Sermon in Blue

An experiment in creative writing. A priest takes the lectern. Glass-stained sun rays project the corner of a saintly portrait onto his face. He begins:

All else equal, these are the days I most struggle with. An open sky, as we have been handed today, is almost too much to bear. Perhaps you have felt it too? The terror in a clear blue sky. Or perhaps you are not the least perturbed on such as day as this. You thank God for these days and pray for many more. Perhaps, when you wake to such a sky: Blank, true—frightfully true—and boundless, you feel (oddly, I add) poured over by the love of the Lord; light runneth over the blue. Light come through the bear and empty. I would not wish to revoke from you this most simple and joyous pleasure. Only know that my own path to the Lord today is long, winding and (as we will see) ends where it began.

We understand, as children, that Heaven is nestled in the clouds. But a silent sky, all vacancy, makes mockery of this. Clearly as that, we can see there is nothing, and that we go nowhere. Thin air into the hundreds of miles; up and up and us into non-being. Should we not fear our ascension into the “eye-bright” abyss? So clearly a great forgetting awaits; a big blue amnesia into which is drawn our emancipated, eternal souls and at once evaporated into impossibly thin ozone. That will be us, for we are all ascension-bound.

The words of Augustine, Sermon 263,

Easily shall the body be uplifted to the heights of heaven, if the spirit is not weighed down by a load of sins.

The observation of Farrier,

Flame tends always upwards. All his life long Christ’s love burnt towards the heart of heaven in a bright fire, until he was wholly consumed in it, and went up in that fire to God.

But simply look skyward and witness: The Kingdom of Heaven is aeriform. All souls admixtured up in a hyaline skin the color of hypoxia. Flame tends always upward indeed, into the thin, the cold-rarified. Into the far-off nihility.

But of course the infantile image, castle in the clouds, is mere picturebook metaphor. We should not expect to stare up the Kingdom’s understructure into an intestinal mass of cables and pipes any time the clouds part. How absurd! A little disquieting that something once so earnestly believed is reductioed away by a single clear day. But at my age, the picturebook image is not so hard to part with.

However, a more mature concern creeps the ratways of holy writ: God is never witnessed direct. He comes always occluded so that we might be spared the trauma of reckoning his awful infinitude.

Take 2 Chronicles 6 or 1 Kings 8:12,

Then spake Solomon, The Lord said that he would dwell in the thick darkness.

Or Exodus 20-21,

And the people stood afar off, and Moses drew near unto the thick darkness where God was.

It is in Psalms, Job, Deuteronomy: God dwells deep in thick darkness with cloud and gloom about him. When benighted to benthic, or by storm-rage beset, or by shadow and thick fog enshrouded - know that you inhabit a time-honored auditorium for theophany. What does this mean for our open blue over-creep? There is nowhere for God to hide. He his absent. A cloudless day is an upturned searchlight. If every hiding spot in the universe was illuminated to you at once in a fleeting instant, how could you so muse, as you do, on divine hiddenness?

Were I to hear the voice of God surge through a turbulent deluge I would name it my Stotternheim. Were I to hear it under a cloudless expanse it would strike like dry lightning, exploding head syndrome, schizophrenia—I would check my self in.

Oh well, no theophany under a sky wiped clean. No matter. There is always the promise of clouds come again; no patch of dirt on earth has been uncovered since creation. I believe our very own local forecast warns of rain come the midweek.

Joyce muses that the artist, in realizing their creation “refines itself out of existence” and that God too “remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence”. Experiences which accord with this—God as the artist standing back—should not be so troubling, should they? And why, in the first place, build up a new Babel through the ionosphere to seek what is “...by thought, neither grasped nor held.”

Noticing the vitreous ripples and visual fizz-fall when staring the blue extent, errors of my biology projected on the over-screen, is also bothersome. So what? I could likewise observe that if the true color the cold intelligence concave were manifested in a man’s iris, I would struggle to meet his gaze. Nonsense again; I am just scaring myself.

Were it only these observations, I would content myself with the counters I have given, or dismiss them (by the weight of my faith) with a Moorean wave of the hand. All my concerns are easily expressed in words and syllogised on. Each goes away with a little sober inquiry. Yes, indeed, articulated quick and rationalized aside the quicker. However, there is something else. Something unmentioned in the Book or the extracanonical or the myriad theologoumenon. The horror that bothers me most is one not so easily phrased. How to say it?

There is a high strangeness to a clear blue sky. An anxiety of uncertain origin. It is over-bright dizziness and suffocation hung upside-down in a false void. There is a deep sense of anomaly about the bare above. The sense it should have never been. It is the mirror image of the ocean drained total.

Deeply and profoundly wrong, I say. It is illegal, amiss, a living contradiction. It is as if I have paired a thing with its perfect negation, witnessed the cancellation, indeed the mutual annihilation, and yet some residue remains and has an evil self-sense of its remaining. The sky sees me pass underneath, exposed, blanket ripped away, as if making an open crossing of a salt flat.

It is impossibility and malice mixed and spread so thin that I in its sight-line can barely sense the looming threat suspended incongruous; here and not and so forcefully against God that this eerie state of affairs undeniably spells his absence or long sleep or other-way-looking more potently than any nameable fact and so he must have been long ago deposed by this—a thing of partial existence bound by alien laws that ought govern only the black yonder of deep space, yes this, the accumulation of all that can not be explained and, once faced, illuminates an irreconcilable point of torsion at the heart of human sense-making whose existence, if we yield it a moment of attention, will compress all meaning to a point. So I, at last, avert my eyes but it is too late for my innocence.

In light of this, how do I find God under an impossibly huge anti-fact? I focus on something firm nearby—impossible on a blue sky. I look instead to the colors down here made real in us. I give thanks for varied weather:

Glory be to God for dappled things –
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow

I give thanks for ceiling and canopy:

…where the unpierced shade
Imbrowned the noontide bowers: Thus was this place

I look around—a place indeed. A place. The open air is no place at all.

Were I suspended à la Golconda, here and I would be one unit, fused in the blue and the words “I am here” distorted. But now, here and I are each our own, in this, a place made for me to fathom whole.