[Note on Sunday, December 15, 2024: Oh wow, there were still all these problems. And we still didn’t even get down to the bottom. But anyway, getting better.]

[Note Monday, December 2, 2024: We did a once-through edit. Except for the very end. That we must revisit. And then maybe go once through again. And then umm]

[Note Friday, November 29, 2024: Okay, we’re releasing this. We need to read it. And edit it at least for clarity. And then we need another essay that builds on this one. And then we will loop back to the Knight of Faith essay we did a couple weeks ago.]

“Knight of Faith, eye of newt, the spiritual nature of representative democracy, toe of crow, shareable versus private spirituality, tongue of frog and wart of toad, from the point of view of God we are all little children, snot-stuffed snout of slaughtered swine, the wise rest on impermanence and interdependence as sea birds float on updrafts over the sloshing sea, splintered beak and tattered feather of long-wandered albatross, now Trump is king and we must flatter him like fops and jesters at his marble-floored gold-escalatored palace but perhaps in the genuflections we can all discover the wisdom of seeing us all — even those we’ve come to fear and loathe — as full humans beyond the caricatures drawn by ourselves and others, hair of deposed sovereign and spit from the bottom of the new master’s soda cup with ice melted also into the heartland-grown corn syrup and the many exotic flavors … ”

We chanted day and night, bent over our flames-crouched cauldron, our shoulders circling round and round as we stirred and stirred (both hands on worn-wooden lathe) our thick lava-esque bubbling and bubbles-bursting magic gruel.

It was challenging work, but rewarding work. Real work!

Scratch that.

No, like’s it’s a record and I’m a dj.

Scratch, scratch, scratch, building exciting new tracks out of exciting old ones.

Scratch that.

You should never be a Knight of Faith for anything except loving kindness. Everything else is bound to make trouble. Particularly to be avoided is playing Knight of Faith to the tune of some babe: this is a surefire way to make everyone miserable.

To make this case, I will bring forth two star witnesses.

First, Julian of Norwich, clearly a saint, and thus someone we should not be too hasty to either dismiss or understand:

And when God Almighty had shewed so plenteously and joyfully of His Goodness, I desired to learn assuredly as to a certain creature that I loved, if it should continue in good living, which I hoped by the grace of God was begun. And in this desire for a singular Shewing, it seemed that I hindered myself: for I was not taught in this time.

And then was I answered in my reason, as it were by a friendly intervenor[1]:

Take it generally, and behold the graciousness of the Lord God as He sheweth to thee: for it is more worship to God to behold Him in all than in any special thing. And therewith I learned that it is more worship to God to know all-thing in general, than to take pleasure in any special thing. And if I should do wisely according to this teaching, I should not only be glad for nothing in special, but I should not be greatly distressed for no manner of thing[2]: for All shall be well.

For the fulness of joy is to behold God in all: for by the same blessed Might, Wisdom, and Love, that He made all-thing, to the same end our good Lord leadeth it continually, and thereto Himself shall bring it; and when it is time we shall see it. And the ground of this was shewed in the First [Revelation], and more openly in the Third, where it saith: I saw God in a point.

All that our Lord doeth is rightful, and that which He suffereth[3] is worshipful: and in these two is comprehended good and ill: for all that is good our Lord doeth, and that which is evil our Lord suffereth. I say not that any evil is worshipful, but I say the sufferance of our Lord God is worshipful: whereby His Goodness shall be known, without end, in His marvellous meekness and mildness, by the working of mercy and grace.

Rightfulness is that thing that is so good that [it] may not be better than it is. For God Himself is very Rightfulness, and all His works are done rightfully as they are ordained from without beginning by His high Might, His high Wisdom, His high Goodness. And right as He ordained unto the best, right so He worketh continually, and leadeth it to the same end; and He is ever full-pleased with Himself and with all His works.

And the beholding of this blissful accord is full sweet to the soul that seeth by grace. All the souls that shall be saved in Heaven without end [shall*] be made rightful in the sight of God, and by His own goodness: in which rightfulness we are endlessly kept, and marvellously, above all creatures.

