Divine Plagiarism

‘I’m not afraid,’ said Luke. ‘You will be…’ said Yoda. - Star Wars Episode V, The Empire Strikes Back.

When questioned about continuing to write fairytales and children’s books, C.S. Lewis responded that ‘When I became a man, I put away childish things. One of those things was the desire to appear grown up.’ A friend of mine tells me about sitting in a Williamsburg, NYC coffeeshop, watching two artist-types sipping lattes over, no kidding, a copy of Finnegan’s Wake. As they try to out-sophisticate each other with more and more disinterested and disdainful utterances, she thinks to herself, ‘I can’t believe this is isn‘t caricature.’ I do not mean to malign the goateed, Burning-Man-Festival-attending, James-Joyce-reading crowd. I have a number of artist (pronounced ar-teest) friends, and I am continually impressed by their creative faculties. Still, there is some truth in Lewis’ retort. We really do go to great lengths to look grown up, and it is generally ends up being pretty childish.

It is not the adult that starts smoking, but the child who wants to appear grown up. The adult rejects out of hand as foolish the concept of inhaling the fumes of burning leaves. When a child decides to become an adult, they put away the need to convince others of their worthiness of the title. You don’t need to pad the resume when you’ve already got the job. So the teenage girl wears high heels and makeup, not the forty year old woman. The girl is concerned with appearing as if she is a grown-up; the woman is too busy with the concerns of a grown-up to care about looking like one. It is the boy who sets out on the rites of passage; the man has long since passed those rites. The child is the one with something to prove; the adult has already come to peace with the idea that he has nothing to prove. Trying to prove one’s adulthood rarely does much to accomplish its intended end, and it usually has quite the opposite effect.

There is a theory that goes something like, ‘if I pretend like fascinating things are dull, then I can convince others that my life is much more interesting than it really is.’ Under the ‘cool by not caring’ plan, you must remain safely aloof from anything that could excite you to joy or fear, for this is the only way to convince everyone that you are above such concerns. Really, it doesn’t make much sense. You try to establish your identity by devaluing everything you encounter in the light of some mythical good you only claim to have. While trying to convince others of your value, you spit on everything of real value. Things that should be joyful, exciting, or scary all become passé in our self-invited pretentious leprosy. We cut ourselves off from the excitement that comes with a rightfully scary endeavor and the joy that comes with its accomplishment.

We treat love in this manner. We are like people who want to fly model aircraft, rather than step into cockpit. We remain safely aloof, feet planted firmly on the ground. We keep the excitement manageable, the fear manageable and the joy manageable. We never let them get the better of us. And we are the poorer for it. We conduct our actions through remote control, hearts safely guarded, safely disengaged. You cannot love from a distance. Jesus Christ, God in the flesh, passed from heaven to earth, through the very fires of hell for love. If the Almighty cannot love by remote control, surely we cannot either. So we must enter into love. I know of no one who has been truly terrified while flying model aircraft. Every pilot I know has scared themselves at some point. Love is no different. Love should be terrifying. If it is not, then we have not truly entered into it.

Consider the man’s role in a romantic relationship. By the rules of the dance, he must leave his safe world and chase after something well beyond his ability to analyze or control. Someone who can easily break his heart. He could remain safely in the well-ordered (though not well-cleaned) world of the bachelor, where all variables are safely under his control. The dance calls him outside of himself, demanding from him a courageous vulnerability in his pursuit of the woman. In this, there is the whisper of danger, the tingle of excitement, and the promise of joy. It should be scary.

The woman’s role is no less scary. She too has constructed a well-ordered world, one where she knows where everything is and why, where she is safely in control. She allows someone tremendously different to invade her world, to mess up the order of things, to leave the toilet seats up. Walking through her world, he changes things even as he is changed. The dance calls her outside of herself, demanding from her the same courageous vulnerability in a much different manner; she must allow herself to be pursued and to be caught by the man. Though her steps are quite different, the dance still carries the same danger, the same excitement, the same promise of joy. This, too, should be scary.

