-St. John's Gospel, chapter 11

I have always had a very concrete sense of loss. I was very young when I learned the inevitable truth of life: that all things are doomed to sail across the horizon of your own perception and disappear from the waking world. I can see the light of a similar realization when I speak, as I have lately, to my four-year-old daughter about death. The neighbor's cat, her aunt's dog, all these little perishings of animals have added up to that dreadful question: "Daddy, are you going to die too? Am I going to die?" And the inevitable, sad reply: "Yes, baby girl. Everyone does."

Even if someone doesn't die, in the literal sense, we experience many small deaths, almost constantly. Being a parent is a series of small deaths, often unnoticed: the last time you could comfortably give your child a piggy-back ride, the last time you read them that one story that they loved, the last time they got up in the middle of the night to sneak into your bed because they were afraid and needed you to comfort them. These are often never acknowledged, even as they continue to occur, even as they populate all other areas of our lives: the last time your favorite barista made your coffee just the way you like it or the last time you saw a friend for lunch before his job took him to a new city. You kept in touch for years afterward, but never like that. Not as two people meeting one another face-to-face, but as ships passing in the night, or like ghosts floating past one another with a gentle nod: well-wishing without substance.

And society groups many of these small deaths under the umbrella of change. And change can sound benign. Change can be a cause for celebration: a "change of pace," or a "change of scenery." Moving up, moving out. Out with the old, in with the new. After all, how can you grieve a job that was never that good to you? Or a house that had that one stubborn leak under the sink that no plumber could seem to permanently fix? And who would want their child to stay a child forever? I certainly wouldn't want that.

Religion tells us that (at least some of) the loss associated with change is an illusion; it is temporary. Loved ones die, we will see them again in heaven. Yet, even these "temporary separations," rend the very heart of God himself.

Jesus is described as weeping three times in the New Testament: for Lazarus (in the section quoted above), for the impending judgement upon Jerusalem, and in the Garden of Gethsemane.

Jesus weeps for Lazarus, why? I think it probable that he does this because, in that moment, he experiences the loss of his friend the way you or I would. He perhaps thinks of Lazarus, gray and still and overcome by the corruption of the grave, his soul bound in Sheol, waiting in darkness. The fact that he will soon be resurrected does not prevent him from weeping, in fact, perhaps it heightens his sorrow all the more. For as he weeps, the question resounds around him from the onlookers: "He had the power to cure the blind, he had the power to heal this man. He let him die."

When Jesus regards Jerusalem, and the people who will welcome him as a king and then crucify him like a common criminal: he weeps. They will not turn from the path of perdition. It does not matter that, in the eschaton, there will be the New Jerusalem. God weeps for the Jerusalem there in front of him, with its holiness and its sin, which is passing away.

And when he weeps in the Garden, he weeps in his anguish, his grief "unto death," not merely for his own suffering (which will be great) but for the suffering that his disciples will suffer for his sake: to be separated from him by the grave, even for a mere three days, to be bereft of their beloved teacher, and for all of their eventual lives of toil, hard travelling, deprivation, and eventual martyrdom. Gethsemane marks the end of his public ministry on earth in the strictest, most intimate sense. That he will ascend to glory, and his disciples likewise does not wipe the tears from his eyes.

I think the myriad tears of Christ reveal something about the power sorrow has to imbue the world with significance. That is not to say that it is appropriate to dwell on every passing, fleeting thing as it darts away from us. It is, however, my belief that sorrow, rightly understood, is at the core of a certain type of spiritual life. I have written previously about the boddhisatva path in Mahayana Buddhism, the vow of compassion for all sentient creatures. There is a certain sense in which to weep, to feel sorrow, can be the outward sign of the inward movement of compassion which in the Christian tradition we call agape and among the Buddhists is the compassionate bodhicitta.

We make a mistake when we pit sorrow against joy. Though it is popular wisdom these days to posit that: "The opposite of love is not hate, it is indifference," a greater and more correct maxim, in my mind, is: "The opposite of joy is not sorrow," for joy and sorrow come from the same source: an overflowing and abundant love.

