"God, I presume."

 “God, I presume.”      

My friend Gaspar Stephens is reading Blake, listening to Ray Wiley Hubbard, and jumping to conclusions. Blake is deriding Swedenborg and the angels,* aery prigs all, thinking they understand God. As Hubbard suggests,^† only the Devil understands God. Of course, he misunderstands Him.

     To his credit, however, the Devil takes none. He doesn’t claim to comprehend God. Only the righteous presume to.

Wednesday afternoon I picked up Uncle Albert after Midweek Noons at St. Jude’s. Roz had taken the morning off work, and she had dropped him off. I picked him up. He waved me down with his cane, refused help getting in the car, and as soon as I’d gotten back in from trying, thrust a paper at me.

     “Fatuous blather,” he said, “pretending at faith.

     “Look here!” he said, pointing.

John of the Asymptotic Cross,

considering the bread of the True Sacrament within him,

while holding the butter for it unmelted in his mouth

“‘We are created with an inner restlessness that sends all of us looking for our True Self,’ it begins.” He began waving I about. “Capital letters,” Uncle Albert said, “our ‘True Self,’ ‘the God that is in us’ if we but ‘surrender to the Real.’” He pointed to the word. “More divine caps,” he crescendoed: “The Real, The Real, The Real!” punching his skeletal index finger into the paper. “Jesus!” he stopped.

     “No, nothing to do with Jesus. Only to do with Us - capital-U. “For where is The REAL?” He moved the paper in and out until it came back into focus. “At the living-watery depths, the ‘wellsprings deep within us,” suspended in which we’ll find ‘the true sacrament’ of ‘the soul itself.’ And all we have to do,” he looked up. “Well, we don’t have to do anything because it’s really ‘no more than a matter of becoming who we already are.’ But all we have to be, because ‘we cannot “get there”; we can only “be there” - which is ironically to “be here!” . . . all we have to be is - you know what’s coming, don’t you? - our fornifreculating True Self.”

     He had been leaning progressively forward. Now, he threw himself backward in the seat. “Drive,” he said. “Seatbelt,” I said. “Fornifreculate that,” he said. I drove.

I helped him out of the care when I left him off. It’s easier for him to sit down into than to climb out of it. Then, I reached in for the paper that had fallen from his leap to the floor when he’d thrown himself backward. He shook his head. “Keep it, he said.

     “Read it,” he said. “Read each word. Reprehend each letter. Set fire to it. Wipe you asymptotes with the ashes.”

     I’m not entirely sure what lit him so hot and bright. The presumption, I imagine. The one who will find God within, whoever he or she is, has no need to fear God without, a transcendent, mysterious, indeed unfathomable God. Rather he, she - and we at his or her direction - just need to get a handle on the One that is already within us. There is no need to seek wisdom or righteousness. We are already Righteous; true Wisdom is already in us.

When I get home, smoothing out Uncle Albert’s paper on the kitchen table, I find I’m interested in how much presumption looks like hypocrisy, especially to those that dare not, or at least try not, to presume. But it’s closer to narcissism. The kind of presumption Whoever-It-Is evinces is less a moral flaw than a mental illness. Such mystics, I’m dismayed to discover (because I find them as full of noxious bloat as Uncle Albert does), are less self-righteous jackasses than they are unable to help themselves. In Ecclesiastes’ terms, they are part of what God has made crooked that we can’t make straight.

     Nor can they straighten out themselves. Hypocrisy may be curable.^‡ Thinking oneself divine is not.

12.23.17

to be continued

_______________

 * in Plate 21 of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

 ^† in “The Way of the Fallen Is Hard”

 ^‡ I’d like to think so, there would be hope for me.