Mother of Whom?

Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign; Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel. (Isa 7:14) 

Immanuel. God with us.

I asked the question, and the question was asked back to me: Is Mary the mother of God?

It is an enigma shrouded in mystery. It leads to confusion on multiple parts of the brain.

There is the chicken and egg problem. How could someone be the mother of the person who created her?

There is the time and space problem. How could the infinite be "born" of the finite?

There are multiple theological problems. How could the holiness of God be present within the confines of a sinful nature? How could a mere human presume to claim such an important role over God Himself?

It boggles our human brains, brains which have been honed and refined by the Enlightenment. Our reason has been sharpened to such a fine blade that mystery is sliced into unrecognizable shreds and the truths it contains thrown out as rubbish.

So fine a blade that we even reject our own Enlightened modes of thinking, for example that if A=B and B=C then A=C.

When boggled and muddled with mystery, our minds go into a tailspin focused on rejecting the question altogether so as to simply make the confusion go away.

I get this. But it makes me sad.

Luke fades to black prior to Mary's being overshadowed by God. She was the only human witness to that event, and apparently didn't believe it was a matter for public consumption when she passed the event along for the record book. And so He trusts us to contemplate the moment, the method, the union.

The theme of marital union with Him is stressed from Genesis through Revelation. He gives us scriptural example after example of His view of what His bride must be like. Pure. Spotless. Reverent. Holy. He speaks to us about how the two become one when they consummate the marriage covenant. He promises us that we become one with the Body of Christ. John speaks to us of the marriage feast we will celebrate when the final trumpet calls.

Marriage, marriage, marriage.

Consummation.

Behold, a virgin shall conceive. In her body. When she is overshadowed by the Holy Spirit.

Gabriel, the friend of the Bridegroom comes to tell her He is on His way. And then, fade to black.

But here's what I envision, as I use the vehicle of imagining that the Father provided for this purpose.

Gabriel leaves. The Holy Spirit descends, overshadows her, wraps her in His wings. He steps into time and space and sweeps her into the scenes of the Song of Songs.

1:2 Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth
— for your love is more delightful than wine.
3 Pleasing is the fragrance of your perfumes;
 your name is like perfume poured out.
 No wonder the young women love you!
 4 Take me away with you—let us hurry!
 Let the king bring me into his chambers.

 2:14 My dove in the clefts of the rock,
 in the hiding places on the mountainside,
 show me your face, let me hear your voice;
 for your voice is sweet, and your face is lovely.

16 My beloved is mine and I am his; he browses among the lilies.
17 Until the day breaks and the shadows flee,
 turn, my beloved, and be like a gazelle or like a young stag on the rugged hills.

4:1 How beautiful you are, my darling! Oh, how beautiful!
 Your eyes behind your veil are doves.
 Your hair is like a flock of goats descending from the hills of Gilead.
 2 Your teeth are like a flock of sheep just shorn, coming up from the washing.
 Each has its twin; not one of them is alone.
 3 Your lips are like a scarlet ribbon; your mouth is lovely.
 Your temples behind your veil are like the halves of a pomegranate.
 4 Your neck is like the tower of David, built with courses of stone
 on it hang a thousand shields, all of them shields of warriors.
 5 Your breasts are like two fawns, like twin fawns of a gazelle that browse among the lilies.
 6 Until the day breaks and the shadows flee,
 I will go to the mountain of myrrh and to the hill of incense.
 7 You are altogether beautiful, my darling; there is no flaw in you.
 8 Come with me from Lebanon, my bride, come with me from Lebanon.
 Descend from the crest of Amana,
 from the top of Senir, the summit of Hermon,
 from the lions’ dens and the mountain haunts of leopards. 
9 You have stolen my heart, my sister, my bride;
 you have stolen my heart with one glance of your eyes,
 with one jewel of your necklace.
 10 How delightful is your love, my sister, my bride!
 How much more pleasing is your love than wine,
 and the fragrance of your perfume more than any spice!
 11 Your lips drop sweetness as the honeycomb, my bride;
 milk and honey are under your tongue.
 The fragrance of your garments is like the fragrance of Lebanon.
 12 You are a garden locked up, my sister, my bride;
 you are a spring enclosed, a sealed fountain.
 13 Your plants are an orchard of pomegranates with choice fruits, with henna and nard,
 14 nard and saffron, calamus and cinnamon,
 with every kind of incense tree, with myrrh and aloes and all the finest spices.
 15 You are a garden fountain, a well of flowing water streaming down from Lebanon.