We should always feel sorrow for creatures, even if, in the case of a good death, it is only sorrow for ourselves that we must be deprived of our loved ones for the little while we sojourn here upon the earth. But, I think it even appropriate to cultivate a sorrow for the passing of the seasons, the days of our lives, the wholesome pleasures of God's good but impermanent world, for what we grieve is the passing away of those smudged images of the Good that sustain us here before we see Goodness itself face-to-face. To see God in these smaller things and lament their passing away is a good pedagogue, insofar as it teaches us to yearn ever more for God himself; that God who suffers, that God who sorrows, that God who weeps.

Boddhisatva-Nature and Theosis: Or, a Proposal for the Integration of Buddhist Thought into Christian Spiritual Practice

Author's Note:

I am a Western Christian with a more-than-popular but less-than-scholarly understanding of the religious and philosophical milieu of Asia. While I attempt to represent the ideas and intentions of other traditions with respect, drawing out from them what I think are valuable insights, I nevertheless recognize my own blind spots. If there are any among my readers who would seek to correct my writing, either in regard to my representation of Buddhism or Christianity, I humbly welcome such fraternal correction.

In later Mahayana Buddhism, the ideal of the bodhisattva is held up to adherents as a supreme religious aspiration and all are encouraged to attain to it. A bodhisattva, an "awakened" or "enlightened being," is a person who has promised to withhold their own enlightenment and attainment of nirvana until all other sentient beings have likewise escaped the cycle of reincarnation, the experience of suffering, and attained buddhahood. Buddhists from this branch of the tradition venerate bodhisattvas as benevolent divine figures willing to come to the aid of lesser beings with their immense magical power.

It is perhaps because of a sense of subtle egoism that Buddhists of the Mahayana schools began to regard the path of the bodhisattva as higher than that of the so-called "solitary Buddha," still seen as the religious ideal among the Therevada schools. I cannot say as much. What I can say is that, to a Christian, the idea of the bodhisattva, a person on a cosmic mission to end all suffering by the force of their own compassion and wisdom, almost immediately recalled, for me, the sublimity of St. Paul's cosmological Christ. Take, for example, this passage from the first chapter of his Letter to the Colossians:

"For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy. For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross. Once you were alienated from God and were enemies in your minds because of your evil behavior. But now he has reconciled you by Christ’s physical body through death to present you holy in his sight, without blemish and free from accusation— if you continue in your faith, established and firm, and do not move from the hope held out in the gospel. This is the gospel that you heard and that has been proclaimed to every creature under heaven, and of which I, Paul, have become a servant."

Take note specifically of the universal scope of Christ's authority, his power, and the efficacy of his salvific work. This recalls the cosmic significance of the mission of the bodhisattva, but, of course, they are rooted in different philosophies. Christ can bring this universal shalom by virtue of who He is, as coeternal with the Father and possessed of Godhood, proper. The bodhisattva, by contrast, has no special spiritual or ontological status beyond what they have labored to achieve by following the path set forth by Buddhist spiritual practice. In this straightforward sense, this type of cosmic saviorism is off limits to the ordinary Christian.

If we speak this way, I feel, we speak too soon. For just as Christ labors to reconcile all things unto himself, the body of believers which we call the Church labors with Him and, by the process of theosis, or what we in the West may call divinization or sanctification, we are made partakers of the same divine nature through mystical union with Christ.

Likewise, just as the later Mahayana tradition came to assign a "buddha-nature," to everything, seeing in all things the potential to transcend the eternal cycle of suffering, so Christ as Incarnation, that is as having become in a certain sense a Creature, has united his divinity to creaturehood such that it is considered obvious to the Christian consciousness that all men partake in a kind of "Christo-nature" via Christ's identification with the suffering: "What you have done for the least of these, you have done for me." This is the fullest expression of what Christian theology calls the imago Dei.

Thus, as Christians advance in the spiritual life and attain more fully unto theosis, they take on more of the aspects of this Christo-nature, not as something achieved through effort but as something infused by grace.

Necessarily, this has a similar dimension to the bodhisattva, for if Christ is a kind of supreme bodhisattva, kind of supreme bringer of shalom, then it stands to reason that those who attain unto theosis become such as well. What this looks like practically in the life of the believer would prompt a much longer speculation, but it must mean, at least, a sharing in Christ's universal compassion and salvific will, as well as a cultivation of such virtues as would allow this orientation to be effective upon the souls of others. It would require, like Christ, an other-oriented spirituality.

