as he wishes us to do. Or so I think. If I am one of the so-called visionary company, my work may be in a lineage including Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s autobiographies, though I think, despite my lesser powers as a poet and critic, that my “genius,” whatever that may be, both attempted and achieved more, and being a theological one, is more akin to the work of St. Thomas Aquinas, who made the synthesis of his age. Perhaps one day my Icon will be read as being a synthesis of what could not be synthesized, and point a direction for catholic thinkers of the future to go toward. Memoirs of the Blind It is in this art book of the 1990s that Derrida makes his famous confession or act of faith, a formula

I have repeated many times in the work, prominently in the essay written at the time of the funeral of John Paul II. Derrida said, “I do not know. One must believe.” Thinking about this in terms of the logic outlined in my book, which emphasizes the deconstructive necessity of the impossibility of possibility, which I counter with freedom of choice and the act of faith, I see that Derrida in this little phrase is once again making a simulation, on the one hand, and on the other hand, once again eliminating freedom, the freedom necessary to make a real act of faith. He says, “One must believe.” Not only is this imperious, but it is not true, because if one must, then it is not really faith, because faith must be based on a free act, not one compelled by Derrida’s logic. He presents skeptic ignorance as the basis for denying freedom and compelling faith. But Vatican II says that persons cannot be forced against their consciences, especially in religious matters. Derrida’s “act of faith” sounds more like the auto-de-fe of the Inquisition, the compelled act of faith, that is made with a blinding necessity. In fact, the logic of deconstruction is precisely that, blinding. But not from an excess of light. Rather the obscure leading to the more obscure. It is not necessary to believe. That is part of the great value of it. It requires decision, the free act, which Derrida tried to make void. Being and Believing My first work, which was met with silence, boredom and the charge that is was merely “incomprehensible gibberish,” was a spur to my work you now hold. Much of it was taken apart and rewritten for the present texts of The Thirty Years War, while earlier versions of Being and Believing join later revisions and a couple of chapters of the work itself in the volumes of this I hope happy juxtaposition that claims to be more than collage, a mosaic law of the Tessera that orders the fragments into a true synthesis. As hidden Heraclitus said, the most beautiful thing is a pile of junk on the ground, just as it is. In his third encyclical, Benedict XVI proved himself to lack understanding in his interpretation of this text. What the artist has is that pile from which he creates the new thing. What Benedict has is a rigid system of old magisterial documents that will admit no real change, a machine that perpetuates only itself. Yet God will break into the world how He will, even including the destruction of that system which denies the efficacy of God’s Spirit to blow where He will. The Pope would limit God, as the seminarian told me: God’s hands are tied. The priests I think really believe this. But I do not. Freedom is the whole thing, in a way, which is the significance of my country despite its flaws, and is the significance of Vatican II, that would free us for God, to serve Christ rather than the Roman order. I was almost right. Being is Believing, faith is what makes us real. Faith must be free to be real.

Light-Compulsion In the late poem “You Be Like You,” Paul Celan uses a reference to the ever, which I think across his text is very different from the mere theology of eternity. This ever holds special place as distinct from the eternal, and involves not transcendent heaven but immanent endurance. At the end of the poem, having roused Jerusalem to stand, let me not forget you, my mother, he speaks a bit of Hebrew: Kumi Ori. O, behold the beloved in her beauty. Come my beloved my beautiful one, the glory of the Lord is the feminine, the beauty of woman, Sheckinah. You be like you, ever, kumi ori. My-beauty-is-not-my-own, Songs sing of her, too, invoking the side of God that is not on the left, the wrath, mere-philosophy, which is legal and Roman, not God’s mercy, but a beauty of the line and shape and form of the poetic image of the woman who was with God from the beginning, is Wisdom herself, and delights in playing with us and helps us in our creations. Selah. The compulsion of light is its directness, the masculine straightness which the gravity of the mass of woman bends as space, alone deflecting the violence of the straight light for the soft curving truth of what alone can, coming from God and being His wisdom, reform the straight, rigid, hard Roman correctness and orthodoxy by a curvature: the secret is neither a straight line nor labyrinthine breaking of amazement, but an unfolding of the wave, the suppleness of the supplication, that does not supply or supplement what is lacking, but like light comes both particularly and at the same time waving. Light is thus irreducibly. Like ever. Zohar The Ein Sof or the one beyond, from which all grow or descend, emanate, the books or the sefirot, the one that is without end, which is both completely full and empty, both being and nothing, can be seen in the title of An Icon for the Church on the Mercy of God. For ever the two senses will contradict each other, the true religion and heretical magic. Derrida would say that I have deconstructed myself, but I think that the title of the first text has apprehended the deconstruction, appropriated it, turned it, and rather than paralyzing meaning given the fullness of meaning, the mindfulness, the memory in words, the theory and practice of literature, the totality which includes the infinite by an ever-limitation. Armageddon is moral beauty.