She is His bride, as we will be some day. She is the first of the brides to come. She becomes one with Him, and conceives.

As a result of this union, this overshadowing, this indwelling, she conceives.

And the who of this conception is the Word. Immanuel. God with us.

Mary, mother of Immanuel. Mary, mother of God with us.

Mary, mother of God.

Angelic Imagination

I wonder if angels and demons have imaginations.

Does He allow them to participate in the ongoing creation process in a way that requires imagination, as He allows us? Or are imaginations like bodies; restricted to those of us formed in His image?

Angelic beings are rational, and I wonder if imagination is required for independent reasoning. Can reason exist without the capability for envisioning outcomes?

Aquinas and Descartes didn't think so, but I'm not sure why.

I need to think about this more...

Reflections on a teapot

I've been talking to my BP about Thomas Howard's idea of everything meaning everything, as it relates to the reawakening of the Christian imagination. I thought it might be good to offer an example of the concept in an easily digestible form, and was given an image of a teapot. So here goes.

Let's say that you were shown an old metal teapot. The empirically minded would note that it is made of scuffed metal and has a wooden handle. They could see that it has been used and looks old. If they open it they can see the stain of yesteryear teas, and perhaps even catch it's scent if they dare dip their noses.

All of these things are real and true and give insight about the pot.

An expert on teapots could look at the workmanship and tell more about it. More facts could be collected.

But what happens when you see it, and know it to be your grandmother's?

When you look, you see the dent on the side and it's flame-darkened bottom. You picture it sitting where it always did, on the back of the old gas-burnered stove. You see the black stick-match holder mounted on the wall nearby, and smell a brief sulfurous blast when one is struck.

You remember the cabinet in which a box of Red Rose rests, and the drawer filled with the tiny Wade figurines you played with year after year.

You remember orange pekoe being offered as a treat, and wishing that you actually liked it.

You remember taking grandma's tea-and-dry-toast cure, and wanting just a touch of butter.

You remember the sound of her coming through the swinging door from the dining room, where Jesus' painted eyes followed her as she walked.

You remember how she poured for sorrows and joys, for calming and reviving, for waking up in the morning, and for restlessness at night.

You hear her voice telling the teapot story again; how she received it as a wedding gift some 30, then 40, then 50 years before.

You remember clearing out the house when she died, and having to throw the old pot away...

These memories add more than mere facts to the reality of a simple teapot. The associations and interactions and emotions provide context.

They give the object meaning.

The Enlightenment would have us strip things down to the essential facts, to isolated collections of details theoretically comprising a whole. None of which have meaning, only existence.

In the enlightened view, the teapot means teapot. There is nothing more. Just the facts.

In Thomas Howard's view, the teapot means love, and comfort, and contentment and safety. It means stick matches and squeaky doors. It means pillowy hugs and powdery old lady scents. The teapot means grandmother, and love.

Going beyond that, it means the technological evolution of man; the forging of metals and hewing of wood for our purposes. It means the alchemy of molecular change and the ritual of seed, seedling, sapling and tree. It means the interaction of man and nature and God.

What if we could see all the interconnections of things all around us? What if we could see them stretching out like spider webs dew-sparkling in the early sunshine? What if we could see the beauty and the wonder and the majesty behind the exterior of every single thing?

I can only imagine...

Chance or the Dance? Excerpts from Ch. 7 (Sex) Part 3

"The view that is being put in this book, however, is that the rush into the fenced-off place is a desecration and not an emancipation. It proceeds upon the assumption first that the idea of the private, the set apart, is a legitimate one, and that on the one hand it is not only worthwhile but necessary that some things be set apart, and that on the other, there are some things whose very nature demands such a setting apart. Second it would suspect that the human imagination has not been mistaken in handling the sexual phenomenon as one of the things to be set apart in the exclusive place.

