Fear of Beauty
All the world like a woolen lover
once did seem on Henry’s side.
Then came a departure….What he has to say now is a long
wonder the world can bear & be.
Once in a sycamore I was glad
all at the top, and I sang.
Hard on the land wears the strong sea
and empty grows every bed.—John Berryman, #1 from 77 Dream Songs
Berryman’s reaction is the natural one, the one the natural man must come to in the end. The world will, finally, disappoint you and break your heart. Nothing particularly calamitous is required; the passage of time is sufficient. That image of the sea wearing on the land is particularly significant to me, because the little strip of Mobile Bay beach which is near my house and which I deeply love is continually being eroded.
Attachment to the world is deprecated in both the Christian and Buddhist traditions. As I understand it, the Buddha’s great insight—and I think it’s perfectly accurate from the natural point of view—was that attachment to anything at all is the cause of suffering. Unable to conceive of an individual consciousness which would not experience attachment, he envisioned a condition of perfect non-attachment in which the individual would disappear into the One (I hope I’m not over-simplifying this). And Christian scripture is full of warnings against caring for the things of this world; the world is the phrase used over and over again in reference to everything in earthly life which can hold our attention and devotion and keep us away from God. Sometimes we seem to forget that it refers not only to sinful things but to good things as well, and I think that tendency is especially pronounced among those of us who live in the material comfort of the industrialized world.
And yet there is also John 3:16: “For God so loved the world….” There must be a way to love the world properly, in imitation of God. Natural love for it will be disappointed and can in fact lead to the forgetting of God and the loss of one’s soul. But there is a supernatural love for it, the love demonstrated by God which we can and should echo, as we echo his creative power in our arts. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son…” Well, we know what happened to the son when he came into our world. We can love the world, but we must love it with the knowledge that we will be hurt by it, and with the willingness to be hurt. The pain in fact constitutes a proof of the love.
Buddhism is right, as far as it goes, about attachment. It should have no trouble understanding the inevitability of the Crucifixion. But it knows nothing of the Resurrection, not only because it knows no God but because the unaided human mind could hardly be expected even to conceive that God, the God revealed to Jews and Christians who is not a being but Being itself, would enter his own creation and suffer at its hands.
Because of the Resurrection, we can give ourselves to the world in love. We can never possess it; that’s in the nature of things, as the Buddha saw, and the desire to possess it is one aspect of the temptation against which the scriptural warnings about the world are directed. And we must not allow ourselves to be possessed by it; we must not surrender our souls to it; that’s the other aspect of the temptation. But we can open our hearts to it, and offer ourselves to the pain it will inevitably bring us, and hope that this offering will somehow work for its salvation as well as our own.
I came across this passage from Pope John XIII recently, part of a list of things that he intended to do “only for today.”
Only for today, I will have no fears. In particular, I will not be afraid to enjoy what is beautiful and to believe in goodness.
This struck me as mildly surprising, coming from a pope. Why should he consider fear an obstacle to the enjoyment of beauty and the belief in goodness? This suggests to me that he would have understood Berryman, as well as the Buddha, but that he knows something they don’t. His counsel that we should not be ruled by the fear of loss and disappointment is a direct result of hope in the Resurrection; hope engenders courage. I hear that hope is the subject of Benedict XVI’s next encyclical, and I’m looking forward to it.
Pre-TypePad
Light On Dark Water 
Leave a comment