Feminist scholar Catherine McKinnon (sp?) makes some fairly unconventional observations on the interaction between men and women. She believes that sex, even in the context of marriage, is an act of assault. Her comments have understandably caused something of a stir. Still, there is little in this world that is all the way wrong. She is right, in a way. The whole thing is quite invasive. Not just the physical act, the intertwining of spirit and heart and mind as well. Just as in a dance, or a fight, the partners must interfere deeply in each other’s worlds. So she looks at the tangled mess that our culture makes out of sex, and she sees a fight. Understandably so: a dance where neither partner cares much for the steps or for each other looks much more like a rugby scrum than a salsa. The beauty of the dance has been lost in our disregard for each other, but that does not mean that we should discard the dance.

It means that we should relearn our steps. He overcomes his trepidation, and holds out his hand for her to take. She takes his hand, and he pulls her to himself. Trust grows as they learn to anticipate the steps of the other. Then a promise, and in that promise they become each others’. He is not a trespasser, but an adventurer. She invites him into her garden, that place that was uniquely hers, and chooses to share the depths of who she is with another. He gives himself to her in his way, and she receives him, yet she gives herself to him in her own way, and he receives her. They eat of each other’s fruit together. The lovers interfere deeply in each other’s worlds, to the point of losing themselves in the other. In doing so, they become someone more amazing, more beautiful, more complete than either of them were before. They lose their lives in each other to find them together.

We confuse symmetry with sameness. There are many things in this world that are quite different, yet quite complimentary. The land receives the ocean at the shore, but the land and the ocean are not the same. There would be no lapping waves for long seaside walks if there were just water meeting more water, or land meeting more land. The man and the woman both give up their worlds for each other. They go about it in very different ways. They both shape their new world together, though in greatly different ways. That world would be the poorer for any redundancies between them. They are the reconciliation of the land and the water, and together they make the shore.

In McKinnon’s universe, we never interfere in each others’ worlds. We harvest fruit until the trees become nameless, until the fruit becomes tasteless. We carry the fruit in bushels to the gates of our own heart, and there we exchange it with others to feed our hungers. But they are never allowed inside. Nor do we enter their world. There is no place for adventure, nor for invitations. Picking fruit is passé. You would have to content yourself with one flavor, and you would have to wait for it to grow. Why nurture one tree, when you can just uproot it and plant another when it gets old? This is the price for staying safe. And as we forget about outmoded concepts of finding and being found, we lose far more than we ever bargained.

Our gates are shattered. We have replaced our private gardens with de facto public parks. Now there are paved paths and signs, but we treat the trees with contempt, their fruit with contempt. The myth has been deconstructed until all of its life is completely lost. Where there once had been magic, wood nymphs and satyrs, now there are planters, pavement and urban planning. We have chased off the magic, and we are left with little more than friction and fluid exchange. And we are much poorer for it.

We think that we are so much more sophisticated, but really all we have done is made our worlds small so that we look large in comparison. If you want to prove that there are no deer in a forest, one way of going about that is to tear down every tree in the forest that a deer could hide behind. Most likely, after tearing down all the trees, you won’t find any deer. That doesn’t mean they were never there to start with. We see ourselves as enlightened, finally free from foolish superstitions. Tearing apart the fabric of myth, we find no magic. The thing about magic is that you have to respect it. It shows up when it feels like, and inhabits holy places. If you desecrate all the holy places, you will not find it. So we who are so sophisticated, we who are determined to rid ourselves of all myth, desecrate all the places where it used to hide. We then congratulate ourselves in our self-fulfilling prophecies, scaring off all magic as we perform our various sorts of vivisection. And of course, we who were bound and determined not to find magic, find no magic. That does not mean it was never there to begin with.

How do we work backwards? Respect for the magic was the first thing we lost. In regaining the respect, we regain the magic. And there is only one magic deeper in this world than intimacy between two immortals. All magic starts with the Author of magic. As we regain our respect for Him, we learn to respect each other. We learn to revere holy places once again. And as the desecration is undone, the magic begins to return. What once was just a tree in a public park becomes a sacred grove once again. It becomes exciting to walk there once more. But along with the excitement, there is a hint of danger. It is a little scary to explore the garden. But maybe, it always should have been scary.