SNC

Ten Thousand Times Brighter

Before today, as of the time of writing, it had been a long time since I'd truly watched the sunrise. I tend to be nocturnal despite my best efforts not to be, so watching the world lighten in my bedroom window is something I'm accustomed to. But around 4:45 last night, I figured that since I hadn't gone to bed, I might as well walk up to as high a vantage point as I could and watch the sun rise properly. When I started walking, the not-yet-risen sun had already lightened the sky enough that it was an ocean blue, and it grew lighter and lighter as I walked. In the East, at a diagonal with Montréal's city blocks, I watched a patch of pale patch of the horizon grow yellow, then red, then orange. This was the introit to dawn.

What really astonished me were the birds. While I regularly hear birdsong when I stay up too late, it's usually muted due to being inside—and of course I can't see who's singing. But here I saw and heard them in their full array: rock doves and crows, sparrows and cardinals, some of which came very close to me. At the point where I stopped walking, a man came around and scattered some nuts for the birds, after which he stood facing the not-yet-risen sun, lowly chanting to himself. What I then thought of was Gustav Doré's famous painting of the Empyrean in Dante's Paradiso, in which a point of light is surrounded by a feathery swarm of uncountable angels, and two people stand looking onward into it. I imagined that the birds were for their part chanting, "Holy, holy, holy Lord God of Hosts, Heaven and Earth are full of thy glory." And suddenly I felt I had never understood anything before in my life: not Doré's painting, not the singing of the angels, not the angels themselves, and not the imagery of the light of God. I had imagined these things, but my imagination was so much poorer than what I could see on Earth, the glory of which is itself nowhere near sufficient. "And he does not realize that the eyes of the Lord are ten thousand times brighter than the sun" Sirach 23:19, middle.

Lately I've been thinking about nature worship, and with it, about the Deuterocanon. One thing I think is sad about those Protestant denominations which do not read the Deuterocanon (i.e. the apocryphal works of the "Old Testament" which are not found in the Tanakh, having come from the Septuagint) is that they miss out on many of the most gorgeous descriptions of the natural world which can be found anywhere in Scripture. The Book of Sirach, whose life advice I question but whose poetry I enjoy, speaks of the many marvels of nature: of a God-made world in which it may be asked, "Who could ever tire of seeing his glory?" Sirach 42:25, end. But the Book of Wisdom is of an even higher poetic calibre: one of my favourite moments is the author's description of the effects of miracles in the natural world, such that "the elements changed places with one another, as on a harp the notes vary the rhythm, while each note remains the same" Wisdom 19:18. Finally there is the gorgeous (if repetitive) Deuterocanonical hymn, "The Song of the Three," which addresses a litany of natural creatures and calls on them to praise God. Beginning with "O all ye Works of the Lord, bless ye the Lord: praise him and magnify him forever" Azariah 35, the hymn then moves onto such creatures as "ye Showers and Dews," "ye Winds of God," "ye Green Things upon the Earth," and "ye Whales, and all that move in the Waters."

I think there is something affectively pagan in a hymn like "The Song of the Three." The impulse to address all the elements of creation as though they were intentional has at the very least an animist bent, very similar to St. Francis's "Laudes creaturarum." However, this pagan impulse is sanctified and redirected ad maiorem Dei gloriam, and so it comes to be a permissible expression of monotheistic faith. Compare and contrast how the author of Wisdom speaks of nature worshippers. Having a deeply enchanted view of nature in general, he clearly has some sympathy for the practice of worshipping nature, though he makes very clear that this tendency is foolhardy:

Yet these people are little to be blamed, for perhaps they go astray while seeking God and desiring to find him. For while they live among his works, they keep searching, and trust in what they see, because the things they see are beautiful. Yet again, not even they are to be excused; for if they had the power to know so much that they could investigate the world, how did they fail to find sooner the Lord of these things? Wisdom 13:6–9

