Output

We spend our lives thinking that the purpose of life is what we put out of ourselves. Our “output.”

Think about this for a moment. From an early age, we’re expected to produce. We produce homework. We produce cooperation. Later, we produce work, in exchange for money. Or perhaps we produce work but don’t get paid for it. In any event, it’s always the results that count– what “comes out of us,” what we do, what can be of value to the outside world. If we can hang it on a wall, show it to others, drive it somewhere, hit nails with it, then it has value. 

Otherwise, forget about it.

What if the whole purpose of life is quite different? 

What if what has meaning in life, if what really matters, is what falls into us— the whole of the life we take into us, all the impressions? What if it’s what we form within us that matters, not what we form outside of ourselves?

Experiencing life from this perspective, thinking about it in this way, might produce a very different picture of what we are and how we do things. If I care about what is inwardly formed in me first, I take a different kind of responsibility. I attend to myself and what takes place in me. This is quite a different thing than attending to the external. It’s not that what happens externally isn’t important; it’s just that all of that comes after what forms internally. My impressions, in other words, don’t emerge from my life; my life emerges from my impressions.

Over the course of an entire life, I take in the whole universe I encounter. This is a unique universe, an idiotic universe, specific to me and the perspective I occupy. Yet from a certain point of view it is the supreme universe; I am the creator of this particular universe. No one else can create it; no one else could take responsibility for it. It exists only because I help make it so. And if I'm not responsible to it, if I don’t attend to it carefully, it can’t form in a proper way. Much of what takes place in it disappears into a darkness that goes both unexamined and unappreciated.

The idea of seeing this may seem like a stupid or unpopular one. It turns the world of things that I am so devoted to on its head, substituting a world of inward impressions which can’t be seen or fully expressed. This in turn may seem to imply a weird kind of futility; if we can’t touch it or see it, if it can’t be used in the way we expect the material things around us to be used, what good is it? We forget, perhaps, that the world of things is always driven first by the world of ideas; and we forget this constantly. So much so that ideas, the intellect, the ability to imagine is sometimes mocked. We forget that the world of things comes after the world of ideas, and that in fact everything we invent and do outside of ourselves arises from this mysterious creative darkness that we call being. If, that is, we call it anything at all, because we even forget that we have being or that it is the original force that creates the world in the first place.

I would submit to you that it is everything we take in that matters in life; that is the singular substance we take to the end of our lives with us, the sum total of everything we have been, everything we have experienced, everything we have encountered and pondered and sensed and felt and thought about. It is this wholeness of being made for something real; all of the material things outside of us are objectively temporary, but our Being is a whole thing more durable than the things that come and go throughout our lives, whether we produce them or someone else does.

This, in any event, is how it strikes me this evening from my hotel room in Hangzhou.

 May your heart be close to God, 
and God close to your heart.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

The Trojan Women

From the moment that The Trojan Women, directed by Andrei Serban at La Mama, begins with the sounds of horns echoing from the foyer outside the theater—where the audience is initially gathered—into the hidden, darkened womb of the performance space itself, one realizes one is not in our own time any more.  

A crack into something ancient, something forgotten, has been opened. A memory is awakened: memory of what, we cannot be quite certain; and perhaps this is the point of genius around which this whole production has been organized. Its center of gravity doesn’t live in today or even in the world of Troy; it’s in our own hearts, and in what it means to be a human being.

Like the rest of the audience, I stood mesmerized as the Greek warriors, their canes of bamboo representing spears, penetrated the audience in the foyer in a phalanx, singing and chanting in Greek. From that instant on, the performance is deeply personal; one isn’t in New York or America. 

One is in Troy. Troy turns out to be all of us, everywhere, in all time.

The experience of the chanting, the pageantry, the presence of ethnic nationals from multiple countries including Kosovo, Cambodia and Guatemala, transcends any presumptions of a politically correct gesture to deliver a “world” performance. The multiple ethnicities and traditional textiles and garments, the presence of Asian and South American instruments and faces, blend together seamlessly. The drama isn’t just in the flesh and the blood, but already—from the start—in the bones of the matter.  Genuine.