And Mercy is a working that cometh of the goodness of God, and it shall last in working all along, as sin is suffered to pursue rightful souls. And when sin hath no longer leave to pursue, then shall the working of mercy cease, and then shall all be brought to rightfulness and therein stand without end.

And by His sufferance we fall; and in His blissful Love with His Might and His Wisdom we are kept; and by mercy and grace we are raised to manifold more joys.

Thus in Rightfulness and Mercy He willeth to be known and loved, now and without end. And the soul that wisely beholdeth it in grace, it is well pleased with both, and endlessly enjoyeth.

[From Chapter 35 of Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love

Notes from the Project Gutenberg version:

[1] “A friendful mene” = intermediary (person or thing), medium: compare chapters 19 and 4.
[2] See chapter 34
[3] i.e. allowath]

*[I added that “shall” because it seemed like the text was missing either a “will” or a “shall” and I felt like a “shall” was more in the spirit of Julian’s time/place. I also moved the paragraphs around a bit.]

See? We should work to comprehend God in everyone and everything — not try to force romantic crushes into being magical bridges to God. That kind of fancy theo-emotional maneuvering takes us away from the work of connecting directly with God.

On the other hand, life requires dealing with each moment as it is presented to us. And so how does a young man go about dealing with a true love that he feels is unrequited? But no, I can’t take the question seriously. I am too old now, and I’ve been proven more crazy than loving too many times. Whatever reality one believes one has been thrown into, it remains true that only the Knight of Faith for loving kindness succeeds. Perhaps one can take a romantic love that one feels one should stay true to — even if unrequited — and persist therein, and in this persistence find God; but that doesn’t happen because one is persisting in one’s expectation for romantic love, it happens because one is persisting in one’s sense that Love is Real.

How to make this clear? The Knight of Faith may love the princess today but he is very willing to stop loving her tomorrow. His romantic love for the princess is besides the point. He must love her and everyone and even himself as if they were all children of God. He must make that motion every moment — the leap into the fundamental spiritual wager that life should be lived for spiritual Love rather than any material, emotional, or intellectual goods. He cannot become a Knight of Faith so long as the princess remains his object of devotion. It may be that his love for her forces him to see that the only love that means anything to him is a Love that is Real, but that realization contains within it the further realization that the only love that means anything to anyone is the Love that chooses everyone, and so the only path that means anything to anyone is living as if everyone were children of God and working every moment to find Love = Reality in that assumption.

Our second witness is Jesus of Nazareth, George W. Bush’s favorite philosopher and a proud spiritual sponsor of the 2003 US invasion of Iraq:

You want to know what the most important commandment is? You want to know the commandment upon which all religious Law rests? You want to know the single principle that — if lived — leads to eternal life? Okay, here you go:

Love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength, and your neighbor as yourself.

What does that kind of living look like? Well, a certain man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and he fell among robbers, who both stripped him and beat him, and departed, leaving him half dead. …

Where in Jesus’s reply to “what is the most important commandment” does Abraham raise his knife over Isaac’s breast? It doesn’t happen. The stories don’t fit. They weren’t supposed to.

The story of the Good Samaritan is a calling to be more loving than any of us ever are — for we all often shift our focus away from God’s Love, and we all often walk on by when somebody could really use a neighbor. But at least it’s a coherent testimony of faith and we can all feel it pointing meaningfully towards the right direction, even if we can’t quite get ourselves to get on board as fully as we would like to think maybe we would, should, could, are somehow actually yes-I-think-so doing — but no, we’re not quite there at all.

Though we don’t generally live up to the Most Important Commandment, we remember that it concludes with Jesus’s “Go and do likewise”, and we sense that it is meant to be lived as best as we can live it, even if within the grandeur of the story we recognize that we will never really live up to it.

The story of Abraham is not a story that is meant to be lived. Building a thought experiment out of this story is therefore not appropriate. There is no injunction for us to “go and do likewise” after we hear the story of Abraham and Isaac.

We can liken the sacrifice of Isaac to romantic devotion to the princess: both are beside the point. God will not ask you to sacrifice Isaac because sacrificing Isaac doesn’t jive with a life of Love. And God asks that you love yourself everyone with a full-on spiritual love, not that you wait forever for a princess who shows no signs of being yours.