It is hard to be inclined toward nature worship if one does not go outside. Because I have generally been inclined to cloister myself away from the world, I have sometimes found myself like Descartes, seeking a divinity I can find by contemplation, not by going out and looking. This isn't necessarily a bad thing; there is something to be said for thoughtful inquiry into the divine intuition. But standing in front of the rising sun, I felt the same as how I've felt on many of my springtime walks this year, where I've seen things like a rainbow bathed in purple twilight and a golden-haloed moon so bright it seemed to be melting. I felt that I could not possibly have adequately asserted the glory of God while voluntarily choosing to avoid the glories of creation by which to compare God to. If, as the Deuterocanonical authors write, God's glory is a light which enormously exceeds the sun—well, how glorious is the sun? If God exceeds the splendour of the moon, how splendid is the moon? It is important that God may be found in all places, even amid banality or ugliness, but is it better to choose one's lover out of desperation or having had many other alluring options which you opted against? If "the things they see are beautiful," can they not then testify to greater invisible beauty? Isn't praise better when it isn't naive?

I think the way that grasping after the joys of this world might serve a faithful love of God might be understood through Spinoza. For him, whenever we encounter an exterior object which invokes unfeigned joy, it is because something in the essence that object expresses is concordant with our essence, and enriches it. When the sun shines on our face, for example, the bodily pleasure we feel points to an invisible communion between something about what sunlight is and something about what we are, a harmony which stabilizes and perfects our existence and brings more of our nature to the fore. While there are joys which are not of this type, because we have finnicky and imperfect minds which sometimes become unbalanced in the discernment of our truest good, temperate and rational joys can always be connected to divine perfection. After all, God is by definition—or rather, defines himself as being—the source of all being, and so whenever we express our nature more fully we participate more fully in God. Further, every joy is capable of serving as a reminder of God, because to stand in the knowledge and the love of God is the model of all joy, the primordial life-giving encounter which repeats itself at all times.

There is, then, something very good in any desire for true joy, but like other human impulses, it is also potentially dangerous. It is not hard to imagine a religion based solely around seeking perfection, beauty, and joy, which looks to what is humble, ugly, and suffering as foul and to be avoided. This is basically the quality of ancient Greco-Roman paganism. I'm reminded of how David Bentley Hart, a contempory American Eastern Orthodox theologican, talks about how any coherent theology should be monistic, not participating in gnostic dualism between a lower substance and a higher substance, but also that any theology worth its salt must have a hint of gnostic detachment from the world. The thing about the joy of God which is present in all other joys is that it also gives us reason to give up Earthly joys. Even if something is truly joyous, there exists an infinitely higher joy in God, so we can bear to give up anything in order to be consistent with God's essence.

In the theology of the New Testament, expressed in the Gospels as well as in Paul and John, that essence is unfathomable love, with which we are consistent when we love God with all our hearts and love our neighbours as ourselves—to the point of giving our life for our friends. This is the kind of joy beyond all joys which is made possible by the concept of a loving God, which should be sufficient to allow us to give up any temporal and bodily joy if it should come to be necessary. Though not before it should come to be necessary, or else we should come to see creation as evil, and tremendously cheapen the life which is our only offering before God. Having the joy of the sunrise is in itself a good, and only heightens the goodness which would be expressed in giving up one's days if it truly was called for. To "investigate the world" as nature worshippers do is good, and only sweetens the experience of finding "the Lord of all these things."

We "moderns" sometimes assume that this era is the first to truly discover what it is like to live without God. But in one of its most gorgeous passages from 1:12 to 2:24 the Book of Wisdom corrects this assumption. The passage begins by speaking of how "God did not make death, and he does not delight in the death of the living, for he created all things so that they might exist." According to the author of Wisdom, who would have been a Second Temple Jew sometime in the first century BC, death ultimately does not exist in light of God, because through God, "righteousness is immortal." However, he notes that for people who have no concept of God, death is a looming, pressing reality. The poet then launches into what is, to my mind, one of the most beautiful parts of the Bible, where he describes the worldview of the "ungodly" in terms which are shockingly poignant and empathetic. When I read this passage to my mother, she said it would be fit to read at her funeral, because it speaks for her; and in the headspace I've been in for most of my life, it spoke for me as well. I'll quote up to the point where I think many atheists would agree that it describes them:

Short and sorrowful is our life, and there is no remedy when a life comes to its end, and no one has been known to return from the grave. For we were born by mere chance, and hereafter we shall be as though we had never been, for the breath in our nostrils is smoke, and reason is a spark kindled by the beating of our hearts; when it is extinguished, the body will turn to ashes, and the spirit will dissolve like empty air. Our name will be forgotten in time, and no one will remember our works; our life will pass away like the traces of a cloud, and be scattered like mist that is chased by rays of the sun and overcome by its heat. For our allotted time is the passing of a shadow, and there is no return from our death, because it is sealed up and no one turns back.

