Dramatis Personae

This morning I woke up as usual, and everything had changed. It was a hot day, just as many before it, and so it was not the heat that raised my hackles. Rather, it was the sudden crushing awareness that though much is taken, not so much abides. Though we are not now that strength which in old days moved Earth and Heaven, we are not any useful strength anymore. We are caught up in toil, labour, the inadequate apprehension of an inadequate world.

Greet the criteria. Meet the criteria. Act as if the criteria are everything. And die by the criteria, proud in your triumph. What a sad lot we are, what a violated mission we pursue. In some sense, we are the guardians of Hermetic mysteries, for Hermes was the great father of Autolycus 'Lone Wolf', and Autolycus of Anticlea 'Withstanding Glory', and Anticlea was mother to Odysseus 'Much Hated'. But that is just mythologizing.

In reality, I was born into the family of the Registrar. And he said, the Mission is that all should be good, all should be God-fearing, all should be grown into manhood and womanhood. Not for my ancestor the tinkly chimes of buzzwords, shifted and redefined at will. No. He was blunt and violent with it. A ruthless man, he, who scorned both the Presbyter and Method of his youth and love, naming himself but one of many Brethren.

He would have spat upon the feet of heathen images, he would have asked, "What fills the spaces? What place is this which claims to value what its values no longer know to name?" But sadly, I am not him, I am not him at all. I come from an effete and paltry generation. We no longer stand up for what is bright and hot and deep and of the Spirit. We fall to the wayside, attracting candidates because we no longer have faith that the Spirit will send them to us.

We make our own mission. We no longer value manhood and womanhood, but we value some imaginary holism. For who among us is whole? What is whole? It is folly and rampaging humanistic pride to seek a whole which only God can provide. We are whole despite our flaws because we are defined as whole, because the Logos writes us whole, not because we can dance a minuet over two crossed swords while declaiming the merits of a maritime climate when making economic gains.

Here we are. We should ask, is our God a Gardner, a Goleman, a Golem, a Csíkszentmihályi? Or is He God, ineffable, incorruptible, all-wise and terrible in His wrath? We should ask many things. But one thing is not in doubt: the mission that we have is not the mission that we began with.