Maybe if we go back to the story’s time and place, the story becomes clearer. Because maybe then and there it didn’t seem like such a crazy thought to suppose God might want Abraham to sacrifice Isaac child to God’s greater glory. Maybe the faith of Abraham is not that he allowed himself to interpret God’s voice as commanding him to sacrifice his son; but is rather in his last minute reversal — the moment when he heard God’s voice clear enough to understand that that’s not the kind of sacrifice God requires.

What if the story of Abraham and Isaac is how we humans can relate more meaningfully to God by putting our faith in God’s infinite spiritual Love? Then it seems that the story does jive with Jesus’s sketch of the true religion.

Abraham was influenced by the thoughts of his day. Rather than straying from the universal and the ethical (as Kierkegaard suggested Abraham was doing by being willing to sacrifice Isaac to God), perhaps Abraham was being absolutely conventional to think that God could command him to sacrifice his son, and that since God is God, he must suspend all other considerations. Perhaps Abraham on the way to Mount Moriah is not superseding the ethical/universal with the spiritual (as Kierkegaard’s analysis would have it); perhaps Abraham is rather the battleground for two different ethical/universals — one that correlates God’s will with our society’s moral certainties versus one that correlates God’s will with own inner sense of a Love that chooses everyone.

Maybe:

The question raging inside of Abraham as he walks with Isaac to Mount Moriah is:

Could God possibly supersede the spiritual/emotional/intellectual values that glow through our own heart of hearts (our inborn sense for how we must think, feel, and act: aware, honest, clear, accurate, competent, compassionate, loving-kind, and joyfully-sharing) and what we sense to be the true spiritual path (living in for and by a spiritual Love that chooses everyone always and will never abandon or let anyone down)*?

*[The universal values and this inborn spiritual path work together. Abiding by the universal values helps us to relate meaningfully to the Love/Lover that chooses everyone; and the more meaningfully we relate to that Love/Lover, the more It motivates and elucidates the universal values.]

And more specifically, could God supersede my inborn God-facing compass with the “universal” — used in this sense to signify not so much what is truly written in everyone’s heart of hearts, as what everyone around me “knows” (which in Abraham’s time and place includes the “knowledge” that God can command human sacrifice, and that of course you just have to do whatever God demands, no matter how terrible).

Maybe two different ideas about God are battling inside Abraham as he marches Isaac towards the slaughter. A God of Absolute Love versus a God of Absolute Power. A sense of God that is ultimately meaningful to human minds/hearts versus a sense of God that isn’t meaningful to our deep hearts/minds — but that has still won over the crowd’s shared story about what God might do. A God that first and foremost refuses all cruelty versus a God that first and foremost demands blind allegiance.

We walk with Abraham and Isaac in fear and trembling. Which god do we call God? Which god do we decide is the True God? Which gods are just our own notions mixing with the notions around us? And which God is the Infinite Reality?

Does our inner sense that we must think and feel and act aware, clear, honest, accurate, competent, compassionate, loving-kind, and joyfully-sharing point us towards the True Path? Or is that sense just some more animal noise? And if so, what sense points us towards the True Path? What part of Abraham’s conscious moment believes God can ask humans to sacrifice innocent children to God’s greater glory?

Ah, but we see the snag in this analysis. For your author doesn’t think God literally said to Abraham, “I will give you a son”, and then a few years later, “Go sacrifice your son to me.”

In fact, your author believes that that story — the literal one — cannot serve as a meaningful or profitable thought-experiment.

Jesus’s commandment to love the Lord with all our heart and soul and mind and strength and our neighbor as ourself, and his sketch of how that looks in action: It is perhaps an impossible goal, but it is in any case actionable: When Jesus says, “Go and do likewise” he is pointing us to a definite direction that we can choose to head towards — even if only the fewest of us will ever truly put Love first every day every moment over and over again, even when it seems wildly impractical. But if Abraham says, “God and do likewise”, what do we do with that? God doesn’t talk to us us in a literal way like he does in the story of Abraham and Isaac.

Sometimes we feel a sense or maybe even words or — you know?: Sometimes we think maybe God or the divine or something more or — you know?: Sometimes we think maybe God would bid us do this or that. We can probably all from experience testify that at least sometimes we are wrong when we believe we’re following God’s will, God’s commands, God’s directions, God’s direction. But it still seems possible that in some non-literal sense God “speaks” to us.

