Yet this snugness is just what blinders me, renders my ideas stiff and inflexible, routinizes me, swaddles me, encourages smugness. I exaggerate but the concern is real. Too often, for instance, I’m surprised by what I haven’t noticed. Last Friday at Urbano, to take a recent example, I utterly failed to see the tiny figurines on the plaster cupcakes that made them the references to Caspar David Friedrich they were supposed to be. Small but distinct, reaching, walking, gazing, there they were. Such a fool.
The other pole is the nightmare that too many endure daily: feeling swamped with unfiltered facts and sensations, blown about by vague and unstable convictions and feelings, awkward and inept at doing whatever needs to be done, exposed and vulnerable wherever they are, dogged by self-doubt and self-disdain.
Sitting here in the sun this Sunday morning, my shelves of books as comforting as cash, coffee at my elbow and wife and tutee quietly talking math in the next room, I feel the powerful attraction of my snuggery. I have my worries and concerns, of course, but my thoughts run: if I can sort this out, get a bit more of that, I’ll enjoy an extended tranquility. The circle of my life then will be monochromatic and of a hue I like, some kind of cerulean blue perhaps.
I’m good at making things pleasant for myself, improving my efficiency in daily routines, and succeeding at normal tasks, but these laudable proclivities distance me from what is outside my comfort zone. To balance this natural tendency, in the absence of disasters that can flip my life from light to dark, I need to do things that regularly risk some amount of discomfort, waste and failure.
This is what happens at the boundary of me and an Other: I see and learn what I wouldn’t otherwise, confront unwelcome ideas, brush up my trial and error skills, put up with inconveniences and irritations, and realize I’m not as admired or approved of by others as I am by myself. Acts of hospitality, friendship and exploration particularly put us in positions of risk. The recent David Brooks column in the NY Times I1.21.14), The Art of Presence, illustrates this perfectly. He discusses Do’s and Don’t for “how those of us outside the zone of trauma might better communicate with those inside the zone,” referring here to friends who had suffered catastrophe. In such situations we who live in the world of common consolations find we have little to offer those who have been plunged into the abyss.
Our persistent presence on that frontier, that brink, however is, among other things, a kind of hospitality in the sense of saying (I’m embarrassed to talk like this) to the shocked, the disoriented, the grieving that, however impossible it is for them to feel it, they are still and always part of the great us. Believing on behalf of another is no easy task. We often feel at a loss, inadequate, frustrated, afraid. I don't look forward to such experiences (even as a well-wisher) but I can't flee such encounters and I don't want to resist them. Instead, I'd rather be open and available to, even sometimes actively in search of, encounters that bring me face-to-face with an Other, with otherness.
Our persistent presence on that frontier, that brink, however is, among other things, a kind of hospitality in the sense of saying (I’m embarrassed to talk like this) to the shocked, the disoriented, the grieving that, however impossible it is for them to feel it, they are still and always part of the great us. Believing on behalf of another is no easy task. We often feel at a loss, inadequate, frustrated, afraid. I don't look forward to such experiences (even as a well-wisher) but I can't flee such encounters and I don't want to resist them. Instead, I'd rather be open and available to, even sometimes actively in search of, encounters that bring me face-to-face with an Other, with otherness.
I mention this to reiterate that risking deeds of hospitality, friendship, exploration,, these 2nd person practices that I believe represent the active and on-going wooing of God-in-love and the beloved Other, counterbalances our self-centering tendencies, pulls us out to the edge of ourselves, makes us alert and alive, and full participants in the great romance around us.
Having called into question my many blessings, I’m off to a concert of Ravel.chamber music. This is a kind of encounter I'm happy to have.
By the way, who ever heard of a 15 line sonnet?
By the way, who ever heard of a 15 line sonnet?
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