On Circles

The circle begins (if circles can rightly said to have beginnings) in mystery. Or let us rather say doubt. But no, not doubt, rather let us say misunderstanding. But then that is not it either. It does not begin with misunderstanding; rather let us say it begins with something not understood.

            The ratio of a circle, the number that makes perfect its comprehension of its origin, completes its boundary without overlap, makes it full without overlapping again onto itself, this ratio is itself incomprehensible. The ratio upon which the circle depends is itself irrational, a ratio that cannot be expressed as a ratio. 

            If this does not make you grin all sly and secretive than I don’t know how we can continue. Practice at this. Grinning at the incongruity, make your grin incongruous, let it begin in your toes, and the balls of your feet, let your grin be a dance as you consider the true way of things. Extend it finally up through your knees, your gut, your chest, your throat, let it burst out gently over your lips. Pick a side, left or right, it doesn’t matter. You have been given, like Buredin’s ass, a luxurious choice. Don’t let the ambiguity of it destroy you. Let the grin curl your lips on one side, drawing them upward towards your eyes. Now can you see it? Good, now we can begin.

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            In the beginning there is no thing but let us not say there is nothing. For even without a thing which is, there is still the foundation of what is. Or rather let us say there is being, but being without predication. We cannot yet talk of it, because it is not known, it is not predicated. Is not understood. There is nothing for us to say about it. Because at this point we have not invented ratios, or numbers, much less realized some numbers cannot be expressed as ratios. For now a circle is just a circle. It is one circle, or two circles, or three circles. It is a circle too small, or slightly over-large, or just right for what it ought to be. A circle is a mushroom’s cap. The disk of the full moon. The rim of a well made pot, or the space encompassed within that rim. For us a circle is neither rational or irrational, it is not understood in those terms. A circle is known and not yet understood. Consequently it is a delight. But even now we get ahead of ourselves. For in the beginning there are not even circles as circles, nor are there numbers rational or irrational. Nevertheless there is still delight.

            In the beginning there is a bird singing, there is a delighted gasp, there is a knowing embrace of all that will come later. It is a moment too deep for what we speak of as joy. But perhaps that is the best we can do for now. Perhaps later when we have had more time to build languages that more accurately express the reality of things we will come up with a word that has the proper weight to it; a word that is not so cumbersome and inexact. For now joy will have to do. In the beginning there is joy. And a dancing grin that comes up and down from the bottom and top. That circles out from the origin, and in that moment before which there are no other moments is the beginning.

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            The circle begins with this mystery. And with the circle begun we move on.

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            As the pot is tipped over, it begins to roll away, down the slight decline of the courtyard. And a new element is introduced. The mind encompasses not the shape, but the function of the shape, the meaning, the distance. The cartwright measures out the spokes, the rim. He develops the tools needed to assist him in creating irrational realities. The circles of wheels, and axles, and ball bearings. The orbits of planets and moons. The probability fields of electrons. Circles quantified and measured. And the circle is become a gear, its teeth biting into the reality of things, propelling us forward. Now, at last, we not only know, we comprehend. We see how things fit together and we ride this bicycle to work. But we do not really comprehend. Instead we forget that the wheels and gears are irrational beings.

            And thus the circle ends, if indeed a circle has an end, where it began. The watchmaker having memorized the gears of the watch takes up gardening. And he sees gears in the grass, a single blade more complicated than the most accurate and complex masterpiece of his craft. He plants seeds. And the circle of his comprehension covers the ground; the truth of the gear is not in its teeth, but in the perfection of the relationship between its origin and the irrational number that governs it. So it ends as it began, in mystery, doubt, misunderstanding, the not understood. Reality is comprehended in a number we cannot ever fully know.

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Dear God, I am a circle. I am an irrational being, a being which comprehends a space. A being which has substance that cannot be accurately measured, but which seeks to measure. I am wanting. I am full. I am a reality that is predicated, whose movements are predictable. I am an equation full of ratios, ratios whose numerators are irrational numbers. I exist in the breadth of Your existence. I spring from you as a circle springs irrationally from its origin. I am something other than You, but my existence revolves around You. I can comprehend neither the beginning nor the end of myself, and my being is what it is because it comprehends those things. Am I an infinity or a singularity? Or am I neither? Am I simply a moment that has come after that moment which we call joy? Dear God, complete in us the irrational work of your Spirit. Finish what you originated. Bring me to that perfect end that I can encompass, but cannot comprehend. Bring me to Your perfectly irrational being which comprehends me with a joy I know but cannot comprehend.

