Charles Victor on Religion

The Sabbath

For six days God created the heavens and the earth, and on the seventh he rested, so relates the sacred narrative of Genesis. Judaism encoded within this tale the basis of its division betwixt labour and leisure. The consecration of rest for man on the seventh day gradually embosomed rest for cattle, land, and crops, the hallowing of the seventh year as the time for the retirement of the bonds of servitude and debt, and the capping year of a jubilee, the seventh return of the seventh year. The sacredness, the fullness, of the seventh day was elevated into a holistic cynosure. While the ideal endured, the prophets give evidence that practice was inconsistent. In Jesus’ day, Judaism, faced with the internationalizing challenges of Roman imperialism, recoiled on many fronts into conservatism, fundamentalism, literalism. Jesus challenges the drubbing of religion into legalism; he allows his disciples to pick grain on the Sabbath, he heals the sick on the Sabbath, for the Sabbath, says he, is for man, and to invert this ideal creates servitude, not leisure. Such humanitarianism served him not well. Continue reading →

As the Bhagavad-Gita seemingly moves towards its zenith in a great battle, Arjuna’s companion and friend suspends the near cosmic momentum with a revelation. He is the Lord God Krishna. The astonished Arjuna worshipfully announces his intention to leave behind his worldly concerns and reside in contemplation of the divine. Krishna objects, and then gives a teaching on life and holiness. There are many ways to oneness, holiness, wholeness. They share a singular essence: the surrender of ego-centricity that the self become free to the divine within, allowing, thus, its power to freely flow. This involves learning not simply a mindlessness of self, but a mindfulness of the world about oneself. Anger, ignorance, and self-sanctification are the three great impediments to this state of being, this state of mind and heart, this wholistic presence with-in the world. One need not go off into solitude, for even in the devotions of the simple-most of mind and heart God is to be found. One must accept one’s position and vocation in this world, and for Arjuna, a prince, it is to lead and to care for his people wisely and well.

Christianity has, in the sundry times and places it has found itself, asked how wisely and well to focus, find, and maintain a mindlessness of self and a caring mindfulness of the world God has not only made but redeemed in his Word and continuously calls to its wholeness in his Holy Spirit. This tract is a brief consideration of the major currents evidenced in that pious pursuit. Continue reading →

The fallacy of the immutable centre

“Things fall apart, the center cannot hold” wrote Yeats[i] as he portended the Western world slowly falling from faith both in itself, and its vesture of Christian cult. As with all brought face to face with the blunt factuality of our finitude—be it as individual, or some greater or lesser configuration of community—Yeats’ poem is permeated with a type of mourning, with melancholy, pessimism, resignation. It is a prescient work presaging the whereto a great cultural loss of communal vision and hope lead. It is a deathwatch for a civilization in extremis. The centre, however, never holds. The centre is an illusion, a transcendental ideal about, not immutability, but continuity. Continue reading →

As in many times past, the phenomenon of angels is upon us again as common religiosity looks to the heavens for some succor the visions of God and Jesus and saints have, for sundry reasons, ceased to provide. They appear as individually pliable succendanea for the traditionally defined icons of the holy. In Christianity, angels have customarily been pictured as members of the minor clergy, as the acolytes, canters and deacons at the heavenly altar. In concert with that ministerial role, they are seen today, with the panoply of its unmet pastoral needs, as avatars of the sacred and caring, supernal medics buoying humanity to well-being of body and soul as their “fallen members”, those denizens of hell, taunt and torment “fallen humanity” to irrevocably sink to their despicable spiritual destitution, their denial, not of God, but of his loving plan to sanctify humanity and all his work. Angels, both the heavenly and hellish, present the mind potent icons for those forces into which the moral mind divides reality–good and evil. Continue reading →