Sunday, May 13, 2012

The Morning We Walked

You ran ahead of me
today across the hill
and each of your strides
sent waves through the grass
bending the blades with your joy.

When I reached out to
hold your hand in mine,
my fingers closed and my hand
disappeared as yours still stands,
and the wind dances gladly on.

I breathed the morning's dew as
the growth and ground yielded
their lavish petrichor, which
filled me with a scent as
sweet as your laughter.

Pink petals of fallen blossoms
litter the streets and mingle
with trash in the gutters
covering the concrete like
the tender rest of snowfall.

Walking down the sidewalk
there are countless downcast
faces busy avoiding gaze:
searching for refuge, they
ignore those they pass by.

But I know it's your face
hiding behind their's which
is why I always offer kind eyes
to remind them and myself
that love has not yet died.

I know it's your heart I hear
echoing behind each of my beats
like footsteps following closely
down the hall we both walk,
toward the door we both will open.


Saturday, May 5, 2012

You Goethe Be Kidding Me . . .

My charming German tomes silently sitting right before my desk.
It is impossible to accomplish anything but Romantic ecstasies into the Sublime or poetic intoxication, when my recently acquired volume of Goethe's Faust (Erster Teil, Zweiter Teil, Urfaust, und Goethe über Faust) is sitting with my own hand-scribbled Fraktur script slithering and staring back at me, beckoning me with a mocking din of tollit lege ringing in my ears as Augustine once heard.  But like all good addictions, a reading of Goethe will slake my thirst for a verse only to rake the coals desiring one more stanza.  I'm reminded of one of Goethe's essays on Shakespeare, wherein Wilhelm Meister recounted his first reading of Hamlet, "You would think that while reading them, you stood before the unclosed awful Books of Fate, while the whirlwind of most impassioned life was howling through the leaves, and tossing them fiercely to and fro."  Goethe can definitely be seen as aspiring to the heights described by Meister here and if Goethe is the Shakespeare of German, Faust is his Hamlet.  I'm trying to read and to write some exams, but catharsis is calling and the rhymes are chiming, the Devil dances and the drama dins, and to me Goethe as he tosses in a poodle just for good measure.  Its a pleasure to have my soul riddled with these verses, however unproductive that may make me. Perhaps you'll see what I mean.

Mephistopheles:                                                              
[Er gibt seinen Name]  Ein Teil von jener Kraft,            
Die stets das Böse will und stets das Gute schafft.          
Faust:
Was ist mit diesem Rätselwort gemeint?                      
Mephistopheles:                                                              
Ich bin der Geist, der stets verneint,                                
Und daß mit rechts, denn alles was entsteht,                  
Ist wert, daß es zu Grunde geht;                                      
Drum besser wär's, daß nichts entstünde.                        
So ist denn alles, was ihr Sünde,                                    
Zerstörung, kurz das Böse nennt,                                    
Mein eigentliches Element.                                            
                                            Mephistopheles: [Offers his name]
                                            A part of that Power which would
                                            Ever Evil do; yet ever does the Good.
                                            Faust: 
                                           A riddle! Say what it implies!
                                           Mephistopheles:
                                            I am the Spirit that denies!
                                           And rightly too; for all that doth begin
                                           Should rightly to destruction run;
                                          'Twere better then that nothing were begun.
                                          Thus everything that you call Sin,
                                          Destruction- in a word, as Evil represent-
                                          That is my particular element.


Schüler:
Das sieht schon besser aus! Man sieht doch, wo und wie.
Mephistopheles:
Grau, teurer Freund, ist alle Theorie,
Und grün des Leben goldner Baum.
Schüler:
Ich schwör' Euch zu, mir ist's als wie ein Traum.
Dürft' ich Euch wohl ein andermal beschweren.
Von Eurer Weisheit auf den Grund zu hören?
Mephistopheles: Was ich vermag, soll gern geschehn.


                  Student:
                  Now that looks better! Now one sees 
                  the where and how!
                  Mephistopheles: Dear friend, all theory is grey,
                  And the golden tree of life is green.
                  Student: I vow,
                  It's all just like a dream to me.
                 Another time I'll bore you, if I may,
                 To hear your wisdom through and through.
                 Mephistopheles: All that I can, I'll gladly do.


Sailing the Sea of Rahner's Mystery

Karl Rahner, S. J. (1904-1984)
For all other understanding, however clear it might appear, is grounded in this transcendence.  All clear understanding is grounded in the darkness of God.

I'm doing a little writing on Karl Rahner's concept of human nature and grace and reread this perennially phenomenal passage from the Introduction to his Foundations of Christian Faith.  Enjoy . . .


What is made intelligible is grounded ultimately in the one thing that is self-evident, in mystery.  Mystery is something with which we are always familiar, something which we love, even when we are terrified by it or perhaps annoyed and angered, and want to be done with it.  For the person who has touched his own spiritual depths, what is more familiar, thematically or unthematically, and what is more self-evident than the silent question which goes beyond everything which has already been mastered and controlled, than the unanswered question accepted in humble love, which alone brings wisdom? In the ultimate depths of his being man knows nothing more surely than that his knowledge, that is, what is called knowledge in everyday parlance, is only a small island in a vast sea that has not been traveled.  It is a floating island in a vast sea that has not been traveled.  It is a floating island, and it might be more familiar to us than the sea, but ultimately it is borne by the sea and only beacause it is can we be borne by it.  Hence the existentiell question for the knower is this: Which does he love more, the small island of his so-called knowledge or the sea of infinite mystery? Is the little light which he illuminates this island—we call it science and scholarship—to be an eternal light which will shine forever for him? That would surely be hell.


If a person wants, of course, in the concrete decisions of his life he can always choose to accept this infinite question only as a thorn in the side of his knowledge and his mastery and control.  He can refuse to have anything to do with the absolute question except insofar as this question drives him to more and more individual questions and individual answers.  But only when one begins to ask about asking itself, and to think about thinking itself, only when one turns his attention to the scope of knowledge and not only to the objects of knowledge, to the transcendence and not only to what is understood categorically in time and space within this transcendence, only then is one just on the threshold of becoming a religious person.  From this perspective it is easier to understand that not many are, that maybe they are not capable of being, that they feel that it demands too much.  But anyone who has once raised the question about his transcendence and about its term can no longer let it go unanswered.  For even if he were to say that it is a question which cannot be answered, which should not be answered, and which, because it demands too much, should be left alone, even then he would have already given an answer to this question, whether the right one or the wrong one is here besides the point.

Caspar David Friedrich The Monk by the Sea, 1810