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LIGHT,
FIRE AND THE RIGHT OF PASSAGE
Mary Jean Irion
So through the flow of words coming
out of human bodies with real working tongues, teeth, throats,
with hands of flesh, bone, blood turning pages of lectures made
of paper made of wood while other hands fingered at switches to
turn machines on and off, and through the microphone with its
wrapped wires and plugs -- and not without the House of the Redeemer
with its iron gates and winding stair and the old library with
its floor and its chairs -- through all that and so much more,
came the light spirit of ARC, right out of the heavy stuff itself,
all things working together for good. Miraculous, it must seem
to us, always, when we think about it: how the flesh becomes word;
and then how word becomes flesh through ears with hairs and wax
and tubes and hands with nerves and muscles and pens with ball
points writing down what must be taken home on feet in shoes in
trains, planes, cars: words not to be forgotten, but somehow
shared. ARC has been networking like this, in this time between
myths: all these forty years.
The time between myths
-- a favorite phrase of ours, but sounding a little outdated now;
for the spinning out of linear, connecting insights from Halverson
to Tillich to Hopper to May to Kahn to Campbell -- we see, now!
-- was fine and sure, fresh as spider silk. Here at my screen
and keyboard, some weeks later, as I have been editing these lectures
and tapes, the thoughts of the fathers seem suspended in my mind
like a shining network of meaning. (Hello, Arachne.)
And -- although myth it may be called some distant day
-- right now these words feel sticky with truth: substantial,
supple, Nature’s own and humanity’s own creating material coming
out of the inner life inseparably together, confirmed by shared
experience.
In these lectures, cohering from
various perspectives -- the artistic, the intellectual, the theopoetic,
the psychological -- a construction of religious integrity has
taken delicate form, approximate as the orb-weaver’s web that
stopped me last summer -- wonderful among leaves in a shaft of
sunlight. A mother and child were already captive there by
the tree. Enthralled, the three of us hardly dared whisper, as
we watched the dark little creature finishing its amazing work
illumined by distant fire -- doing what it had to. After a while,
we walked softly on our differing ways, going where we had to,
rich in the rituals of the dappled morning.
And now, at this moment just before
the first Spring in these three zeroes, I see how long, how
patiently a little dark organism has been weaving its dreams
and ideas together, making something extremely fine and important,
whether the cells of that community are 20th Century artists or
ARC Fellows or contemporary scholars, teachers, scientists, social
scientists -- the new community of feeling and thought, whatever
its size or slant in art/religion/culture -- the sacred making
is all the same. This is web sight -- weaving worldwide connections!
And I see how the whole web of Creation shines in a fresh light.
The myths of the past, I must believe,
never built better than this with stronger Love. It reaches far
and round as a world (“ambitious,” some call it), yet straight
and flat as the time it takes to travel from here to there and
this to that. As long as we hear overhead the sizable fly buzzing
with bug-eyed despair, myth is the two-marveled thing that is
in us to do: reason waiting, emotion waiting “noiseless, patient,”
then both together in the spider seizing the day, taking the wild
chance, throwing need and imagination out far, far, until with
the help of the wind it is surely anchored in the stuff of truth,
ready for the strong silk to construct its never perfect, always
intelligent pattern. Only Nature and human nature with poetry
and time can bring to such a worldwide web the gift of substance
by building life’s redeeming experience into a multi-dimensional
world.
W. H. Auden and Edward Mendelson
have spoken for themselves. Believing still in historical, literal
Christianity, their backward pull gave a useful tension to the
day; we needed to hear what they said. This pair may walk on
ARC’s web any time and be perfectly safe. The new web is capacious
and elastic enough to house their weight; and its spider takes
their difference as a matter of curiosity with no lack of good
will. Indeed, it enjoys their company.
But let a fly buzz down abstractly
as either slavery or despair (the Thing of idolatry or
the No-Thing of atheism), and our spider will trap, juicify
and swallow it, digesting and excreting with the precision that
only a healthy body knows how to effect. This fly-drinking is
not only its way of personal salvation, it is the orb-weaver’s
dynamic way of refusing to “lounge in myth.” The new mythmaker
will take on its obligation to destroy the superstitions and
self-delusions it finds in Christendom or elsewhere with neither
mercy nor guilt, whenever those bugs come its way. This is called
good thinking in pursuit of intellectual integrity,
and few quests are more precious. (“Think!” said Merlin. “THINK!”)
But the mythmaker chooses to live in peace with professing Christians,
atheists and others, being sometimes guest and sometimes host,
because people are greater than any system ever spun by any mind.
True, that celebration of Light
that brought in the new millennium was only a symbol of our oneness
as human beings and our oneness with the world. Our holy arrival
in a better country was only a hunch that had to find its figure,
a yearning wish hung out in the massive dark, a vision pulled
out of the slightly true. Then days and weeks fell into the
usual headlines.
Nevertheless: we did
that, whether we knew it or not: we made the real world brilliant
that millennium night, as surely as ARC spun its abstract web
one February day, taking a chance that sunfire might bless it
with Shine. Or maybe everybody, everything was just doing, creaturely,
universally, the work each part had to do in a world where Everything
is Holy, Holy, Holy, and Every Person is called to be The Hero.
Tell me: Was the Pillar of Fire any
better than this? Or The Olympian Flame? Or The Light of the
World? And aren’t they all in us still? And don’t they together,
at best, enable and join this Rite of Passage?
Myth is largely a dream to live into;
and -- when it hardens into idolatry -- to live out of. The process
leaves us free to return where Light is real -- a wave and yet
a particle -- incredibly mysterious like the whole physical world,
real as Earth itself and Water, real as Flesh, real as all these
wonders we wake up to when Light itself reveals everything from
mountains to seas to lions to worms to people to bedsheets to
breakfast, showing us where the absolutes have gone: where they
always were: right here. Truth has not changed, nor the feel
and scope of the sacred. It is only we who have come home to
make mental rearrangements, storing all the fixed myths and their
figures in the archives of the heart.
Mary Jean
Irion is a writer, an English teacher and the Founder/First Director
of The Writers’ Center at Chautauqua. Her poems have appeared
widely in poetry magazines and literary reviews, also many in
The Christian Century. Among her awards are prizes from
The Poetry Society of America and NFSPS. Her books are: From
the Ashes of Christianity (J. B. Lippincott), Yes, World
(Cambria Press), both nonfiction; and Holding On (Heatherstone
Press), poems. Her latest work is an African
journal, She-Fire: a Safari into the Human Animal, in search
of a publisher. She is an ARC Fellow.
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