If God literally appears before us and tells us to kill a child for God’s glory, we need to immediately seek help. That’s all the further we can go down a thought experiment based on a literal interpretation of the story.

But a story in which Abraham feels God’s voice like we all sometimes maybe think we do is not necessarily at odds with the original, and it has the advantage of being relatable. And that story has only one solution. You don’t sacrifice Isaac. You don’t call any god/notion/tradition who/that demands cruelty the “True God”.

Nowadays of course we don’t even start the walk up to Mount Moriah. But we still find many ingenuous ways to call our notions the Truth; and we still try to counteract this weakness by opening up enough to Godlight to “hear” God well enough that God might direct us away from the worse and towards the better.

Strictly speaking, Abraham doesn’t need to sacrifice that poor goat, either. But how far can one get from the beliefs and norms of one’s times and places? Swapping out Isaac for a goat represents a great theological advancement, even if, I mean: really: God doesn’t need us to slit goats’ necks either. Why do we “know” that now? And why is your author so confident that that “knowledge” is more in line with God’s Truth than the ancient “knowledge” that of course God needs goats sacrificed sometimes, and pretty often actually — especially if somebody screwed up, or experienced a bunch of suspiciously bad luck — ?

We know we can lay off the goats for the same reason that we know that Jesus is right that the essence of the spiritual life is a dual motion inward to a God of Love and outward in the understanding that that same God and same Love shine through everyone else — binding us all together as children of the True God. Deep inside we know that God is Love; and we also know that there’s really no point sacrificing goats for the glory of God: killing innocent creatures is not needed for communion with the divine, and thinking it is amounts to a misunderstanding of divine nature.

When a young boy arrives at a new school and scorns the “bad” kids who act up a little in class and who don’t show any kind of love of or aptitude for book learning, he goes home and tells his mother about how sloppily these kids are living. His mother smiles gently. After all, everyone in the story is like seven years old and living in a safe and easy moment-spot. How bad or good can any of them really be at this point in their lives? But God is Infinite. What are the odds of God agreeing with us that we are “good” and some other people are “bad”? What are the odds of God doing anything but smiling gently, and gently leading us all to the perspective that understands, embraces, and actualizes the Most Important Commandment and the Story of the Good Samaritan?

You might argue that it’s too easy for Abraham to have faith if his faith corresponds to his own inborn sense of spiritual direction. You might say, “Abraham’s faith means nothing if he doesn’t prove his faith by suspending all ethical considerations, thereby being fully ready to do God’s will — even up to and including sacrificing Isaac’s young life.” But you’d know that’s not true even as you said it. The journey into a true individual subjective relationship with God must be a journey that is meaningful to the person taking it. And that implies abiding by those inborn rules that we must abide by to be meaningful to ourselves. And as our own failure to live up to the Good Samaritan’s example demonstrates, being a Knight of Faith within the universal values (in the sense of those values written in our own heart of hearts, rather than just in the sense of those values that other people in your time and place subscribe to) is already impossibly difficult.

The point here is that suspending your community’s sense of the ethical/universal is not the same as sacrificing your own innermost sense of the ethical/universal. And that I feel like Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling conflates these two meanings of ethical/universal. In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard brings forth three tragic heroes to prove that the Knight of Faith is not a tragic hero. Agamemnon, for example, is a hero because he sacrifices his daughter’s life so the Greek ships can move. And he remains safely within the “universal/ethical” in doing this — everyone can understand and be grateful for this sacrifice. Except no. Not now. Now it’s like: That war didn’t need to happen in the first place, and what kind of Gods are you worshipping if they make you kill children in order to move ships? … and so on. Agamemnon’s “universal/ethical” is not ours. Rather than applauding Agamemnon’s murder of his innocent child for the sake of a war over his brother’s honor, we’re wont to say, “he overstepped the universal values in order to appease some common idiocies of his day.”