De Profundis

In the beginning, before the earth was divided up by geographers and kings, and was still formless and void, there was darkness over the face of the Deep. Before the seven seas were conquered, this Deep stood at the center and was ringed by the civilizations which comprised the known world: the Egyptians, Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Carthaginians, Babylonians. And those whose lands bordered other seas, Nubia, Sheba, Persia, Gaul, these were the far-flung ends of the world, strange exotic realms. The center of the ancient world was the Deep. A vast and terrifying expanse of water, inhabited by a dragon named Leviathan and the gods only knew what else.

            
Those who had the courage to traverse out of the sight of land, and who had the luck or skill to return, made fortunes for themselves and for their kings. But many set out to bring back their fortunes and instead washed up on some distant shore bloated and unrecognizable or sank with their ships to take their rest at the bottom of everything.

           
The word mediterranean means “in the middle of land” though one might poetically interpret it to mean “at the center of the world”. The Mediterranean Sea is  2.5 million square kilometers and is bordered by three continents. It has an average depth of about 1500 meters and at its deepest point is over 5000 meters deep. By contrast the combined average depth of the earths oceans is almost 4000 meters, and at its deepest is nearly 11000 meters deep. So in oceanographic terms the Mediterranean is just one among many comparatively shallow peripheries of the broader mass of water that covers most of the planet. But for those civilizations that rose and fell over the course of several millennia, both bound together and separated by its watery expanse, the Mediterranean was the Deep.

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One of the more famous Bible stories, one that everyone in the West seems to just intuitively know, regardless of whether they have ever attended Sunday School or sat through a church service, is the story of Jesus Christ walking on water. The sea on which Jesus walked was not the Mediterranean, by any reasonable definition it was not even a sea at all. The Sea of Galilee is in truth a lake; freshwater, covering less that 200 square kilometers, and only 43 meters deep at its extremity. Even in terms of lakes it is not all that impressive in size, and from the vantage point of any number of its surrounding hills can be easily encompassed in a single panoramic photograph. It is most certainly not the Deep.

           
But it is here that one of the most powerful object lessons in history was given. The disciples, as they were making their way across this lake, the lake on which many of them had made their livelihoods as fishermen, saw a figure striding across the water towards them, and they became very afraid, unsure of what this meant.

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In the end it doesn’t much matter how deep the water is, once it is over your head. When I was eleven, my brother almost drowned in water that was only 5 meters or so deep. The siblings of his friend Jeremy don’t get to use that blessed word ‘almost’ when they recount the story. So the fear of drowning has loomed large in my mind since childhood. Most of us know the sensation well enough, that fear is primal enough that the Psalmist can immediately grip our imaginations with the line, “Save me, O Lord, for the waters have come up to my neck!”

Even before my brother’s accident I can remember as a child, playing in a friend’s pool, walking out to the point of the drop-off between the deep- and shallow-ends, and slipping, the water covering my head. In one sense I was in no great danger, my parents were watching us play, and even then I was a strong swimmer, it was not even a second later that a scissor kick brought me back to the surface and safety. But as I felt the solid bottom drop out from beneath me, and the Deep open up beneath my feet, the feeling in my gut was that of a body preparing to do battle with death. I gasped in the sunlight, suddenly glad to be alive, and spent the rest of the day in the shallows.

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The Jews were not a sea-faring people, they made no great ships and were not sailors. To the Jews the sea was utter chaos without opportunity. The Phoenicians and Philistines might ply those waters, but not them. So when Jonah wanted to flee to Tarshish he had to hire pagans who worshipped other gods to carry him across the waves. Even Solomon in all his splendor relied on Hiram King of Sidon to handle his shipping needs. But their own fears notwithstanding, the Jews believed that their God was still God over the waves. He had set their boundaries in Creation. He had parted the Red Sea. And according to the prophet Isaiah would one day pierce the dragon Leviathan with a sword. So it is, that in John’s grand vision of the end of time when all of creation is renewed, there is no more sea because the sea and all its chaos has been ultimately and finally defeated. The Deep beneath replaced with the Deep above. And mankind no longer goes down to Sheol, only ever further up and further in, into the presence of God.

So it was that when Jesus strode out across the small waves, of a small lake, in a small country, on the edge of the Deep, he wasn’t just performing an interesting trick or a startling illusion. And the disciples weren’t amused the way we would be amused to see an illusionist do some similar action that seems to defy the rules of the world as we know it. No, Christ was walking out across elemental Chaos, he was putting the formless void underneath his feet, he was dancing on the back of the dragon Leviathan without fear. That the disciples found this troubling should not surprise us. Jesus walked across that small lake, called for Peter to come and join him on the waves, in order to show his disciples that the time was at hand. The Deep was ready to be conquered.