Yet even at the start the marrow is also present. Andrei and his cast have tapped into something primeval here, something that reminded me of our trip to Lascaux earlier this year. Everything about the performance is drawn from roots that lie deep inside the soul: the textiles, the faces. The pageantry, the singing, the chanting, the lamentation of the women. 

This is how we used to be, the undertones reverberate: 

We cared.

We cared together.

My wife performed in this piece over 30 years ago when it was in its original form. Andrei remarked after the performance that back then, it was about Vietnam; now, it’s about #metoo. 

Yes, there is no doubt it was, and is, about those things, and in important ways. Perhaps the conceit of modern times, and the #metoo movement, however, is that our times can somehow own this issue —in the same way that we think we own everything else in our world.  The play reminds us that it has been forever there, and in timelessly important ways. There’s no denying the intelligence and emotional vitality that saturates the performance with this impression. Men have been involved in abusive relationships with the opposite sex for as long, it’s certain, as they have been involved with war… men, it seems, are perpetually bent on destruction. Hell is a town we build in our own shop and carry on our own shoulders. 

It’s all there. Yet the Trojan Women has more than enough muscle in it to rise beyond the obvious and do some heavy lifting that crosses over from the physical to the metaphysical. The play is also about mysteries that can’t be expressed with words. The fact that the whole performance is in Greek adds a powerful impetus. One’s ordinary intellectual mind has no choice but to take a back seat to events; it’s assigned a job it rarely undertakes in modern "entertainment.” It has to think. Without direct access to the words one expected to explain everything, one finds oneself experiencing everything through one's sensation – the physical presence, the movements of the actors, vibrations of the sounds—and one’s feelings.

It turns out, surprisingly, that what’s taking place becomes more important without the interference of one’s ordinary mind. Its meanings are wordlessly magnified. One finds oneself using parts to sense and to hear and to see; and one discovers, surprisingly, that these parts not only have powerful intellects of their own (whoever knew that?) but that they can in their own ways know even more than the ordinary intellectual mind, with all its glib answers, could ever know. 

Perhaps that sounds immaterial to the progress of the play; and perhaps you want me to tell you all about what happens, and how great the actors were or weren't. (They were.) But in a certain sense that’s hardly necessary. We already know that Troy was sacked, and the women were raped, murdered, or enslaved. That happens here, as well; but the way that the piece taps into our sense and feeling of ourselves brings home the fact that we’re all in Troy. It was there before we humans built it, and it’s still here in us now. 

Invasion, struggle, lamentation, enslavement: is this our legacy? Is this all we have to offer one another? 

The opening processional ends. Time surrenders itself. We enter the darkness: the womb of the theater, in which… perhaps… something that physically, viscerally speaks to this can be found. The audience is in a herd, standing as a crowd that witnesses. We’re penetrated by the warriors with their spears, shuffling, circulating, shoving us aside to make way for events. 

Cassandra appears, waving flames of warning. We are going to destroy one another.

But of course, no one is listening. Even the audience, presumably the wiser due to our exalted status as observers ex machina, can’t understand: her language, a language of prophecy and doom, is foreign to us. Perhaps, like the Greeks, even if we could understand her, we wouldn’t want to. We believe too much in destinies and damnations to allow them any alternative. 

The action unfolds, with the ritual washing and sacrifice of children, the chilling ululation of the mourners, the caging and humiliation of Helen—stripped and raped by a chimeric man-bear in the same way that Greek soldiers will soon strip and rape those selfsame females who persecute her. Over and over again, the audience, still standing, is pushed aside as the cages circulate. We are in the middle of it. 

Like so many have done through so many periods of history when atrocities are perpetrated,

We do nothing.

The doorway to something more ancient that our memories, already cracked, slowly yawns open wider into the abyss of irony and tragedy. We used to lament the dead, loudly, with the cries and anguish of both our human and our animal parts. We used to do it together, as a community. 

