THOUGHTS
on
CHIEF EPISCOPAL OFFICERS,
BLOODY BIG RODENTS,
and the
FUTURE of the DANCE
PART TWO:
[To recapitulate, where we left off ...
So: deacons, priests and CEOs? Apprentices, sub-branch managers, RMCs,
ADs, RDs and CEOs? Phew. Now we’ve sorted that out and ciboria and piscine are
in their rightful place in the rubbish dump of history, this strange beast
called Church, Anglophile branch,[1]
should burst at the seams. Okay?]
Except Merton again. “It seems to me that the best of Anglicanism is
unexcelled, but that there are few who have the refinement in spirit to see and
embrace the best, and so many who fall off into the dreariest rationalism.”[2]
What was this mad ’merican monk on,[3]
or on about? While this, from a Roman Catholic, reveals hints of the doctrine
of “salvation by good taste” that I have heard one colleague parody Anglicanism
as, it does critique the slow sad slide of a glorious conduit of mystery into
dull pragmatism. I doubt the zany Dylan-loving monk was applauding Anglican
penchants for obscurantism, but rather its ability to convey divine mystery –
and the converse, lamenting its 1960s proclivity to strip bare possibilities of
divinity, still apparent in Aotearoa Branch as a tendency to resemble the
Labour or Green Party at Prayer.
So, given that Merton was to some extent an outsider, and to most
extents a prophet, was he issuing a warning that has fallen on mainly deaf
ears? Another devotee of Merton, incidentally, was that other mad prophet,
James K. Baxter. He noted of Merton, “his books went out, into the world,
knocking at every door, saying: ‘Mourn and rejoice! Your respectability is no
use to you any longer. It can’t hide you from God. It never did; you only
thought it did. Come out and meet your Lover.’”[4]
It seems there are critics of a doctrine of salvation by good taste. But I
suspect that, at the same time, Merton and Baxter alike would decry that other
emerging heresy, salvation by executive order.
For, buried in the obscurity of rite and ritual, sometimes abused but
sometimes a vehicle of unspeakable mystery, is something important. There
dwells there some impishness, some playfulness, some exotic craziness that
perhaps could convey eternity, could convey Om, could convey an Omega point or
a nirvana beyond the mundanity of those trials and tribulations, Shakespeare’s
“slings and arrows or misfortune” that dog us “all the day long of this
troublous life”. Certainly it could do so with more accomplishment than the
language and structure of a suburban sub-branch, the “respectability” that
Baxter loathed and that is strangling still the lifeblood from God’s crazy
people.
All the while the slow strangulation was aided, abetted and I suspect
master-minded by purple shirted and purple-aspirant CEO- and AD- and RMC-types,
as they breathily chased administrative and theological mundanity,
respectability, banality. Because as it happens, though they weren’t heavily
into genuflection, they so horizontalized the mysteries of the Church’s core
business of worship that ironically
they were prostrate, worshipping faded middle-classness in the service of
something called “relevance,” “the dreariest rationalism.”
Baxter’s Holy Spirit famously squawked and laid an egg[5]
and the Incarnate Baby slid silently down the bathwater’s ecclesiastical gurgler
(too dull and prosaic to ever be a piscina) and slid past glaring gate-keepers,
out the door, into city streets and bars. “Come out and meet your Lover.”
Ah, the gate-keepers! The psalmist saw them long ago: “I have seen the
wicked in great power, and spreading himself like a green bay tree.” They are
still there for now, at the door, keeping seekers out and the submissive in.
Burnt-out clingers to past dreams, aesthetes whose version of good taste, often
paradoxically prosaic, is the apotheosis of aspiration. That’s not the way we
do it here, which means “that’s not the way we did it as Mother Ecclesia died
around our ears, but we’re still here.” The purple-shirted and their acolytes
often love them, because: deep pockets. Because compliance.
Because
boat-unrocking stagnant dreariness.
So where now, Mother Ecclessia?
Will o’ the wisps, or in Latin “ignes
fatui,”were considered dangerous things, leading the vulnerable to sticky
ends. Fire of fools. But perhaps there is a clue there? Fools for Christ
perhaps?[6]
Perhaps where Mother Ecclesia has become the hoax that Merton feared is where
it became afraid to be foolish.
We are called to a dance of fools. Out where the ignes fatui dance. Out beyond the stern, glum gate-keepers of propriety
and dignity. Out where the dance is undignified, crazy, holy.
Merton fought against this “out”, trying to stay on board, trying to hint from
within at the possibility of a dance, a holy manic largesse
of spirit. He tried to persuade his gatekeepers of a mad manic faith so bizarre
(yet, ironically, so disciplined) that he dare liken it to a tab of LSD. Oh to
have faith that might be likened to the outplay of a tab of LSD! Oh to have joy
that might suggest drunkenness at nine o’clock in the morning!
I once experienced a bum acid (LSD) trip. For umpteen hours I was
trapped in a body that was being strangled from within, strangled by the God I
did not believe in. Perhaps it was prescient.
Since then I have also experienced life trapped inside a body of faux-Christ. Trapped where the lights are going out, trapped and soul-strangled
from within by a small g- imposter-god, a faux-god
called “how we’ve always done it,” and “how it’s safe to do it” and strangely,
because faux-gods will always shape-shift,
actually a god called “how the ticket collector did it” and “how the auditor
did it” and a myriad other invitations to a living death.
Yet, just beyond the hunched shoulders and glowering visage of that faux-God, beyond the glaring gate-keepers
and their stern visages sneering in cold contempt, do I see ignes fatui, dancing on the marsh, threatening
to lead journeyers to their death?
Not leading though, to the death of hope. Not leading to the desperate
death of the respectable, to the dreary rationalist death of the already
lifeless. Not beckoning the banal, prosaic pragmatism of a club-church in which
croziers became iPhones and piscinae became gurglers, the club-congregation of
the already-dead. Leading to a holy death.
That
body of banality is an imposter. Its death knows no hope: abandon hope, all ye
who enter. CEOs going down out of habit more than courage, followed by their acolytes
with extinguished candles, trudging together in a self-inflicted death, death
without dance. “I had not thought death had undone so many,” wrote Dante, and it
is undoing many more, trudging, trudging. Grossman wrote of the darkest of
deaths: “immediately behind Viktor, right at his heels, followed doubt,
suffering, lack of belief,” and then bleakly, “we will have vanished – just as
the Aztecs once vanished.”
[More later ... because after Good Friday comes Easter]
[More later ... because after Good Friday comes Easter]
[1] Because here in the antipodes we don’t like to think “English”,
though sometimes we skip the Angles and Saxons and claim the Celts.
[2] Merton, to Donald Allchin, April 25th 1964. Reprinted in
Furlong, Merton, 274.
[3] In a tongue-in-cheek letter to a friend Merton suggested the latter
send “a barrel of LSD” along with some Bob Dylan records. I am informed a
“barrel” was slang for a mere tab, but Merton’s humour was terribly risqué and
with that sort of impishness he could never have been an Anglican, I’m sure. Merton,
to Edward Rice, July 20th 1964. Cited in Furlong, Merton, 296.
[4] James K. Baxter, Complete
Prose (Volume 3. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2015), 38.
[5] James K. Baxter, “Ode to Auckland”, Collected Poems (Wellington: Oxford University Press, 1979), 598.
[6] For those who feel that foolishness belongs outside the hallowed
grounds or faith, 1 Cor 4.10 and surrounds makes interesting reading.
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