From the Great Deep to the Great Deep He Goes

T   hen loudly cried the bold Sir Bedivere:

"Ah! my Lord Arthur, whither shall I go?

Where shall I hide my forehead and my eyes?

For now I see the true old times are dead,

When every morning brought a noble chance,

And every chance brought out a noble knight.

Such times have been not since the light that led

The holy Elders with the gift of myrrh.

But now the whole Round Table is dissolved

Which was an image of the mighty world,

And I, the last, go forth companionless,

And the days darken round me, and the years,

Among new men, strange faces, other minds."

       And slowly answer'd Arthur from the barge:

"The old order changeth, yielding place to new,

And God fulfils himself in many ways,

Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.

Comfort thyself: what comfort is in me?

I have lived my life, and that which I have done

May He within himself make pure! but thou,

If thou shouldst never see my face again,

Pray for my soul. More things are wrought by prayer

Than this world dreams of. Wherefore, let thy voice

Rise like a fountain for me night and day.

For what are men better than sheep or goats

That nourish a blind life within the brain,

If, knowing God, they lift not hands of prayer

Both for themselves and those who call them friend?

For so the whole round earth is every way

Bound by gold chains about the feet of God.

But now farewell. I am going a long way

With these thou seëst—if indeed I go

(For all my mind is clouded with a doubt)—

To the island-valley of Avilion;

Where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow,

Nor ever wind blows loudly; but it lies

Deep-meadow'd, happy, fair with orchard lawns

And bowery hollows crown'd with summer sea,

Where I will heal me of my grievous wound."

       So said he, and the barge with oar and sail

Moved from the brink, like some full-breasted swan

That, fluting a wild carol ere her death,

Ruffles her pure cold plume, and takes the flood

With swarthy webs. Long stood Sir Bedivere

Revolving many memories, till the hull

Look'd one black dot against the verge of dawn,

And on the mere the wailing died away.

       But when that moan had past for evermore,

The stillness of the dead world's winter dawn

Amazed him, and he groan'd, The King is gone.''

And therewithal came on him the weird rhyme,

"From the great deep to the great deep he goes."

       Whereat he slowly turn'd and slowly clomb

The last hard footstep of that iron crag;

Thence mark'd the black hull moving yet, and cried,

"He passes to be King among the dead,

And after healing of his grievous wound

He comes again; but—if he come no more—

O me, be yon dark Queens in yon black boat,

Who shriek'd and wail'd, the three whereat we gazed

On that high day, when, clothed with living light,

They stood before his throne in silence, friends

Of Arthur, who should help him at his need?"

       Then from the dawn it seem'd there came, but faint

As from beyond the limit of the world,

Like the last echo born of a great cry,

Sounds, as if some fair city were one voice

Around a king returning from his wars.

       Thereat once more he moved about, and clomb

Ev'n to the highest he could climb, and saw,

Straining his eyes beneath an arch of hand,

Or thought he saw, the speck that bare the King,

Down that long water opening on the deep

Somewhere far off, pass on and on, and go

From less to less and vanish into light.

And the new sun rose bringing the new year.

~ Idylls of the King: The Passing of Arthur, Alfred, Lord Tennyson

   

    Were I to stumble on this blog post, I would most likely do little more than pass a cursory glance at the above text.  At first glance, it seems to be a mass of words, written in an old-fashioned style, about a mythical person, seemingly without any relevance to my own life.  We're busy.  We're bombarded by text.  Articles bookmarked on the internet to revisited at a future date when we have a few moments to truly go in deep (but do we ever return?).  An email from a friend that we put a star next to their name so that we remember to respond when life slows down for a minute (but how many days and weeks go by before that happens?).

