Matthew Rose:

Tradition is the ritual abolition of time—this, in a sentence, was Guénon’s discovery and his revelation to the West. To a culture formed by Greek philosophy and biblical religion, he argued that no lasting society could be built on the contemplation of nature or the hope for a life beyond it. Time could be resisted only through tradition—only through the unceasing repetition of acts whose archetypes were thought to be as old as humanity itself. By imitating his ancestors, Guénon argued, the man of tradition was made contemporary with them and so transcended time. He lived in timeless solidarity with the generations that had preceded and would follow him. Neither nature nor history, therefore, could defeat him—for he had nothing of his own, did nothing by himself, and stood for nothing unique. He was merely a member of a sacred series. As Guénon’s greatest interpreter, Mircea Eliade, observed, the life of a traditional man had meaning only under one condition: that he was not an individual at all. What he did had always been done. What he believed had always been believed. His life was one of holy repetition.

As Guénon saw it, the postwar West was littered with mere fragments of knowledge. Modernity had succeeded in severing each branch of knowledge and every practical skill from the “sacred sciences” that once ordered them to wisdom. Guénon lamented that social roles, now dominated by technology, transmitted no spirituality and offered no portals to contemplation. Modern life instead imposed its own empty rituals, which were nothing but a “parody” of the sacred rhythms of traditional life—exacerbating our exposure to historical change, rather than protecting us from it. Guénon concluded that the West was indeed an exceptional civilization: It was exceptionally ­abnormal in seeking “the destruction of all ­traditional institutions.”

At the time of his death in 1951, Guénon had largely given up hope that the dissolution of traditional societies could be stopped. He encouraged his followers to hold inwardly to the eternal doctrines that he, in a conspicuous break with tradition, had committed to writing.

[…]

We need not agree with Guénon in order to recognize that he was right about the dismantling of tradition in liberal societies. He understood the civilizational calamity, to say nothing of the human cruelty, of making each generation a stranger to those that precede and follow it. Who we will be, what we will believe, where we will live, how and when we will die—we are now burdened with building our lives from scratch, precisely at the moment when we most need the wisdom of tradition. Guénon was rightly horrified by the nihilism of a culture whose past is stolen through enforced forgetting. And though he was not a believer in any traditional sense, he sought the same consolation many religious people do: refuge in a realm of imperishable truth.

But in imagining a primordial tradition, existing beyond the flow of time, Guénon, paradoxically, drained human life of its meaning. Guénon ignored the personal and embodied dimensions of human experience. No individuals mattered when seen from the horizon of deep time, and no great men or women could shape our common destiny. Guénon’s vision of eternity prevented him from seeing any real human beings, whose unfolding lives form the drama of history. His “tradition,” hidden in secret symbols and encoded rituals, was disembodied from the ways in which any inheritance is transmitted. Guénon showed almost no interest in Western art, literature, or folkways, and his failure was no accident. For he could not acknowledge the animating core of our culture, with its basis in the Bible, whose message he could not bear to confront. Scripture sees time as fraught with meaning. It imagines that eternity is glimpsed in the small dramas of ordinary lives whose every moment is charged with meaning.

Guénon’s return to tradition was no return at all. It was an escape—from the finitude of creaturely life into the imagined citadel of tradition. His error was fundamental and prevented him from being the steward of any tradition that might be renewed. He did not understand that our involvement in history, including our vulnerability to it, is what allows us to seek what is truly human and what is infinitely beyond history. With his vision turned to the mystery of human prehistory, Guénon failed to appreciate the mystery before him. It is the mystery that the deepest ­human potentialities become full, rich, and perfected only through the adventure of history, where they are tested, illumined, and enhanced. Human beings must live in time, and it is only within a world of change that we can give shape to our souls. Our responsibility to do so gives our lives a perpetual restlessness and discontent. Guénon experienced as a crisis and a loss what is, in truth, a task and calling. And when we see time not as the place of our dispossession, but as our journey toward home, then a more exalted vision of human life opens before us.

I had to make two attempts, one several months ago, but I read Francis Spufford’s Light Perpetual this week. I can’t say why, but the fist time around I just couldn’t grab on to any of the characters. Even the second time took a little effort and a hundred or so pages. And that lag getting into the book came as a surprise, since the opening chapter is such a completely gripping start.