In fact, everything was done as a community: war, death, mourning. There were no political divisions here: in the struggle between tragedy and humanity, a stake used to be driven in the ground around which all could gather. Lamps were lit; even the children participated. Corpses were stretched out in simple shrouds, death allowed its place.

How very different than today. How very, very different.

   I wish I could say there were some answers here, but there aren’t. What there are are questions, reawakened, as though from some vast slumber of the soul. Where did we come from? Who are we? Where are we going to?

I left this piece emotionally moved, touched by something deeper than ordinary life. In my own investigations of meaning, the central question seems to revolve around what it means to be human. This piece of theater is a direct practical investigation of that question, accessible to everyone. 

There’s a moment, a powerful moment, at the end of the play after the murders are complete and death has had its way not just with the living victims but even with the corpses, where the women are bullied and herded as animals in chains.

 Suddenly the processional of anguish and confrontation stops. 

The herd of women, facing outwards in an almost—but not quite, because a quiet dignity suffuses it— pathetic circle, look directly into the eyes of their captors, the men, and a long moment of silence ensues.

They have to see each other. They must see each other—

as human beings.

In the face of death, disaster, and tragedy, a new respect is born here. What will come of it is unclear; but the ground floor of it is that there is no escaping the struggle and the suffering of our humanity. There’s a symbolic moment at the very end, perfectly executed, that binds the whole cast together in that action as they enter the hold of the ship that will take them away from Troy.

Let me be clear enough: one doesn’t like this play. It is a piece of genius. It’s brilliant. It’s disturbing, exhilarating, inspiring. But it isn’t there for one to like. 

To love, perhaps; but like real love, to be earned, one has to be willing to suffer the pain it inflicts.

For myself, I loved it. It’s a living thing that should be shown again, 

and again, 

and again.

May your heart be close to God, 

and God close to your heart.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

A Broken Heart, Part VII: A Coda on Suffering

Neal and my mother

October 2019

Vis a vis the task of pondering I set myself on this China trip—which has an organic quality that is developing its own independent line of inquiry, not the one I assigned to it—I  come to a juncture where the intersection between judgment and suffering becomes a question. 

Not, mind you, the preconceived notion of suffering as a torture inflicted by God for sin, but suffering as a voluntarily shouldered burden.

This is the way in which Gurdjieff conceived of it: an inherent property of creation which we have not only an ability but a responsibility to shoulder. Our discrimination and any action of judgment that ensues ought, in other words, to begin from this premise; without it, nothing objective can be obtained. If there is justice, it begins with an understanding of this suffering. If there’s compassion, it equally begins from this instant of suffering. It becomes, in essence, the point of creation, because anything that proceeds—any action, any feeling, any attitude or choice—without incorporating this instant that inwardly forms the seed of compassion necessary for each moment fails to begin its life within creation with the most essential information needed in the action of discrimination.

Christ’s two great commandments are adages that form their center around this question. The essential Love he says lies at the heart of the two commandments is an action of compassion; and that compassion is informed by sorrow. Love formed from the organic, compassionate receiving of Sorrow can never be formed in a wrong way: it’s selfless, because the particles of its substance are direct emanations from God, not blended with any other substances. There is no admixture.

Students of Beelzebub’s Tales will recall that what “broke” the cosmos was the admixture of the particles of God’s Being with other re-concentrated particles of God’s Essence, which, once they re-entered Heaven, began to alter the character of Heaven itself and inevitably dissipate it. It was the purity of God’s Being that was affected; and hence the need to separate out all the results of creation into a subsidiary place of residence called Purgatory, where all the souls created by God are forever segregated from His Being. 

The mystery of the veil between God and creation, a veil which lawfully can never be penetrated (see Ibn al Arabia’s Bezels) is a result of this necessary separation. 

The privilege and obligation of creation is to receive the eternal sorrow that arises because of this gulf between God and His own creation; God loses an essential part of His very Being in order to create the world, and it can never be regained. 