It would suspect this because it would see the body as the image of the person, and the person as a thing vast and mysterious and not to be raided. ...The human imagination has set the sexual rite into this veiled sanctum. It does not occur in the marketplace, or at the table, or in the drawing room. Not even the parody of it (whoredome) occurs there. One goes behind closed doors. But the closed wooden doors are themselves only the sign of the closed doors behind which the human imagination keeps the phenomenon. They are not the closed doors of embarrassment, or of shame, althogh some eras have acted as though they were. Rather, they are like the veil into the holy place: up to here you may all come, but I must go alone beyond here, in unto this personhood whose being is to be opened under this particular modality to me alone. (And of course the physical actualitites of the rite so exactly correspond to this awarenes of entry into the secret place byond the veil that they hardly need pointing out.)"

"...those who honor the shrine begin to participate in an exchange and a communion whose nature eludes those who traffic in holy things. ... But... those who honor the shrine move, by their very attendance on the rubric, toward some great and unimagined Unveiling when the ecstatic secret is opeoned to those who have learned that no churl will see the Holy Thing; to those who have learned that it is not by pushing into a thousand shrines that one becomes able to pass through that final Veil, but rather by brave and single attendance on the one shrine committed to one; who know that an unveiling is a real unveilling only to the extent that what is veiled is set apart from the other things around, and that one's appreciation of the reward is in some ratio to what one has experienced of patience in waiting for it; and to those who have recevied the ecstatic communion entrusted to them as an image of some final Communion when the knowledge of all beings will be ecstatic; who, by their participation in the rite (or by their wait for it--those who for one reason or another are denied the foretaste here) have apprehended the knowledge of other beings as a high and holy thing, not to be flung open at random."

Acedia and the love of nothing

The quote below came in a comment from a blogger I enjoy, Dr. Ken Craven. It's focus is on tolerance, but it reminds me of a world stripped of imagination.

"Acedia... sloth [the sixth deadly sin]. In the world it calls itself tolerance, but in hell it is called despair. ... It is the sin that believes in nothing, cares for nothing, seeks to know nothing, interferes with nothing, enjoys nothing, loves nothing, hates nothing, finds purpose in nothing, lives for nothing, and remains alive only because there is nothing it would die for."

--Dorothy Sayers

Full of texture and flavor and knobbiness

From Chance or the Dance?

"There is, it would almost seem left over from our childhood, the invincible desire to locate experience and grasp it and savor it in the same way that we used to need to get hold of some new toy and handle it and get our teeth into it. This is pointless, we suspect--this carousel that spins us past things and never lets us get the ring. And the faculty in us that shouts at us above the wheezing of the calliope that something is there, and that it is as full of texture and flavor and knobbiness as we wish it were--this faculty is imagination."

More snippets of goodness

More snippets of goodness from Thomas Howard's Chance or the Dance?

• He calls poetry "the noblest utterance", and says that "Image making is what delights us about certain people's conversation." He says that poetry carves shapes using words. "...it is in poetry that we try to speak the language that is suggested to us by our imagination as the real language of things." He says that poetry comes through the midwifery of the poet. Poetry halts us and tells us to to look at the prosaic more closely. Through it, the clutter of daily experience becomes epiphany.
  

• On application of the imagination as part of reason: "And when we do exercise it, it is in order to bring about a heightened awareness of the experience in question. To do so is to reach across a gulf that cannot be spanned ... by the analytic faculty in us."

• He talks about the new myth, in which imagination is cast off as foolishness, and points out that in this myth, connections are stripped away, reducing things down to what they think is "truth". But this is a confusion of truth with mere facts.

• Related to this idea was one I found profound. That when you strip things of their context, of their interconnectedness and meaning, paring away to nothing but a set of facts, the thing is lessened. It is no longer itself when it is -only- and merely itself.

• "...if we scrutinize the way we do things, we shall find that we have festooned everything with formality and that nearly every act is loaded down with gestures that bespeak much more than can be discerned in the functional demands of the situation itself."