Here, Christianity stands ready to receive a corrective. For especially in late modern times, Christian soteriology has more and more retreated inwardly. There is a greater emphasis on one's personal holiness. Christians disappear into preoccupation with their own salvation, a theosis of a "private Christ," if you will. I have heard many Christians routinely boil the faith down to the bare goal of "getting to heaven." It would be much better to receive the outwardly-directed and affective spirituality of the bodhisattva, and work for one's own salvation through and for the sake of the salvation of all.

Here, obviously, other issues arise. How could such a schema apply to a Christianity that is not at least hopefully universalist in its outlook? Indeed, I do not relish, and do not intend to take up, the project of squaring such a profound, cosmologically Christic spirituality with traditional Christian beliefs about eternal damnation, its exact nature and condition. I would leave that project to someone more interested.

Yet I find nothing so pressing in my own spiritual life as to cultivate this spirit and disposition, and live it to the best of my ability.

The dust from the sanitarium's car had scarcely fallen back to the earth when my parents' freshly-waxed black coupe thundered down the drive. The hood ornament, a silver hawk, menaced me as I walked out on the porch to greet them.

"I'm sorry," I said, "you already missed her. She's just left."

"Well that's no matter," my mother said, bustling past me to the door. Father followed behind her, holding his hat in his hand and floating at her heels like a wraith. The hollow expression on his tall, gaunt face was the only sign in the visible universe of the morning's earlier tragedy.

In a blink, there we were. The sitting room was as dusty as it ever was. The reheated cakes were beginning to return to their natural state, and the steaming coffee was the only perceptible sign of life. I busied myself studying the cupids and cherubs, half covered in soot and dust, chasing one another beneath the crown moulding. I glanced at the whiskey in the decanter by Father's elbow, decided I preferred the pale gray nothing to the warm amber blanket of intoxication, and declined internally. I had decided I liked the pain, actually.

"It's time, I think, son, to begin the search anew," said my mother, unperturbed. She waved a cigarette carelessly, like a child with a lit match.

"Mother," I said, "she's just gone to sanitarium for a few months. The doctors say that such hysterias are easily treatable with ample rest and some of the new therapies they're trying..." I trailed off, knowing that I was just speaking hollow claptrap. My mother-in-law had disappeared into that sanitarium by the seashore a decade ago. Her mother before that. Swallowed whole, like they had never existed. A cloud of uncertainty hung over me, but then when did it ever not?

"Still," she continued, tactlessly, "in the event that she does not return, you should begin to make arrangements. After all, a significant fortune rests on your shoulders, my son, a significant fortune." She gestured to the house in general. "Your great grandfather built this magnificent house like he built our family: with wisdom and shrewd business sense. You should run it just the same. Marriage is a business contract, after all."

I nodded glumly. "Mother, you are always practical. I would like to be impractical for a while. Surely great grandfather's luxury could afford me that," I did not add: "Just as it has afforded you your fancy cars, trips to Europe, and vampiric hanger-on socialite friends."

She dismissed me with a perfunctory wave of her hand. "You are a man, you should think and act manfully. Make yourself worthy of your great grandfather's house, or perhaps I will no longer suffer you to live in it."

I let the threat pass by without taking it, as I had let many such darts in life fall across me. In the ten years of my marriage, she had threatened often and acted never.

The rest of the luncheon passed by with talk of Europe and Turkey, strange foods and exotic places and the idiosyncratic ways of the foreign peoples she had seen. Father floated by the window, cup in hand, surely bilocating to somewhere beyond that musty room. I was glad to see them gone.

For a few days, I talked to no one and did hardly anything. I made coffee and toast, languished at my desk until dinner time. I telephoned around 6 to ask after my wife, who was always doing "very well," but was likewise "very tired," and couldn't come to the phone. On the third day, I took the car out into town to buy more necessities. I floated through the general store and the post office like a ghost, and just as lightly as I perceived was I perceived in turn: a nod of the head, a "morning, mister," a "that'll be a dollar-fifteen."

I returned from the post office with a bundle of papers from work, which I scratched my signature upon without looking at them or what they said, then festooned them with stamps to go out again. A telephone call from work arrived, was answered, words were exchanged whose import I could scarcely begin to guess at, and then for some reason I remained the rest of the evening by the telephone, perhaps awaiting another call. In vain, it seemed, because it still had not come when the next day arrived.

