No Friend Like an Old Friend

Aristotle says that a man only speaks well of what he actually knows, which means in the case at hand that I have to ask myself how much I actually know about acedia. Can someone who's been a mystic since he was three truly find himself in such a cluttered and sluggish atmosphere of head and heart? That my professedly agnostic father, for example, should find himself acutely bored on a regular basis was a matter of course, but even he could get quickly to doing something about it, and those somethings were usually positive, although not sufficiently intellectual, artistic, or religious.
I did, of course, know, and still can know, profoundly dark moments. How else, for one thing, can we stay in touch with the Cross? But to what degree were these moments simply of the acedic species?
I have actually tried to write, occasionally, about characters in the doldrums. I think this was, for one reason, that I was so little in the acedic regions, and wanted to stretch at least my intellectual experience and sympathies. And perhaps, for another reason, I had an unconscious interest in identifying the real nature of my personal predicament as a veteran of the dark night, none of which I actually understood, through having the vocabulary for, until I was becoming a Catholic.
I went so far, as a matter of fact, to devoting the last two-thirds of a novel to the concept of ennui, oddly enough, at the same time as I myself was rollicking through a most wonderful book called "Father Smith Instructs Jackson", in the summer of 1958. It was good fun. I wrote furiously, and even predicted Shawn and me setting down a year later on Cormorant Island, the land base for Alert Bay, so haunted was I by the dream of returning to Lasqueti, the home of the unconquered piano. The book was not a waste of time. Jack McClelland's editor, the lovely Claire Pratt, sent a note saying that I "wrote well, but should not attempt to rewrite the book, as the character doesn't actually do much." The "wrote well" part impressed my mother-in-law-to-be, and thus the book was worth the effort. But, consider the author's complicated reaction. On the one hand I savoured the comment on the competence with language, on the other I had to admit that I was hardly the do nothing sort, and even rankled at the inference. Probably Claire, daughter of a minister-poet, knew I was trying something on.
But I think I have had my fair share of acedia laid on top of the more adventurous travails of the mystical life, and indeed Kathleen Norris' book just might be a very lovely window on the at last divinely revealed explanation of this. (Dollars to donuts there will be a relevant symbol on tonight's viewing of "Morse".)
Kathleen, by the way, tells a lovely story that is most timely on this date. Once upon a time there was a pseudo-zealous young fellow who entered a monastery, only to find himself profoundly dis-edified at recreation time when he found his brother monks discussing the World Series. To everyone's relief, he did not last long. Nor did he know his Saint Thomas, a man, like Aristotle, and even Saint Paul, aware that all human activity that did not sin was a blessing from God, a sign that there was something else in life beside the work ethic and study only for the sake of academic honours. As I write, the Arizona Cardinals are about to challenge the Pittsburgh Steelers in the Super Bowl and you can bet that there will be all sorts of angels down along those benches trying to keep those guys from more than their share of injuries.
And speaking of the angels, my old friends, I have to say that they are the reason I could never stay, for longer than a recognizing moment, in the arms of acedia.
In the process of Thomistic research for the sake of dealing with Kathleen's book, I settled, at first, on Thomas' writings about pain and sorrow. Acedia, after all, is a form of sorrow. There is nothing else you can call it. A thing is what it is, as all real metaphysicians will tell you, and all modern dilemmas come from the determination to makes things what they are not. For instance, the new president of the United States seems to think that abortion is a virtue, a solution to social problems. Such a view will produce an unfathomable amount of acedia. And those half-wits in the Middle East are determined to prove that violent aggression can solve geographic and economic problems. More acedia, and no wonder Hell is so over-populated, and Purgatory running on overflow.
And the scum of Africa are illustrating how the slave trade could never have functioned at all if blacks had not been at the bottom of it.
I found great stuff in those sorrow sections of Thomas. That is an infallible likelihood, of course. And, thus, I thought I was off. But not so. That was then, yesterday, and this is now, which means that I had to tuck in with the angels, me old buds. Holy shit. You really want to cross these guys? Read and weep.
As Thomas says, "There must be some incorporeal creatures." This at the beginning of his treatise on the angels: Question 50 in the first part of the Summa.There must be. No dithering here, none of that painful, embarrassing waffling back and forth of my old man, night after night at the dinner table. Of course, my old man was somewhat like Thomas' old man, a soldier in the pay of the emperor who was on the wrong side of the Pope, Frederick II. There must be angels. Man must have incorporeal company, the spirits, who get along just fine without the baggage of bodies. Spirits are the stuff to have at the dinner table, rather than simply material ambitions and off-colour jokes. Spirits are the real reality, flashing back and forth between God and Man, lighting up the ether, inspiring and restoring sanity, life, love, intuition. Carriers of light, harbingers of wiser days to come.
The hermits could only survive because they had the angels for company. And the saints as well, now in heaven existing as pure spirits. No bodies. My my. All those disappointed Islamic terrorists, so plum out of luck when they get to Heaven - if they actually do - only to find out there are no bodies there, especially no bodies of virgins, other than the body of the virgin mother of Christ, who might have things to say to them about the indescriminate dismembering of innocent civilians.
We had a saint around here this morning, a new friend and ally: Felix di Cantalice. Marianne has been studying the Capuchins, and read me out his name this morning, reading the old Catholic Encyclopedia on this computer desk, and when I descended to the kitchen I found myself surrounded by rather a lot of light. I first assumed that Pio was up to his old tricks, but then realized that it was more likely a sign of this new chap I'd never heard of, for all that he was a great buddy of Filippo Neri. It was Felix who made the Capuchins a major force in Rome and vicinity. Excellent choice for the newest member of the board. A big part of his job was begging for the brothers. I feel right at home.
The Capuchins seem to be up to some soul searching over their constitutions. With their recently retired minister general in the immediate vicinity, can the mystics be of any assistance in these deliberations?
There was, by the way, a symbol on Morse. He has to tell his sergeant, Robbie Lewis, that on a previous assignment, with a different chief inspector, they had failed to "keep looking". I'm not at all sure at this moment why this is relevant, but I know it is.