Spike is Best

Time is freely proffered, and time resists our attempts at sequestering it; time is as present as our freedom. Pope Francis speaks not infrequently about beginning time processes rather than occupying spaces. The latter tends to falsity and regards time as flowing. But as T.S. Eliot wrote, "All time is eternally present". In The Family Reunion he wrote, "The past is about to happen." Time comes in seed form, always right now, and it accretes to itself what we choose to engender. Time does not flow; it aggregates.

Perhaps we live in times of the whetstone and the millstone, and they are one and the same stone: you can be sharpened if you choose, or cast into the sea. You may be a great sinner, and the millstone lying in wait for you can become instead a whetstone for your sharpening if you repent. You may be one of the just who knows it all; and always analyzing and classifying, inspecting and verifying, the whetstone of your formation can become a supreme weight, and overnight you can find yourself tethered to it by nothing other than your own absolutist insistence, and you can be cast into the sea by it, off the barque of Peter. Even cast off the seat of your own mind.

Cast into the sea by your own super formation! Huh, imagine that.

People moaning about confusion in the church are inventing a false problem to evade the challenges they are being called forward to. Those challenges are quite clear, and the problem that people have with it is that it is not what they expected, or have known, or it's something they dismissed out of hand in typical human fashion, and now faced with what, in their relativism, they dismissed, it appears as both threatening and short shrift in comparison to the hierarchy of their nicely stacked ideas. What they claim is short shrift they are threatened by because they see it as something that will rob their storehouse. It's a clarity that does not align with their subjective certainty, which proves their certainty facile and, well, subjective.

This is made worse in that their subjective certainty is bound up with their religious scrupulosity, not to mention their religious grandiosity. Insofar as they seek this evasion, they want confusion; they purposely seek to confuse the ringing, unmistakable messages, teachings, example, and guidance of Pope Francis. The evils and errors they attribute to him, either by arrogant accusation or by the pietistic hypocrisy of concerned fraternal correction, are directly linked not to reality, but to the hot house of their own ideas. When confusing him goes so far, they seek to banalize him; when that goes only so far, they seek to undermine him in myriad other ways.

For where are they being called forward to? Outside. And not just outside in opposition to remaining inside, as though going outside would mean leaving behind, which is not what it means most essentially, nor in that remaining inside would be to occupy an actual reality, which it wouldn't. But called outside in new ways that brings with it the renewal of the very Church. The reality of the Church is shown in that it can meet messy present matter in the newness of faith; going out in new ways does not foreshorten its riches; it is the proof of its rich depth. Here is an interesting simplicity: the renewal of the Church is constituted in doing what the Church is supposed to do. Those who know best find this extraordinarily difficult to accept. And what is it? You might call it the perennial orthopraxy of the Body of Christ. Why do they find it hard to accept? Because the huge implication in this is that the Church is not what you thought it was.

All the best of what you know is only what you know. The best of what you know, if left to remain like that, is nothing but a reduction, which is the flip side of watering down the faith. We hear about these figures watering down the teachings of the church. Personally I would like to know where these people are, but lets grant for the sake of argument that there are minions everywhere in the church under the sway of watering it down: the flip side error goes mentioned little to none at all, except by the Pope and a few others. Perhaps it goes so little mentioned because this error is far more prevalent and is, and has been, the mode of operation of those who are constantly harping about people "watering things down".

To reduce - as when a recipe calls for you to reduce a sauce or gravy. This is the lost road of the mastermind. Jesus has not asked you to take what He has given you and reduce it down into a super-concentrated concoction. Jesus has not given you the fresh fruit of the Gospel and told you to turn it into fruit leather "just in case" we run out of food near the end of winter. These people are like the Israelites in the desert who attempted to save the manna overnight "just in case" - after all, one needs to be on the right side of history. LOL. Yes, see how much on the right side of history you are when you wake in the morning to find your priceless storehouse being eaten by worms because, wayward child that you are, you took it and attempted to preserve it away from the Church and her Supreme Pontiff. Like a gaggle of ladies stowed away in some kitchen making jam preserves: taming the Holy Spirit. Domesticating God's doctrine. This is the mistake - indeed, no mere mistake, but serious objective error - of turning the Church into mere wisdom, and thereby ceasing to be receptive and docile to what the Church is teaching at this time, which is the present tense matter in which the eternal form is proven. We are not one-time receivers.

In a word, what is received must be given. There is never going to be a perfect time to do it, and every time is an acceptable time. Again, this is a simplicity that we find difficult. Jesus says I Am, and says to us, give as you have received. He is that simple with us - it's beautiful. Interesting that when Jesus speaks of being salt of the earth and light of the world, in both images the essence of the preservation, or saving, that he speaks of, consists in going outward: salt is to season the earth, light is for the lamp stand. Insofar as they fail to season the earth and fail to go on the lampstand, they lose their saltiness and lose their light; nowhere does Jesus put this loss to a failure to self-preserve your uber-identity as salt and light. And the reflexive "Yeah but one needs to first be salt and light, and therefore..." is itself the first paroxysm of reductionism.

Bruised and dirtied from fighting in the streets. You would think that the manly man subculture, which for the most part takes to Chesterton who wrote the great street-fighting novel The Napolean of Notting Hill, would be all over this sort of image. But I guess not. When it comes to the life of the Church, the crucified foundation of which has turned the world upside down for all time, it would appear they prefer the image of the stay-at-home dad, overtaken with granny-like fretting about disturbances in the force, inducing an endless schizophrenia about Infiltration and the Fruits of the Enlightenment, disenfranchising anyone who lends them their itching ears from the here-and-now present as something always insufficiently banal, even though they themselves are the ones eviscerating it, by the incestuous networks of traditionalist social media, which has an interesting pathological need to trot out pre-scripted stage dramas, and deliver it through the extremely selective drip line as "news" like timed pellets fed to mice or chickens. The material of the pellets is not what matters; what matters is that they get the mice and chickens coming to the feeder with the same volition that rightly should be given to the Keeper of the Keys. In other words, they want you on their timeline. Let me repeat that: the pellets aren't what matter; all the information, or "news" hitherto come out, or to come out, as it relates to the original material from which it is derived, means nothing. They want you on their timeline.

There is a word for this. It's called manipulation. Where the corpse is, there the vultures gather.

“So if anyone tells you, ‘There he is, out in the wilderness,’ do not go out; or, ‘Here he is, in the inner rooms,’ do not believe it. For as lightning that comes from the east is visible even in the west, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. Wherever there is a carcass, there the vultures will gather." --Matthew 24, 26-28