This action is reflected in all of the subsidiary actions of creation; we experience a piece of it in parenthood, as we let go of ourselves and what we are on behalf of our children. (Long subject that deserves a book of its own, I cannot go into it here.)

The point is that experiencing this sorrow, if it is done deeply enough, creates an essential compassion that unerringly points the soul in the direction of right action, simply because its impulses then arise from and develop in a direction formed by the pure and unmixed particles of God’s own Being.

This is why intentional suffering forms the core practice needed for spiritual development.

We cannot rightly judge unless we first suffer.

We cannot rightly discriminate unless we first suffer.

Without first suffering, in this instant, our impulses towards others will always be selfish and unworthy.

Look around carefully and see the world. Do you see how this is? 

I need to see it every day, and suffer myself in this condition, as well as the suffering of all others. We don’t suffer alone, we suffer together, on behalf of all creation. And it is this suffering—this action that begins with a broken heart—from which all impulses and action ought to arise.

May your heart be close to God, 
and God close to your heart.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

A Broken Heart, Part VI: The Broken Heart Itself

The Apocalypse Tapestry

Photograph by the author

To begin to live deeply enough to be truly human will break one’s heart.

This happens when one senses the whole of life, and everything it is. This sensation, which ought to be a natural and inherent one in every human being, is almost entirely atrophied in man.

Gurdjieff’s system of inward development was meant, among other things, to re-awaken this capacity in man. The re-concentration of the particles of God, the Sorrow of His Endlessness, in man, has the inevitable and entirely objective result of awakening this capacity. Yet even within the Gurdjieff work itself this subject is poorly understood and rarely spoken of, simply because folk don’t ever develop the capacity for it. One could perhaps even become a Superman and fail to understand this one most essential point. 

That’s the danger of being a Superman.

There’s no blame to be assigned here. The tendency in every spiritual work is to indulge in theory and philosophy, rather than coming to terms with the simple, ground-floor activity of Being, which is where the concentration of Divine Love and Wisdom can take place. 

How many times have I said it? Until it becomes boring, perhaps, yet one cannot say it too much: only through the initial impulse of organic sensation can this capacity be re-acquired and developed. Even then, many years of hard inner work lie ahead. One has to be willing to suffer; and no one wants to suffer. Human beings want satori, we want nirvana, we want liberation: but no one wants suffering except as a temporary condition to be tolerated on the way to these wonderful inner places collectively described as “freedom.”

The medieval Christian mystics—who had, to be sure, their own flaws and misunderstandings, including some obsessively myopic perspectives—at least knew that suffering lies at the core of the human experience. Gurdjieff wholeheartedly resurrected this altogether unpopular idea in Beelzebub’s Tales, starting with the Buddha’s teaching of intentional suffering. 

Yet perhaps even we self-inflected, over-wise Gurdjieffians overlook the fact that real intention comes from God alone; and that intentional suffering, to the extent that we experience it (only possible, remember, through Grace alone) belongs to God and is an experience not of our, but of God’s, Being.

This idea of intentional suffering, which ought to be a daily practice, not a theory, brings us closer to the intimacy with which we ought to receive this infinitely precious material substance called life, which flows into us from the deepest part of Being. 

Life ought to be concentrated, not dissipated—and yet we dissipate. If we truly receive life—if we receive it organically, if we receive it in all its capacity for conscience (the collective and instantaneous sensing of all that is) then what we receive is suffering, which is the essence of creation.

One instant of this sensation carries more inner value than any other kind of impression; than any thousand other kinds of impressions, because it is an indelible impression of Truth, which cannot be brokered. Truth breaks the heart; and if there is one instant in all of mankind’s spiritual history that encapsulates the absolute essence of this Truth, it’s Christ’s crucifixion. The image of that moment summarizes not just the human condition, but the condition of creation itself, with all of its Glory, its courage, and its contradictions: suffering, tolerance, sacrifice, and Love, the material physical, and the Divine, all together in one instant.

