Why Being Rather Than Nothingness? Part XII

Dr Martin continues his series on time and reality, discussing how "all the awful things now impacting our lives will be swallowed up by time."

From Crisis

By Regis Martin, STD

Ultimately, all the awful things now impacting our lives will be swallowed up by time. We can instead set our minds on God, Whom time cannot mar.

Part XII in a series.

There are no accidents with God. No serendipities will fall from the sky today without a wise and all-knowing Providence willing their descent. However sudden or unforeseen their appearance, however much they may delight or dismay the earthbound creature, it is by divine design alone that God allows us to hear every bell and whistle from above. Has He not already counted the hairs on our heads?

Next time you find yourself blindsided by an unexpected event, therefore, do not call it chance, as if the universe were no more than a mindless swirl of atoms and your life an instance of cosmic caprice. See it, rather, as a privileged moment, unfolding in a world which did not make itself, while at the same time manifesting the hidden choreography of the God who did make it, having fashioned it all out of nothing and choosing from moment to moment to hold it all in being above a bottomless abyss.   

So, what is the obvious inference here, the thing that fairly leaps right off the page, hitting between the eyes even the most obdurate atheist? It is the fact that none of us has the capacity to self-generate, to draw being out of nothingness. We are the poorest and most destitute of all God’s creatures, not only because we are not the cause of our being, not equipped therefore to jumpstart the engine of our own existence, but that alone among all the animals we know this to be true, and the fact that we do may bring us straightaway to our knees in abject gratitude for a gift we could never ourselves give.  

In the circumstance, the illusion of the self-made man, the self-determined man, should be the easiest of all to puncture. Save possibly in the case of the unresisting solipsist, for whom the self-centered self is the only self on the planet, all other selves existing only as extensions of his own ego and appetite. For the sane among us, however, from the moment we first experience the self, we necessarily realize that we did not make that self but that it was instead given to us, freely vouchsafed from the first instant of our being. We are, each of us, like a word spoken by Another, by the Absolute Other, who holds the whole alphabet of being in His hands and whose own being is that of pure self-giving love.  

Why else, then, did God make a world, filling it with impossible people like ourselves, if not to watch it dance? Unlike that awful Hindu god Shiva, determined on dancing it to death, the only constant in whose life being the pleasure wrought by watching it all implode.  

Anatole France was surely right when he pronounced chance as “only the pseudonym God uses when he doesn’t want to sign his name.”

Nicely put, too.  It ought to become a habit, therefore, as Luigi Giussani urges, “to perceive in all things—from the boughs of the tree to the hairs of the person you love—the presence of the Mystery that became a man in flesh and blood. …Getting used to seeing this in everything,” he concludes, “is a history that God allowed you to begin.”

It might not be a bad idea, in other words, to try and get accustomed to giving God permission to work His magic in our lives, permission to send out His epiphany rays in order for us to see actual glints of His glory amid the grime and the grit. How else are we to glimpse the face of God, the Creator and Sustainer of all that is, unless we cultivate a spirit of attentiveness to signs of His presence in the world He created?

To be sure, He will send them out anyway, that being the very nature and logic of love, which is to remain always and everywhere diffusive of itself, radiating out into the universe of all that is not love, in order that it thereby be made lovable. But such an added blessing it becomes when we choose to join our love to His and, thus, to share in the superabundance of God’s own life, watching it unfold day by day. Knowing that, as Hopkins puts it in a lovely little lyric that reads like a prayer: “Thee God I come from, to thee go / All day long I like fountain flow / From thy hand out, swayed about / mote-like in thy mighty glow.”

How unwelcome can that possibly be? To behold the things that are, yet need not be, acknowledging at every turn a world so “charged,” as Hopkins exultantly puts it, “with the grandeur of God,” that it will constantly and everywhere “flame out, like shining from shook foil”? To see—indeed, to savor—the sheer artistry of God, knowing that in each particular thing there “lives the dearest freshness deep down things”? Call it a Marian comprehension of being, if you like, which means it always remains open and receptive, childlike in expectancy before whatever blessing God wishes to bestow upon us, knowing in advance that it bears the stamp of His approval.    

To see life, in other words, not as mere cosmic chance but as divine dance; and to learn all the steps along the way. The Lord of the Dance will be glad, I’m sure, to show us the steps. In fact, He longs to perform them with us, as together we concert our steps with His own in perfect harmony before our common Father in Heaven. How beautiful and evocative an image Hopkins has given us in describing the scene: “For Christ plays in ten thousand places, / Lovely in eyes and lovely in limbs not his; / To the Father through the features of men’s faces.”

In a marvelous little book written by the late Thomas Howard—one of those “drop everything books” I make my students read every semester—the notion is given emblematic expression in the title chosen for it: Chance or the Dance? What does that mean? It means that you and I are either the chance result of so many aimless atomic collisions or there is an actual order and pattern—call it dance—which is both elegant and efficient, designed by Someone orchestrating the whole affair. “Is it chance / or dance / moves the world?” he asks in the frontpiece of the book, quoting the poet Eugene Warren. “Is the world / blind and dumb / or bloom, festal / A vain jest, / or holy feast?”   

Professor Howard is in no doubt where the truth of the matter lies. Meanwhile, the modern world has tried mightily to disconnect us from the rhythms and rigors of the dance, seeking at every turn to rob us of all that is truly human, which is the saving knowledge that things are not random, not chaotic. “They are, finally, glorious, and the diagram of this glory appears everywhere and on all levels.” We are not to imagine ourselves, “grinding tediously toward entropy, but dancing toward the Dance.”

And thanks to a wise Creator, all creation is invited to join. Not ourselves only but, as Howard will insist, “the stars and acorns and angels—all operating in our different modes under the sovereignty of the whole pattern…all moving solemnly and joyously in a measure, finding our true freedom in the steps appointed to us…”

We must, by all means, endeavor to resist the gravitational pull of this grim and awful age. Tom Howard certainly did, his whole life having been an ardent and unremitting defense of what he—in the tradition of Edmund Burke and T.S. Eliot and Russell Kirk—was wont to call “the permanent things.” I like to think that even now, having at last learned to move in a measure both solemn and joyous, he has gone to a place where he may intercede for those of us still learning the steps. It is a consoling thought. No less consoling, it seems to me, is to think that we, too, may someday inhabit those same precincts of glory and felicity.  

“We shall not cease from exploration,” writes T.S. Eliot in the final section of Four Quartets, containing some of the finest and most moving lines of poetry ever written by a modern poet. “And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time…

Quick now, here, now, always,
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well 
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
And the fire and the rose are one.