What did arrive was a letter, from my wife. I exchanged the packet of work documents with the postman for this one few-inches-square envelope, lavender-colored, and it seemed to me like paying Kublai Khan a bag of stones for all the silks in China. I half-ran to the house and I watched myself bolt the latch. I regarded it for a moment, then decided not to open it again. Not even the fresh air and the blue sky could share my pleasure.

I stood by the door to the sitting room. I gingerly opened the envelope with a penknife. Inside, a single bit of folded white cardstock which read, in a crooked but feminine hand:

"I wish to have my paints brought to me, please. Doctor says he will not mind if you bring them to me. Bring the children along too, I miss them terribly. You can find them in the bureau, left drawer.

Hope to see you soon, L."

I stood a while longer and puzzled at it. Then my eyes drifted, naturally, to the door to the studio. It had been shut during her last spell, almost two weeks ago. It seemed then like the door to some temple of sacred solitude. I scarce believed it when my mere mortal hand was able to turn the knob.

Within was everything the way I remembered: the writing desk, the easel and paints, the astrolabe and the globe on the low table, the shelves and shelves of sketchbooks, the pens and pencils scattered upon every surface, and the locked bureau at the far corner of the room, midmorning sunlight invading through Venetian blinds to bleach the ancient wood with stripes.

I worked my key in the lock, but even before the door opened I could hear them, stirring. I opened the left drawer, and there, within the hollow recesses of the padded jewelry box, were six very small dolls. None were larger than my fist. Each was hand-stitched, with skin of light, creme colored napkincloth and clothes made from corduroy. Buttons for eyes, sewed mouths which nevertheless wiggled up and down to form the semicircle of a smile and they all turned to regard me. My hand jerked involuntarily, and all at once they tumbled out upon the floor, but whatever the height of the fall to the scale of their bodies might have suggested, they landed soundlessly and were instantly back upon their feet. They cartwheeled and danced and jeered among each other, all to the tune of the ghostly laughter of children, somewhere, in some unseen dimension of space.

I looked upon them with manifest astonishment, and yet, though to see dolls' faces and dolls' eyes move in such a fashion was, in the abstract, a horror, I found that those countenances contained a note of familiarity. Here a young boy in a sailor's costume, here another dressed as a knight of the Round Table, girls in pastel Easter gowns or in painters' smocks. I gathered them up into my arm and I felt, for the first time, what a father must feel holding his child. There was color and texture to me again, if only a little.

To see the way they jumped and pantomimed and ran through the house was like seeing morning glories burst open at the first rays of sunshine. The toys in the empty nursery, little cars and blocks with letters written on them, were man-sized to their eyes and I could scarce tear myself away from the wonder of their play. Telephones rang and were ignored. Mail from work came and found itself piled in the unused garret office. The whiskey decanter in the sitting room seemed to have regenerated itself with lack of use. Life had come from nothing. All attention rested upon the miracle.

And in a few days' time, I had gathered all of the painting supplies and made preparations for the visit to the sanitarium. The living dolls busied themselves helping with those preparations, or simply being a nuisance, taking the phone off the hook or spreading their playthings and craft projects all about the various empty rooms.

The day of the trip came, and we were all in excitement. It was a long drive along a narrow strip of stone-shingled beaches and rocky coastline. All the way the motor seemed to hum like the distant droning of an airplane passing overhead. The sun and the waves conspired to make the air at once refreshing and clean. All under heaven was well.

By late afternoon, we had descended into the town by the cape, the sanitarium looming overhead like an Aegyptian obelisk, chasing the sun beneath the waves. After making arrangements at the inn, I made up my mind to walk the rest of the distance to sanitarium.

People were coming home from the beaches, and there were purveyors and their carts selling all manner of fare, even as the day withered away. The dolls, which rode in my pocket in place of a handkerchief, made evident to me by a series of frantic gestures that they wanted a balloon from one of the carts. I payed the man for one, a round man with no beard to speak of, an androgyne sort of face, large and round with lit coals for eyes. "I think they're wanting another, boy," he said in a grandfatherly voice. I paid him a dollar for a bundle and he merely winked, nodded, and he watched as I continued on my way.

