Letter #93: A World of Minute Particulars

Cleansing the Doors of Perception

Spangle

Well, I have to admit, I’m going to miss the “hooded devil-worshippers conspiring to blind the world to God” in a sinister plot. What a fun bunch of guys they were. I could tell you stories.

But if we take them out of the mix, we are left with a Terence Howardesque convergence of harmonic frequencies in which things continually and inevitably must come apart before they can come together again. You say that “our original sin was to try and learn about things by tearing them apart.” Doubtless true. But it’s hard to imagine learning any other way.

You and I talk a lot about how the world is shot through with consciousness, how whether it is a stone or a rainbow or beauty, it finds its shape and being in the perceiving mind. And yet it’s also true that the mind cannot perceive these things except in their particular forms. I can’t worship without something to worship. I can’t love without someone to love.

William Blake said we had to know the world in its “minute particulars,” and if “the doors of perception were cleansed,” these particulars would appear to us as they truly are: infinite. This, for me, is the whole point of the sacrament of communion, the whole point of the diction of poetry, the whole point of love and marriage: to learn the holiness of particular things and to learn the particularity of holiness, slow by slow, day by day. This is the task of religion and of life.

So right now, we live in a disenchanted world that we know is full of enchantment. Yet we can’t return to that enchantment by going back to the superstitious particulars of old. We can no longer say that demons hurl the lightning bolts and angels move the stars. That language is dead to us. The door to the past is closed.

At the same time, we can’t be gulled into believing that the world of scientism is the real world. It’s not. Astronomy does not change the fact that the heavens declare God’s glory. Brain science does not erase the soul. We have not just lost a thing. We have lost a thing that is real and must be found again. Because there is a God and there are souls and there are angels and demons, too, but we can’t know them with our old knowledge.

This is why it is so hard to talk seriously in religious terms. How can we speak of the particularities of the Christian faith to people who don’t believe in God? It’s nonsense to them. And yet it is in those minute particulars that we know God. He too must have his separate nature or he cannot exist for us at all but as an amorphous generality.

This is not an impossible problem. It was solved before — by Paul. But we must think — in minute particulars — about how it can be solved anew.

Your Dad.