The symbolic value of Christ’s crucifixion, in other words, transcends Christianity itself, which is nothing more than a reflection of Truth. Christ’s life and action were of God, not of man; and although we filter all of it through this vehicle called Christianity (just as other teachings have been filtered through their own material forms) the objective Truth of it belongs to God and transcends the form.

In any event, I think to myself here not of Christianity and its form, but of suffering and its Truth. Our hearts (our feeling capacities) are the most sensitive and finely tuned of our perceptive faculties; and without the finer kinds of information that can—nay, must— flow into us through an open action of them,  we do not and cannot learn what we must about life and the fundamentally compassionate work it calls us to. 

We’re called to discover two things: our own selfishness, and the fundamentally compassionate alternative to that, which does not belong to us but to God’s Being. 

In these two discoveries we’re given the opportunity, should we be willing to suffer it, to participate “with Christ” in the living action of Being which joins the Divine Will with the material world.

Why this is and must forever be an action composed of intense spiritual suffering is perhaps too complex to explain; only the wordless action of Being explains it, and does so in mystery.

Yet one thing is certain: that wordless action begins in suffering. It begins with a broken heart, in a broken universe that only God’s Love can heal.

The final installment of this seven part series publishes on Dec. 12.

May your heart be close to God, 
and God close to your heart.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

A Broken Heart, Part V: Attractive Irritations

Yantai, China

I had to put this essay aside briefly while I landed in Wuhan and navigated Chinese immigration and customs; while I was trotting through immigration, it occurred to me, in the context of this discussion with myself, that we don’t really understand what objectivity is.

The parts in us that discuss objectivity are not objective.

Let me explain that a bit. Objectivity exists naturally within the presence of Grace; it doesn’t exist naturally within my own presence except insofar as Grace suffuses it. It is, in other words, a property of the Divine Inflow; and if we think about this for a moment, of course that becomes quite obvious. Divine Properties emanate from Divine sources, not from me. The instant I become confused about that all is done for.

Yet it’s common to become confused about this and “mix” objectivity—that is, my flawed and ego-driven concept of it—with the events of life. This is how I pose as an authority and develop the attractive irritations that I invest in so often in my ordinary Being. Attractive irritations, which are all too commonplace—they orchestrate most of the events in the average inner day—, always rely on a secret presumption that I occupy an objective point of view. Study them for a while and you’ll see this more clearly.

The question remains; why do we insist on pretending we, from ourselves, know anything about objectivity when it’s so clear it emanates from a higher level? We spend our lives investing in an ersatz objectivity which has nothing to do with real objectivity; and even if we’re infused on a daily basis with the influence of Grace and its consequent Divine Objectivity, we still insist on pretending we know what it means to be objective. This indicates that the parts of ourselves that are selfish are like untrained, impulsive dogs that do whatever they like regardless of the master’s commands; and perhaps this sheds some new light on exactly what Gurdjieff meant when he said one should wish not to die like a dog.

The better parts of ourselves, disturbingly, die like a dog every time we appropriate an authority we don’t actually have; and if we attune our seeing to an unselfish place according to the influence of a higher nature, we at once begin to see that death of dogs in a thousand tiny instances in life. It calls into question everything that we are and all that we do.

Yet we have no right to condemn that action; only to allow it to engender remorse. And this is the dilemma, because condemnation is ingrained into the deepest texture of our natural (ordinary) selves.

Here we come to the crux of the issue of why the medieval mystics hammered so hard on their anvils of eternal damnation: they want it to be about punishment.In this way we see how a flawed interpretation and experience (by flawed I mean limited) of the Divine gives birth to a vision of punitive character which belongs all to clearly not to God, but to man. There is a wish to condemn; and yet that wish stands in irrevocable contradiction to the natural impulse of God’s Divine Grace. 

Love does not care how we are. It simply cares. The instant that love cedes its territory to selectivity, it is no longer Divine. And it’s this experience of simply caring that can flow into us in its purest form, quite simply and quietly. 

