Prodigal

 

Musings for the Fourth Sunday in Lent (Laetare), the 27^th of March 2022. Pew Notes, St. Peter’s Church, Eastern Hill, Melbourne 

“Being Swallowed up therefore in the Miserable Gulph of idle talk and worthless vanities, thenceforth I lived among Shadows, like a Prodigal Son feeding upon Husks with Swine. A Comfortless Wilderness full of Thorns and Troubles the World was, or worse, a Waste Place covered with Idleness and Play, and Shops and Markets and Taverns.” For the poet Thomas Traherne (1637-1674), people are insatiable. Our wishes and desires can even drive us to sell up our inheritance, go on world trips in search of everything or nothing, living out our version of the poverty of abundance: work, consume, be silent, die. Like the younger brother in this morning’s Gospel story, in the end there can seem no way back and no way out. 

But Traherne does not deny insatiableness. He understands we need to measure our desires and direct our insatiableness towards that which brings life, not emptiness and loss. He continues the memory of his own early adulthood in his ‘Centuries of Meditations III 14’: “As for Churches they were things I did not understand. And Scholes were a Burden: so that there was nothing in the World worth the having, or Enjoying, but my Game and Sport, which also was a Dream and being passed wholly forgotten. So that I had utterly forgotten all Goodness Bounty Comfort and Glory: which things are the very Brightness of the Glory of GOD: for lack of which therefore He was unknown.” 

When the brother returns home, instead of being treated as worthless or simply fit for hire, his father welcomes him ecstatically as found, honouring his existence in ways that confound the mere customs of society. He was dead to them, now he’s alive. The person who told them to go to hell has come back from some place like hell. 

Which leaves the awkward business of the angry elder brother. Like the teller of the parable, Traherne is not either/or, he’s both/and. He is inclusive. His message is the “Goodness Bounty Comfort and Glory” already available to the elder brother, that the father now is getting him to understand, again. And like so many of Jesus’ stories, it’s open-ended. What’s going to happen next? Somehow, it’s implicit in forgiveness. Any time spent learning and living God’s love is time not spent on husks.     

Philip Harvey

Thinking

 

Our being passes the whole of life thinking. We never cease from thinking, even in our most unthinking moments. Sleep and dream too seem to be thinking, a quiet combustible time we pass so much of our waking time trying to understand, in retrospect. We have access while thinking to all known created being, from the tiniest periwinkle to the vastest supernova. We can think about them all, though not all at once. Indeed, our thinking can only think so much at once, such that part of thinking seems to be putting a hold on thinking; self-regulation, in fact. Active awareness includes judgement, synthesis, decision, so many silent and formidable processes, yet instrumental as these are in being, they are still not everything that is thinking. Our senses colour in our thinking, while supplying a lifetime of sound effects to modify the effects. For some of us, it’s all too much. We would sometimes like thinking to cease, if only for a few hours or years. Opiates, addictions, movie marathons, and other remedies to the persistence of thinking are easily available, though they don’t stop us thinking. Reality meets us coming around the corner, one more thing to think about, only slow it down. Others cannot have enough, unceasing as they are in their pursuit of lifelong thinking. The language continues to evolve that might invent enough vocabulary for thinking, maybe. We walk around our highly tempered language like an actor, as stuff keeps happening. The next invasion, for example, is always possible and when it happens we take on the changes. The imagination expands the daily or yearly givens into possibilities that only thinking can do. The outside will offer mysteries that we must understand inside: sunlight or a falling leaf or a thunderbolt. Which leaves us with Thomas Traherne, or rather his saying: “As nothing is more easy than to think, so nothing is more difficult than to think well.” [Centuries of Meditations’ I 8] Our thinking will continue, regardless of what he is saying, but what is he saying? That we live thinking, we don’t have to do anything about it. That we are conscious of how our thinking can take us anywhere anytime, but that to go where we think well requires a choice. We train ourselves in the way of thinking well, as if there is indeed a correct way. We can do this more and more, with practice, as we know that thinking well is true. It is simply learning to think in that way and not another. We can ask for something outside of ourselves to assist in overcoming the difficulty of thinking well. This way of thinking can be prayer, a whole mode of existence, a vast improvement. It is as easy and difficult as thinking well.

Principle

 

The day is young that is waking at the first with thoughts as they occur from out of dreams and into the vision of shapes again, familiar with the light. Many another has learned through time to give thanks at waking for the light itself and every existing being and thing that breathing permits them to enjoy, further. Such understanding comes voluntarily to the awakened one, never mind their level of lucidity or vagueness, cheeriness or grumpiness, refreshment or hangover. Waking at first is for many another the hour of least affected thought. The time before breakfast is when thought alone is sorting itself out, observing its mood, sitting quietly with an assembly of early morning ideas, making out some liveable form from which to proceed. It is the hour prior to conversation with the world, the trial and error of social media, the holdfast position in preparation for daily news updates, the hour before opening a book. This book by Thomas Traherne, for example. “He thought it a Vain Thing to see Glorious Principles lie Buried in Books, unless he did remove them into his Understanding; and a vain thing to remov them unless he did revive them, and rais them up by continual exercise.” This is paragraph 2 of Book IV of ‘Centuries of Meditations’. The editor has kept the seventeenth century spelling and capitalisation, which give the sentences all manner of pitches and tones and emphases, as if playing an organ. The author is not saying books are vain, but vain if they are not being used for the purpose intended. For him understanding grows, the conversation goes on regardless, in a day where books will lend to the conversation. He removes the contents of the book, by which he means transfers the thoughts to his own mind, the place where they may live again. The sentences of his book are the beginning of the day of their thought, general statements and fundamental truths and primary assumptions that he calls principles, which is why he finishes this paragraph with these words. “Let this therfore be the first Principle of your soul. That to have no Principles, or to liv beside them, is equaly Miserable. And that Philosophers are not those that Speak, but Do great Things.” Thomas Traherne, in his own book, would have us become alive to our own thoughts and more awake to our own principles. Actively to consider thoughts and consciously to think them through with others will fill the day with gladness and felicity. Not to do so will make for personal misery. A great thing spoken, or found in a book, is but one thing. Thought enlivens the day once it is raised up by continual exercise, he is saying from sometime in the seventeenth century, and for this author that is the purpose of a book. Our principles are resurrected, if in a book, and removed to where they can live.

