The Sisyphus Myth

 

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An Orthodox Theology of Time – IV / V

Time as Woundedness and Time as Decay, Growth unto Death.  How do we primarily experience time as fallen beings? Do we experience it as change or, more precisely, mutability, that is, a growth unto death? 

 

“To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,/ Creeps in this petty pace from day to day/ To the last syllable of recorded time,/ And all our yesterdays have lighted fools/ The way to dusty death. […] it is a tale/ Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,/ Signifying nothing.” (Shakespeare, Macbeth, V.v. ll.)

 

First we experience fallen time as constant change or ceaseless movement in a cycle of death that can be seen cyclically in the seasons, which move in a circle like a snake swallowing its tail. Winter follows Autumn and Spring follows Winter just as death follows old age and old age is not the end, for out of our death comes the birth of our descendants. Thus all of time is a perpetual repetition of death since the moment that things come into existence, changing from non-existence into being, they straightway move back again from existence into non-being.

This experience of fallen time is what Pozzo, in Waiting For Godot, expresses when he cries furiously at Vladimir:

Have you not done tormenting me with your accursed time! It’s abominable! When! When! One day, is that not enough for you, one day he went dumb, one day I went blind, one day we’ll go deaf, one day we were born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same second, is that enough for you? [Calmer] They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.

 

Second, we experience fallen time as unending desire. Once we desire something it lacerates our whole being until we possess it and our desire for that thing is then satiated until the thing possessed tempts us into some new perversion and the vicious circle begins all over again. Man’s life, then, is like this vicious circle insofar as he is continually turning around while facing his own self like it was a household idol, as The Great Canon of St. Andrew of Crete puts it: “I am become my own idol, and have injured my soul with passions.” Luther expressed this fallen circularity of time well when he says that homo in se incurvatus or man is turned in on himself.

 

… St. Gregory of Nyssa  has a nice image to convey this hopeless cyclical perpetuum mobile. It is of a man fruitlessly attempting to climb uphill in sand and never making any progress. It is the spiritual life where one’s house is built not on the rock of Christ but on the sand of spiritual illusions:

“He [the passionate man] is like those who toil endlessly as they climb uphill in sand: Even though they take long steps, their footing in the sand always slips downhill, so that, although there is much motion, no progress results from it.” 

[Also, remember here The Myth of Sisyphus: The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.]

Third, we see time as decay in memory—Schmemann’s “evil time.” In evil time, we remember the past as perpetually lost like a ghost that must relive its own murder.  Thus we remember continually and cannot change the death of our spouse, our mother, our child, or worse, a moment of humiliation by our spouse, our mother, by us of our own child. We cannot choose our past, for deliberation is a mark of future action in the present, the choice between what we would like to have happened and what actually happened remains only an undying craving for another world, as T. S. Eliot acknowledged: “What might have been is an abstraction/ Remaining a perpetual possibility/ Only in a world of speculation.”(T. S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton”, I, ll.6-8 in Four Quartets).

Each of these faces of fallen time points to our fundamental need, in time, for time’s renewal in Jesus Christ.

Source: http://www.bogoslov.ru/en/text/2668945.html

To Be Continued

For Part V go to https://orthodoxcityhermit.com/2015/12/18/memory-made-clear-and-serene/

Footfalls Echo In The Rose-Garden

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This heartbreaking commentary belongs to a “broken” father and priest, Fr Aidan (Alvin) Kimel, whose second son Aaron died by suicide. Fr Aidan preached his funeral homily and prayed the committal over his casket. In Father Aidan’s words, Aaron’s “death has shattered his life and the lives of his wife and children; has changed and traumatized him at the core of his being, in ways that he has not yet begun to fathom”. This post’s heartfelt and poignant ruminations had us all in tears and haunted us ever since reading them. Never before has T. S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets” become so transparent and pellucid. Dearest Father, I am asking your blessing, and offering my poor prayers. I find your blog very inspiring and your words resonate deeply within me. I am so sorry about Aaron’s death, especially that it was suicide. That must have been a very difficult homily to give. I pray that you and the rest of your family will be put back together from the shattering. Memory eternal, Aaron!

Eclectic Orthodoxy

First Movement

Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future / And time future contained in time past.

I live in time, bracketed by a past I can neither change nor retrieve and a future that beckons, disappoints, and terrifies. I am never satisfied with the present, never content. I am torn apart in time by time, fragmented.

Years ago I read Jean Pierre de Caussade’s The Sacrament of the Present Moment. The secret to holiness and contentment, he writes, is abandonment to the divine will given in the present moment: “To find contentment in the present moment is to relish and adore the divine will in the succession of all the things to be done and suffered which make up the duty to the present moment.” I can see the logic, but only rarely have I been able to practice such deep surrender…

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New Martyrs. New Mob. New Hollow Men.

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“One of the women looked up and seemed to be almost smiling as she said, ‘Jesus!'” (1)

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They are the “new martyrs” and sadly, we are the “new mob”, “we are the hollow men”.

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“I’ve learnt something important from the horrors of the last few weeks. As I pray for the Christians in Mosul, it becomes clear to me that I need their prayers more than they need mine. … I thank God for the humbling gift of allowing me to witness these new martyrs walking on their way to salvation before my very eyes. … We are witnessing the birth of holiness; we are part of a miracle.” (2)

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The Hollow Men by T. S. Eliot

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We are the hollow men

… Alas!

Our dried voices, when

We whisper together

Are quiet and meaningless

As …

rats’ feet over broken glass

In our dry cellar…

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This is the way the world ends
 (3)

Not with a bang but a whimper.

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Watch Marlon Brando legendary reading of “The Hollow Men” in Francis Ford Coppola’s and Stanley Kubrick’s groundbreaking classic Apocalypse Now (1979) at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPeHO1r8paU and also listen to T. S. Eliot himself reading it in his own unforgettable manner at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fu8awT5Jzs

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(1) http://www.christiantoday.com/article/isis.executes.12.christiansincluding.boy.and.2.women.who.were.raped.in.public.and.beheadedfor.refusing.to.renounce.jesus/66532.htm

(2) For the full article “NEW MARTYRS. NEW MOB” go to Father Seraphim’s last year blog entry at http://www.mullmonastery.com/uncategorized/new-martyrs-new-mob/, ” still timely, with the ever-rising wave of genocidal persecution of Christians by Muslims.