worship in the temple

one corinth 6:19-20

“Isn’t it time that we lovingly free ourselves
from the beloved and stand it, although we tremble.
as the arrow stands the bowstring, tense to be more than itself?
for abiding is nowhere…

could we exist without them? [earthly things] is the legend in vain?
that once in the lamentation for linos, the daring
first music pierced the barren numbness, and only
then in frigtened space, which an almost godlike youth
suddenly forsook forever, the void began to feel
that vibration which now enraptures, consoles, and helps us?”

rilke, “first elegy,” duino elegies

–
“the shadow
of the objet rearing up became
the object”

cocteau, “crucifixion”

–

our bodies are a strange limit that is not always limit but a condition for possibility in sense. ever-changing (even in death) our bodies expand and decay in a sensible space which provides ground for our immateriality and infinitude to manifest. as in all dangerous liaisons, including this bodily material and immaterial expression, its intensity peaks mediating our relationship inbetween–which at times appears to only fallaciously persist in contradiction. at once the site of the formal unfolding of self and consciousness and will that is ever-exceeding its identification as a being unthinkably accidental and unprecedented. and the tenuous grasp of the breath that it needs to continue working. it is unwitting and weak. and we underestimate our strength in our beautiful dance on the tight rope. dangling without steady footing, our bodies lead us into our meetings with the divine. it is through our bodies that we puncture the illusion of an uninterrupted ego-ideal, an otherness not coimplicated but rooted in me. it is through our touch and material connection that we find the life that resists a death by objectification. this temple, the body, is our worship space for love.

shall we gather at the river? click —>  temple   <—- for a two-hour audio service.

–

our temple is not a marketplace.*

how do we purify our worship space?
we must break the ideal vision of otherness and probe deeper than the simple surface of flesh. we will find divinity in our connectedness.

a brok -en/ered temple

-faust’s body-

accustoming to any ritual…creates a community of expression a pattern of signification of that expression. through our ritual subjectivization through commodity exchange, we have become used to treating the body as saleable merchandise. how dangerously the words of men, misunderstood, create ontological traps that trick us into treachery against our selves and our gods (our others).

faust’s body is the body for sale. wagered.
faust is in love. what is the significance of his deal?

in a contract he sanctions his restlessness, “for restless activity proves a man.” (ll 1759)

faust is in love, this striving without satisfaction, a seat close enough to infinitude–configured incorrectly as a stopping–eludes him. and he is tired. he laments failure and sets to drink. enter mephisto. faust is weak. he wants strength to face failure. he signs a contract to to sanction his curse of love’s consummations (ll.1604). a pact to let him loose his passions. this deal consecrates his bad luck to criticize until the derided die. he bets his life that he will never find a moment that he wishes will abide.

faust is confused. his strivings are unending. the wish for each moment to abide is not a failure when the moment does not. this is the lack and abundance that finds us following our breath. he wishes to lose himself, calling “let my own self grow into theirs unfettered, till as they are, at last i, too, am shattered.” (11 1774-1775). he is confused as to his power. to transform and continue, to loose his passions. he seeks instead a sensible power in knowledge, sciens, via contract. he wants authorization for his inability to be satisfied. to impel him beyond stagnation. he fears the peak will prove his master.

his bet belies his cynicism for joy. as “the word dies when we seize the pen” (ll.1728). faust’s worship is true, he believes in infinite love; but his temple is prostituted, sold, in cynicism. failure is so pervasive. the bet is that he won’t feel awe, excstasy. but then he approaches the coffin.

“apparently we were bored with consciousness. well, we won’t be bored any longer!” (celine, //journey to the end of the night//). do we create conflict in order to stave off inactivity?

with whom do we wager?

faust offers “as i grow stagnant I shall be a slave whether or not to any one indebted.” (ll1710-1711). faust is afraid of slowing down. so he asks the devil to tempt him to slow down. he is an ardent believer, he does not think that the devil will tempt him adequately; he bets his life. he expresses his hatred of his life, but this is part of the critical move–that negates, like mephisto…”the spirit that negates” (ll. 1338). he wishes to reach peace. but he does not wish to be a slave. it is when he realizes that his position of mastery is in fact enslavement that he is saved.

in light of our certain death, are our ethics meaningful? faust is saved regardless of his contract. the future is always unknown and undefined. the truth does not need proof and cannot be disproven. “whether or not,” our debt is inconsequential…

let us NOT construe the terms of this wager to validate eternal return.
faust wagers he will never be content to take this moment now for every moment, his striving to cease. (//faust// l. 1700) to say, “verweile,” abide, is not to call come back. his bet is to love as though it is our last moment. it is eschatological not Wiederkehr/recurrence. to think it could eternally return is to swell in the justificatory scheme of transcendent meaning…that i might experience this very moment again and bear it and love it…
instead, as eschatological, this moment is accidental and you will never live it again. and so you wish for it to stay within your grasp.

we pawn off this difficult grasp–that is, the beauty and weakness of our moments–for a simple sensible one.

we are lost to each other in our surface immersion.

doin time for money?

