...out of the whirlwind

We may feel bitterly how little our poems can do in the face of seemingly out-of-control technological power and seemingly limitless corporate greed, yet it has always been true that poetry can break isolation, show us to ourselves when we are outlawed or made invisible, remind us of beauty where no beauty seems possible, remind us of kinship where all is represented as separation.

One mark of our cultural abnormality is how strange it seems to think of freedom as marked by self-restraint, loyalty, fidelity, reverence, piety, or responsibility. We tend to think that freedom is the absence of responsibility.

Now, it certainly is the case that I am an individual and free. But the sort of individual I am is personal, and necessarily in relation to others. In the tradition, a central claim about persons was their ability to give themselves and receive others, as Jacques Maritain puts it: “this is a center … capable of giving and giving itself; capable of receiving … even another self as a gift.

In fact, one of the marks of the greatness of a being is its ability to give itself to another. For Thomas Aquinas, “it is the nature of every actuality to communicate itself insofar as it is possible. Hence every agent acts according as it exists in actuality.” By this Aquinas means that everything gives itself to the world as it can. There is a “basic generosity of existence.”

For finite beings, the generosity of existence occurs both because we are rich and because we are poor. As rich, we have existence and communicate ourselves to others. Unlike God, finite beings are poor, lacking the fullness of existence and so each tries to enrich itself by its relation and dependence on other beings. As persons, we give and receive because we are both generous and in need.

While all finite being must receive, this is not a shameful imperfection but a sign of personhood. Unlike the sovereignty model where capacity for isolation is the mark of perfection, to receive is not imperfection but perfection, a mark of our dignity.

I can think of myself as an empty container of freedom, as a sovereign who exists prior to my entanglements with others, but this is a paltry and ghost-like self. The person who matters is the one who is son, father, husband, cousin, son-in-law, friend, and each of those roles limits my ability to do just whatever I want, whenever. As son, I owe piety; as husband, I owe fidelity; as father, I owe gentle instruction; as friend, I owe loyalty. Consequently, I am what I am in virtue of the responsibilities I bear. Insofar as I matter as a person, I am constituted not by sovereignty, but by what I owe. And only by knowing what I owe to others do I know who I am and what I’m for; ignorance of owing is to be devoid of a self.

If this is true, then the ability to cultivate a sense of owingness is to become a real human being, a free human being. But almost every bit of our cultural life is stacked against our developing this sense, and so we are deaf and dumb about what matters most.

Dionysus made wine, not a medicine, but a sacrament. Jesus Christ also made wine, not a medicine, but a sacrament. But Omar makes it, not a sacrament, but a medicine. He feasts because life is not joyful; he revels because he is not glad.
“Drink,” he says, “for you know not whence you come nor why. Drink, for you know not when you go nor where. Drink, because the stars are cruel and the world as idle as a humming-top. Drink, because there is nothing worth trusting, nothing worth fighting for. Drink, because all things are lapsed in a base equality and an evil peace.” So he stands offering us the cup in his hand.
And at the high altar of Christianity stands another figure, in whose hand also is the cup of the vine. “Drink” he says “for the whole world is as red as this wine, with the crimson of the love and wrath of God. Drink, for the trumpets are blowing for battle and this is the stirrup-cup. Drink, for this my blood of the new testament that is shed for you. Drink, for I know of whence you come and why. Drink, for I know of when you go and where.

The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things … are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.