"Maris stella, illumina nos nosque itinerantes dirige."
(“Star of the Sea, shine upon us and guide us on our way!”)
Many see the world as a heap of "things".
Very few are able to see in every split second the Wonder and the Mystery of God's eternal (i.e., free from time and space) Creation of the world.
Still fewer under-stand that every so-called "thing" that exists came and comes originally from God's Infinite Love.
For millennia the Ancient Philosophers (long before being called "philosophers") had taught the Wonder (Plato still remembers the word), for millennia ecstatic Prophets and Shamans have lived in the Wonder...but then slowly something began to freeze. Names were forged: "things", "matter" were invented as spells to separate the experience from the Sacred ...and the humans put these idols where the Gods and the God should have stayed. The "golden calf" of the Bible has been maybe a little temptation, relatively easy to defeat, but this giant, colossal, golden calf stood and stands.
We see "things", "matter", instead of seeing the Wonder.
We don't see the infinite Bridges to the Truth ("bridge" could be acceptable as the translation of "symbol" , from sym-ballo, Greek for "throwing together", like the two halves of an object that has been divided with the purpose to use the pieces as tokens...but you know that, if you are a Reader of this blog).
We still call the Pope "Pontiff", but we don't usually remember why (Pontifex in Latin, from PONS + FACERE, bridge + to make).
We still call a rite "liturgy", but we don't know why (Attic Greek LEOS people + ergon, work: a public work).
Which "bridges" is the Pontiff supposed to build (or perhaps to reveal) ? Which "work" for the people are the Priests supposed to carry on ? Many don't even know how to ask such questions...
In an amazing subversion of the Tradition, the world is allowed to believe in itself as a "thing" and materialistic "philosophies" induce people into thinking that they ARE themselves mere "things". Death is no longer the inevitable passageway from the finite to the Revelation of the Infinite Truth, it has been transformed in mere loss. But "loss" of ... we don't know what, since birth itself is no longer understood as the absolute Miracle of the Donation of Life, it's just a "fact" (the third idol of the unholy trinity, with "matter" and "things").
Visionaries, Seers, Prophets have always voyaged back and forth in time and have always thought to the "facts" as to mere symbols, because "facts" could be foreseen, losing in this way any possible connection with a frozen world of "things" and "matter". So little "factual" the "materiality" of the world had always been considered, that the Seer had to be capable of raising "shields" in his spirit to avoid foreknowing what could have crushed his psyche.
What are we taught of all that today ? That the Wonder of the world is just a subject for "fantasy" movies ? Or worse... that "it's all psychopathology" ?
But, even if going back to the Path of the Vision can be difficult, still everyone can learn to look at the world and can learn to see the Miracle that the world and Life are, and everyone can remember that - despite all the catastrophes caused by the finitude of the finite and by evil in the hearts of the human beings - God is all in all and that every square inch of the Creation is full of Angels of meaning and that all the Wonders of the Creation hint to the Infinite Love of God, and that there are no dead "things" but only SYMBOLS to the Infinite Love. "Symbol": a symbol is the half token that is available to us and that can become whole by meeting its other half when we remember that the corresponding token of all that exists is the Infinite Love of God: a great mystery indeed, but visible in instants of spiritual enlightenment, when we come to taste Wisdom and we mysteriously but radiantly KNOW that the Infinite Compassion has opened the world to us all and has donated Life to us all.
Free from the chains of nihilism, once upon a time the Artists were able to convey this Wisdom in their symphonies that alchemically transformed the appearance of the unending dispersion of multiplicity into the Infinite Unity of Beauty and into a source of true enthusiasm (Greek: en theos, to be in God), and the images of the painters were able to deny any "thing", "matter", and "fact" and were open windows for the Sacred Light to touch our perception.
In the Light from High, astonished witness of the Wonder, Rembrandt portrayed himself all along his life in a long series of self-portraits. Have you ever seen his "Philosopher in meditation" ? Sitting in front of a window that allows the Light to flow on him, he is in a room from where a spiral flight of stairs winds up, while one closed door behind him reminds us that perhaps there is another precipitous flight of stairs that goes down. And an old Woman, Wisdom, kindles the fire.
The Vision that was in the heart-mind of the Artist-Shaman seems to have been submerged by the waves of darkness of the nihilist despair but it still here with us if we reject all the obscenities of nihilism: we can turn our back, like Rembrandt's Philosopher, to the door that leads downward, we can meditate the Sacred Knowledge that still radiates from the Scriptures and from the Sacred Art of all ages, and we can raise our eyes and "see the sky" ( Lev Tolstoy, War and Peace, the death of prince Andrej: Book I, Part III, XVI). We can see the world for the first time, now. We can see the Genesis and the Revelation, now. We, of all the beings of the world, we can be and we should be the most acutely aware of the Wonder of Life and of the Infinite Love of God !
The Seer comes and proclaims the law of the Infinite Love of God, let's stop our obscene dance around the golden calf of "things", "matter", "facts".
Yes, all that sounds difficult, after centuries of darkness: it's sad to think about that: Pascal looks at the immensity of the cosmos and... gets frightened !!! And we should remember that Pascal lived his entire life with the notes about his Vision sewn inside the doubling of his jacket, moving it from jacket to jacket. "Fire, The God of Abraham and Jacob ..."
And still, he forgets the vision and looks at the world in fear !
...maybe he shouldn't have sewn that piece of paper into his jacket ? maybe he should have raised a giant flag, lit a beacon on top of all the mountains...??? Questions...
But Pascal is just the symptom of a contradiction, soon much worse came to darken the world: Kant tries to teach us that we can say "God is not" without contradiction (and he's been awarded an overwhelming world success, and you will not safely pass through the brainwashing machine that is called "university" if you will dare say the simple truth, that Kant is a fool). A few lines after that sentence the same Kant says that the verb "to be" is just a COPULA. Nothing to think about. Of course, it's just the Being, not anything important...(And they teach you in school that he is "a deep philosopher". Deep indeed, maybe not from the "Depth" (Bathys) that is one of the Traditional Names of God, maybe deep from the other depth...).
The masters of the hellish game even call "age of Enlightenment" the dark age opened by the salvoes of Kant against the Sacred Knowledge...
Let's go our Way and forget these miseries... and, unlike Pascal, let's try to listen to the Vision that has been proclaimed forever at the four corners of the world:
LOOK ! WE ARE HERE ! We have received Life and we have received the Reason, so we can be aware of the Gift of Life and of God's Love !
We can rejoice with all the Myriads of Angels, rejoice of the Glory and of the Infinite Love of God.
"Maris stella, illumina nos nosque itinerantes dirige."
(“Star of the Sea, shine upon us and guide us on our way!”)