That dice thrown

will never annul chance and that all thought utters dice thrown, and that Derrida depended on these poeticisms, and that I once held that the symbol divides itself in two, and the possibility of thought is the thought of possibility, as the culmination of my time in deconstruction, of what do I say of these things now? It may be that the poet meant to say that possibility is irreducible, that action is an illusion against the backdrop of perpetual and unchanging about-to-be, that the step though taken, is really annulled by the fact that chance itself cannot not be. This principle of supreme indeterminacy, which entered most people’s minds through the science of physics, but was first stated by a poet, seems to say the last word is that there is no last word, that the possibility is that it, possibility itself, makes reality in act the very figure of the impossible. That somehow the reserve of the possible not only annuls the dice throw that would annul it, but in fact annuls itself, that possibility is made The Impossible. That was Derrida’s one chance. From this hunch he wove a fantastic work of seeming, a phantasm of ligatures, cuts, sutures, ligaments, agglutinations, analisms, and magical cruelties that post-post, retro-active, in principle, annuls itself at the same time, du meme coup, in the same blow, as a throw of the dice, that it annuls everything else, as if to say, marriage is always already annulled even

before it is ever consummated, before it can be. Marriage cannot be, love cannot be, there can be no end, nor any beginning, we are vastly lost in the indeterminate middle of a wasteland. On the other hand, that the symbol divides itself in two, that was true, but that the two parts fit together, marriage in other words, is in fact predetermined, not indeterminate, and that we will have identity is the principle, not the cause of difference or the force of deferral and delay. That if we be but broken, we can be put back together was the promise I made myself from the outset, and that possibility and all its problems was the key was a token to remind me of the way, for with possibility we may have the answer, but without it we have nothing. That from the beginning I saw the project of my career in writing as a path leading from nothing to everything, the great reversal, was exactly set against deconstruction, though I knew it not at the time. That in fact the end was reached by the logic of the impossible, that I have recuperated my true identity, that the logic of deconstruction has been decided in favor of a Christian love, which unites and distinguishes, as in marriage, that meaning will yet be, that the yes I say to Thee has more meaning than ever, is not to say this real affirmation is ever indeterminate or over determined, but that God is implicit in every truth, and that all we say and do refers to Him. To arrive at the apocalyptic by the reverential love of revelation is to say “yes” to the Lord. His ways are not our ways. We accept His judgment.

God- Church- World is the system of the Anti-Christ, which is a thing that may surprise some, especially those who have read the cover of the books and turned to this last page to steal my ending without having made the journey I made to get here. The Church in the Modern World, a key document of the Second Vatican Council, stated the position by just boldly placing Catholicism in and not juxtaposed to or against modernity. If this was an error, I do not know, but that we see in recent events the worldly aspects of the church are beyond doubt. Yet, she may be holy, and without a doubt God is, and the world too is not without its goodness, bestowed by God, both natural and human. So why do I make this extraordinary claim concerning evil and the things most of us know and love? I think like the poets said, particularly Blake: The deception is great. And many there are who are deceived, and wittingly or not go along with the corruption of not only morals but faith and the intellect, all of our culture. We must be radical in our love of Christ, and fight for Him, as He fights for each of us. If you have read all my pages you know the story, but the solution is not really in my hands or yours however, but in God’s. God so loved the world, and loved the church, and loves us, I believe, that we should not give up on them and

our-selves, despite the enemy within the perimeter. In a way I have called in an air strike on our own position, hoping that God will by His own means cut out the evil wherever it may be, and especially in my heart, and in yours and yours. That the apocalypse was written long ago, and in a sense has already occurred, is reassuring. That God is in control, that is part of our faith. Trust in His mercy, and hope for the best. Do not lightly leave off good things, spiritual things, or be disturbed by every wind of finance and politics, or of turmoil in the church. Pray for the will of God to be done now where we are, not later, for sufficient to the day is the evil thereof. The Bible may say contradictory things, and a fortiori churches and mere men, and most of all the work I have written, but do not let the oppositions overcome the one truth you live by, whatever that may be, that star, that dream, that love and hope, even desire and most of all your truth. Perhaps to each his own, perhaps we are all one. God knows, and that is enough for me. May God forgive my errors.

After Reading Roland Barthes

Four Directions: Inward/Outward/Forward/Up Is the Kingdom “Within” or “Among”?

(Plato and Aristotle, again) solitary/solidarity

spatial and temporal Moral/Mystical [prayer] the meta

(at once) Public/Exhibitions [politics] the para

metabolic hierarchy overriding the parabolic open-endedness

Life/Death/Otherwise

The pleasure of the text

and the bliss of Barthes ……………… is neither moral prayer and

(inward) politics are

nor mystical not on the same

(up) page:

one implicates

but without love one supplicates

projected forward in time there/you is a site

(written narrativity) not a destination

Barthes states the premise and outward in space in/up is E turnity

of never making a denial (the possible reader) E ever explicates

and of the logical crux

of contradiction, along moral inward conflict moral inwardness

with the necessity of the (as opposed to difference) establishes the

Impossible, that it is parameters

and mystical elation PM political

out of, over and above, conflict exhibitionism

I, on the other hand, the dialectical outcome of conflict obliterates

but not otherwise,

see the necessity of depend on love pleasure/bliss

denial as the only is sex w/o love

basis of affirmation: love is the reason for

there is yes if and the conquering of self religion is

only if there is no in the moral conflict love w/o sex

and the abandonment of

while accepting the self in mystic height [sublime vs.