Come, therefore, let us enjoy the good things that exist, and make use of creation to the full as in youth. Let us take our fill of costly wine and perfumes, and let no flower of spring pass us by. Let us crown ourselves with rosebuds before they wither. Let none of us fail to share in our revelry; let us leave signs of enjoyment everywhere, because this is our portion, and this is our lot.

The first paragraph is dedicated to describing a physicalist, secular view of human life, one in which our mind is just a product of our body, and in which death is simply the cessation of our existence. One must remember that the concept of an immortal soul is originally Greek, not Jewish. Judean consensus at the time would have contended that the soul is snuffed out in death, bequeathing the remains of the spirit of an uneventful stay in dusty Sheol—at least, until the body is resurrected in the Messianic age. This opinion really is not so different from contemporary secular physicalism, and like in the present day, unsurprisingly leads to an ethos of "carpe diem," "seize the day," "you only live once." I believe the Book of Wisdom here shows that this worldview, which is anything but foreign to us today, can be expressed movingly and coherently within antiquity, demonstrating a high level of empathetic imagination for those who, then (and now), who live without God.

But the author of Wisdom also does not agree with this perspective. Partially, this is because it is based on the assumption that our lives are ultimately in ourselves and not in God. Another reason is that it it can be taken to contravene the love which godly righteousness urges us to show to people who are useless or inconvenient to our ambitions in this life: the poor, the widows, the old, the weak, etc. An "ungodly" person also forsakes the task of loving "godly" people. Someone who "professes to have knowledge of God and calls himself a child of the Lord," who "calls the last end of the righteous happy and boasts that God is his father" is unbearable: "He became to us a reproof of our thoughts; the very sight of him is a burden to us, because his manner of life is unlike that of others, and his ways are strange." Because the person who demonstrates godly faith and godly love stands for something which seems incomprehensible and judgemental to those who only hopes for joy in this world, the ungodly decide to "find out how gentle he is, and make a trial of his forebearance" by plotting to "test him with insult and torture" and to "condemn him to a shameful death, for according to what he says he will be protected."

Obviously, the Book of Wisdom cannot here be taken as carte blanche condemning contemporary atheists—it couldn't be, because they did not exist. Before the modern period, "ungodliness" was not so much about disbelief in God than an unrighteous pattern of behaviour which does not make sense in light of God's existence. It would not be remotely fair to accuse self-identified atheists of being inherently immoral, because many atheists have given their life for the sake of an ethic of love. Likewise, many self-identified theists implicitly think of the world in terms which the author of Wisdom would call unrighteous and ungodly. This should be especially obvious to a Christian, because it is extremely easy to read this section of Wisdom as being Christological. The gentle man who calls himself Son of God, who proclaims knowledge of his Father and ultimate salvation for the righteous, and who is therefore condemned to a shameful death—I don't really even have to explain this, do I? But no one involved in the persecution of Christ was anything like a contemporary atheist, given that his chief human opponents were Roman pagans and certain rival Jewish sects. It is even written, in John 16:2, that, "Indeed, an hour is coming when those who kill you will think that by doing so they are offering worship to God." So we can hopefully pretty well put aside that this critique is levied against atheists.

What is the case is that, in light of post-theistic physicalism becoming pervasive, most people today must contend with the very strong suspicion that "the spirit will dissolve like empty air." But I believe that, rather than the Wisdom account in which an atheist suspicion leads to a carpe diem mentality, it is a social order which is optimized to "leave signs of enjoyment everywhere," and to do so by abandoning any tender human love or concern, which promotes a view of life as "short and sorrowful" and of death as being "without remedy." Marx is correct that, through capital, "everything solid melts into air," though we have surely never lived in the kingdom of God or acted fully in accord with holy love. It is impossible to blame anyone for viewing "our allotted time" as "the passing of a shadow" in which we ought to "take our fill of costly wines and perfumes" when that understanding is an accurate assessment of the conditions of modernity. The powers and principalities of this world proliferate joys specifically of that kind, after all. They are the lot that is offered to us.

