Soliloquy

“He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire.” Luke 3:16.

Luke is the only one who introduces fire into the baptism story of Jesus. Jesus will baptize not with water but with the Holy Spirit and with fire. This is a different kind of baptism and it needs to be explored to uncover what Luke intends to convey. I would like to focus my reflection on fire and see if it leads to an understanding of this passage. There are many uses of fire in the Old Testament. Theophanies were accompanied by fire. God appears to Moses in the burning bush, Exodus 3:2. By the time God appears to Elijah at Horeb in I Kings 19:12, the divine was no longer in the fire. Fire may not necessarily be a means of presenting the divine. In the New Testament fire is most commonly a metaphor for divine judgment. In early Greek thought, Aeschylus gave us Prometheus who stole fire from the gods and so gave humanity civilization. The name Prometheus means the one who thinks ahead. He is a forward thinker. I may conclude from this that fire has its origin with the divine and once in the hands of humanity, has the power to point the way ahead. Fire discloses, uncovers something without which humankind is not complete.

Heraclitus thinks fire is light. Light illuminates. It makes visible what has been hidden. When Luke says that Jesus will baptize with fire he may be indicating that the outpouring of fire upon humanity brings something new to light. This cannot be the unquenchable fire of verse 17, which surely is a metaphor for judgment. Jesus baptizing with fire is something other than judgment. Something is hidden that will be revealed by Jesus in this baptism with fire. Luke does not say what is to be revealed, only that Jesus will baptize with fire. Fire shines brightly. It is light. Baptizing with fire is baptizing with light. He who is the Light will pour out upon humankind his light, that is, he will pour out Himself. Luke may be indicating that Jesus will give Himself for humanity, that baptism conversation is a conversation about the sacrifice that Jesus will make, and therefore when Luke says that Jesus will baptize with fire he is conveying the idea of the Passion of Christ. If this argument holds, then I must conclude that the life of Christ is Passion, from beginning to end. Further, those who are baptized in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit are forever the Passion of Christ. The Revelation of John conveys the same idea: the Passion of Christ is the Passion of the Church. The fire is not judgment. It lights up the way into the Passion, and the Passion is sustained by its light. The divine which no longer inhabits fire has, by its exit, made room there for the Church to exist in the fire and be illuminated by its light and enlightened by its wisdom. That the Church exists in the fire and is not consumed may be the essential meaning of Emmanuel. It may be that today the Church is the Burning Bush, the place of revelation, the final proclamation that God is still with us.

“Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be consoled, because they were no more.” (Jeremiah 31:15. St. Matthew 2:18)

Sadness awakened at mid-morning, uncovers the strength to push evil aside, spreads across the land, drapes America’s soul with grief. Sadness as strong as love that blindly abides. Unseeing through tears that baptize the earth unto a blessedness. This blessed earth waits to embrace children innocently returning from a brief time in the sun. Thoughts cease to be whole; sentences fractured; verbs powerless to lend sense to a ruptured spirit. Rachel weeping, again, for her children. Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, in sure and certain hope. I weep with Rachel. Perhaps it is in weeping that hope abides.

A serpent stole immortality from Gilgamesh. The idea caught on. A parable? Is there a difference between eternal and immortal? Maybe eternal has no end, and immortal has no death. Maybe eternal is the offspring of time, and immortal is the child of human Being. It is difficult for humans to face death, to accept mortality. Human want more. They want to claim their progeny. Immortality. Nothing less will satisfy their yearning. They will be the gods they worship. They have already created and invoked them, only to sacrifice them to teach them mortality. They have become like them, and they embrace the likeness. They want their gods to be mortal, even as they long for immortality. A paradox? When is a parable a paradox? Kafka could answer that. Kafka saw human Being diagonally when it was not aware it was being seen. Kafka knows how to become the Other. He still knows.

I have never been disappointed reading Eliot. I always find something in “Four Quartets” that is worthy of reflection. Time weighs heavily, if unevenly, on each of the four. Some of my own thoughts have been informed by Eliot’s ideas of time. The beginning is the end returning to itself. This is how I have phrased my own idea. Toward the end of “Little Gidding,” the last of the four quartets, he writes:

“We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.”

Earlier in the poem he had written something like a theme that runs through his work, and I have often returned here when I needed to refresh my thought.

“What we call the beginning is often the end

And to make an end is to make a beginning.

The end is where we start from.”

Eliot’s concept of time seems to have a sense of purity, originality, demand. He speaks of  “A condition of complete simplicity (Costing not less than everything).” Time by virtue of its purity and originality, demands everything. This is the essence of its complete simplicity. He ends with the prayer of Blessed Julian of Norwich:

“All shall be well

and all shall be well

and all manner of thing shall be well. “

From this I gather that what time demands of me, it returns to me.  This is not optimism. It is where hope lives.

My faith is populated with questions! It is not a resting place. Seldom is it at peace. My faith has never grown up. It lives by rebelling, still wanting to remain young. I think if my faith ever matures, it dies. Jesus knew this. Neruda could make mountains tumble with one word. Perhaps only Lorca knows the secret.

I wonder whether my last breath will be deep or shallow. What I don’t really know is, after my last breath, will I breathe a different air? How will I know when I’m dead? How long will I be dead? After I’m dead for some time, years, millennia, what’s next for me? How will I know?  How can I know I’m alive when I don’t know what “life” is?  When I’m dead, can I wish that I were alive? I shall not want to live again. That is mostly true. A man reflecting on his life is often drawn to wonder about his death. Seem so natural!

I like to ask questions for which I have no answer.

When I was a young boy, very, very young, I read Blake under trees and in the
shelter of rocks. I could smell the salty breeze of the ocean. I felt as large
as the ocean, like Whitman or Yevtushenko. “The Tyger” emerged from the foam of
the waves, at noontime, not the forest of the night. Was it because of The
Tyger that I still seek symmetry? In vain. Tyger, then as now, chaos. Chaos
that I am. Fearful symmetry.

I’m thinking about miracles this morning. Is a miracle a divine act or a divine story? Both? The boundary between act and story has narrowed, as has the boundary between divine and human.I had to stop writing yesterday. I’m not sure why miracles dislike being probed. Except by children, perhaps.

Story reveals what wants to remain hidden. Story brings the divine out of hiding. Does the divine fear being seen? I believe humans exist in stories, through stories. However, it is one story told many different ways. What is authentically human does not exist in multiplicity. The divine is one. The human is one. The miracle is one. The past has not yet arrived. It brings the One. Now, I am too many!

The past has not yet arrived.