Up the hill we climbed. I was holding the balloons. Gradually, the dolls wormed their way out of my pocket and rode upon my arms to help me carry them. I had scarce moved another hundred feet before I began to notice them, like dandelion seeds, floating away on the breeze, one by one, each carried aloft by a brightly-colored poppyflower of helium and rubber. One by one they soared on the ocean breezes and I, like a man possessed, flying across the railing and down to the craggy shore, tears stinging my eyes, thorns snatching at my clothes, screaming and crying and laughing all at once. "Come back!" I shouted until I was hoarse. "Where are you going? Come back!"

The last figure riding upon the poppy stems, silhouetted by the sun, smallest of them all, waved a warm goodbye. I could see in the gesture the childish wave one gives a friend from the back of a parent's car, a salute that says: "I'll see you later!" And I knew, just like children, that the parting would feel longer than it really was. And I was, in some small measure, a little glad, even as I choked on my tears.

A man leaving work at the sanitarium noticed me and came to help me. I saw, for the first time, a friendly face perched atop a white labcoat.

"Sounds like you had a bit of a nervous episode," he said, nonchalantly, "happens to all of us sometime. You said this was the first time it's ever happened to you?"

"The first time," I nodded.

"Then I wouldn't trouble yourself about it, just..." He seemed to be looking over his shoulder. "Don't say anything about it while you're up there."

I nodded sullenly. Looking out the window, I noticed the place where the balloon-seller's cart had been. Not a trace of him remained. It was only a few minutes to the top of the hill, and only a few more past the front desk into the little room where the patients had their visitors. The art supplies had already been taken by a nurse with a scowling expression and carried away, presumably to my wife's room.

The visitor's room was bisected by a wall half of plaster and half of clear glass. Two telephones on either side. I sat staring into her face, pretty as birdsong and as dark and deep as the sea, before I picked up the phone on my end. She seemed to have found some of the strength that she had lost over the past few weeks, when I had seen her shrivel and fade away before my eyes. She was already crying, crying and smiling simultaneously.

"They're gone, aren't they?"

"How did you...?"

"I knew they would be. That's just how its got to be, stupid of me to think otherwise."

I remembered the raw, chest-rending pain, on the beach, the last doll floating away from me on a red balloon.

She continued: "The chaplain says it's no use worrying, that these things happen all the time. That all I can do is hope and pray."

I nodded, suddenly quiet. Then I said, "but what does he know? They're just waiting for us, darling, I know they are. They've got a fun game, you see, that they want to teach us, and..."

The deep, wretching sobs broke from my lips like waves crashing on the rocks, and for a long time I heaved and sighed and breathed deep and then began to cry again. She was crying too, I could tell, but also smiling. When I looked up again, she was a picture of broken serenity and I said: "I never learned to play games, darling. I was practically born practical and I want to be impractical all the rest of my life."

"That's the thing, isn't it?" She broke in. "If we're to be any fun at the game, we've got to learn to play, real play, you know, not the way adults pretend to play when they've decided they're just too important and old to have fun."

"We'll teach each other," I said, a bit hopeful.

"And maybe, later, we'll be ready."

This essay originally appeared on my Substack, Marginalia Mundus. I thought it would be an appropriate first entry for my writing here. This essay, like all of my work, is written without the aid of AI at any step in the process.

“As the thoughts move in the mind of a man, so move the worlds of men and women in the mind of God, and make no confusion there, for there they had their birth, the offspring of his imagination. Man is but a thought of God.”

- George Macdonald, A Dish of Orts

I am a man possessed by the drive for other worlds.

Even before I fully understood the concept of an imaginary other-world, I was already participating in it. Maps were scrawled in 50-cent notebooks, imaginary histories for cities that never raised their towers to the sun. Armies crawled across the teeming circumference of my adolescent mind. Empires rose and fell. Peaceful lands of dwarves and elves and whatever else basking in the warm sun and blue sky of a summer’s daydream. Every adventure story, every bit of Bradbury or Robert Louis Stevenson, was melted down and recombined into fodder for pretend games, even just for myself. Sometimes, inspiration took the strangest sources. When I was a child, I heard the Grateful Dead song "Deep Ellum Blues," and, not knowing that Deep Elm is, in fact, a real neighborhood in Dallas, Texas, I confabulated a world-space, map, and milieu for the "fictional" city, based on tropes from gangster films I was too young to watch (a la The Untouchables and The Godfather). Strange bit of alchemy that.