But this morning, as I stood waiting for the sunrise, I felt that the lot I was offered was different, that it was in the birds and in the sun and in the sky. And here I thought about how the Wisdom poet distinguishes between nature worship and other forms of idol worship. Nature worship he treats sympathetically, for it does reflect a truly good and beautiful creation of God. Idol worship, by contrast, worships the work of human hands, and the author of Wisdom treats this practice with intense scorn and derision. The broad gist of his argument is that anything created by a human being lacks any of the rich liveliness with which any human being has been endowed: "For health he appeals to a thing that is weak; for life he prays to a thing that is dead; for aid he entreats a thing that is utterly inexperienced; for a prosperous journey, a thing that cannot take a step" Wisdom 13:18. Nature worship at least is not entirely demeaning, because it worships true glories, but idol worship is beneath human dignity as it submits to an undeserving lord.

The sun is definitely something different from a sculped wooden idol. But a naive concept of a divinely-produced nature in which no human hand has played a role also doesn't hold up. There is no part of the Earth which has not been impacted profoundly by human industry, and experiences of natural beauty are often marketed in just the same way as other crafts. When I have taken walks lately, I've very much enjoyed not letting any "flower of spring pass us by," smelling the blooming lilac trees and whatnot. But these are entirely cultivated gardens in a built urban environment, no less produced by the circuit of money and labour than any idol of antiquity. St. Basil, certainly, would not approve of some of the more exuberant gardens I've seen. A month or so ago I read the "Sermon to the Rich", in which, during a time of famine in Caesarea, Basil castigates wealthy citizens for hoarding wealth and for spending it on beautiful things:

It amazes me, how they can pile on notions of superfluities. There are countless chariots, some for transporting goods, others for carrying themselves, covered with bronze and silver. A multitude of horses, and such as have pedigrees of well-bred fathers, as among people. And some of these carry the men about town, dissipating them; others are for hunting; others have been trained for the road. Reins, belts, collars, all of silver, all inlaid with gold. Saddles of genuine purple: they primp up the horses like brides. A plethora of asses, distinguished according to color, with men to hold the reins, some running before, some following after. An unlimited number of other servants striving to fulfill every outlandish wish: stewards, treasurers, gardeners, workers skilled in every art hitherto invented, whether for necessary purposes or for enjoyment and luxury. Butchers, bakers, winepourers, huntsmen, sculptors, painters, artisans of every pleasure. Herds of camels, some bearing burdens, others put to graze; herds of horses and of cattle, flocks of sheep, swine; the herdsmen of these; with land sufficient to feed them all, and which continually augments the wealth with additional revenue; baths in town; baths in the country; houses gleaming round with every variety of marble, in one place Phrygian stone, elsewhere tiles from Laconia or Thessaly. And of these houses, some are heated in winter, others are cooled in the summer. A floor decorated with mosaic gems, gold laid out on the roof. And however much of the walls eludes the marble tiling is adorned with choice works of pictorial art.

This depiction Basil gives is magnificent and beautiful, and he absolutely despises it. Basil admits of nothing good in all these extravagances, and while I have a desire to say, "Couldn't all this be taken to glorify God?" I also understand his harshness. In creating these things, the rich of Caesarea exhibit an attitude much like the ungodly of the Book of Wisdom, taking their fill of Earthly pleasures while the poor suffer, and so tacitly admit that they view this transient life, and not the love of God, as the highest joy. This is a fairly standard case of idolizing Mammon over God. Unfortunately, thinking this way makes my OCD scrupulosity go completely insane, because everything connects to Mammon. We have no power over the sun, but the mountain I had climbed to see it is shaped by human hands—by costly houses, by gardeners, by municipal schisms over taxes—as is the nature of Montréal. The experience of going to see the sunrise in Montréal, much like the experience of smelling a flower, is not detached from the sort of idolatrous society which St. Basil would castigate. Is it wrong to even appreciate, to say nothing of creating, that variety of material splendour? For my own sense of self-preservation, I can't let myself entertain that idea too deeply, and the fact that I have entertained it in the past was a product of not holding my own life to be of any value whatsoever, which is itself wrong. Complete refusal to engage with a fallen world to the point of withering to death benefits no one.

