So, three Biblical ideas occur to me while reading your essay:
- Whether asked to become birds or bread, God seems to keep stones as stones. I don’t think it’s as simple as mere perception or will. There is a right way and a wrong way to see things. It’s just that it is also not as simple as saying perception plays no part in the “is”-ness of a thing.
- God appears as a flaming bush, and I think that is an apt parallel to this discussion of masks. There is a sense that a mask only becomes a mask when it stops burning. There is another sense in which lighting our faces on fire seems dangerous.
- If Christ is the unknowable God made known in Man, there is maybe a sense in which the mask-ness of Christ is our failure to see rather than God’s failure to show.
“Once you see the Trinity, you see it everywhere,” I think you quote me as having said one evening over drinks. You have an annoying habit of realizing the full import of the words coming out of my mouth—I suppose it’s only fair that one should speak and another interpret.
Here I think you have said fairly well what we have both tried to say in sundry Estuary discourses, and I just want to add a sort of chorus to what you’ve written.
It seems to me that reality is somewhere between the perceived and perceiver. It is the relationship—that spirit of the thing—that gives the bare chaos of facts reality.
Christianity always seems, to me, to be caught between the reasonableness of either materialism or Gnosticism. Christianity is an unruly beast making war with both sides not by saying what is reasonable, but starting from what is true—no matter how outrageous—and then reasoning from there.
Materialism is of course reasonable. I can grab this. I can taste this. This is real.
Gnosticism is also reasonable. I can close my eyes and see the deeper reality, see that that apple you’re eating is just of apple—apple is just of fruit—fruit is just of bounty—bounty of existence!
The upshot of these reasonable philosophies is that one man tries to eat the fundamental being and starves while the other—like a baby—discerns nothing so that whatever he grasps he puts in his mouth—a rather dangerous game without mother and father watching.
Is any of this to the point of your essay? Of course not. You made the point of your essay right well, and I have myself written on this topic heretofore.
I mean to simply add a footnote.
I was asked recently what masks I wear, and in deference to the questioner, I did not roll my eyes. In deference to time, I did not go into my whole spiel. I simply quoted the poet: “The mask I wear is one.” Yet—if I had had more time to think—I should have quoted The King in Yellow: “But I wear no mask.”
Both quotes are pulled from art, and art fundamentally about love.
Love—radical love—to ever hope to eat the sublime reality, our gnostic friend must be humble enough to accept a mask, a piece of bread and watered down wine. The materialist will want a mother to stay alive but also to learn discernment, the value of things behind their masks.
One true perfect mask has shown us the perfect reality. God is Love: Lover, beloved, and love—there is nothing but that these three in one uphold and sustain it.
Tale Told 