-diotima’s body-

we share a faustian confusion with value.

how we value things in relation to a third term is not necessarily metaphysically harmful unless this relation is forced. any durress casts suspicion on the entire enterprise of valuation–it verily induces a culture of non-belief! when all is forcibly reduced to the same…law, value ($), time/pace of speed…this ignores the variation of life.

ours is a culture that conditions a fairness as treating every one the same. but we honor this truly by treating all with freedom to find treatment as they like. any prescription of justice that relies on a forcible reduction to a third term of meaning in order for it to be coherent wagers that otherness is a position that can in some sets be resolved entirely. for example, even the teleologically quixotic rawlsian liberals who say that justice is helping the least well off, assume a universalizable determination–a universal set of definitions–of “worse off.”

but love is not reduction, it is an opening, a gift not a regulation. the problem with our value and flesh…is it reduced to one flat surface.

diotima’s body is full of various concavities and espouses a love in between. a loving of the beautiful in all bodies. make contact. all is more and less than what you have imagined.

we find the temple wanting. how do we find the lack that has us need? in plenitude of belovedness, how do we leap again into the wager of loving? it is through the body, our contact, when i realize my limit. when i look at your face i see my death. but that is real. i need you to be real.

why do we share immortality in connectedness? why does the body demand this?

it is the irruption of the reflection in the pool, and the wake that carries on. beyond the stone thrown. so for once throw the first stone.

diotima notes that we achieve immortality in mortality through our contact. which breaks the surface. disturbs it like waves ransacking the solid serenity of any pond. diotima’s body is shared. jump in!

it is a shame not to love the beauty in all bodies. all bodies that can help create some waves in the pool.
we are ashamed as culture assails the culmination of our loving.

-uninterested love and the boundless body-

how to resist the particularization of love, the hierarchized schema, and other unknown terms the ordering, the hegemon. how do i love all the same when facing a body which is limited in space?

and how with this body facing this body can i love at all, if love is depossessive. am i to forget that you and i are in possession of material?

the body is paradoxical. two beliefs in one form, that i live beyond my frame, that my frame will perish with me to certain extents trapped inside.

it is in this paradox we find the blur of multiplicity, the movement that brings our love beyond frame, en frame. we need our bodies to live beyond our bodies. elsewise we lose our bodies to hegemon, figured as ground, as principle, as hole, as whole, as any one and many of things figured, that is, to death.

we lose sight of the double vision which is perfect sight.

your body, this wholly, holy, hole-y material is the resistance to tyranny and oppression! to a solitary petit mort!

warning, in our bodies we tend to forget that we play multiple games with an other.

“this wild gaping after just one body is a small thing” and so says diotima, we despise it.

and so we share immortality in our connectedness..that is we can give birth to beauty and the good together…yet we must surpass the impossible demand of our bodies, to stay grounded located particular.

flesh pollutes our idea of beauty only if we treat this flesh as the closure that it is not. if we collapse you to your (sur)face. but, flesh is more than an at times bedazzling cover. it is the material in which our otherness asserts itself.

are we to fear the material that irrupts our mathemes?

hegel writes that lovers seek to annul the distinction, the separable element, our flesh, in “love”

thus, “shame” or “the raging of love against [exclusive] individuality”…”enters only through the recollection of the body.” (love fragment). but i am forced to remember/recollect, that is to collect again! your body as it is lost in this culture of surface worship. can we cast the money changers out of our temple?

the prison from which i am afraid to reach

whereas our flesh itself, our divine material, lets us alight beyond it as mere barrier/difference, to the instantiation of lack itself…that which is not us and propels us to search for us.

this implication, that the body is a corruption, leads us to an inordinate feeling of guilt and dismay. our immanence is a difficulty, a cross of the transcendent, but it IS. and in it is beauty and good. “the ultimate goal of the activity of Eros is a transcendent “possession” of the eidos of Beauty but the means toward this involves an engendering upon the visible modes of beauty.” (cavalier, on //symposium//) love must root upon the ground. i do not believe that we are all united in struggle, like some. we only struggle when we deny love.

do we struggle in/out of love?
real love is happiness, but what when real love abuts a structure bent on its (love’s) destruction? Hegel notes we do feel ashamed…

beyond the other, what of the burdens that are impositions of the big other?

(that you enplace a demand when there is none)

as pure love is not common, our others will often see pure love as though it is not…through abused/ing eyes.

does the invitation imply that its refusal is something that rejects an attempt to obtain some thing? thereby the offer itself is impure love? e.g. why’d you have to offer?

i do not think so, but why

and an other easily interprets invitation in this way. in light of duty at play.

how does one welcome and open not create the burdensome demand on others to come and share? that is, how does the posture/process of pure love (openness, welcoming) not in itself tend to lead an other–so skilled in the perspectives of duty and law–this is impure love–to feel threatened? the lover appears to then present an infinite demand

but let us remember the possibility that the demand itself is not real, it is rooted in an other’s disbelief, doubt, displacement–

that a gift does not need sacrifice.

we all want too much from each other. but this wanting need not be possessive, but a part of striving itself. too much, too much. but this excess is our very living breath. we must learn not to fear excess. and to do what we think good in spite of failure and shame.

let us pray

-temple persistence-
our flesh is the persistent separable element, which causes a difficulty to loving. and so how do we triumph the flesh? an unfleshed love is too dematerial, i am in love with imago, ideal; and a love en flesh is often too material, i am infatuated with a dead object.

if we let flesh exist as it is, that is in constant motion (we are decaying, every breath is closer to death)…then flesh could be our temple.

hyperion, in love with diotima, predicts their trial, “I see how it must end. the rudder has dropped into the tide and the ship, like a child caught by the feet, is seized and flung against the cliffs.”

-holderlin, //hyperion//

what a trying temple. our goal is that it be plastic.**

love is believing in spite of all the evidence.
the proof that contradicts itself.
when i confront you in an immersion,

i slip into the pool past your reflection. i lose weight. though underwater i hold my breath, i am lost. and i remember the surface.

from underneath, immersed in a sea, recollection is a mercy. not a limit.

let us pray.
–
* cf john 2: 13-16, for the biblical denouncement of commercializing the temple
** cf para. 64, p.39 in hegel, //phenomenology of spirit//.