However, it is worth asking in what spirit the natural world should be enjoyed, for which the potentials and shortcomings of nature worship are a useful case study. How does the Wisdom poet's archetypal nature worshipper compare and contrast with his description of the "ungodly"? Well, for one, the ungodly's perspective on nature is one of exploitation, to "make use of creation to the full." Nature is viewed as a storehouse of pleasures to take advantage of, opportunities in this transient and fleeting life. The nature worshipper, by contrast, is inspired to some extent by a drive toward God, "seeking God and desiring to find him." Though each of these views are joyous, their sense of place relative to nature is wildly different. However, the nature worshipper's divine intuition does not exist alone; it is implied to be mixed up with vice, because otherwise the nature worshipper would find the true God they seek. Of all idolators, "it was not enough for them to err about the knowledge of God, but through living in great strife due to ignorance, they call such great evils peace" Wisdom 14:22; all idolatry "entered the world" "through human vanity" Wisdom 14:14. If the nature worshipper was merely in error, they would correct their understanding; like all idolators, they must also be afflicted with vanity to be lastingly misled. Nevertheless, the object of their idolatry is not one of pure vanity, and so the divine intuition subsists alongside vanite. These relatively noble nature worshippers are thus distinct from the "ungodly," who do not seek anything else in nature but the satisfaction of their appetites in advance of their death.

In the Magnificat, it is said of God that "he has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts." In the case of nature worship, the divine intuition comes to be scattered like so: the genuine urge toward divinity dissipates into the natural world, producing from it a host of imagined gods. By this conception, works like "Laudes creaturarum" and "The Song of the Three" might be thought to turn the pagan impulse on its head, and rather than scattering divinity in nature, collecting nature in divinity. When the author of the Song calls out to the many creatures of the natural world to praise God, he might be conceived of as practicing a kind of animism. However, this gesture is perfectly in line with the original quality of Edenic language, which names all things and addresses the names to God. There is here a hint of the figure of the Bodhisattva as far as my limited understanding of that figure goes, who intends, having achieved blessedness, to forego it to pursue the blessedness of all things. In hailing the creatures of the world, the "Song of the Three" traces hints of God back to their source, moving from partiality to fullness, while in the same gesture inviting these hints of divinity to participate in the Source rather than truly leaving them behind. What the nature worshipper seeks in nature, the Three have already found, yet they return to nature so that not only they, but all creatures may adore the source of all joy.

One section of Walter Benjamin's (who I am apparently obligated to mention in every single essay, along with St. Francis and Spinoza) "Theses on History" explains a lot about this project. In thesis XI, he speaks of how "the corrupted concept of labor" goes along with, "as its logical complement, that nature which, as Dietzgen put it, 'is there gratis [for free].'" In this conception—developed through vulgarized Marxism, bourgeois ideology, and fascism—"Labor, as it is henceforth conceived, is tantamount to the exploitation of nature, which is contrasted to the exploitation of the proletariat with naïve self-satisfaction." In defence of the utopian aspirations of Fourier, what Benjamin argues for in its stead is a concept of labour which, "far from exploiting nature, is instead capable of delivering creations whose possibility slumbers in her womb." I believe there is a connection to be made between Benjamin's concept of labour here and his concept of the naming-language in "On Language as Such and the Language of Man," where he argues that the essential project of human language is to encapsulate the specific languages of things into names and then to convey these names to God. Humankind cannot take the creatures of the world for granted, as though they were merely to be used as signposts in a progression toward divinity. When we do so, we lapse into the all-too-modern idolization of progress-through-labour which Benjamin rightly calls corrupt. Rather, we must somehow take up the task of gathering all creatures together into divinity, both in our labour and in our speech, our ora et labora.