Tennis

 

Here are words of Thomas Traherne (‘Centuries’, I 22) on insatiableness: “Thus men get one Hundred Pound a year that they may get another; and having two covet Eight, and there is no End of all their Labor; becaus the Desire of their Soul is Insatiable. Like Alexander the Great they must hav all: and when they hav got it all be quiet. And may they not do all this before they begin? Nay it would be well, if they could be Quiet. But if after all, they shall be like the stars, that are seated on high, but hav no Rest, what gain they more, but Labor for their Trouble? It was wittily fained that that Yong man sate down and Cried for more Worlds. So insatiable is Man that Millions will not Pleas him. They are no more then so many Tennis-Balls, in comparison of the Greatness and Highness of his Soul.” Written soon after the end of the English Civil War, Traherne questions the whole endeavour of fighting for land, or wanting to be a millionaire. He has observed and knows personally that humans are insatiable. But rather than judging, Traherne’s argument is that we could use our insatiability for godly rather than worldly and selfish pursuits. For him this is, as he puts it, true nobility. The Puritans were against tennis. The main reasons given were that it was a ball game, thus leading to vice and violence; that ‘people like us’ could be enticed to play the game on Sunday, instead of resting; and that it was a game played exclusively in Continental Catholic monarchical courts. Did the game not originate in the monasteries? Enough said. Royal, or Real, tennis was not the same as modern lawn tennis. It was not played by ‘people like us’. It was elitist. Imagine, nations could come to blows over tennis. Leaders might exchange a to-and-fro of words, send dispatches, employ lawyers, engage in coverups. It was a symbol of oppression. It could get right out of hand. The whole universe could end up filled with whirling tennis balls. In a word, insatiable. How then do we read Traherne? Given his happy nature, we can imagine him playing royal tennis. Surely even tennis has its own felicitous place in the order of existence. Youth may be recalled, a tonic for the weekend. And he has an eye for detail. What’s all the racket? He doesn’t see the point in going to a court of law, or war, over more tennis balls. To enunciate these meditations to some purpose, his writing is full of sallies, lobs, aces, and the occasional well-timed forehand smash. What’s the issue, in comparison with the greatness and highness of our souls?, he asks. Enough said.    

 

Property

 

Reading Thomas Traherne (ca. 1637-1674), astonished both at what I read and that, in fact, I am reading him at all. His masterpiece ‘Centuries of Meditations’ was only found, in manuscript form, in a London street-barrow in 1896. The single manuscript of his ‘Commentaries of Heaven’ was rescued from burning in a Lancashire rubbish tip about 1967, donated to the Library of the University of Toronto after a scholar identified it as Traherne, then bought for U$110,000 by the British Library in 1984. There is now The Oxford Traherne project, a scholarly enterprise that intends to publish the first tranche of 15 volumes in 2024, even as everyone expects more manuscripts to show up. Traherne’s radical theology centres on the purpose of life being what he calls felicity, or as we would say happiness. He writes copiously about our end being felicity, to a very religious woman living in Herefordshire, by name Mrs. Susanna Hopton née Harvey (1627-1709), someone who was at different times an Anglican, a Roman Catholic, and a friend of Nonjurors, such was the turbulence of social change. When she presented one of Thomas’s manuscripts for publication after his death, Susanna overlooked to mention its author, with the result the book was published under her name, not his. Traherne’s main message is that love is all and worldly things are just so many tennis balls. C.S. Lewis wrote that ‘Centuries of Meditations’ is “almost the most beautiful book in the English language.” This obscure but ultimately felicitous course of events was on my mind while reading about Filippo Bernardini (born ca. 1993). He is the person working for Simon & Schuster London who has been accused of creating multiple fake internet domains and misleading email addresses in order to secure unpublished manuscripts from well-known authors, defrauding by impersonation. Why anyone would indulge in such a phishing scam remains to be seen; doubtless Filippo has his own story, which may further test credulity now that he’s under arrest and has to have his own official version. So many tennis balls. “The safeguarding of our authors’ intellectual property is of primary importance,” the publisher’s spokesperson said. That Thomas Traherne’s writing was his property seems not to have been of much meaning to him, his family, or friends. His brother Philip rewrote many of the poems after Thomas’s death, in a style more fitting of emerging tastes in verse. Mrs. Hopton, the person being addressed in ‘Centuries of Meditations’, treated them as good handouts for her spiritual reading circle, but seems to have taken the matter no further. Libraries in all likelihood hold more of Thomas Traherne in their property, awaiting the day when an unsigned manuscript surfaces.