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Yesterday I saw a picture. A picture that could only have come from the Deep. A little boy named Aylan Kurdi; red shirt, blue shorts, Velcro shoes, lying face down on the edge of the sea; drowned in the Deep, devoured by Leviathan. He, along with his brother and mother died while trying to make it a few dozen kilometers across a corner of the Mediterranean Sea to Turkey to escape the violence engulfing Syria. His father, Abdullah, watched his wife and children die in the waves and was powerless to save them. Abdullah alone survived to become one of those many thousands of desperate human beings who are officially being labeled ‘migrants’, because were we to allow them to be called refugees we would have an obligation to offer them asylum.

I have a son around Aylan’s age. He is, as most toddlers are, by turns infuriating and delightful. As Jeremy Clarkson once humorously said of toddlers (comparing them, if I remember correctly, to a Maserati), my son is a source of almost infinite frustration, but if you tried to hurt him or take him away from me I wouldn’t hesitate to visit whatever destruction I could upon you. So when I saw some other father’s son lying at the edge of the surf, his life consumed by the Deep, I could not help seeing my own son. Could not help imagining the desperation that gripped his father’s heart to risk such a passage. Could not help imagining the anguish he is feeling this very moment, the sleep that flees him, the tears, the utter despair.

In truth Leviathan doesn’t lie at the bottom of the Mediterranean, the dragon coils in the Deep of the human heart. It whispers the insidious lie that this is someone else’s problem. It sets our minds to counting up the cost of what accepting these desperate souls onto our communities and homes would be. It plants a germ of fear that maybe there are agents of terror hidden amidst the innocents, people who would seek to bring the fires of Syria and Iraq to our own city centers.

The Mediterranean is, in our day, one of many shallow peripheries of the great oceans of a world. But the world it once bound and separated is three continents, and dozens of nations, each with their own invisible walls. The Mediterranean is a barrier only when we want it to be. Every day it is crisscrossed by the yachts of the wealthy inhabitants of Monaco and the container ships that carry the wealth of nations around the globe. It is only the necessity of powerlessness that makes its passage dangerous. The Mediterranean is only the Deep once more because the rich and comfortable have decided to use it as moat.

But that dragon is already defeated. Jesus stands with his heel on its head and he calls us to join him. And it is time for the Church to once again step out of the comfort of the boat, to stride across the waves of the Deep, to plant our heels firmly on the throat of our fears, and to reach down into the waves and pull the desperate and drowning out of the jaws of Leviathan.

Jane

I am going to have a sweet guitar in heaven
It will fit my fingers, the frets just perfectly spaced for my hands
I’ll name it “Jane” because that is what I always name my guitar
And it’ll hold its tune for ages
Just snap back into tune super easily
And with all those endless ages to practice I’ll get pretty damn good
Of course, my friend Chris will still play better than me, but that won’t matter
We will both get better than anyone ever got here on earth
And it’s not even like we’ll even bother with comparisons anymore

The guitar will be made by a real craftsman,
Maybe Jesus himself will make it,
Maybe he’ll give it to me on my birthday, if we still have those,
Say, “Here, I made you this, it’s not much, but I hope you like it.”
And I will say, “Dude, Jesus, this is amazing!”
And I’ll tune it up, strum it, hear its perfectly balanced tone,
Then I’ll pass it around the party, give everyone a chance to play it, admire it
When it comes back around to Jesus he’ll get this grin on his face
And we’ll all chuckle when he breaks out into “Wonderwall” by Oasis
Because that joke never gets old:
The guy... at the party... with the guitar...
Trying to impress his friends by playing “Wonderwall” by Oasis

But then we’ll stop laughing because holy shit this is amazing
It’ll be like hearing the Ryan Adams cover version for the first time but only better
Like as much better as the Adams’ cover was than the original, only moreso
Jesus’ version will make us all feel like we’ve never even heard music
Like this was the song that “Wonderwall” was always wanting to be
Or maybe even that every song ever wanted to be

And Jesus’ll just be standing there grinning, playing this awesome guitar he made
Singing a song that he didn’t even write, except maybe in a way he did
And we’ll all stand there gaping like idiots, our mouths hanging open
Listening to “Wonderwall” for the very first time

Fraction Hymn

τὸν χριστὸν ἔδει παθεῖν καὶ ἀναστῆναι ἐκ νεκρῶν Acts 17:3

The flowers break

Open the earth

Above our graves

While angels sing

A sempiternal litany

Our only response

Reciting once again

These favorite verses

Of poetic wisdom:

But I could not understand what had been written.

Winter was warm

Was thought warm

But wasn’t warm

Mr. Eliot knew

He was wrong

How we need

Spring summer autumn

Winter then spring

Again and again:

We need flowers breaking the earth above our graves.

It is necessary

In awful blooming

It is necessary

In sundered flesh

It is necessary

In sorrowing bones

It is necessary

In aching silences

It is necessary:

In this unrelenting agony of resurrection flourishing it grows.