• The new myth says "Politics and commerce and urban planning and medicine and housekeeping--here is where the real stuff is."

Delightenment

Over the next few days I'll be writing more about truth, reality, and God, because it has been a focus of discussion with my BP re. his work on the Christian imagination.

I was thinking about how the evil one loves to steal words and distort them for his own purposes ("choice" being a fine example), and how inaccurate a phrase "The Enlightenment" truly is.

We are riding the edge of the wave of reclamation, a restoration of wonder which will bring us to greater understanding of creation, and there will be a word to capture the essence of this era. I'm not sure how early in a cultural shift the name for it becomes apparent, but I want a word for it, as I write about it. I've been playing with a few, but my current favorite is "Delightenment".

I like that it begins with "delight" because a restoration of wonder and love to reason is key to deeper truth. I also like that it conveys an undoing of the distorted aspects of the enlightenment without doing away with it completely.

More as it unfolds...

Imaginatio divina

At my beloved priest's invitation, for a few weeks I have been practicing what I am calling imagiplation or imaginatio divina; the use of the imagination for experiencing God.

It has been an amazing adventure, one which I need to document in greater detail in future. For now I'll limit myself to telling you about His gift to me this morning.

I approach Him in a particular setting which He created for me, and I climb into His lap. Normally I cuddle in like a child. This morning however, I turned my face up to Him as a woman, not a child. He bent His head to meet me and we kissed a kiss of lovers at rest. And as we kissed, He began to blow His breath into me.

I entered His presence heavy of heart and mind. I left at peace and in wonder.

He is so very generous...

Tales more beautiful and amazing

"It involves us in all kinds of difficulties in which human ingenuity, unable to discover or imagine a way out, realizes its own feebleness and finds itself at a loss and confounded. It is then that God's purpose is manifest in all its radiance, rescuing souls more miraculously than any writer of fantastic tales, who, straining every effort of his imagination in the seclusion of his study, unravels the intrigues and perils of his imaginary heroes and always brings their adventures to a happy conclusion. It leads souls far more ingeniously past mortal perils, past monster, hell-fire, demons and their snares and carries them up to heaven. All are the subject of mystical tales far more beautiful and amazing than any invented by the crude imagination of mortal man."

page 24 of "The Sacrament of the Present Moment" by Jean Pierre de Caussade

On Cabbages and Pigs

From The Baptism of Imagination: A conversation with Peter Kreeft:

"Well, the cabbages-and-pigs image recalls John Stuart Mill's statement. He said it is better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied. So, if you go to a counselor to overcome your dissatisfaction and exchange it for satisfaction, I think that can be very foolish. There's a good satisfaction and a bad satisfaction, a good dissatisfaction and a bad dissatisfaction. If you have a lover's quarrel with the world because you have been taught to expect happiness from this world yet you haven't found it and don't know why, that's a very good dissatisfaction. If a counselor throws cold water on the fire of that discontent, great harm is done. It's worth having the bad discontent in order to preserve the good discontent, which is the search for God. I think discontent is the second best thing in the world, because it brings us to God."
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"One of the reasons Christians are generally happier than nonbelievers is that they don't expect so much of the world. They look at the world as a gymnasium, or a training ground, or, if they are terribly pessimistic, as a prison. The world can be a wonderful barracks, a fantastic motel, but it's a lousy home."

Elixer of God

"Our creative discontent, that which drives us to imagine an alternative reality, is the image/imagination of God beating in our breast. The cosmos is pregnant with hints that guide our imaginings. We are called to heal the world in the image of our most beautiful imaginings. The eros of imagination is the elixir of God running through the universe."

--Mordechai Gafni

The beginning of creation

“Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire; you will what you imagine; and at last you create what you will.”

--George Bernard Shaw

Paint Paradise

“You have your brush and your colors, paint paradise and in you go.”

--Nikos Kazantzakis

Care of the Soul (4)

From Care of the Soul (pg 32):

"Part of our alchemical work with soul is to extract myth from the hard details of family history and memory on the principle that increase of imagination is always an increase in soul."