What if the Father of Faith is just another human being? That is to say: What if faith is possible not just in story books and scriptures, but in all human lives? I want to argue it is, and that that implies that Abraham’s big insight in the story of Isaac would have to be that God doesn’t desire physical human sacrifices. And we’re off! After we’ve realize communing with God does not require killing innocent children, it’s not a great leap to asking God to accept us as tools of God’s will — that we might be a living sacrifice to the God of Love.

Granted, we say a lot of things we don’t mean. Nonetheless, there has been theological progress since Abraham’s childhood, and that progress has come by generation after generation asking themselves what it would really be like to follow God — rather than following our own notions, or the myths of our surrounding worlds.

And yet it remains true that faith is not believing in stories about someone else’s faith, nor is it even believing in Jesus’s account of what faith is. Faith is walking with God. Faith is a spiritual journey. Faith is reliance not on ideas and feelings and principles; nor even is it reliance on stories about the Love that chooses everyone; faith is reliance on and relationship with the Love that chooses everyone.

But is faith something one does alone or with others? Faith communities can help one stay grounded in the spirit. And they can also help one drift into shallow interpretations of one’s chosen religion.

But is the Knight of Faith primarily a believer in God’s specific plan for his life or in God’s Love for all? A belief in God’s specific plan for one’s own life can help one stay grounded in the spirit. And it can help one drift into shallow interpretations of one’s life.

The question is not “alone or with others?”, nor is it “God’s plan for me or God’s Love?” The question is one of primacy: What comes first? First and foremost the spiritual path is an inside-out* relationship with a Love that chooses everyone, flowing into life with that Love, and thereby comprehending oneself** and everyone else within and through that Love.

*[inside-out: Based in the center of one’s conscious experience, and radiating out from there.]

**[comprehending oneself and everyone else with the Love that chooses everyone:

“Oneself” is a conscious moment. A conscious moment consists of feelings, ideas, and notions all sliding in and out of each other, interacting with and changing and giving birth and death to each other; and all this shot through with the Love that chooses everyone (spiritual Love is the only Reality; as such it creates, sustains, and shines through everything — including each conscious moment).

More wisdom is when one’s feeling/thinking/acting relates to Pure Love* with less confusion, thereby poetically** interpreting It into life with less distortion.

*{Pure Love = Reality = Love = the Love that chooses everyone. We’re pointing towards a shared human vista with words; we’re speaking poetically; we’re goofing around.}

**{the relationship between Pure Love and the rest of one’s conscious experience must be a poetic one, because stories about and reactions to Pure Love are not equivalent to Pure Love. We can point meaningfully towards what is prior to our ideas and feelings without trying to capture it literally; and pretending we can capture what is prior to our ideas and feelings literally in ideas and feelings causes us to worship our own ideas and feelings, rather than to use them to better and better orientate our whole conscious moment within the Love that Is.}

The more cleanly one’s feeling, thinking, and acting flows into and out of Pure Love; the closer to infinite and thus equal is one’s compassion for one’s own flowing-together of PureLove/feelings/thoughts/words/deeds (i.e. “oneself”) and everyone elses’ “selves”.

And vice versa.

That is to say: The more one loves God with all one’s heart, soul, mind, and strength; the more one loves one’s neighbor as oneself. And the practice of working to love’s one neighbor as oneself helps to center one’s conscious moment around Pure Love.

“and the second is like the first”* because loving God implies living the Truth (we are all children of God) and thus loving one’s neighbor as oneself; but loving one’s neighbor as oneself implies living the Truth and thus loving God.

*Then one of them, which was a lawyer, asked him a question, tempting him, and saying,
Master, which is the great commandment in the law?

Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.

Matthew 22:35-40, KJV]

The Knight of Faith’s center is not a romantic crush; nor is it some other guess of God’s exact plan for his life. The Knight of Faith’s center is loving God with all his heart and soul and mind and strength, and his neighbor as himself. A Knight of Faith may love a woman, and a Knight of Faith may believe God is calling him to do this or that in the world; but a Knight of Faith is centered not around these guesses but around the Love that chooses everyone always and that is enough for everyone with infinite joyful giving left over and that never ever lets anyone down.

Does the Knight of Faith lift the knife over Isaac’s thin, desert-tanned little-boy neck — certain that God will stay his hand, but yet willing to let Isaac’s blood careen and puddle and pool and bunch and dry upon the sandy dirt?