   Stop now and read the poetry above, slowly, line by line.  It's beautiful, no?  Who cannot identify with Sir Bedivere, who has seemingly lost his last friend in the world that that enemy that waits in the wings to triumph over us all, Death?  He cries "Whither shall I go?" to his dying friend.  What will I be without you?  Arthur replies, "The old order changeth, yielding place to new."  The old order changes, but it will be replaced by the new.  I am going, but there will be more in this life to comfort you.  Arthur asks his friend to pray for his soul, "More things are wrought with prayer than this world dreams of."  And then, Arthur goes "from less to less and vanish(es) into light."  But it doesn't end there.  The last line gives us hope: "And the new sun rose bringing the new year." 

   Tonight I am grieving.  I am posting this in memorial of a friend who passed away on September 4th, 2013.  His service was today, and I was unable to attend, being halfway around the world.  I was with him the hour he passed from this world unto the next, and I wish I could have been there today to remember him and say goodbye.  As my favorite poet writes, "Every man is a piece of the continent,/ A part of the main./ If a clod be washed away by the sea,/ Europe is the less."  I am, in short, diminished by this man's death.

   Dear Peter, these are words that should be said in life, not death.  You were precious, and wonderful, and loved.  I hate my fallible human memory, as even now, my memories of you begin to grow faint.  You were always a joyous sight to behold; even in death you clung to life with vivacity and life and wit.  The last time I saw you in the hospital, I wanted to kiss you on your worn cheek, as we had always done, but my nerve failed me, and for that I will be forever regretful.  Stupid words, but thank you for your friendship.  Thank you for always being ready with a compliment.  Thank you for the way you endeared yourself to your students.  Thank you for telling me I was beautiful and sharing the moments of your life with me.  Thank you for your songs.  Thank you for dancing with me and seeing my worth.  You are truly a precious being, created in the image of the Living God.  I love you now and will always love you.  Cursed be this memory that will erase, but my heart will always remember.

You will always be remembered.  Go gentle into the night, dear Welshman.  May the good Lord protect you and keep you.  Amen.

There is legitimate guilt that is removed through repentance and restitution, and there is irremediable guilt.  When people say, "I know God forgives me, but I can't forgive myself," they mean that they have failed an idol, whose approval is more important to them than God's.  Idols function like gods in our lives, and so if we make career or parental approval our god and we fail it, then the idol curses us in our hearts for the rest of our lives.  We can't shake the sense of failure.

~Timothy Keller, Counterfeit Gods, p. 149

You Say, "I Will Come"

You say, "I will come."
And you do not come.
Now you say, "I will not come."
So I shall expect you.
Have I learned to understand you?

~Lady Otomo No Sakanoe.  Translated from the Japanese by Kenneth Rexroth

Who Was King Herod?

Herod was not born a Jew.  His mother was the daughter of an Arabian sheik and his father, Antipater, was an Edomite-- a pagan people living in what is now Jordan.  Antipater was a gifted opportunist who backed the right Hasmonian prince in a succession struggle and managed to marry a Hasmonian princess and secure an appointment at court.  Next, he displayed excellent political judgment in backing Julius Caesar in the civil war against Pompey.  For backing Caesar, Antipater obtained the appointment of his twenty-five-year-old son Herod as governor of Galilee.  Soon after taking office Herod suppressed an uprising led by Hezekiah (or Ezekias), and put him and a large number of his followers to death.  Taking "the law into his own hands got him in grave trouble with the Jewish Council in Jerusalem," a conflict with religious Jews that was to continue throughout his life.

   After Caesar was murdered, his assassins Brutus and Cassius took control of the East and demanded funding from the local rulers.  Herod complied but eventually fled to Rome where he somehow gained the favor of Mark Antony and the Second Triumvirate, and they caused the Senate to elect him "King of the Jews."  With this backing, in 37BCE Herod gained the throne of Judea.  To help secure his claim to the throne, he banished his wife and son and then married his teenage niece.

   Herod claimed to be a Jew, but many Jews did not accept him as such.  In an effort to gain support from the more traditional Jews, Herod undertook a massive rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem on a far more magnificent scale.  Later he greatly compromised this achievement by placing a huge golden eagle over the main entrance to the Temple.  This was hotly condemned by leading Pharisees as an idolatrous Roman symbol, and some young zealots smashed it during the night, for which they were arrested and burned to death by order of Herod.

