God and Writing, or How We Might Have Failed in Our Arrival

True Word, True Bread, Christ came down from Heaven: to heal us. From ourselves. Wallace Stevens sat on the edge of his bed and heard the bird sing at daybreak and thought it was reality, the thing itself. But dark Stevens in darkness heard a bird sign only and so ended his lifes work as a Greek by divination of a sign, not with the thing itself. Dark Stevens, in his hard reality of fiction, knew the death of evil as a tragedy, and perhaps was that and nothing besides. But hear the poor man say, we are what we are to God, that only, and nothing besides. And what are we to God? What can we be but an idea? We are but ideas in the infinite Mind of God. He alone is that which is. We simply are not. So some far-fetched

fiction would tell allegories of how we sleep and only think we wake. Far rather, God dreamed, and dreamed of us. What will we be when He awakes? Since there is no composition in God, as Aquinas says, no parts, no accidents, no movement, we are but the ideal of substance, already eternal, already one. Derrida, in his writing, would substitute composition-less composition for God. How? By destroying writing as he writes, by interdicting steps he cannot take. He makes writing One. As he wrote: Nothing outside of the text. Composition-less composition. A new God. Utter complexity so enormous it is sublime virtual simplicity. Rather, monotony, as my nephew Justin Martin said, nowadays everybody is the same. What we once were, our idea of God, or better, a dream our God enjoyed, became a limitless possibility without an act, an actor, an action, an actuality. To make us infinite, as Mallarme said. But we, instead, felt indefinite, and

fell, abyss on abyss, with only that one direction, gravitys, which our light could not escape. The totality of knowledge as possible became the thing that drew us. And the light of the idea, that shape, that form, though insubstantial as a dream, died. We did not arrive. We dived. We plunged. We did not climb, we did not aspire. Without Spirit, in a material more dense than the quickest quicksand, we expired. This we though is merely our country and our culture, two supreme fictions. Individuals instead have climbed out of the abyss and scaled the mountain to the altar of God. Looking back they see the abyss in flames, the burning in the waste, the fire that may consume all in the chasm, while those on the mountain escape the fate of fire. The Church has never been in the abyss, so the we is not the Church speaking. It is gathered at the throne on high, where someday all can find a place. Let us then speak of all rather than we, for all are called. God and

writing at first did not seem opposed, and surely God has no opposite. Knowing this, the deceit had to be at once brazen but clandestine, and the contamination but oblique. The way of light is strait and narrow, but there is no end to the windings of the serpentine line of the writers indefinite traces. God has written, has already written, on our hearts, and it is a pure writing, a pure love and a pure timelessness that is at the heart of the human race. Climb the mountain, retreat into your hearts, find the purity inscribed there, a kingdom, eternal, waiting for you and me. When we stop writing, when we fall silent, when we choose understanding, when we become real, without artifice, but with art in life, with creation in love, thoughtful, we may listen to the words of others, learn discernment through a listening and a putting into practice, testing the spirits, to find what is right and pleasing to God, to be transformed by the renewal of our minds, through meaning that is

neither excessive nor repetitive, but simply delineated, like the edge of a diamond, that creation of the form and pressure of the time: sharp, hard, bright, rich. Michael Bolerjack