Blake Was Right

            A few years ago, when I was blessed with the privilege of entering the Orthodox Catholic Church, one of my teachers spoke of the Church’s vast repertoire of prayers for specific occasions.  Echoing a now well-worn expression, he said that for every occasion, “There’s a prayer for that.”  Indeed, for many coming to Catholicism, whether Western and Roman or Eastern and Orthodox, it can all seem a bit mechanical, as if salvation were a great complex of machinery, and we need but perform the proper rituals to be forgiven and saved.

            But salvation is not just about forgiveness.  Ultimately, it is about theosis—becoming a saint through becoming like God (sanctification through divinization). 

            And there is no app for that.

            There is no app, and there is no algorithm, for becoming a saint.  There is only joy.  Exuberance is our way.  To be is the first good—a truth universal enough to be acknowledged far beyond Catholicism, yet big enough to be missed by many who are Christian; yet despite this truth, we try so hard to flee from our being.  Consciousness is the gift of God, yet we strive so much to be unconscious, to be self-conscious (which the Prince—calling it “conscience”—reminds us makes cowards of us all), to dwell in false consciousness and to wear a false face.  And so we avoid our joy, and bliss, the last of the three—and the greatest as love is the greatest—is lost to us.

            God forgive us for trying so hard not to be, for wanting to return our ticket, and make an end of all, long before our ends be achieved.  May he forgive us our shadows, those parts of our selves, disowned and disavowed, because we think we lack the courage and the strength to bear them (and yet, they are both our courage and our strength).  May he forgive us for fleeing from our bliss as the beasts flee a fire in the forest.  For truly, our bliss is the fire within, and we fear to embrace it, lest we should, as the saint said, “become all flame.”

            And so let us dance.  And so let us sing.  Not to cover up our pain, or to hide from our truest selves, but to express both ourselves and our pain, so closely allied to our joy.  Let us dance in our being; let us sing from our souls.  Let us be, and perceive, and rejoice in it all.  For saints—and here is the point—saints are not born, nor are they built or made.  All saints are grown.  And growth, being an organic thing, comes from within.

            We are born into a world in full flight from our true being.  Our world should nurture us as we grow, giving us rich nutrients and pure water to feed upon; but instead it gives us poisoned soil, and air so arid it would rob us of what little native moisture we possess at our beginning.

            Being, again, is the first good.  And if we are conscious of anything, it must be the truth, for one cannot truly be conscious of anything—cannot know anything—but truth; all delusion is distortion of consciousness, as evil is a perversion of the goodness of being.  This leaves us with the exuberance of bliss as beauty.  And here the poets have preceded us, for it was Blake who commented that “exuberance is beauty”—and, really, what better definition can there be?