Whether they serve the purpose of escape, as in the hedonist's paradise of Cockaigne, or the exaltation of society's highest ideals, as in fable-like realms of chivalry that were Arthur’s Britain, secondary world fantasy as a literary device is at least as old as the Middle Ages. This is to say nothing of countless folk tales handed down throughout the ages which largely transpire in the aetherial and atemporal realms of Once Upon a Time, of Elfland. In the background of both the literary and the folk traditions are the various Other-worlds and Under-worlds of pre-Christian myth: Sheol, Olympus, Alfheim, etc.

The human drive to plumb the depths of the unknown, I imagine, drove the creative impulse over time. The mythological story about the nearby mountain being a portal to a heavenly realm falls by the wayside when it is mined for iron ore. The confabulated travel narrative of Marco Polo, once the East did not seem so far away and exotic as another world, gives way to the chivalric romance inhabiting the uncharted country of the distant past. Eventually, as academic history and archeology demystified that past, the fantasists beat a retreat to the inner keep. The Romantic, the dreamlike, the world of the interior and fable, older than science and more primeval than reason. Figures like MacDonald, Dunsany, and E.R. Eddison, even Lovecraft in his Dreamlands Cycle, lead the charge into the world of dreams and the poetic unconscious. In the modern world, fantasy as genre fiction emerges not just because of its aesthetic differences from literary fiction, but because the literature of the last two centuries, dominated by the novel, has gravitated more and more towards the same material occupations and concerns as our workaday lives. In Thomas More's Utopia from the 16th century, the social critique of the predatory landowning class and the pauperization of the peasants was nested within a self-consciously fantastic story about "No-Place" delivered by a man named Raphael "Hytholoday," a Greek-rooted neologism for "speaker of nonsense." In the 19th century, on both sides of the Atlantic, social critique is delivered openly, nakedly, using exaggerated versions of real-world subjects: Mr. Gradgrind and Ebenezer Scrooge, Bartleby the Scrivener, and Judge Jaffrey Pyncheon. The rise of the novel as an art form, with a focus on realism, coinciding with modern social trends towards new and Enlightened ideologies led to the ghettoization of fantasy, such that by the time of Tolkien he may, in his essay "Faerie Stories," remark on the way that fantasy had been relegated to the realm of the nursery by the parochialism and taste of adults.

This trend, let's call it the "constriction of mythopoesis," continues to this day, and is perhaps even worsening. Typical fodder for faerie stories, we might think, has changed little in a thousand years. People still want tales of high adventure and true romance, of true good and true evil, of worlds where morality exists and the choices of the characters are transcendent rather than merely eminent in scope. Since the genre fantasy boom of the 1970's, it is difficult (not impossible) to find the exploration of these themes outside of the genre, as the wider market for fiction has coarsened and become dominated by not just the realism that was the hallmark of the early days of the novel, but now by the cynicism, politicking, low morals, and generally poor taste of the present mass culture. Works like The Wheel of Time, formulaic and patently in the mold of Tolkien though they were, maintained the spark of nobler human sentiment and drive for enchantment even as it was rapidly disappearing from elsewhere in literary life, perhaps life in general.

Now even the worm has begun to eat its tail, for given the success of a newer crop of fantasy writers more preoccupied with worldly concerns of power and Machiavellian struggle, epitomized by G.R.R. Martin, the cynicism has overtaken even the walled ghetto of genre fantasy. It is much like (and is perhaps merely a subspecies of) the metastasizing cancer of the "childfree" movement, wherein childless adults petition slowly but inexorably to ban children from public spaces, complaints ranging from the noise and smell of little people to more misanthropic beliefs about the value of childrearing at all. Such, I feel, is the fate of genre fantasy. Adults who confuse cynicism, coarseness, and hedonism for "maturity," slowly colonizing what they take to be a childish medium but what is really one of the final bastions of good sense in an insane world.

But I began this essay by talking about my own relationship to fantasy, to the secondary world in particular, for as the real world grows ever darker many more people retreat to the worlds of fiction, and even to airy realms of their own imagining. Never before have there been so many people engaged in what modern writers term "world-building," but what in saner times might have merely been called "imagination."