The overwhelming experience of Divine ecstasy may eclipse such experience in its sheer intensity; yet it’s the day-to-day relationship between the human and Divine, bereft of spectacle, that feeds being at its root; and if we’re not fed from the root, we’re not nourished. 

Part VI of this seven part series publishes on Dec. 9.

May your heart be close to God, 
and God close to your heart.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

A Broken Heart, Part IV: Left Behind

Detail from The Apocalypse Tapestry

Photograph by the author

To be eternally damned, which is the overarching theme of evil among the medieval Christian mystics such as St. Catherine, fits well with Church doctrine and dogma. Yet the inner mystical traditional of the Catholic Church has always known, in its heart of hearts, that this idea is what Gurdjieff would have called formatory—constructed from an extraordinarily complex, but otherwise decidedly superficial understanding of the matter. The deepest experience of  Divine Love and Wisdom reveals at once—in a single instant— that no such thing could ever be possible. God’s capacity for mercy & forgiveness is infinite.

Yet souls do get left behind, trapped in a bell jar of their own sin: a closed system where remorse does not—cannot—act. Fire, to be present, needs three things: a spark to light it (an increase in heat from outside the system), matter to burn and air (oxygen) to help it. A closed system, a jar into which no air can penetrate, cannot ignite.

What is this “spiritual air,” this catalytic quality that can begin to ignite the action of remorse? It is, quite simply, my capacity for seeing, which must become unselfish.

Now, one rarely, if ever, hears a discussion about inner seeing which discusses its quality. The presumption, perhaps, is that we either see—or we don’t. Yet this isn’t the case at all. Seeing itself can be either selfish or unselfish; and unless we’re in alignment with the action of Grace (help) even our seeing is selfish.

Think about this carefully for yourself in regard to your own work. 

What do I see for? 
Why do I see? 
How do I see?

If seeing is all done on my own behalf, so that “I’ll be better,” I’ll improve; if seeing is about me and how I am, already it violates Gurdjieff’s premise of pure and impure emotions. (See Gurdjieff’s seminal essay The Meaning of Life.) I’m not objective; my seeing begins tainted with the idea that I have a right to judge myself. 

There’s a very subtle and vital difference between the self-judgment of selfish seeing and the objectively discriminatory judgment of remorse of conscience which is conferred only by the action of higher energies; the difference ought to be clear, and if it isn’t, there’s a problem. 

This concept of unselfish seeing, of an objective inward vision of myself, can become an evolving focus within me. I need to understand how to see on behalf not of myself, but of God; and indeed, as those familiar with his methods know, Michel de Salzmann oft emphasized this idea of seeing on behalf not of myself, but the Lord. This is, to be sure, a higher level of impressions that what’s usually available to me; yet the good news is that help for this kind of work is sent. This is what God’s Grace and Mercy may inwardly engender: the capacity for an unselfish seeing.

Part V of this seven part series publishes on Dec. 6.

An additional note to readers:

...New installments from The Inherent Wave of Being— A Treatise on Metaphysical Humanism will begin Jan. 2020. 

If you haven't read the original series of posts, it published between September and November 2018.

May your heart be close to God, 
and God close to your heart.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

A Broken Heart, Part III: The Concentration of Desire

So we see in the flawed doctrine of eternal damnation, which erroneously turns damnation into a thing of sorts—a physical place in which crude tortures take place—a rough approximation, in physical terms, of an actual metaphysical state of non-refinement, in which the particles of God’s Being, although collected through the impressions of Being, never become distilled into a concentration of finer substances. My self-will is what prevents this; in the stubbornly temporal (not eternal) ego-experience of life and Being, even my suffering is about me and how I suffer. Gurdjieff’s emphasis on objectivity (read, non-judgment) bears close examination in relationship to this. When I sense inwardly and organically (conscious labor) and when I feel inwardly and organically (intentional suffering) these two faculties have a property of objectivity to them. They are already touched by the concentration of the Divine from within; and they lead the way towards a greater, more objective, understanding of Being through Grace; for insofar as “gold” (refined particles of Divine Being) is present, so more gold can be acquired. Gold begets gold; or, as was said in the Gospels, To he who hath shall much be given.Those who do not have are thrown into the fire; yet this expression is a bit off the mark, because what really happens is that the fire never acts on them. 