This project, which I would associate with the "Song of the Three" and with St. Francis's "Canticle of the Creatures," is as possible today as it ever was—which is to say, only possible by the grace of God, because it is an ethic of extremity. However, I would argue this is more possible than nature worship as described by the Wisdom poet, which strikes me as having become completely impossible. It may have been possible, at one time, to address natural creatures as pure and glorious and divine, looking to the traces of God which they express, rather than to their possibility of exploitation. Today, however, I think this approach would be wholly inauthentic, pretending that a nature in which human labour is obviously bound up is an untouched product of God, and therefore committing idolatry of the usual type. To do so would be motivated by what Adorno, in his "Theses Against Occultism," calls the panic of "a humanity whose control of nature as control of men far exceeds in horror anything men ever had to fear from nature." To react to this situation by attempting to regress into a prior epoch is no more permissible than to address the pomp of wealth which St. Basil describes as though it were of divine and not of human make. There is here no hope of finding divinity, only of sharing it.

There is another side to what I have been saying, which applies not to "nature worship" but to "worship" unmodified. The gradual foreclosure of nature worship might be understood as what Benjamin, in "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction", calls the death of "aura." Aura he defines as "the unique phenomenon of distance" which is most easily felt in the case of natural objects, such as when, "while resting on a summer afternoon, you follow with your eyes a mountain range on the horizon or a branch which casts its shadow over you." The aura of a natural object gives it a sense of divine creation, of having been put in place by greater-than-human forces. The phenomenon of capitalism has been, through the reproduction and dissemination of images and the unlimited exploitation of labour, "to pry an object from its shell, to destroy its aura." It is this decay of aura which is essentially why I think nature worship of the kind described in the Book of Wisdom is no longer possible, and like Benjamin, I believe not in attempting to restore aura or in pretending it has not decayed, but rather, in reckoning with the reality of its absence.

But Benjamin's concept of aura is primarily used not for natural objects but cultural ones, works of art. He specifically refers to religious objects as relying on aura, being prized for their "cult value" rather than their "exhibition value." As examples of the former type, he mentions how "certain statues of gods are accessible only to the priest in the cella; certain Madonnas remain covered nearly all year round; certain sculptures on medieval cathedrals are invisible to the spectator on ground level." All in all, for these objects, "what mattered was their existence, not their being on view." As such, it was possible to address these objects, like natural objects, as representing a divine rather than a human order—especially because the cause of their existence, though human, really was driven by a yearning for God. However, this is not the mode of perception we use today: "the quantitative shift between [cult value and exhibition value] turned into a qualitative transformation of its nature." All the old sacred objects of worship are on exhibit for us now, imaged and recorded and disseminated, and to pretend that they aren't is no less anachronistic than to pretend nature worship is still viable.

The most obvious offenders in this regard, I would argue, are tradcath Little Dark Age edits and other such things. I'm going to confess to something embarrassing here, which is that, for the couple years these have been around, I have always on some level found them viscerally compelling. They aren't intellectually compelling, but they have a real fetishistic, quasi-pornographic power to them. They are, of course, profoundly exhibitionist, based on rapid-fire decontextualized anauratic exposure. Yet they wear the history of religious aura like a suit of skin, as though this exact phenomenon was not directly responsible for the erosion of what it fetishizes. This paradox is obvious and actually exhilarating, but it is exhilarating in the same way that Walter Benjamin describes the fascist aestheticization of war: "[humanity's] self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order." The fruits of dwelling in this insuperable paradox—one which (unlike divine mysteries) is based not in love but in alienation, fetish, and the abandonment of reason—are only a kind of self-destruction which obliterate the capacity for divine intuition. This mode of exposure becomes a pleasant but malignant tumour on the body of religion. Divinity is associated with a stream of images which occlude the invisible face of God and consequently bar what is pictured from being reconciled with God. I suspect that, for the same reasons, [REDACTED] is a fascist development in transness, but that's a hot take for another day. This is all the more tragic because what is pictured is often, though not always, beautiful and worthy of appreciation. For example, I find this image of Christ I saw in one of the linked videos to be utterly stunning.