Does the Knight of Faith wait all his life for the princess — certain that God will grant their union in this life, yet willing to die alone without so much as a smile from his daydreamed bride?

No and no.

The Knight of Faith in Abraham’s day perhaps flirts with the possibility that God would command a father sacrifice his child’s life to prove to God that he loves God best. But by centering himself around God’s Love, the Knight of Faith works with God to lift his personal theology out of such errors — even if the prevailing surrounding theologies were susceptible to or even encouraged such misinterpretations of the divine.

The Knight of Faith might be a man who loves a woman or a woman who loves a man or a man who loves a man or a woman who loves a woman or a man who loves a they or a woman who loves a they or a they who loves a man or a they who loves a woman or a they who loves a they — that’s all the permutations I can think of; I hope I’ve not left anyone out! —

What I mean is, the Knight of Faith may love a princess with his everything, and the Knight of Faith may think it best to wait for his chosen princess, may believe that this love is true and thus is part of God’s plan for him and thus should be waited for. The Knight of Faith may do all this and he may expect to win the princess in this life because he may feel that that’s the path God’s laid for him in this life;

But the Knight of Faith is centered first and foremost around God’s Love, and his life is first and foremost a self-observing, -analysing, -critiquing and -adjusting meditation on living that Love, and so he may very well in time come to see that he’d misinterpreted God’s path for him, or that perhaps God had bade him wait for his princess, but now God bade him let her go.

On the Knight of Faith’s freedom:

The Knight of Faith’s center is the center of each human conscious moment. At the center of each conscious moment is Godlight = spiritual Love = An Infinitely Joyful Infinitely Giving Giggle of Kind Delight. Nothing else truly exists, and nothing else is a free-cause.

All that exists is Pure Love. As the transcendent cause of all things, Pure Love creates this shared illusion (the interwoven tapestry of all bodies and minds). As the immanent cause of all things, Pure Love is a first-cause shining through everything.

All creatures are free to the degree their actions consciously flow off their true nature. The only true nature is Pure Love. And so we are free only to the degree our actions flow off of Pure Love qua immanent first-cause — as opposed to Pure Love qua transient first-cause:

Our consciousnesses cannot sync up with the totality of all caused things (i.e. illusions) as they tumble as one off of Pure Love [this is Pure Love qua transcendent first-cause]; but human consciousnesses can to some degree sync up with Pure Love as It shines through everything, including each conscious moment [this is Pure Love qua immanent first-cause].

We are unfree to the degree we’re bumped here and there by proximate causes. But the only first-cause is the Love that creates, sustains, and shines through everything. And so we are free precisely to the degree that our conscious moments sync up with and flow off Pure Love as It shines through each conscious moment.

Freedom is not following one’s own whims any more than it is following the whims of one’s leaders or the prevailing norms of one’s era. Freedom is following God. This freedom cannot be forced by laws. This freedom must come from within, from being overflowed and exploded apart by the Love that chooses everyone.

This freedom finds itself: we have within always at least some relationship to the Pure Love shining through our every conscious moment; and to the degree we cultivate that relationship (to the degree Pure Love rules the rest of our conscious moments and organizes our feeling/thinking/acting around Itself), we become more free.

You cannot legislate spiritual freedom, and pretending you can force spiritual wisdom onto a culture just tempts people to lie to themselves and others about the most sacred things. Hence the separation of church and state, and the refusal to equate leaders with God’s agents on earth. The free man bows to no one except the God of Love within; oh, and I guess to everyone to the degree they need your helping hand — for the Love within recognizes Itself in everyone and delights therein.

The Knight of Faith will avoid making the most egregious of spiritual errors — confusing one’s owns notions for the Truth to the degree that one commits grave sins against God, others, and one’s own inner world. If he does end up slitting Isaac’s throat to prove to God that he loves God, then he was not yet then the Knight of Faith — even if perhaps now he sees his mistakes and rights his rhythm (and spends the rest of his life in repentance for his terrible error).

The Knight of Faith may well win his princess’s heart and even marry her, after the fashion of humankind. But only as a bonus. Insofar as he is a Knight of Faith, his being is concentrated around only one inward action: working every moment to better and better give oneself over to the God of Love, and to better and better interpret that Gentle Persistent Kindness into feeling, thinking, speaking, and acting.