We can understand this, if we wish to, from the perspective of the enneagram. It’s a whole system; and yet it’s typical to become stuck on the right side of the diagram, in which an endless cycle of the forces of material desire and power trap us without developing the force needed to pass from fa to sol. To do that, the fire of remorse needs to be lit; only then does the dross of our ordinary sin begin to be burned off. In this action, our sin itself becomes more concentrated (lesser sins burn easily, but greater ones endure.) 

The more concentrated the remaining matter of our sin becomes within us, the greater anguish it causes; the greater the anguish, the greater the remorse. So one sees one needs one’s sin if the inner flame that spurs us towards the Lord is to become hotter, hot enough to concentrate our desire sufficiently. 

This concentration of desire is a principle theme for Hadewijch, Catherine, and others, and should not be discounted in the same way their prosecution of eternal damnation ought to be.

Part IV of this seven part series publishes on Dec. 3.

An additional note to readers:

...New installments from The Inherent Wave of Being— A Treatise on Metaphysical Humanism will begin Jan. 2020. 

If you haven't read the original series of posts, it published between September and November 2018.

May your heart be close to God, 
and God close to your heart.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

A Broken Heart, Part II: To Love Even The Devil Himself

Detail from The Apocalypse Tapestry, Angers

Photograph by the author

I touch here on, as I said before, subtle metaphysical mechanisms and philosophies that it could take many weeks or months—perhaps years— to sort through and discuss. Yet the ultimate point is that God is ultimately merciful, and loves all of His creation regardless of its nature. God loves the devil, who, as all other creatures, does His bidding. In this regard the devil cannot be blamed or judged for what he is, for he—like all the rest of creation—is of God. While we resist the devil, both with and without, we owe him that same non-judgmental love that God gives him. He, like the rest of Being, is our neighbor, and one of the finer points of Christ’s great command Thou shalt love thy neighbor is thyselfis that the devil is my neighbor too.

It may sound heretical to say one should love the devil; and yet the devil is always in me, for he is the personification of sin itself. In this regard I understand that I need to respect my sin: indeed, St. Catherine points it that it’s my lack—my sin—that spurs me, if and when I see it in an organic manner (my words, not hers), towards God. No other experience moves me in the direction of the Lord so much as remorse of conscience, which is an instinctive property of Being.

Or at least it ought to be. Yet such instincts are distinctly atrophied in me; it’s only a closer relationship with the molecular properties of the organism and their role in three-centered Being that can open my eyes in regard to this question. The whole purposeof three-centered Being is to open these parts of awareness so that remorse of conscience can be reborn and act within.

If I truly see and sense my sin—all of it, from the beginning—the anguish it produces becomes my friend and ally in my search for the refinement of Being. Nothing concentrates the particles of the Divine so effectively as remorse; if my Being is the crucible for this spiritual alchemy, then remorse is the fire, and my deeds the ore from which a more refined experience of the Lord can be distilled. In this sense I can love the devil, because without his temptation, and my consequent sin, there would be no anguish—no flame, no fire— from which to act.

In this way we begin to see, perhaps, that the flames and fires which the damned are presumed to spend eternity in are quite exactly this thing: my sins, collectively, without the action of remorse of conscience. If remorse does not arise in me, I live eternally, but I live within my sin, which exists cumulatively, durably, and undistilled. The action of remorse doesn’t begin; and the refinement of Being which proceeds from it never takes place. 

This should be contemplated carefully and often, because without an understanding of this my inner efforts are in vain. 

Part III of this seven part series publishes on Nov. 30.

May your heart be close to God, 
and God close to your heart.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.