Peter’s Blog For September 2014
These times I find it hard to get a novel that really engages me. I have tried returning to ones that gripped me in the past but find that though they have a good sense of the dream all our stories are about they move too slowly. On the other hand, most modern novels are too gloomy for my taste. I was surprised, therefore, to be drawn into a novel in which eagles tell their story.
The novel Callanish is about three eagles and a buzzard who tell us the story of their lives in a London zoo. The oldest of them, called Minch, is a wisdom figure for the others and especially for young Creggan, a newly arrived golden eagle from Callanish in north western Scotland. The third eagle called Kraal is from North Africa and has been in captivity for some years. He is still full of anger as he rails against his captivity. The buzzard’s name is Wooli and he deals with his captivity in a completely submissive way but this turns out to be a shrewd ploy meant to catch his captors off guard. However, when his ploy works and he manages to escape he soon realises that he cannot cope with his freedom and so remains within the confines of the zoo and is soon recaptured.
The two ways
This growing inability to deal with a life outside their cages is common among the eagles in captivity as they have gradually settled for being confined to the limited space of their cages. They have become so used to the security of this that they want no other life. They have become so accustomed to being free from attack and to having all their food provided that they have lost their desire for any life other than being confined to the limited area of their cage. But this was not what Minch had learned from her years of captivity and she is prepared to go to great rounds to teach Creggan another way of handling his captivity. In words like the following she keeps reminding him of the course he must follow:
“You must never forget your homesite. For if you are to survive here you will need to remember it, even though you will finally want to forget. But I shall not let you. As long as I am here to remind you I shall never let you forget.
Forgetting is the greatest weakness, and your greatest enemy. Most of the eagles in the Cages have forgotten, for they cannot bear to remember, and because of that even if the opportunity came they would not be able to return to their homesites. But there are a few here, a very few, who cannot forget, and in them there is courage still, and strength, waiting, waiting… In time they will learn which ones they are. For myself, I am perhaps too old now to hope to return. But not too old that I cannot make sure that you never forget. NEVER.”
The predicament of the eagles is starkly expressed in the following story:
The Sky`s The Limit
There was once a poultry farmer who was given a present of an eagle`s egg. He decided to experiment with it, so he put it among some eggs a hen was hatching out. In due course it emerged with the other chicks and grew up with these. Even though it was never quite the same as them, it adapted itself to their ways and always thought of itself, and acted, as one of them. So it spent its time with the other chickens within the strict confines of the barnyard.
One day when it was about a year old its eye was caught by the inspiring sight of an eagle in full flight and something stirred within it. However, its gaze was soon brought back to earth, by a cock telling it to stop star-gazing and to get on with the job.
Now, there are two endings to the story. One has the young eagle putting its head back down as it had been told to do and continuing for the rest of its days within the very limited world of the barnyard. The other ending is, that the young eagle inspired by the vision in the sky, stretched its wings and took off. From then on it was no longer confined to the barnyard but had the sky for its limits.
Confining our life to a bunker
As I read Callanish and was reminded of this story it dawned on me how the predicament of the eagles is symbolic of ours for over recent centuries we have allowed ourselves to be seduced by a false vision and value system that seriously confines the human spirit and the way God seeks to build on this. This vision is an alluring one that Science, Economics and Consumerism have developed but it tends to confine us to a vision of ‘the good life’ that limits us to an understanding of the human largely in material terms. This very limited area of human life we thus get confined to is symbolised by the barnyard in the story above, by the eagles’ Cages in Callanish and by the graphic image of life lived in a bunker.
The origins of our predicament
We see the beginnings of this bunker-like existence in a comment Kenneth Clark made in his wonderful series of TV programmes called Civilisation. There he tells us that in the 17th century people began to ask themselves the question, Does it work? and Does it pay? rather than the question people had asked themselves up to that time: Is it the will of God? In other words, people began to take on the way Science and Economics viewed the world and what was important or of value in that world. This new way of seeing life gradually replaced one which viewed everything around us as being a part of God’s design or will, understood not as what we are meant to do for God but as a dream God has for us. It is a dream God builds into everything and especially into human nature, a dream that offers us the sky for our limit.
You have prepared a banquet for me in the sight of my foes. My head you have anointed with oil, my cup is overflowing. Psalm 23
What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man conceived, God has prepared for those who love him. 1 Cor 2:9
This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. 1 Jn 4:10
The bunker Exclusive Humanism confines us to
Instead, what we have ended up with today is what Charles Taylor in his book, The Secular Age, calls Exclusive Humanism. This means that we view life from an exclusively human perspective and that seen and valued largely in material terms. As a result, we suffer from what he terms “the modern malaise” of boredom with the ordinary, restlessness and a sense of depression. He explains how over the last 500 years Exclusive Humanism has taken hold of our minds and hearts as life was gradually emptied of God, of the spirit, of the sublime and of the notion of a dream that is innate to human nature. This is the dream that was built into us when we were made in the image of a God who is love and it is a dream too of the intimacy or union into which the attractiveness of this love draws us.
