SNC

Three Shepherds

“It is a book of webbing,” says Manjushri.

“Webs, and more webs,” says Avalokiteshvara.

I bounce my leg up and down and squirm a little on the hard wood chair. Manjushri sits to my left, and Avalokiteshvara to my right. They have been generous enough to pause the flow of time: the priest, at the chapel altar, remains seated with a pensive expression. In a moment he will rise to lead the Magnificat, but a moment is plenty of time for such mahasattvas as these.

“Well that is what I would say,” I say, “and I am of little understanding.”

The topic of discussion is the eleventh chapter of the book of Zechariah. The images stick with me, but I do not understand them: “And I will feed the flock of slaughter, even you, O poor of the flock”; “I will not feed you: that that dieth, let it die; and that that is to be cut off, let it be cut off; and let the rest eat every one the flesh of another.” I have read Zechariah before, more than once, and then it did not present a stumbling block for me. But here, removed from the context of the larger book, I have no concept of what lesson I am to take from this first lesson of Evensong.

“Tell us what you would say, shravaka,” says Majushri.

“I guess I just don’t feel it’s anything other than an a priori analytic exegetical opinion rather than a real synthetic engagement with the text.”

It’s apparent to me that this is not really a meaningful distinction for my awakened interlocutors.

“I guess I would put it like this. The words of the lesson are inerrant: not only the original words in the original manuscript in its original context, but these words, in this translation, in this context. They are inerrant because a perfectly sufficient explanation for why this series of words has appeared now in this context is, ‘in order to make this series of words appear now in this context,’ and this is such a sufficient explanation that it leaves no room for any other question of intentionality, of what these words are ‘meant to be,’ so there is nothing to do other than just to leave them be, as such in this moment which is already passing away. But this analysis does not satisfy me because the point of allowing the words to just be such as they are is to allow me to inhabit a world with them, to be affected by them and to affect them, so that I am caught up in their net and they in mine, and here I am not doing that.”

“How do you know you are not doing that?” says Majushri.

“I guess you might claim that my way of coinhering in a shared creation, or vessel or substance or Indra’s net or what have you, is in this case through incomprehension. Perhaps you may even see it as part of being a bodhisattva, my not having any interpretation of these words to offer. Perhaps that is the implication of the Lotus Sutra: you know better than I do. I guess I don’t even know what my question or my contention is anymore.”

The words of the lesson keep swirling in my head: “And I took my staff, even Beauty, and cut it asunder, that I might break my covenant which I had made with all the people”; ”Then I cut asunder mine other staff, even Bands, that I might break the brotherhood between Judah and Israel.”

“You don’t really want to talk about the Bible, do you,” says Avalokiteshvara. “You want to talk either about your friend or about bugs.”

“No man of reason could contest that,” I say.

The two bodhisattvas leave me in quiet for a moment. They already know what I have to say: about the webs in my room that I insist on not clearing away, both for the sake of the spiders and because they represent something unrepeatable, a product of the exact specific relationship a spider had to its silk glands and to my room and to other creatures and to its nerves and neurons and sense organs at a moment in time that is already passing away. About that, and about how language works the same way, in the way this person at this time navigates through the vast multiplanar expanses of punctuations and grammars and rising and falling intonations and vocabulary and speed and slowness and topics of varying interest or disinterest and conventions of etiquette and dialogue and even the specific patterns of spelling with typos and misspellings and variants of words. How it is impossible to listen to anyone speak for themself—or even not speak for themself, with how they integrate quotations and echoes of other people’s speech, which is part of speaking for oneself—without watching them weave a world in front of you in a hundred dimensions, a manifold cosmos. How I am sad for the same reason I am always sad in church, because of the requiems. It is nearly All Souls Day, and I continue to want my words and my netting to reach out through prayer to the webbed-soul of my dearest friend in Sheol, like the web of my eye reaches out to the webs on the ceiling of my room, but I am barred by the great divide that a requiem is not meant to be offered for anyone who did not die a Christian, or who died by suicide.

“Beauty is broken apart,” says Avalokiteshvara; “Bands is broken apart.”

“But I am not broken apart,” I say. “Well, maybe I am. But not in this sense. My webs still reach out to her webs, through ‘my’ own webs extending backward and forward in time. My prayer still reaches out to her. She is in me and nothing can cut me off from her. Or perhaps you mean that I am broken apart from the church, but that doesn’t seem right either, because I’m here right now, and even if this particular restriction is one I cannot abide by, I... well I guess it’s true that I cannot commit myself to either my desire to simply break it or my desire to simply abide by it wholeheartedly, and so my heart is divided. A spider’s heart is only meant to have one chamber.”

Today is Bible study, but tomorrow I have confession. I debate between two different models of sin. The first is that sin is hardheartedness, by which I mean it is a transgression against Love Exposure: you cannot bring yourself to really love the object to which your heart is set; you do love it, because you are involved with it, but you hate that you love it, and the love takes the preeminence. Confession here allows you to confess that you have loved it, that you have loved this sin, and to break out of the hard heart, which is the duty of the faith, the faith of absolute allegiance to Love Exposure. The other model is that sins consist of the third of the heavenly spirits who have come to become administers to death in this blasted fallen saha world, who give up the profuse generosity and love of the heavenly spirits toward one another in favour of preening over status and power by doing evil and by inflicting suffering. In that sense each of my sins is one of the innumerable angels that feast on the death that is in me and propagate it, as well as propagating what I have learned may be called “insect,” the use of the person’s thought and speech webbings to propagate vapidities and vanities and other nonsenses that hide the disembodied souls of Nephilim feasting on your soul. Confession here would be to cut through “insect” I of course have to specify, NOT bugs, which I adore and to recognize what is there, the sin-creatures swarming inside of you.