It has not escaped my attention that this runs in tandem with the general demoralization and prolification of the working classes especially the rural people, who have always carried the torch of raw poesy and folklore. The problem is compounded by the higher echelons of creatives (non-working aristocrats, professors, and sponsored artists) having become essentially defunct as a class, or having been subsumed by the endless capitalistic drive to bean-counting and monetization. These types would have codified and put to pen the untutored insights and genius of the smallfolk, but no longer.

When the world feels cramped and shrinking still, the retreat into fantasy isn't just a way to preserve those essential human things which are tread mercilessly under the foot of Capital, it is also a means of escape from present unsalutary conditions. And here is the rub, hasn't the world always been full of evil and darkness and predation? Why now, in what is materially a much more comfortable era, do we increasingly retreat so far as to leave the world entire? I believe I speak for many when I say that the material comforts of the present age seem but a mask for deeper decay. Sane folk would gladly trade calorically dense artificial food and climate controlled artificial houses for bread and beans among true friends and a drafty house of real timber and a well-loved hearth. Faerie stories especially teach us that wealth, or the appearance thereof, often masks what is otherwise empty and hollow, or else depraved.

I cannot speak for everyone, but when I search myself, two streams emerge and feed into one another like the River Ouroboros.

The first is the incalculable drive to create and explore, to transcend the workaday and enter a realm where the highest things in man are everywhere on display, and not hidden behind the drudgeries of work and the often unglamorous duties of domestic life. To be clear: true nobility and virtue lie in these things. Simple humility and self-sacrificing care for others are the epitome of the Gospel. Yet, I have never claimed to be a humble or virtuous man, nor even a sensible one. And just because a man thinks upon St. George and the slaying of dragons does not mean he cannot apply the same vigor and manly courage to his own less ostentatious duties. In fact, they are in some ways more a credit to him for the fact of their obscurity.

The second is the weariness with the world as it is, with its myriad flaws and deprivations and, what is most important: the ever-present sensation that all is crumbling and falling apart and I, a lone man, can do nothing to solve it. Then it is especially seductive to retreat into the realm of the fantastical, into faerie, where great lords and heroes and magery can conquer the odds, beat back the forces of evil which, in the waking world, threaten always to swallow us and everything we love. This too, without a moderating force, can become merely a disguised form of despair. For, after all, good men have existed in our world as in fiction. Real heroes have taken stands, and have raised swords. There is always the threat that those who would walk among titans in the world of fiction could be titans to their family, their community, nation, perhaps the world. Christ was one such man, radically present, transcending all myth to bring what was great and holy and true in the whole creative tradition of the human race into Incarnation.

Both of these streams, the flight to fantasy and away from the trevails of the modern world, are understandable. They are even in some sense commendable. Soldiers cannot be ever and anon fighting at the front, or the front will collapse. A rotation of the regiments from the spiritual trench warfare of our present society into the infirmaries which the fictional worlds nourished by true myth present for us may be necessary. It may be that for us to serve, in this day in age, as good Christians we must be also, in some sense: good Narnians, or good Hobbits, or good denizens of Faerie as our stations allow.

Think, then, of this analogy in the context of the old Christian idea of contemptus mundi, or ataraxia, a contempt for the world and for the flesh. For what is an infirmary in comparison to a battlefield other than a small compartment of Home within the Tumult of War? The soldier resting upon the bed, his wounds healing, is being restored by those comforts: warmth, tenderness, and companionship devoid of threat, which characterize the Homeland for which he fights. Danger is never far away, never truly out of mind, but so long as the front remains and there are stalwart comrades to man the guns, we can remain there for a time.

Faerie, for some of us, then, is that small glimmer of Heaven which we retreat to when we must have strength for the battles ahead. It restores us and it teaches us the greatest lesson that art has to give: this is not our ultimate home. We sojourn on this Earth, like wayfarers, and we look toward our own Kingdom, and along the way we tell stories to one another about the splendors of that Kingdom, and the dangers we will face along the way, and how, if we are brave and stalwart, we shall overcome them.

"Once upon a time," we say to one another, not unlike the Man who, long ago, in a faraway desert, spoke to His friends thus:

"The Kingdom of Heaven is like unto..."