Letter #3: The Breaking of the Bread

Practice, Practice, Practice

WigWam!

As this will conclude the premiere week of our letter exchange, I’m glad to be able to wrap things up with a definitive solution to one of life’s eternal mysteries. Your nickname “the Wigwam” came about in the following manner.

When you were born, your mother and I felt you should be welcomed to the world with appropriate fanfare. To that end, in your honor, I rewrote the lyrics to “See How the Conquering Hero Comes,” from Handel’s Judas Maccabaeus. I would parade around our apartment holding you in the air at arm’s length while singing the new version, “Spencer the Baby, what a funny little guy!” Occasionally your mother would join the parade, and when she did, she further revised the lyrics and sang “Spencer the Wigwam…” etc. I assume she did this because women are irrational and a mystery. Beyond this, my wisdom does not extend.

To your question: How to know God as we knew him when we were children — to see the creative presence behind the stuff of life without surrendering to an animism that makes godlings of the stuff itself?

I think this is the core of the business of living. Like you, when I finally found God, I also remembered him. I remembered that I had known him naturally as a child “when meadow, grove, and stream, the earth, and every common sight to me did seem apparelled in celestial light,” as Wordsworth put it Wordsworthily. I suppose this is why Jesus tells us that in order to enter the Kingdom of Heaven we must become like children again. But of course, as Wordsworth himself discovered, you can’t recreate that unconscious innocence. You can only hope sometimes to feel “a sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused, whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, and the round ocean and the living air, and the blue sky, and in the mind of man.”

You can’t fake this perception and it doesn’t just happen. I think you have to make a conscious practice of seeing rightly. Prayer can help and God-centered meditation, and charity work which can provide a path out of solipsism. But for me, right now at least, ritual symbolism has a special power to it. This is why I’ve come to take communion so seriously. I want to teach my heart to know him, like the disciples outside Emmaus did, in the breaking of the bread, and thus in every little thing. Done right, ritual can free the symbolic structures of the mind from the merely personal and give spiritual meaning to physical experience. It can teach us to know the creator through creation.

Happily, you’re coming on the podcast this Friday to launch the Substack and spread the word. We can continue the conversation there.

Till then, farewell!

The Wig-Dad