I don’t think it would be a spoiler to say that every character dies in the first chapter (it says as much on the inside jacket) when a German V-2 rocket explodes at a Woolworth’s in London in 1944. What follows and what makes up the rest of the book is a series of snapshots from the lives that would have gone on had a bomb not gone off when and where it did.

Shoppers, saucepans, ballistic missiles: what’s wrong with this picture? No one is going to tell us. Jo and Alec, as it happens are looking in the right direction. Their gaze is fixed on the gap between the shoulders of Mrs. Jones and Mrs. Canaghan where the rocket is gliding into view. But they can’t see it. Nobody can. The image of the V-2 is on their retinas, but it takes far longer than a ten-thousandth of a second for the human eye to process an image and send it to a brain. Much sooner than that, the children won’t have eyes any more. Or brains. This instant—this interval of time, measurably tiny, immeasurably vast—arrives unwitnessed, passes unwitnessed, ends unwitnessed. And yet it is a real moment. It really happens. It really takes its necessary place in the sequence of moments by which 910 kilos of amatol are delivered among the saucepans.

In one sense, the opening chapter is meaningless to the story and the characters whose lives play out on the pages that follow, since at no point do we revisit what really happened. In another sense, however, much like with the whole of any story, or poem, when you close this book at the end, you can’t help thinking simultaneously about the beginning, about how the stories of these characters have never actually taken place, the lives of each as a child violently cut short. This makes what is otherwise a fairly simple novel into something much more moving—and haunting.

I’m reminded a little of how I felt—or in the inverse of how I felt—at the end of Adam Makos’s A Higher Call. Makos tells the true story that revolves around two pilots, one American B-17 pilot named Charlie Brown, and one German Bf-109 pilot named Franz Stigler. Because Stigler chose not to shoot down a nearly crippled B-17 after a bombing of Bremen, Brown and his crew live to see the future and the families they would never have known because that future and their families would not have existed.

Makos describes the scene at a filmed meeting between Charlie Brown and his crew and Franz Stigler in Massachusetts in 1990:

From above it must have looked funny, the circle of people crowding around one small man in the center, hugging him and one another amid the sounds of tears and laughter. But everyone that day owed something to Franz Stigler, the man in the middle. Because of him, twenty-five men, women, and children—the descendants of Charlie, Blackie, and Pechout—had the chance to live, not to mention the children and grandchildren of Charlie’s other crewmen. . . .

From above, the circle of people blended as they hugged near the [B-17] bomber’s wing, becoming just one mass, bigger and greater as the gaps between them vanished.

That, of course, was a true story all the way through, while Spufford’s story is only based on a true event. (There really was a Woolworth’s in London destroyed by a V-2 rocket in 1944.) But the effect of each story is nearly the same. Somehow, deep down, the thankfulness of the one story is nearly interchangeable with the lament of the other. The fact is, I can imagine, for individuals and for the world, a moment like this—a circle viewed from above as people hug and blend, give thanks and reconcile—for all the lives that went wrong as much as for the ones that went right.

One of the things I like most about Light Perpetual is how Spufford so humanizes each character. This is not a sob story about simply wonderful lives that never got their chance. Though it might be a little overdone at times, each of his characters has as much trouble and tragedy as anything, but each still has some chance for meaning, joy, redemption. Each life is set on some trajectory in a way that we all know as both intimately chosen and yet vastly uncontrollable.

As one character, Jo, is observing a group of young students later in the book, she wonders about the glories and the harms that await them:

But you can’t warn them, any more than you can tell them in terms that would make sense to them that their transformation is glorious. Youth isn’t visible to them, any more than air is. It’s the condition of their lives, but it isn’t a thing that they could imagine not having, and therefore could imagine as being desirable in itself.

In The Sense of an Ending, Julian Barnes puts this eclipsed, front-loaded sense of childhood quite powerfully:

In those days, we imagined ourselves as being kept in some kind of holding pen, waiting to be released into our lives. And when that moment came, our lives—and time itself—would speed up. How were we to know that our lives had in any case begun, that some advantage had already been gained, some damage already inflicted? Also, that our release would only be into a larger holding pen, whose boundaries would be at first undiscernible.

