More than once I have been in conversation with a respected scholar who confessed to me that he would like very much to believe in God, but when he looks, he finds nothing at all, only silence.
I have sometimes replied that that is pretty much what I have found. Nothing. Silence. Once or twice I have quoted for my companion some texts from St. John of the Cross, about the nada y nada y nada.
snipping a great deal
neither the believer nor the unbeliever actually sees God. But they do reason a bit differently about what their own experience presents to them. They understand their own destiny under these stars, with the wind on their faces, a little differently. Perhaps, most strikingly of all, they reflect quite differently upon their own inner experience of the relentless drive tounderstand within them, and their striving for truth, for justice, for love.
They read the clues differently. But neither one actually catches sight of the quarry they ardently pursue. This fact—that they both stand in darkness—is not often brought to attention and meditated upon.
It seems that anyone who encounters and wrestles with what St. John calls the "nada y nada" is walking the same path in a certain sense. Which explains why Oriana Fallaci can say her only kindred spirit is B-16, and why a certain British-American journalist alluded to in Novak's post (and who clearly is cruising for a conversion) finds himself with a lot of surprising intellectual bed-fellows. The challenge for the West is to find the courage to confront the nada y nada and stop being distracted by the yadda, yadda, yadda.
Which brings me to another post at First Things -- Michael Linton's on Christian art. He as a take on the Andres Serrano Christ that is astonishing. He posits the challenge of the Christian artist thus:
How can I convey the shock of the Incarnation to a culture that after two thousand years of hearing about it finds it quaint and boring?
He wishes he'd thought of what Serrano did.
We have to find dramatic ways to tell our story. O’Connor found them, so did Walker Percy, and so did Olivier Messiaen. And for all its faults, Gibson did this, too, in his Passion of the Christ.So, even though Serrano intended to mock and Linton wouldn't, he writes:
Put it in the context of the first chapter of John and a crucifix submerged in a bucket of urine is a pretty dramatic exegesis of the Word becoming flesh—makes you sit up and take notice. And that’s why I wish that I’d thought of it.
Hmm. But does telling something dramatically require telling it grotesquely? A commenter a couple of posts ago opined
Wise Blood ruined Catholic fiction, making Catholics think you have to be grotesque and symbolic and inaccessible to be Catholic, leaving popular fiction to the bad guys.
He seems to be onto something. The danger of grotesquerie is that it's like porn --it has to be more and more outlandish in order to stimulate --and there comes a point where everything has been done. How do you get anyone's attention then, after you've contributed to the saturation problem? That seems to be the challenge of re-evangelization, doesn't it?
Incidentally, what makes B-16's writing so penetrating? Its content, surely, but I think part of its power derives as well from being utterly devoid of cant or "show."