God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. Gn 1:27 …. Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh (or one person). Gn 2:24
Letting our dream become dormant
In the circumstances in which we live today our dream tends to become dormant because the world of work and wealth demand so much of our time, energy and resources that we have little or nothing of these left for bringing our dream to be. This is what Minch is worried about in her concern for her fellow eagles as she sees them being seduced by the limited life the Cages have to offer. She sees them settling for being well looked after, for food, for shelter, and for being free from attack. She fears that they will become so accustomed to having all their material needs met that they will no longer be able to survive without these should they ever be offered the chance to have the sky for their limit. As we saw above, when Wooli escaped from his cage he was no longer capable of availing of the freedom he was offered.
Minch’s way of dealing with this seduction of the Cages is to never let the eagles forget where they have come from. If they are to survive, they must never let go of their memories for these are their strength and their hope.
Minch always wanted Kraal to tell her where he came from because she said, as she had said to Creggan on his first night, that for an eagle to survive the first thing he must know is where he comes from, and he must not forget his memories however distant they may be. They make up his hope and give him his strength. Then Kraal remembered that when Creggan had asked him about where he came from all he had said was ‘the South’and not really told him any more. He had wanted to forget … just as Minch had told him he would.
How we can have the sky for our limit
During my years as a teacher I learned the truth of Minch’s words. I learned that if we are to follow our dream and have the sky for our limit, we must keep returning to the significant places and people of our story. For example, in returning to the love of our parents, family and friends, these people continue to give us a sense of who we are and of what we are capable of becoming. If we remember their love, it arouses our dream of intimacy and the joy we again find in their presence.
It is to this personal and tangible experience of our innate dream that the Bible must talk to if the ultimate dream it reveals is to remain tangible, real and above all credible. It is this fulsome love that the three persons of the Trinity want with a passion to reveal to us that inspires our ultimate dream. However, if their love is not to become too ideal and spiritual for us to identify with, we need to keep returning to people like our parents and how they gave us a very down to earth feel for our dream of love, close relationships and the ordinary joy we find in these.
Flying to knowledge without ever going to college
Often we are reluctant to follow Minch’s urging us to ‘return to our homesite’ because of the ghosts of the past but also because Science and Economics do not value this “hole in reason’s ceiling”. Our personal experience and the way it engages our whole person “heart, soul, mind and strength” is seen as too subjective and personal to have the objectivity Science requires.
And I have a feeling
That through the hole in reason’s ceiling
We can fly to knowledge
Without ever going to college.
Patrick Kavanagh
It is this invaluable personal experience of our dream that our parents for example give us, which Jesus wants to talk to when he reveals the “Good News” of God’s love and dream for us. This is a love that creates and maintains an intimacy or union and a joy that is “complete”. This is the sky of unlimited possibilities that the three persons of the Trinity want us to take off into and to enjoy to the full.
As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you; abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love. These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete. “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you. Jn 15:9-15
Re-discovering the sublime
One of the first groups of people who sought to break out of the Cages we have confined ourselves to were the Romantic poets of the nineteenth century. William Wordsworth, for example, put our predicament succinctly when he wrote, “getting and spending we lay waste our powers” and so he sought to escape into a sense of the sublime that we find in nature. In poems like the following there is a description of the same quest inspired by Dostoevsky’s belief that “we are saved by beauty” or by the sublime love symbolized by the Grail in the following poem.
The Few
No argument can pierce the shuttered mind.
Let truth shine forth resplendent as the sun,
Still, crouched in their dark corner, will they find
Some guttering candle till life’s day be done.
Even though we sang like angels in their ear
They would not hear.
Those only in whose heart some inkling dwells,
Grown over through it be, crushed down, denied,
Will greet the peeling of the golden bells
And welcome the truth when all around deride.
Yet sight has laid a debt upon their will
Not all fulfil.
For even those who see, only a few
Will have the intrepid wisdom to arise
And barter time’s false values for the true,
Making their life a valiant enterprise
To vindicate their heritage long lost
Nor count the cost.
And out of that so noble fellowship
Questing the Grail upon the mountain peaks
Well is it if it meet the expectant lip
Of even one persistently who seeks
Yet in this quest the glory and the goal
Of the awakened soul.
Arthur Osborne
If you are interested in exploring the dream of love and relationships as the quest “of the awakening soul” you will find a brief picture of it presented in THE HOME PAGE of this website. For a more detailed description of how love and relationships develop you might go the Life, Love and Relationships that is under COURSES in the main menu at the top of this page. To find out how you can discover how love and the dream it generates has developed into a profound wisdom you have accumulated during your life you might look at What Do YOU Want, again under COURSES.