And yet, out of such unknowable, uncontrollable, chaotic sludge come all the tainted goodness and glory and light worthy of the name “life.”

Jo again, reflecting on that same group of students as they sing together:

Can they hear it, this immense organised sound they are making together? Can they hear the organ that they have briefly become, whose separate pipes are all those sticky pink organic tubes in teenage bodies? Imperfect pipes, made of damp twisted cartilage without a single straight line, pumped up by weird fluttering bladders, and yet capable of sounding a chord that seems to lay hold on some order in the world that already existed before we came along and started to sing. Making an order that matches an order. Music is strange, she wants them to see, and one of the things that is strangest about it is that it comes from our messy bodies. Sing, Hayley. Sing, Tyrone. Sing, Jamila, Simon, Samantha, Jerome. Don’t stop till you must. Notice if you can that your temporary orchestra of hormones and still-digesting Big Macs from lunchtime can be coaxed into playing the music of the spheres. If you let yourself be the instrument.

Then the bell goes, and they clatter away laughing.

I think what I would like to see is a book like this, with almost the exact same introductory chapter, but written for characters in the Middle East—say, a family in Afghanistan, killed by a U.S. drone strike. Zamir, Faisal, Farzad, Arwin, Benyamin, Hayat, Malika, Sumaia—what lives might they have lived, “those particles, flecks, shreds, lumps and pieces that, previously, were parts of people; people being missed, waited for, despaired of . . .”? Isn’t this worth wondering, too?

But what has gone is not just the children’s present existence . . . It’s all the futures they won’t get, too. All the would-be’s, might-be’s, could-be’s of the decades to come. How can that loss be measured, how can that loss be known, except by laying this absence, now and onwards, against some other version of the reel of time, where might-be and could-be and would-be still may be?

Which is to say, how can that loss be measured except by the standard of its own existence in time? How can the loss of life be known except by remembering it and lamenting its loss? In the words of Barbara Kingsolver, when she visited Ground Zero in Hiroshima:

I was moved beyond words, even beyond tears, to think of all that can be lost or gained in the gulf between any act of will and its consequences. In the course of every failure of understanding, we have so much to learn.

There is more than enough in any given day’s newsreel, public or private, to provoke this kind of lament, to plead a deep humility, and to warrant a corresponding hope.

It seems right to end where Spufford begins:

Come, other future. Come, mercy not manifest in time; come knowledge not obtainable in time. Come, other chances. Come, unsounded deep. Come, undivided light.

Come dust.

Leah Libresco Sargeant:

It is easy to think of our charity or tithing budget as being allocated out of our surplus, but we give ourselves a generous accounting of the essentials that must be satisfied before we can give to others. When St. Basil speaks of giving to the poor, he speaks not of prudent savings but of waste:

“The bread in your cupboard belongs to the hungry; the coat hanging unused in your closet belongs to the one who needs it; the shoes rotting in your closet belong to the one who has no shoes; the money which you hoard up belongs to the poor. You do wrong to everyone you could help, but fail to help.”

What St. Basil describes is not charity but justice. The unused shoes are not mine to give—they belong to the one who needs them. When I carry them out of my house and place them in another’s hands, I am not a magnanimous figure, bestowing gifts, but a penitent thief, asking forgiveness. […]

Augustine saw a neediness on the part of the giver that balanced the vulnerability of the receiver. As glossed by Peter Brown in Through the Eye of a Needle, Augustine linked the duty to give alms to the daily petitions of the Lord’s Prayer:

“‘Daily’”—cottidiana—was the ever-recurrent word Augustine used, whether he spoke of sin, of prayer, or of almsgiving. The human condition demanded this. The soul was a leaking vessel on the high seas. Little trickles of daily sins constantly seeped through the timbers, silently filling the bilge with water that might yet sink the ship if it were not pumped out. And to man the bilge-pump was both to pray and to give alms:

‘Those who work the bilge-pump lest the boat go down do so [chanting sea shanties] with their voices and working with their hands. . . . Let the hands go round and round. . . . Let them give, let them do good works.’”

