Barbellion (author of 'Journal of a Disappointed Man) and Apurva/the uncanny, unprecedented

 Reading the ‘Journal of a Disappointed Man’ by Barbellion I reach back to the early 20th.Century to hope for him.  What can that hope, that prayer, that earnest supplication ‘give that man a break’ God; what can it do?  Are prayers dropped into eternity and in that way outside time?   Are they are retroactively effective, landing into Barbellion’s time and helping him?  What is the Christian theology on this point?  The Hindus who have thought of everything, for whom abstruse points are the old normal, speak of the uncanny, the apurva.  The wikipedia article :

apurva

summarises the main thinking on the topic.  Essentially its this: how can the sacrifice rightly done, the results of which must fructify, remain in abeyance and benefit the celebrant after their death.  The normal causal connections seem broken.  

And now I remember that in Christianity prayer for the souls of the dead in Purgatory is efficacious. The space time continuum is not as firm a construction as we suppose it to be.  Adepts at an advanced level regularly flout it.  

Ramana Maharshi the great sage was once asked whether it was possible that someone could be the reincarnation of a person who had not yet died.

Yes, he replied, because the upadhis (forms of limitation) are different in that case.  Causal logic is subverted and by the normal understanding of karma actions yet to be performed were fructifying in another life.  

How very apurva!!

I absolutely recommend ‘Journal of a Disappointed Man’ by Barbellion as the sort of book that you can take up and read some entries occasionally for their poignant beauty and resolute courage in the face of a dismal prognosis.  He died at age 27.

Barbellion

available on 

gutenberg.org 

Graham Greene's answers to Prayer in The End of the Affair and The Power and the Glory

In a comment on my previous post John Doyle wrote of an answer to fervent prayer that brought a difficult situation with it. I have had experience like that myself so I have no difficulty in accepting the truth of what he says laying aside the sceptical post hoc propter hoc with a little smile. Graham Greene was a man who believed in prayer and who writes about it convincingly. I’m thinking here of two books in particular, The Power and the Glory and The End of the Affair. Excellent recollective reading at this time when death seems to want to crash our party, approaching with the friendly clink of his carry out. In the latter book Bendrix is saved it would seem by the prayer of his lover who offered to leave him and give herself to God in exchange for his life. God in Greene’s book is a literalist who highlights the passage in the Gospel ‘knock and it shall be opened unto you’ by having the front door blasted off its hinges on top of Bendrix and saving him from the falling rubble. During the Blitz of course. Generally in Greene’s books God is a near remote figure who cannot comment on individual cases and simultaneously has a sharp elbow.

It’s a novel of stalking with Bendrix setting a private detective after Sarah to find if she has a new lover after she abandons him. The detective and his boy are splendidly comic pathetic in the English manner. Weather as the not often gentle rain is a feature of this book as it is in ‘The Power’ which runs with the immediate sweat of Mexican jungle. Humidity, humility and a priest on the run clinging to his duty to the end. He has prayed that he will sacrifice his own last confession and communion and go to hell but that his daughter should be saved from the evil which he sees nascent in her. Does he get his wish? This is Greeneland so you won’t be surprised. Mr. Tench the dentist marooned in Mexico by the falling peso is another comic turn from a member of the chorus. There’s a Marxist policeman, an acolyte of Satan, who trails the Padre.

These are some of his best books which haven’t dated at all. He was never much better than this which sound depreciative but is not given the high standard of his work.

Covidology IV

Can we surpass ourselves? Is there more in us than meets the eye, the eye of whiggery?

All hated Whiggery; but what is Whiggery?
A levelling, rancorous, rational sort of mind
That never looked out of the eye of a saint
Or out of drunkard’s eye.

(from The Seven Sages by W.B. Yeats)

Prayer in these days is being dismissed as empty incantation. Raising the mind and heart to God is feeble magic and divagation from the true path of enlightened action. Fatuous waffle from the high places is to replace the inspiration that guides action. To do everything solely through our own efforts is to surely fail. Prayer changes everything in a direct immediate way through breaking the moulds of conventional reliance on practices which are not adequate to the present emergency. Action based on modelling where none of the numbers have any validity may itself be a form of secular incantation or statistical voodoo.

Death has your number.

Let’s work, let’s pray.

Praying without Belief

Amod Lele prays to Manjushri even though he doesn’t believe in him.
clamavi
I ask what if Manjushri believes in Amod Lele? At what point does the ‘penny prayer’ drop and the weighing scales tell him his true weight. The penny prayer drops when a good thump of ‘de profoundis’ is delivered with it.

How does one move from a position of rational unbelief or agnostic reservation to belief? Is it a negotiable fissure that is spannable by rational devices? My feeling is that such would be non-confirming and subjective bricolage. No, one must be un-benighted by a tap of the sword of Manjushri.