I was a regular Sunday Mass
attendee a decade ago in the year of the writing experiment that I’m revisiting
this year. And on Sundays I would write
my meditation immediately upon return from Mass, often drawing inspiration from
the Gospel reading, or a hymn. So I
wasn’t entirely surprised today when a Eucharistic hymn today sang of poverty and
the poor, but the coincidence with the place I ended yesterday’s commentary and
this morning’s hymn was, nevertheless, intense.
I went with my daughter to this morning's service at St. Joseph’s, fresh from an intense morning of lacrosse. There was a
decidedly ecumenical spirit in today’s service, with the Gospel reading, from
Matthew 15: 21-28, disclosing the faith
recognized by Jesus as one that transcends regional and parochial boundaries. The reading identifies Jesus as ‘withdrawing’
to the region of Tyre and Sidon, which the homily referred to as signifying
non-Jewish territory. The drama of
the reading is a conversation between Jesus and a Canaanite woman, presumably a
pagan, who addresses Jesus as ‘Lord’ and asks him to heal her daughter. The disciples are annoyed and ask him to send
her away. Jesus more or less complies and tells her she is beyond his
appointed post to the house of Israel. But
she persists and with her persistence she seems to call the figure of Christ, the anointed one, the good
shepherd with a appointment beyond the house of Israel. It is an epiphanic moment where Jesus
discloses to his disciples the key to his teaching is faith. “Oh woman, great
is your faith! Let it be done as you wish.”
There is a way to hear this Gospel
as recognizing the universality of the Holy Spirit. Faith arrives to anyone who receives the Holy
Spirit, regardless of their place of dwelling.
And there is much from my meditation from this day ten years ago that
speaks to this universality, which the learning community is always moving
towards, ontologically speaking: “as a vestige of the boundless boundary, the learning community
appears as an ever expanding horizon, a world constantly renewed by
worldliness, one that is constantly being cared
for, built and rebuilt, cultivated and maintained.”(8/17/04)
On this day, a decade later, ‘renewal of the world’ is understood as
shepherding, caring, and/or healing. Faith
leads to healing, and the healing in the story leads to a renewal of the bond
between mother and child. For humans
there is no bond more essential. The
bond is renewed through the mother’s faith, which is propelled by the love for
her daughter. Her love generates the
power of a faith that moves Jesus, calling Christ. In
this moment we witness the Sage being moved by a member of the community in what is not a
reversal of roles but a deeper affirmation of the Sage as learner: the one who
must be more capable of learning, because he has always to learn to let them
learn.
I want to identify as epiphanic
this moment when the student (supplicant) offers a love propelled faith that
calls the Sage into learning. It is
epiphanic because it is an offering of an opportunity to the Sage, and in this
sense it is hyper kairological, a break that is happening
within an already occurring break, which is why I describe the moment in this Gospel as one when
Jesus ‘becomes’ Christ, which is to say, prior to the Passion and Resurrection,
he transcends the house of Israel.
Matthew 15: 21-28 is thus an example of the improvisational poetic
dialogue I describe in the first line of the meditation from this day ten years
ago: “The spontaneity of the improvisational performance is the crux of the
poetic dialogue as a creative making of meaning that interrupts the status quo
with the Leap beyond.”(8/17/04) The status quo in the Gospel is
the positioning of Jesus as appointed to the house of Israel, and the Leap is
the leap of faith toward the beyond that is the universal reach of the Holy
Spirit.
Final comment. Just over a week ago (OPM 173, August 6, 2014) I wrote about encountering a
fragment from Heraclitus I’d
not read before, listed as #130 by Haxton, and described it as the most
rudimentary kind of fragment: just one word: Akea. The fragment’s
simplicity caught my attention, but so too Haxton’s translation with two words:
silence and healing. I had written much
in the first half of the experiment on ‘silence’, and ‘healing’ had received
some attention. So on August 6 I
wrote: “The connection between silence>healing>teaching
demands further thinking.” Today was a
moment when I further thinking on this connection happened, but that only makes
sense when I call attention to an important moment in the conversation
recounted by Matthew. When the Canaanite
woman first appealed to Jesus he responded with silence: “Jesus did not say a
word in answer to her.” While the
straightforward way to read this is to translate his silence as non-recognition
(she was outside the House), I want to read this as the beginning of the
interruption, and borrow Heraclitus’ Akea
to stand as the symbol for the margins of the epiphanic event: the one margin silence, the other healing. What happens in
between them is the coincidental testimony and witnessing of a faith propelled
by love.
More poetic and creative would have been a Gospel that would have had Christ say ‘O, mother, great is your faith.’
More poetic and creative would have been a Gospel that would have had Christ say ‘O, mother, great is your faith.’
