[Author’s note: This piece explores, through the lens of my own experience, humanity’s need for salvation, with all our impulse to creativity and self-determining possibility for good or for ill. The piece requires patience, as it is not until the end that the light comes. I am including a recording of my reading it in the presence of the Eucharist; I encourage listening, as the spoken word in the human voice is far more expressive than written text. — VJT]

✠ Dedicated to my good friend, Fr. Michael Chernetzki (July 23, 1963 – October 21, 2013); ordained priest of the Diocese of Rockford May 21, 2011.

Recordare, Domine, quid acciderit nobis; intuere et respice opprobrium nostrum.

Behold, you who listen; behold, you who would, and see my disgrace. Ecce: ecce opprobrium meum. A pall unto me is become the veil that veils all peoples, and in the web that is woven over all nations I stand ensnarled. This web clings like a sticky film, the way a spider’s work fastens to exposed flesh in summer humidity. This web, it is samsara, the frustration of Sisyphus, the huis clos of Sartre, the disappointed and godless absurdity of Beckett.

I know this web; it clings to me. I know it as one trouble succeeds the next, strife upon strife. I know it in the alienation, I know it most and best in the alienation. I know it in the relegation to the margins of society, in the destitution, in every failure, human and moral, which has marked my existence. I know it in the hand-to-mouth struggle to survive, in the itinerancy which dogged me, which I once believed would be my death. This web, it is misery; more truly still it is futility. It is the futility of the sixth day, a ceaseless agitated toil doomed neither to bear fruit nor to rest.

And, flung down, I cannot arise. Like an animal brought to bay, I cannot rise; like a beast, pinned at the neck, I cannot rise. With a yoke on our necks we are hard driven; we are weary, we are given no rest. I know this web, this despair, in the aching loneliness, especially as Christmas approaches. I breathe it in the atmosphere, this mid-December day, when even the sun has never risen – the air grey and turbid with heavy wet snowfall, with suburban retail interests, with that small-minded ugliness which modernity alone is capable of producing. It crumbles like salt, like sediment beneath my seasons-old boots, for all their matted-up shearling lining, and encrusts the carpet of this old car I write in, held together with bungee cords and duct tape, and strings and sealing wax. We labor beneath this web woven over all the nations: Veni, Redemptor Gentium. We, in frustration, struggle, and in impotence we flail, and like Michelangelo’s Awakening Slave we torque on the axis of our nothingness, twist and writhe to be free, reach and press to emerge from the shadows of a useless and hyletic indeterminacy which we cannot even name. Veni, noctis depelle nebulas dirasque mortis tenebras.

It is the pain of loss, taken after the mode of the living. Humankind: our genius we cannot bear, and our gifts are too much and, with Luther, we fling ourselves to the floor, and we thrash, and we gnash, and we cry out our non sum, alongside many other feats of irrationality.

Come, for naught do I await some reversal of fortune, vainly through all these years I await. Come, as we pine for release: for freedom from the lash of these taskmasters, deliverance from the gravitation of the void, and from the unabating pain whose absence I have never known. Without you, I can do nothing; I, too, am not.

The veil, the web, shadow and cloud, the obscurity of the night, the gyre, the abyss: Noctis depelle mortis tenebras. Set before us are life and death. There is but one selfsame reality; it is ours to claim as blessing, or to curse according to darkness. For this is the sign of the Son of the Blessed: We will see him at the right hand of Power, and coming with the clouds of heaven, after he first comes with the overshadowing of the Power of the Most High. The Power of the Most High! We invoke you, o Adonai, Hagios Ischyros, o Holy Mighty One.

But for not by strength does man prevail. And so is it also with God.

Hugh of St. Victor wrote: God is absolute power; He can do all things. God is not in tension with reality; God is reality. It is only beneath the dome of our murky web that duress and domination reign. For us, the notions of power and force – pushing, pulling, cajoling, punishing – are as one indistinguishable tissue. Our power is a function of our total and complete impotence. Of ourselves, we can do nothing. The power this earth offers is always authoritarian, always destructive, always bears the seeds of death. We live in futility. Earthly power is futility.

God is an eternal dynamism of radiant good. All things experience this transcendent attraction and, in their depths, are drawn to him, captivated in awe. A universe redeemed and ravished, a new heavens and a new earth, necessarily adheres to him; all creation is ordered to such submission, rapt, in obediential wonder. For his goodness is desirability itself. O come, desire of nations.

Our power is repulsive, and futile, and we exert it all the more in sterile and compensatory desperation, like a deranged tyrant who massacres his subjects to forestall the inevitable loss of his throne. We can stockpile weapons of destruction, threaten cataclysm from here to the edge of the galaxy, loose the damning force of a billion bombs – all without replicating the vital energy of a single microbe.

Christum Dei virtutem! Christ, the power of God! The power of God is veiled to us by its excessive splendor, yes. But also because it is pure. We are duly impressed by pageantry, by armies, by the smoke of tyrants and charlatans. But a pure flame burns clean.

Veni, Adonai!

Image: Adobe Stock. By vadim_fl.