Know No Love


Dear Eugene,

Mockery of the world.  Nip it in the bud, what we don't understand, looked but didn't see, listened but shall never hear.  Snuff it out.  Prescribe treatment.  Send it to specialists, learned elites, to dissect, to analyze, to make a case and categorize into predetermined abstractions.  When the folder of knowledge is finally filled with satisfying hypotheses we can at last give out a long sigh slam the book close and clean off the trail of flesh and blood on ground.  The show must go on.

Rowan Williams once said in a sermon:

 "All this really comes to one thing: the terrible threat of knowledge without love.  Is anything in human relations more frightening than that?  And how often has the Christian picture of God concentrated on His knowledge in a way that is totally oppressive?  ‘O Lord, thou hast searched me out and known me. Whither shall I go then from Thy presence?’  That can be a cry of despair; we have no privacy before the terrible omnipresent eye of God.  And our fear of exposing ourselves to any other – in therapy, in the confessional, or simply in ordinary friendship – has a lot to do with that primitive dread of knowledge without love.  There are no guarantees that what we show won’t produce revulsion or worse, perhaps contempt or amusement.  In Dostoyevsky’s novel The Possessed, the central figure, Stavrogin, determines to make a public confession of a particularly appalling episode in his earlier years and goes to read this confession to a local monk with a reputation for sanctity, Bishop Tikhon.  Tikhon listens without a word of condemnation, then shocks Stavrogin by asking if he can bear not the hostility but the mockery of the world.  Stavrogin leaves in disgust and fear, unable to publish his confession.  He cannot face that ultimate rejection, laughter."

The Dostoevsky novel he mentioned is usually known as Demons, a title that I like better.

One thing I found out about myself, an answer that I've been seeking, elusive until this past weekend after the church camp, is the reason for my deep resistance to going for a vacation.  Maybe one day I will write enough for a book about it, but it is as simple and stupid as this: that I find it necessary to root in a space and time I enter and to make the swift uprooting a casual, expected, even desired affair to me is obscenity of the worst kind.  Like mistaking a whorehouse for my home.  I dwelt among named people, embraced by particular air, touched by special grace, when I meant myself to be fully there.  I don't touch and go, gas and dash.  If I stay but don't intend to stay for good at least I would stay for a good amount of time and mean to do a good amount of good.  Jesus was rooted by a few particular nails.

A pretty stupid confession, I know.  But there you go.

Yours, Alex

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