Monday Reflections: Notes from Meditations on the Tarot

I.

The Magician 

The Anonymous author of Meditations on the Tarot is not writing a book on divination. This is not a book for the reader of the cards, and the reflections are only on the major arcana. It is a book which uses the images of the cards to bring us into a deeper relationship to the world of symbol and faith. 'A journey into  Christian Hermeticism' - the author calls it, and what is Christian Hermeticism but a journey itself, an ever growing relationship.

In the first card, we're invited to meet Symbolism itself in the form of the Magician, who like symbols themselves "conceal and reveal their sense at one and the same time."

The magician is linked by the author to "the rapport of personal effort and of spiritual reality" - the card that opens the door to understanding the others. 

                          Learn at first concentration without effort; transform work into play;

                          make every yoke you have accepted easy and every burden that you 

                          carry light!

Seen that way, it's obvious we need a magician of some sort - we need to bend the exterior life to reflect the will, shape it, as a magician does. It is not an easy task though, each person has a burden which seems impossibly heavy; but Christ has called us to do the same, with his own magic lifting the yoke until it is easy to bear. The key our anonymous friend gives is in disinterested concentration - focusing not on the burden, but on the One who makes burden's light and there, concentrating 'without effort' on the absorbing beauty of Christ, our work becomes the serious, joyful play of the child.

I'm finding as I read these reflections, that I love the quiet of them, the abundant symbolism, and the different and completely non-divinatory view of the cards. It's a way of looking at them I'd never really explored before, and it's a blessing to have the chance now.

Reflections: Saint and Pope

I wonder if some of us American Catholics are going to lose our fondness for St. Francis during this pontificate. So many bloggers and Catholic media personalities are tending toward the "I love him but.." line regarding Pope Francis, that I think we're going to discover just how much we don't actually love the Franciscan spirit when it's lived out right before our eyes. I know I often don't.  St. Francis was God's fool, and that foolish, full-hearted sort of love is terrifying, challenging, overwhelming; it leads us, like St. Francis himself, to strip naked before the whole world and fling ourselves as babes into the arms of God.  Francis embraced martyrdom, poverty, pain, and misunderstanding in an attempt to walk after Christ as a living icon.

 "[Francis] is great because he is everything. He is a man who wants to do things, wants to build, he founded an order and its rules, he is an itinerant and a missionary, a poet and a prophet, he is mystical. He found evil in himself and rooted it out. He loved nature, animals, the blade of grass on the lawn and the birds flying in the sky. But above all her loved people, children, old people, women. He is the most shining example of ..agape"*



Like Francis, this pope is making himself comfortable naked before God and man. He's not trying to show anything, I think, so much as he's simply being himself before God, and God's poor sinner before man. He's decided that he fears being misunderstood and misrepresented less than he fears that each person he interacts with will not see the love of God in him. And so he embraces everyone with that holy promiscuity Francis himself was know for. Every person, not every thing. And the distinction is always there for him. Pope Francis does not seem careful in his words in the thoughtful way a Thomas More, a Thomas Aquinas, or a Benedict XVI might be, his words are careful of their own free will, because they come from a soul already defined, and they are careless because he's chosen to allow them to be. Because this is his calling: to rebuild the Church, not as merely the guardian of morals, but as the true home of each and every soul. And we are a world that misreads careful words as cold and unloving. We need a chance to come home first - to be like that poor, wild boy in the parable, who's father ask questions another day; after the party, after the joyful embrace, after he's fed his starving boy, bathed him, clothed him, and loved him back into safety. 

 "I will show the way, He said. Follow Me and you will find the Father and you will all be his children and he will take delight in you. Agape, the love of each of us for the other, from the closest to the furthest, is in fact the only way that Jesus has given us to find the way of Salvation and of the Beatitudes."*

I am often uncomfortable with those formed by St. Francis. I'm torn between the desire to imitated and the knowledge that this is not my call, not my charism. But I love the squirming sense it gives me, that love really is the answer. And that love doesn't require niceness so much as holiness. And all of us, from the crustiest old imitators of Padre Pio, to the all embracing daughters of Mary Magdalene are called to be holy.

* both quotations are from Pope Francis' interview with Eugenio Scalfari


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Reflections: Gregory of Nyssa's Life of Moses

"..he teaches, I think, by the things he did that the one who is going to associate intimately with God must go beyond all that is visible and..believe that the divine is there where the understanding does not reach."
   ~Gregory of Nyssa

Gregory's life is interesting, there are bits about it that I love - like the above quote, and absolutely dull bits to skim quickly while nursing or half-asleep. I feel as if I'm missing something half the time..and maybe reading half-asleep will do that. But the reminder again and again that Moses saw God in the darkness, that he had to "go beyond all that is visible and..believe that [God] is ..where the understanding does not reach" is the essence of it all for me. Gregory returns often to the darkness which God has made His hiding place and tells me it is "the place where [Moses'] intelligence lets him slip in where God is..the unknown and unseen."

So perhaps it is better I read him in the dark dawn..half-awake and unresisting; with tea in hand and a blanket wrapped around me. With silence, or the soft sounds of sleep bringing the darkness to life. Waiting for the clouds to lift, for the sun to rise and warm the garden, and to "never cease straining toward those things that are still to come." (Phil 3:13) as Gregory encourages in his reflections on the man who approached the dark and returned with a face radiant as the sun.

 

Reflections: Prayers to a Lowly God and The Sickness unto Death

I learned to pray from Rainer Maria Rilke.

Years after learning the form of things as a little child, prayer came to me all out of the night, in a scrap of paper: "Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now." In those words I found my voice and began a love affair with the One Who wanted to hear.

I learned to see from Rilke as he watched Italian Madonnas nurse their growing sons..as he traced the shadows under Icon eyes and mourned the loneliness of God, waiting among His candles and scented air..ready to greet "all the immense images in me .. and those powerful lands that were once pulsing with the life of the gods" as friends I have known and seen before.

But I learned to live from Soren Kierkegaard, who held my hand and whispered that it is good to stand alone, that "every life preoccupied with being like others is a wasted life, a lost life." And it's his kind voice - uncertain and full of haunted dreams - that guides me as I move in this month of quiet retreat.  As I remove myself from groups that weighed me down with their refusal to allow growth, that offer comforting pats of affirmation but balk at building charity. 

I'm learning as I grow that I've less and less patience with the habit of making peace for the sake of avoiding uncomfortable disagreements. And in this Kierkegaard is my guide, though I am blessed in ways he was not - with a family to love me though the arguments, and friends to smile on my hopeless dreams and over-reaching efforts.  In August I'll hold both my mentors in reserve, and reach forward, to one I've only met in passing - Gregory of Nyssa, who's Life of Moses sits beside my bed, waiting. I've read bits of him in Kathleen Norris - we share a love of the quotidian, of darkness, and of the God who can be found in both. I'm looking forward to learning more.