Dormition fast, august 9; receiving words, part two.

...blessed are they that hear the word of God, and keep it. Luke 11:28b.

There is often a disconnect between what we hear a person telling us, and what they intended for us to hear. A certain level of intuition is required in all communication between persons. Intuition overcomes the disconnect caused by the ambiguities with which the surface levels of language are fraught. The greater the intimacy between two persons, the greater and more profound the level of intuition between them.

My wife and I speak fewer words to each other now than when we were newly married. There is less to speak because we both so often know what the other would say about a given thing. But this is not the result of boredom or a loss of love, quite the contrary. We speak less because we know each other more, and our love is settled. But to get to a point where one can intuit another, you must hear and learn their words, their countenance, and the spaces between their words in the givenness of a common life over years. The knowing silences among spouses or friends who love each other are a blessed joy because so much of the longing of human life is to know that you are known. Indeed, it seems that so much of the loneliness of our age stems from a lack of this very thing. How many young people today live with a terrifying sense of being unknown? What a hell to endure. There is a reason that the Church is constantly praying that God remember persons, that He remember them in His Kingdom forever. To be known by God is to be saved. The four words in the NT which should cause the most fear in us are I never knew you (Matt 7:23).

There is perhaps no greater earthly blessing than to have had a mother and father who taught with gentle words and actions. A father who tells and shows his son how to dress a deer, how to shine his shoes, how to light a fire, and similar things gives his son a sense of how to find in words and forms a meaning, he shows him how to follow another and how to follow a path (this is what it means to be a hunter...). Of course, we live in an age which is impoverished with regard to formative relationships - most children spend little time with their parents, most are schooled in crowded classrooms (and with TVs and computers to nurture them there), many, probably most children who attend church now get schooled into mass media style programs. Grandparents now often no longer live near their grandchildren, many preferring (or feeling coerced into) golfing or the unbothersome old folks' home. There is a scarcity of single aunts and uncles (single in the sense of unmarried, adult, and chaste) who are active in the lives of children and see it as a calling to assist in the rearing of their nephews and nieces. Children are formed most, increasingly almost exclusively, by the TV/Internet/video game/cell phone technocracy and other pawns of it - all of which divorces the child from patterns of knowing which develop real intuition - remember, the deepest and most real of human intuitions require a knowledge of both body and mind in a unified act. To develop deep intuition, a relationship between persons must involve the presence of the body and mind of both persons. There is plenty of physical contact between persons today, but it is increasingly mindless. Consider the gratuitous sexual activities of a pansexualist culture. Sport is increasingly divorced from principles of honor, truthfulness, and decency. Recreation is more and more another avenue of consumerism, the showing off of various toys, and less about the gathering of families and communities. All of this breeds loneliness. And this loneliness leads to words which are arbitrary and manipulated, which have no basis in the real relations of persons, which are at best, mini-commercials. How can one hear and keep words when there are no persons to listen to and follow? And when there are no more traditions but only the bought and sold styles of the moment?

Some think that the current epistemological crisis is centered around the academy. They blame Derrida and company for the current crises of meaning. I say nonsense to all this. Virtually all of Derrida's would be followers were second rate cultural pawns itching with their own petty agendas. If anything, Derrida's critique of the metaphysics of presence and his attacks on dialectic in rhetoric and on philosophy in general were decent intentions even if misused and oft given to the destructive sentiments of nihilism. If an Orthodox might find a central problem with Derrida, it is that he does not take his apophaticism far enough. He does not privilege absence enough, there remains in his thought the presence of too many pop sentiments. Were Derrida to seek total absence, he might very well find God, and in the end it seems he came closer to such a finding. Anyway one sees it, the reality is that most of the pawns of the current epistemological anarchy in academia are simply folks who want to sleep with whomever, whenever, and who watch a good deal of TV and movies and who are basically formed by the same entertainment cultures as the general public. If one does not believe this one should read three different undergrad college course guides. Pop culture and pansexualism rule the universities. I am still inclined to agree with Weaver that Ideas Have Consequences, but I wonder if the decisive consequences have not already been had (in the extreme), and now we live in an age in which the consequences control the ideas. The fundamental epistemological problem here is not (or no longer) academic in nature. It instead concerns how we fashion our lives, how we make our money and acquire goods and services, how we conduct our families, and order our relationships to other persons and to things. Where do we find meaning? Where do we acquire intuition?

To be continued....