In her own reflection on this passage, Catholic author Eve Tushnet writes that being asked to give feels like a mercy to her when she is burdened by sin. “I have many grateful, difficult memories of being in the middle of some bout with one of my various sordid sins and being asked for money or seeing someone in need whom I could help,” she writes in her newsletter The Rogation Dragon. “It feels like being allowed, like being given the undeserved chance to serve someone.”

Isabel Colegate:

I have been to Farne Island, off the coast of Northumberland, in very heavy rain. Leaning over the cliff behind St Cuthbert’s chapel the smell of fish was overpowering; there must have been at least fifty cormorants perched up and down the cliff below. The island’s desolation is beautiful, even in the rain, even with the cormorants.

It rained on Iona too, but not on the evening we arrived. We landed in perfect weather, the sea silkily blue and quiet, the sky clear and the air as sweet and soft as we remembered it. It was in the morning that it rained. We set off all the same to find the hermit’s cell, marked as such on the map. The kind young man in the shop had suggested that we should go round the hill, because it was less likely that we would get lost. The hill was steep and boggy, he said, and there was no path. If we went round we could walk on the flat ground beside the sea before turning up into the rocks. We might get lost there too, but it was easier walking.

Following his directions we came to the white shell beaches of the Bay at the Back of the Ocean, where there were oyster-catchers, a single sandpiper, and a few eider ducks sitting motionless on the glassy sea. Past the first rocky outcrop we turned inland and crossed the uneven sheep-grazed turf towards the higher ridges. The rain had turned into a gentle drizzle. The rocks receded before us, repetitive shapes of grey in the still grey air whose soft touch was damp on our faces. Here a tiny stream, there a patch of swamp, with bog cotton growing in it and sea pinks at the edge. We climbed, the sea behind us. A solitary walker said, yes, she had been to the hermit’s cell once, it was over there somewhere, beyond the next ridge, or the one after that, a little to the left perhaps, and higher up. We began to flag, separated to widen the search, lost each other, added our faint cries to the crying sheep, despaired.

I sat on a tussock and two minuscule rock pipit chicks floundered helplessly in a ditch at my feet. Removing myself hurriedly to a nearby rock, I watched the parent bird, beak full of food, hopping and chirping a foot or so above them, failing to find them. The other parent bird chirped in agitation from the rocks. Time passed. The chicks presumably drowned. Should I have lifted them out on to a rock where the parent could see them or would I only have made matters worse? Wasteful nature cared not at all, and I was lost, and this was the desert.

If it was St Columba, or one of the twelve monks who came with him from Ireland to lona in 565, who had made the cell among these grey rocks, on this yellowish turf sprinkled with tiny flowers, among the rock pipits and the white-rumped wheatears, it would have answered his need for self-abnegation as perfectly as the sands of the Sahara did for St Antony or the northern forest of Temnikov for St Seraphim of Sarov. It was nowhere, bathed in the pure light of nothing. Each rock differed only subtly from each other rock, each swampy patch could have been the one I had walked through ten minutes before. There were crows, but faraway on a higher ridge; they did not have the look of crows that bring bread to hermits. The sea was out of sight, guarded by rocky distance, the pearly clouds concealed the sun. One might dissolve into the soft atmosphere; the seasons would change, cyclical rather than progressive; only one’s bones, showing through the flesh, would mark the physical journey towards the stark skeleton whitening among the stones.

We struggled on, of course, and in the end we stumbled upon a small circle of stones and convinced ourselves that this was the place. Then we limped back and were revived by soup and walked quite easily along to the abbey to be amazed by sound. Sir John Eliot Gardiner, the Monteverdi Choir and the English Baroque Soloists were on their Bach Cantata Millennium Pilgrimage and had come to lona for the day of Bach’s death. To be more accurate it was the day before his death; they were giving the concert that afternoon as well as on the following morning because so few people could be fitted into the abbey. The logistics defied the imagination. All their instruments and equipment had had to be transported from the mainland to the island of Mull and from Mull across the sea to lona. Three days earlier they had been in Mühlhausen, two days later they were to be in Anspach. Tickets for the concert were free, because Iona is a holy island.