But we want to help our nation in this wobbly moment.

How to proceed?

Abraham believes God is commanding him to march Isaac up Mount Moriah and kill him there. George W. Bush prays for wisdom and the most powerful nation in the world invades Iraq to finally set things right in the Middle East, make it all nice and cozy and tame like Europe after World War II. Julian of Norwich’s wisdom generally feels timeless; one believes she experienced God in a point and in some deep sense knew that all is well; and yet, somewhere in the general blessedness, she does let slip,

And yet in this I desired, as [far] as I durst, that I might have full sight of Hell and Purgatory. But it was not my meaning to make proof of anything that belongeth to the Faith: for I believed soothfastly that Hell and Purgatory is for the same end that Holy Church teacheth, but my meaning was that I might have seen, for learning in all things that belong to my Faith: whereby I might live the more to God’s worship and to my profit.

But for [all] my desire, I could[1] [see] of this right nought, save as it is aforesaid in the First Shewing, where I saw that the devil is reproved of God and endlessly condemned. In which sight I understood as to all creatures that are of the devil’s condition in this life, and therein end, that there is no more mention made of them afore God and all His Holy than of the devil,—notwithstanding that they be of mankind—whether they be christened or not.

For though the Revelation was made of goodness in which was made little mention of evil, yet I was not drawn thereby from any point of the Faith that Holy Church teacheth me to believe. For I had sight of the Passion of Christ in diverse Shewings,—the First, the Second, the Fifth, and the Eighth,—wherein I had in part a feeling of the sorrow of our Lady, and of His true friends that saw Him in pain; but I saw not so properly specified the Jews that did Him to death. Notwithstanding I knew in my Faith that they were accursed and condemned without end, saving those that converted, by grace. And I was strengthened and taught generally to keep me in the Faith in every point, and in all as I had before understood: hoping that I was therein with the mercy and the grace of God; desiring and praying in my purpose that I might continue therein unto my life’s end.

And it is God’s will that we have great regard to all His deeds that He hath done, but evermore it needeth us to leave the beholding what the Deed shall be. And let us desire to be like our brethren which be saints in Heaven, that will right nought but God’s will and are[Pg 69] well pleased both with hiding and with shewing. For I saw soothly in our Lord’s teaching, the more we busy us to know His secret counsels in this or any other thing, the farther shall we be from the knowing thereof.

[Chapter 33, Revelations of Divine Love, Julian of Norwich, circa 1343 to after 1416]

Hmmm.

Why do we who are so much less wise than Julian of Norwich know that the Medieval Catholic Church’s doctrine that the Jews were eternally responsible for and condemned for Jesus’s death is (as today’s Catholic Church now holds) false? Or did she know, or maybe be kind of know, but yet also sensed that her manuscript would not survive if she contradicted the church’s teachings? Was perhaps her mentioning that she’d not seen purgatory and she’d not seen the Jews as being particularly guilty of Jesus’s death: were these perhaps the best hints she thought she could get away with as to the fact that these teachings of the church were not really, strictly speaking, true?? Or was she — wise and loving though she was — honestly still kind of bamboozled by the dogma’s of her time and place?

How to be a Knight of Faith in a way that isn’t awful? How to give your all to God for real, and not trick yourself into thinking God needs you to go crush xyz sinners who, actually, are just as much children of the living God as you are? How to give the princess the space she needs to feel whether or not she feels what you feel?

God’s will for your public life? And God’s will for your nation? Ah, but even mentioning it I feel the evil piling up like so much sludge choking the drain, stopping up the tub with more and more and evermore toilet water.

And yet Abraham Lincoln was obsessed with the question of God’s will for the United States of America. And Abraham Lincoln didn’t mess everything up, didn’t parade around in and gum up the works with the same old boring shit about how my dad and my nation and my GOD is gonna whoop your dad and your nation and your god.

Hmmmmm.

Author: Humpty Dumpty
Editors: All the kings horses, men, and monopolies
Directors, Producers, and Catering: Bartleby Willard & Amble Whistletown
Copyright: Andy Watson