3.0 (Saturday, Portland, ME) Again, as I wrote yesterday, I'm glad to read these autobiographical journal like entries that document where I was 10 years ago. I don't recall what St. Joseph's church we went to, but I'm sure it was with Kat, who was home that summer prior to studying abroad in Milan. Of my three kids, she's the most devout. Those Franciscans who ran her HS had a positive impact on her! Today, Saturday, just a lazy morning so far. I've spent the past month or more with a routine that has me working out first thing in the morning, then writing for a few hours, brunch, novel reading/siesta, then a few hours of yard work leading up to dinner. As I told a colleague the other day, when you keep your goals minimal you're sure to meet them. But if you do it every day, then the list of completed work adds up quickly. Weekends have been finding the flow, relaxing, some yard work projects, but mostly just taking it easy. But I'm anxious to keep the flow of writing, so I'll see if i can write some words that I'll include in the sabbatical work.
ReplyDelete3.0b - The fragment from this day 20 years ago: “as a vestige of the boundless boundary, the learning community appears as an ever expanding horizon, a world constantly renewed by worldliness, one that is constantly being cared for, built and rebuilt, cultivated and maintained.”(8/17/04) Today, I am taking the almost opposite approach in my description of the learning community. First and foremost, the learning community is bounded and limited to the participants (best if the number is around 11), and the place where it is gathered. I need to say more about that location, and when I get into editorial mode in the fall, I might write something about the Harkness table, describing the specifics of what I'm calling the seminar room. I'll also describe 3-4 actual experiential learning assignments I've given my Hofstra students: the labyrinth walk, the book crate/unpacking my library, the abstract statue description, the encounter with the Socrates/Plato statue. All that to say, the learning community is now being described as the spontaneous and unpredictable gathering that occurs but is not sustained, but certainly isn't "expanding." However, it is for sure constantly renewed by worldliness. This remains a central claim. The book/text or work (of art) gathers the learning community. It wordliness brings them together and maintains them apart. The classic Arendtian formula! Speaking of Arendt, here are a few words in response to the last pages of the section on Work from Human Condition, and the first pages on Action from the same.
ReplyDelete3.0c - While it may not rise to the level that Arendt has in mind with her description, the discussion that unfolds with the learning community is akin to the "doing of great deed and the speaking of great words" [that] will leave not trace, no produce that might endure after the moment of action and the spoken word has passed." (HC, 173). Of course "great" here is a relative term, and Arendt can be understood as underlining the extraordinary or exceptional character of the appearance of the learning community, what she elsewhere likens to the miracle. Ironically the teacher might find himself during and then afterwards saying to himself, "Well, it was a miracle that everyone truly showed up and showed out today." This describes the fact that there really is no guarantee that a discussion will happen. And that's the point: a teacher hopes, can plan, but can not guarantee the "outcome." The 'greatness' of the discussion coincides with its appearance, with its happening. The students and the teacher can only fulfill the promise that they will return to the seminar room at the appointed hour, and that they will arrive with their annotations, their highlights from the text, and that they will be ready to share, to speak and to listen. But "the force of mutual promise" is, as Arendt describes, the power that keeps the location of common learning in existence. The room where the table and chair are ready and waiting for them becomes a place of discussion when the promise is fulfilled. The promise is the recognition that the dialectical negation of solitude, which is a relinquishment of relational autonomy of study, is an affirmation of the raison d'être of the being gathered with others, a recognition that others too have experienced the provecho of study, and although their experiences have all be unique, the text they have all studied is in fact one and the same libelli whose fata includes bringing everyone together and mediating a discussion. The promise between the students and their teacher is also promise offered by the book that its endurance, its worldliness, in some way sustains the discussion, which appears and then disappears as soon as it is over. Discussion is an example of what Arendt calls acting in concert, "which disappears the moment they depart."(HC, 244). And "the force that keeps them together...is the force of mutual promise...an agreed purpose for which alone the promises are valid and binding."(HC, 244-245). Discussion is an example of what she describes as "action and speech" is the "articulation of natality." (HC, 245). But it does have the quality of what she identifies as "the ever-recurring cycle of becoming," (HC, 246) in the sense of the birth of presencing, which is the opposite of the "automatic necessity" (HC, 246). The logic and rule of predetermined "outcomes" is the way schooling attempts to control freedom and natality and produce what Nietzsche described as the herd mentality, and what Arendt calls behavior. In contrast, discussion is a form of action, an interruption of automation and the mimesis of artificial intelligence, and thus "the beginning of something new." (HC, 246). From the perspective of schooling, discussion "seen from the viewpoint of the automatic processes which seem to determine the course of the world, looks like a miracle...The miracle that saves the world, the realm of human affairs, from its normal, 'natural' ruin is ultimately the fact of natality, in which the faculty of action is ontologically rooted...Only the full experience of this capacity can bestow upon human affairs faith and hope."(HC, 247)
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