   As king, Herod was empowered to appoint the high priest.  Being cautious about possible rivals, as his first selection he appointed "an obscure Jew from Babylonia."  This infuriated his mother-in-law and eventually Herod withdrew the appointment and gave the job to his mother-in-law's seventeen-year-old son Aristobulus.  Soon after, Herod arranged a bathing party at Jericho, at which he had Aristobulus drowned.  Subsequently, in an effort to overcome their angry opposition, Herod began to appoint Sadducees (the hereditary priestly class) to the high priesthood, each serving a short term and retaining his privileges after leaving office.  This helped in building a base of influential religious supporters.  But they were of little help in shielding him from growing religious antagonism, some of it based on his dreadful family life.

   During his reign, Herod ran through ten wives and not only disinherited his sons from previous marriages, but had at least three of them murdered.  Late in his reign he became very alarmed at the rapidly growing outbreak of messianic hopes and prophecies, and anyone he suspected of being the Messiah he had put to death.  When he became suspicious that his current wife was involved with a group expecting the Messiah, he had her killed too.  Matthew 2:16 claims that, hoping to eliminate Jesus, Herod ordered the death of all the children under the age of two in Bethlehem.  Whether or not this actually happened, it was utterly in character. 

~The Triumph of Christianity, Rodney Stark, 2011

A New Heart and a New Spirit

I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean; I will cleanse you from all your impurities and from all your idols.  I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.

~Ezekiel 36:25-26

Wham! Pop! Boom!

Here's another photoshoot I did in Dubai for Sephora for MBC Haya Magazine.  The photographer is Tina Patni.

The Failure of Romantic Love

We look to sex and romance to give us the transcendence and sense of meaning we used to get from faith in God.  Talking about the modern secular person, he [Ernest Becker, author of the Pulitzer-prize winning book The Denial of Death] wrote:

He still needed to feel heroic, to know that his life mattered in the scheme of things.... He still had to merge himself with some higher, self-absorbing meaning, in trust and gratitude.... If he no longer had God, how was he to do this?  One of the first ways that occurred to him, as [Otto] Rank saw, was the "romantic solution.".... The self-glorification that he needed in his innermost nature he now looked for in the love partner.  The love partner becomes the divine ideal within which to fulfill one's life.  All spiritual and moral needs now become focused in one individual.... In one word, the love object is God.... Man reached for a "thou" when the worldview of the great religious community overseen by God died.... After all, what is it that we want when we elevate the love partner to the position of God?  We want redemption-- nothing less.

~Timothy Keller, Counterfeit Gods, p. 28.  Emphasis mine.

   I am currently reading Dr. Timothy Keller's Counterfeit Gods.  John Calvin, the sixteenth century French theologian, wrote “The human heart is a factory of idols... Everyone of us is, from his mother’s womb, expert in inventing idols.”  What he means is that instead of worshipping the one true God, we each invent something else to worship-- it's the one thing you think you need that if you lost it, you'd feel like your life would be over.  For a long time, when I was younger, I think I idolized beauty, and specifically my own.  Thankfully, I don't think that's as much a big deal to me anymore.  Rather, my current idol, and boy does it have a grip on my life, is love.  I didn't realize how much I was internalizing it, but I bought every lie that Hollywood (and the occasional fiction novel) had to offer.  If you dig deep down into my mythos, you'll find that I believe (and I wish I could write that word in the past tense) that if I can just find a man to love me, my life will be complete.  Moreover, it'll mean that I'm okay.  That I'm loveable.  Romantic love is my idol.  Of late, I've pinned that romantic love to a particular man, and wow, what a royal mess of things that has made.  It's led to me compromising on values that were important to me, and, as Keller writes (pg. 38), if you put "the weight of all your deepest hopes and longings on the person you are [in love with], you are going to crush him or her with your expectations.  It will distort your life and [his or her] life in a hundred ways."  And that is exactly what happened.  Keller quotes Becker again:

The failure of romantic love as a solution to human problems is so much a part of modern man's frustration.... No human relationship can bear the burden of godhood.... However much we may idealize and idolize him [the love partner], he inevitably reflects earthly decay and imperfection.... After all, what is it that we want when we elevate the love partner to this position?  We want to be rid of our faults, of our feeling of nothingness.  We want to be justified, to know our existence has not been in vain.  We want redemption-- nothing less.  Needless to say, human partners cannot give this.