In either of these models sin is, as is apparent, a creature, which is a kind of heresy in the eyes of the Neoplatonic Christian tradition in which evil exists only conditionally on other creatures which can nowhere be found as possessing its own being or its own distinct self. But of course, I don’t believe anything possesses its own being or its own distinct self, and that love does not require this impossible standard of its objects, and certainly the love of God does not require it—and whatever God loves in this creation is a creature. So sin is, one way or another, a creature.

In any case, if sin is faithlessness to Love Exposure, then I have certainly sinned as regards the requiem masses: I have committed myself neither with my whole heart to my friend, because I have not entirely dismissed the rubrics but have allowed myself to become grieved and alienated by them, nor to the rubrics, which I hate but which I would not hate if I did not put some stock in them. But I cannot confess to the priest who imposes these rubrics to say, “I confess to having taken you seriously and also having hated what you have to say: I confess that I have loved what you have to say, because I have taken it seriously, and I will no longer hate that I have loved this, but will love it and also not take it seriously because I have to take my friend seriously.” Frankly I don’t even know if this is remotely coherent; he certainly would not understand it. Such confessions must be saved for God. But as for if sin is involvement with the devouring worms fallen from heaven, covered up by the veil of insect, what can I say? “I confess that this building is filled with evil dead Nephilim souls and that they are eating me and infecting me and making me want to kill myself and also for the building to burn down and it has made me want to leave here forever.” I think that would probably be even worse.

“Would that be skillful means?” I ask. “To sound completely insane?”

Avalokiteshvara clasps me into a hug. I find the mahasattva incredibly beautiful: they appear to me as a bronze statue, entirely androgynous despite their exposed chest, serene in countenance with half-closed eyes, sitting with one knee up and with one arm laid on their raised knee. It occurs to me that this is what I love about St. John as well, who is also depicted as strangely androgynous and filled with the confidence of a plenitude of holiness.

Manjushri says, “You cannot abandon the Bible or even this one lesson of the Bible because it is a web, and you are a lover of webbings.”

“I had thought,” I say, “for a while, that the authority I gave to the Bible was because the unparalleled love of God shone through in it. I had never thought I could give it the authority of absolute correctness of intention, such that each word was rightly intended. Perhaps that is part of it, but you are right; even where the light does not shine and does not find me, I love the words because all words are holy.”

All words? Even the vile tracts of monsters? Oh, or less extreme but far more intimately felt in this moment when it is so topical: the words of the rubric? Well yes, for the same reason as the Bible, because not even the worst of intentions can succeed in defining what it produces, even for a moment. The spider web is intended to kill, and many words are insect, filled with the swarming of the souls of murderous Nephilim. But the web is a manifold cosmos, and the words are a manifold cosmos, in what cannot be intended within them: the blind traversal of lineament to lineament, in the coursing of consequence through so many decisions as regards the use of this character or that or this word or that or this grammatical construction or that or this topic or that or this piece of thread or that empty space, so many decisions that all the grains of sand in the Ganges river cannot outnumber them.

Avalokiteshvara continues to hug me. I nuzzle my head against their chest like an idiot cat in search of oxytocin from the mahasattva. “Intention can be a wonderful thing,” I say to Manjushri, “sometimes. If someone intends love or compassion or sympathetic joy, that intention can be a light that finds me. I might even find such moments in the Bible. But of course most of this world is unintentional wonders, and even where intentional wonders exist, they exist alongside the unintentional and uninterpretable wonders, not simply ‘not interpreted until God tells us how to interpret them’ but ‘not pertaining to interpretation.’ That is what creation entails, this creation and the new creation, and surely also the model of the true hopes that spring from fidelity to love, mostly not hopes of by which something is purposed but hope that is simply such. Which I think is why it is so important to me to pray for her and so painful for me to feel that that prayer is exiled. It is not merely a matter of praying for good purposes, that those purposes and goods and articulable forms of love may apply to her; it is also the vast expanse of hopes I have for her which are simply, ‘That it be such,’ in an intarticulable way: merely such.”

That word shines for me with the sovereignty of God: the ‘such,’ to which one cannot make adhere the statement of ‘it is identical to this’ or ‘it is distinct from this,’ which one cannot comprehend by saying, ‘it is this way,’ ‘it is not this way,’ ‘it is both this way and not this way,’ ‘it is neither this way nor not this way.’ Skillful means is built upon that sovereignty, because if none of those statements can be made ultimate, one is free to pick up any of them as love and compassion and sympathetic joy demand—or delusion and craving and hatred, or insect, though I would rather not.

“Would you give me a flower?” I ask Avalokiteshvara. “I would feel better if you gave me a flower.” I think of the Flower Sermon that the Buddha gave, in which he lifted up a white flower without speaking a word. That would be enough, to see the way that the leaves unfurl and the veins spread through the tissues, its own web, shining with the light at Tabor, by which I am free, not compelled, to say, “Yes, it is this way; she is here, identical to this.”

Avalokiteshvara looks me in the eyes and smiles. At once, he and Manjushri are both gone, and time keeps running. But it does not run as it did before; we have gone back a bit, reliving something that happened just a second ago, the end of the First Lesson. The lector says, “his arm shall be clean dried up, and his right eye shall be utterly darkened.” I cannot say what it means: but there is in her arm something of the arm that was laid upon the knee, and there is in her right eye something of the half-closed eyelid of bronze. And there is, in the words, something of a flower.

“My soul doth magnify the Lord.”

I stand up and say, ”And my spirit hath rejoiced in God my saviour.”

“For he hath regarded the lowliness of his handmaiden.”