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September 22, 2001
Fall
How far is it?The towers of the World Trade Center were each less than a mile high, and their footprint was less than a city block.
You could bury the buildings in Central Park twice over, yet like the Park, they were a world unto themselves.
There are things, and there are places, but these skyscrapers were both.
They were made to be seen from too far away.
At vast distance, we lose the details. We see a simple generality, easy to categorize, but not examined in detail.
We see a symbol.
I saw details.
Saw from a few blocks away, through binoculars, people hanging out of upper story windows, flickering between the columns like birds among the meadow stalks. I saw people falling that impossible distance.
Not a mile, but forever.
Fall
Fall
Fall
We are all fallen
and falling still.
We never do settle
in this world.
By some sad pun of circumstance today’s occasion is the Autumnal Equinox, and the first day of Fall. The season seems appropriate: the Year turning the corner into retraction, darkness and death. But even when all the leaves lie dead on the ground, the tree survives, to bloom again in time. And first there is the harvest of the fruits, and the beauty of the change; the south-bound birds and butterflies that glorify the atmosphere. All going on now, without regard for our concerns.
A wonderful season, the Fall.
I’ve spoken here before about our Fallen World, and of my (as Irenaeus put it “falsely so-called”) Gnosticism. I am hardly the first to fall back on spirituality; indeed some have fallen forward on it, as on a sword.
I have no beliefs, and do but offer my understandings, limited and flawed. I know it may seem ridiculous, not to mention pompous, not to mention escapist, to retreat into such musings. An intangible net of unverified imaginings about the unknown can hardly contain the reality of our current pass, but it’s what I’ve got. And it’s something to work with, when reality fails, as it so spectacularly has.
Gnosticism says that reality always fails; that it is not we, but God that is Fallen, and that Creation is the consequence of this Fall. The World is born of some desperation or distress, some instability in that which should be perfect, immutable and unchanging. Yet even shattered into Being, the fragments of Divinity intuit restoration and return. I would choose the Garden of Paradise over the Holy City, but all our visions are just that: visions; tantalizing us with intimations of some ultimate destination beyond our comprehension.
If reality ever succeeds in getting there, it will be its own undoing.
Yet that is our true desire, and with this faith we proceed along a mysterious path. Now and again we earn a revelation of just how we may serve this end, but mostly we go in darkness and uncertainty. Our Ecstasies point the way, but the terrain is twisted into a maze, with no direct path. Our morals and our ethics, traditional or ad hoc, must guide us where illumination is lacking. Our progress seems as slow as our lives seem fast, and there are always those who would force the issue and speed us headlong to the brink; a danger to themselves and others.
A danger most of all to God.
For our failure will be God’s failure, and Creation may yet climax not with the transformation of Matter into Spirit, but in final dissolution, each shattered particle adrift, alone, inviolate: never to be reunited.
How far is it?
From here to the Apocalypse.
From here to Paradise.
As far as forever, as far away as the gods we only imagine.
As close to us as death is every day.
As close as we hold what we love.
We will achieve it.
Near or far, we will find the right way.
I say this in faith, but also in knowledge, or whatever sort of knowing I have gained by everything that I have seen and lived. I know it by every pattern of my mind and heart that finds harmony with a pattern larger than myself.
Laugh with me,
for the whole World is a disaster, and one more cannot defeat us.
Let it teach us the better way.
Cry with me.
We will only win by knowing better.
And by acting better than we have.
That we can do this, I have no doubt, for we house a sacred force. We have seen it in the selfless sacrifices. We have seen it in the will to persevere. It is the same force that weathers Winter’s wasteland, then blooms again in Spring. Our Summer slain, still it ripples in the Autumn leaves. And if the billows of red, yellow, and orange that will unfold amid the green should recall a vision of terror, we will know better.
We will be better.
Pray with me.
A wonderful season, the Fall.