    In Counterfeit Gods, Keller recounts the story of Jacob from Genesis 29 in the Bible.  Jacob falls in love with the beautiful Rachel, but is tricked into marrying her homely sister Leah instead.  Jacob makes an idol of Rachel and "apocalyptic sex" and Leah makes an idol of Jacob and his love.  Keller writes: 

   We may wonder how Jacob could have been so gullible [his father-in-law switches Leah for Rachel on his wedding day], but Jacob's behavior was that of an addict.  There are many ways that romantic love can function as a kind of drug to help us escape the reality of our lived... Our fears and inner barrenness make love a narcotic, a way to medicate ourselves, and addicts always make foolish, destructive choices.

   That is what had happened to Jacob.  Rachel was not just his wife, but his "savior."  He wanted and needed Rachel so profoundly that he heard and saw only the things he wanted to hear and see.

He continues:

...(T)hen what do we learn from this story?

   We learn that through all of our life there runs a ground note of cosmic disappointment.  You are never going to lead a wise life until you understand that.  Jacob said, "If I can just get Rachel, everything will be okay.  And he goes to bed with the one who he thinks is Rachel, and literally, the Hebrew says, "in the morning, behold, it was Leah" (Genesis 29:25).  One commentator noted about this verse, "This is a miniature of our disillusionment, experienced from Eden onwards."  What does that mean?  With all due respect to this woman (from whom we have much to learn), it means that no matter what we put our hopes in, in the morning, it is always Leah, never Rachel.  Nobody has ever said this better than C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity:

Most people, if they have really learned to look into their own hearts, would know that they do want, and want acutely, something that cannot be had in this world.  There are all sorts of things in this world that offer to give it to you, but they never quite keep their promise.  The longings which arise in us when we first fall in love, or first think of some foreign country, or first take up some subject that excites us, are longings which no marriage, no travel, no learning, can really satisfy.  I am not now speaking of what would ordinarily be called unsuccessful marriages, or holidays, or learned careers.  I am speaking of the best possible ones.  There was something we have grasped at, in that first moment of longing, which just fades away in the reality.  I think everyone knows what I mean.  The wife may be a good wife, and the hotels and scenery may have been excellent, and chemistry may be a very interesting job: but something has evaded us.

   The solution to all of this is to fall in love with Him who can fulfill all of our desires and needs.  It's to fall for the one true bridegroom who has already proven His love to us by dying for us on the cross.  This is the prayer of my heart these days-- that God will remove the idols of my heart and that I will worship the one true God.  I love this quote from Paige Benton Brown: "Can God be any less good to me on the average Tuesday morning than he was on that monumental Friday afternoon when he hung on a cross in my place?"  I'm still working on sacrificing those idols-- and trusting Him to provide for me that which I seek for myself-- and I would do well to remember that monumental Friday afternoon.  On Sunday at church, my pastor (mis)attributed G.K. Chesterton and said, "Every man who knocks on the door of a brothel is looking for God."  I don't know who actually said that, but I think it's true.  As the song goes, I've been looking for love in all the wrong places.  Or, in the words of Augustine, "Fecisti nos ad te et inquietum est cor nostrum donec requiescat in te."   You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.  If you're the praying sort, pray that my heart will find it's ultimate satisfaction in God.  I pray the same for you, dear friend.  Place your hope in Him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us.

Loving the Unloveable

"Love means loving the unloveable-- or it is no virtue at all."

~G.K. Chesteron, Heretics, 1905