The cantatas they sang for Bach’s death day were among his most sublime, being on the themes of death, fear, faith and holy joy. The last chorale was sung outside the abbey, in front of the west door. Afterwards, in the low evening sunlight, incongruous on this remote northern island, a tall man in a frock coat stood smiling and bowing, a neat group of superlative musicians looking slightly shy behind him. Together with the audience scattered around the grassy mount in the churchyard we acclaimed them, thinking of St Columba, thinking of Johann Sebastian Bach, thinking of our mysterious species’ extraordinary need for something to praise, something to glorify.

St Columba, or St Columcille as he is known in Ireland, set off with twelve monks for Iona in 565. It seems he had no idea of being a missionary. There had been some kind of quarrel, possibly over a question of copyright. It seems the saint may have copied a particularly beautiful psalter without the permission of the bishop to whom it belonged. The local king forced him to return the copy to the owner of the original, but later St Columba, himself the son of a princely family, defeated the king in battle and won back the psalter. But as a monk who had taken up arms, he had to be exiled, in penance.

He had already founded monasteries in Ireland and he continued his work among the Irish who had settled in western Scotland, his reputation for peace-making and holiness spreading wherever he went. It is said that when at last he was weakened by age, St Columba was resting on a rock when the old white horse which brought the milk every morning to the monks of Iona came and laid his head upon his breast. The horse wept and foamed copiously, but the saint would not allow the monks to lead him away until he had given the affectionate beast his blessing; and the next day St Columba died.

Juliette Kayyem:

The historical significance of asking Jews to carry badges had been lost on me; so was the idea that access is both a vulnerability and essential to the institution.

At airports, stadiums, even schools, safety and security procedures are put in place to protect the essence of the institution itself: travel, recreation, education. We may not like the fortress aesthetic, but we’ve come to accept it.

But what if the essence of a place is that it is defenseless? What if its ability to welcome others, to be hospitable to strangers, is its identity? What if vulnerability is its unstated mission? That is the challenge I hadn’t considered. … To make a soft target harder would more likely change the target than deter the attacker.

In security, we view vulnerabilities as inherently bad. We solve the problem with layered defenses: more locks, more surveillance. Deprive strangers of access to your temple, I urged the committee members, and have congregants carry ID. They would have none of it. Access was a vulnerability embedded in the institution, and no security expert could change that—we do logistics, not souls.

The standoff in Colleyville ended with the attacker dead and the hostages unharmed. But all around the country, synagogues are no doubt convening their security committees, wondering what more they can do to defend their members without losing their essential vulnerability. A synagogue is not like an airport or a stadium. When it becomes a fortress, something immeasurable is lost.

Rowan Williams:

We have to forget our self-protective habits in order to discover our shared challenges. But what science alone does not do is build the motivation for a deeper level of connection. We act effectively not just when we find a language in common to identify problems, but when we recognise that those who share these challenges are profoundly like us, to the extent that we can to some degree feel their frailty as if it were ours – or at least, feel their frailty impacting directly on our own, so that we cannot be secure while they remain at risk.

Brian Doyle:

As a fan’s notes for grace, a quavery chant against the dark, I sing a song of things that make us grin and bow, that just for an instant let us see sometimes the web and weave of merciful, the endless possible, the incomprehensible inexhaustible inexplicable yes, . . .

Look, I know very well that brooding misshapen evil is everywhere, in the brightest houses and the most cheerful denials, in what we do and what we have failed to do, and I know all too well that the story of the world is entropy, things fly apart, we sicken, we fail, we grow weary, we divorce, we are hammered and hounded by loss and accidents and tragedies. But I also know, with all my hoary muddled heart, that we are carved of immense confusing holiness; that the whole point for us is grace under duress; and that you either take a flying leap at nonsensical illogical unreasonable ideas like marriage and marathons and democracy and divinity, or you huddle behind the wall. I believe that the coolest things there are cannot be measured, calibrated, calculated, gauged, weighed, or understood except sometimes by having a child patiently explain it to you, which is another thing that should happen far more often to us all. In short I believe in believing, which doesn’t make sense, which gives me hope.