truth of contradiction sublimation:

in the logic of the the going forward and needs sublation]

Impossible going outward involves

and the abandonment no turning but the inward to repent

of the need for and outward require it denying/affirming

consistency: at once

which is to say, turning metanoia is at heart is the turning:

all things are possible: opposed to all of the parameters away from the

the Impossible is impossible. of PM (not post- but para-modern) para-modern

Genesis and Revelation

The loss of a sense of origin and the end of things is apparent at the finale. History must

be seen as having a point of departure and a goal in order to be history, the story as

such, which can be temporal or organized according to another logic, but which must

have definite limits, as does the Bible, the pattern of all books. Where we come from

must be where we are going. The break-up of the book itself is part of the loss,

connected by hyper-connectivity to the subtraction of the beginning and ending,

witnessed already in the modernist valorization of the middle of things, the in medias res

epic, which became an end in itself in the PM, an infinite regress that cannot be crossed,

an unsearchable wasteland, a void filled with tracks, traces and signs, neither pointing

and indicating, nor expressing and conveying, but simply standing in the place of the

place itself. Imagination creates the pattern. Patterns are not just connections produced,

valued as an end in themselves, and multiplied to no purpose, but relationships

comprehended, giving one understanding of the truth which is inherent in the structure

of the whole and the part. That there is no longer a whole, and therefore no longer any

parts, so that every part has become a whole in itself, is the legacy of the PM. This

contradiction, learned from the logics of reading and writing, has displaced time and

order as the fulfillment of the prophecies concerning the ultimate. Christ is the alpha

and omega, and without Him we can do nothing, which explains the absence of Christ in

the ultimately political and financial culture and discourse today. That there be no end

to the power struggle of parties, in principle, or to the exaggeration of wealth derived

from theft and exploitation, are the unfortunate outcomes of the end of history, when

history ceased to be historical.

The News

Is that despite our insatiable thirst, we are drinking salty water from an ocean of lies and

corruption that purports to inform and describe and explain ourselves, our lives and our

time. The news is that there is nothing man-made that is new, just variations on themes

invented long ago. That the invention may have been immemorial. That invention was

not ours. That we try to re-invent. That we merely copy the past, but advertise it as our

new world. That God is ever new is no longer news. The true new cannot be bought or

sold, cannot be manipulated, is grace, is mercy, is life, the holiness and righteousness of

God. That we make ourselves experts in our own demise. That we have eliminated the

principle of Authority: every one is author, there is no Author. So ungovernable, we will

seek a last desperate rule. It may be global or tribal, capitalistic or a facetious fascism.

Then our end will be near. The church led the way in this, and the influence of the world

on the church cuts both ways, and the model of the dominion has already been copied.

Yet, be not disconsolate, desolate, or late. Belated we are, but really arriving just in time.

We seek to begin again, sometimes, and God tells us it is so. That one may by the grace

of God make a radical break, with everything you were and knew, and all who knew you,

for the one thing that is your destiny, is the thing that the Impossible could never make

impossible. As long as there is the possibility of possibility, which God alone knows and

gives, we may still think, and pray, and love. Now this is news that will never grow old.

And a word that is needed in the life of the world today. The news so-called by its own

definition will and must pass away, replaced by more news, the news ever flowing. But

God is waiting in the very same waters to baptize us and forgive us and love us forever.

Symbols

The speculative begins and ends in the realm

of the symbol, which as has been said, gives

rise to the thought. That every symbol implies

an explication means that in the folds of things

that have meaning are possibilities that both

open and close our understandings. Open

because they allow reading and therefore the

possibility of learning, and close because the

limit case of comprehension is a grasping that

cannot grasp itself, on the one hand, and

which must let go, turn loose, of itself, in order

to be grasped, not by any and every other, but

by the one truth, the incomprehensible that

comprehends us as we are, making us

comprehensible to ourselves in principle,

though sometimes knowledge is deferred or

denied. That the symbol divides itself in two, in

the etymological sense of the word “symbol,”

indicates a brokenness, an incompleteness, in

fact, which in principle is already complete and

whole. Symbol systems are always derived from

other systems, which seems to deny origins, as

does our understanding of language, which

cannot be incomplete, but which as has been

shown, and in contradiction to this, has some

radical incompleteness lodged in the heart of

every state of affairs. We did not invent the

remedy that God provides. We sought Him,

hidden in things, and have perpetually found

and lost Him over and over again, the

Absolute, the cause and goal of the search, the

guard and guide of life, that than without which

nothing can be conceived, in which we live

and move and have our meaning, making

symbolic actions, which we sometimes dimly

perceive in truth, but which we believe have a

definite value for God, where we hope our

works will always be written in the book of

eternal narrative, a place in which our roles,

written, are read, by all of us, actors and

audience, at the discretion of sole Authority.