Earlier this year I was reading a book my liberal Catholic grandmother wanted me to read to better understand her views, The Universal Christ by Richard Rohr. One of the theses of the book is that Christ, the divine person of the Son, has in fact been incarnated three times: first as Creation, second as Jesus of Nazareth, and third as the Church. I bristled under this claim, first off because I am not a pantheist and therefore do not believe that Creation is God. But as I've thought about it more, I've realized that I have other reasons for objecting, and that the foremost of these is that my experience of Creation and the Church is nothing like my experience of God. I can appreciate that all created things draw their being from God, but they are not God, and in fact, are often mingled with enough of the evil of human hands that to call them God would be idolatrous self-worship. The exact same thing can be said about the Church, and all religious practices which derive from the divine intuition: they are in some sense made by God, that is true, but they are also made by human beings and suffer from human failings. Things like Little Dark Age tradcath edits, or alternatively, the hideous thought that Mount Everest is covered in human trash due to sightseers seeking its allegedly extreme and untouched nature, really hammer home why I feel that way. Neither the Church nor Creation, received in the spirit of this age, are anything like God at all. And as portrayed in the discourse of certain Christians who would exploit the terms of their religion for worldly gain, neither is Jesus of Nazareth. Not even love is like God when that equivalence is used, as it sometimes is, for a weapon.

But in the end, none of this matters. "Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity" Ecclesiastes 1:2. As I have said, the real task is no different than it was before, and while I still don't entirely agree with Richard Rohr, I think he has the task in mind. Rohr is a Catholic, and so believes in the Incarnation: that God has dwelt fully in the world in human flesh, a glory so incomprehensible that "if these [human beings] would keep silent, the very stones would immediately cry out" Luke 19:11. Even if Creation is not God, Rohr is bound by his faith to attest that Creation is at a minimum the world in which God deigns to dwell even today, as the presence of the Spirit, and that in the Spirit of God this Creation is received in unfathomable perfection. And even if the Church is not God, Rohr is bound by his faith to attest that, just as God has dwelt in Creation in the flesh, he has also dwelt in the Church in the flesh through the Eucharist, and that the Church is saturated with and received by the Holy Spirit. And while I am not a Roman Catholic and do not desire to become one, there is plenty to admire in this view, because it esteems all things, gathers them up in God, and looks for the Church at the heart of the Church and the Creation that slumbers in Creation. "And, having made peace through the blood of his cross, by him to reconcile all things unto himself; by him, I say, whether they be things in earth, or things in heaven" Colossians 1:20. "And he that sat upon the throne said, Behold, I make all things new. And he said unto me, Write: for these words are true and faithful" Revelation 21:5.

There is a practice, most common in the Eastern Church, to pray ad orientem, toward the East, looking toward the rising of the Light of the world whether it is night or day. That is what I took the opportunity to do as the sun rose over Montréal, reading from prayers on my phone—let no one say I yearn too highly for aura. When I began, the sun had not yet risen, but there was a moment midway through when all of a sudden I was practically blinded. The grass turned gold, the air was the colour of honey, and I could not look forward or my eyes would have burnt out; even looking down, I had to kneel to take myself out of the line of the light. This is not, and cannot be, the Light of the world, whose eyes are ten thousand times brighter than the sun. Nor was the fact that I was praying divine, because divinity is none of the things that can be said or the concepts that can be expressed. But coincidentally, I was at this time next to a church, in the United Church of Canada, whose creed begins, "We are not alone, / we live in God's world." The sun does not shine for mortal flesh alone, and we have spoken to God unawares. So saith the Holy of Holies, the Song of Songs, from the first chapter, beginning in the fifth verse:

Dark, I am dark and desirable,
O daughters of Yerushalayim;
like the tents of Qedar,
like the curtains of Shelomo.
Do not look at me, that I am darkened,
that the sun has glared on me;
my mother’s sons were incensed with me,
they set me as a keeper of the vineyards.
My own vineyard I have not kept.

As for the sun itself—my partner and my friend, "messor lo frate Sole, / lo qual è iorno, et allumini noi per lui" ("Sir Brother Sun, who brings the day, through whom You illuminate us," from Laudes creaturarum)—I have nothing better to say that what Kafka said.

"Leopards break into the temple and drink all the sacrificial vessels dry; it keeps happening; in the end, it can be calculated in advance and is incorporated into the ritual."

"Please come and join us."