Memory or Communion Eternal? Part 2

 By Ralph Karow

 

Before continuing my article we’ll need to recall my thoughts on eternal life being a deeper immersion in the perichoresis of perfectible harmony; otherwise known as the mystical Body of Christ. It’s only one’s spiritual nature that enters the mystical body, yet one’s spirit must be somehow bounded if we are to remain our individual selves. And here’s another reason I prefer the analogy of cells in a body to stones in a building: cells contain a nucleus and organelles within the bounds of a permeable membrane. When we enter into eternity, is our soul with its organelles of rationality, heart, eye, and ear encompassed by a mystical membrane so that it may adhere to and interact with the other cells in Christ’s body? And what other than love could be the force of adhesion? Not just any love, but the threefold love of self, God, and neighbor. When I was with my father at the nursing home, we didn’t talk much, but we certainly shared a heartfelt silent love, especially when we could sit in the outdoor garden. No doubt John’s wife and children fostered that same sense of love for him (and each other), but what I want to focus on is love of self and love of God. I think what brings us the greatest sense of love of self is when what we think and what we feel are in complete concord because that inner concord is in harmony with our sense of God. Ideally that’s already in concord with others as well, but if not, then either others need to come into concord with our self, or the other way around, or probably a little of both.

When John and my father were in their late stages, you couldn’t reach them through the intellect—which, not to sound demeaning, is the same with infants. Infants know nothing about the semantics of language yet easily grasp the music of language. They begin to vocalize by producing vowel sounds either individually or in melodic phrases. Parents get excited when the child attaches consonants to vowels and begins forming words. That’s when they begin to “teach” the child words, phrases, and sentences by providing clear examples for them to mimic and by expressing their delight when the kid gets it right. Probably fair to call that the beginnings of the intellect.

What interests me more though, is who taught the infant to make vowel sounds and sing recognizable intervals of melody in the first place? It’s a simple fact of nature that timbres whose overtones cling most closely to the order to harmonic sound are perceived as the most pure and beautiful. And that certain intervals found within the order of harmonic sound are perceived as perfect and pure. The largest intervals are deemed perfect and the next smallest pure. This solely human capacity is both innate and universal. St Augustine wrote that the “teacher within … the one teacher, the Christ … prompts us to know what in heaven is” by bringing out innate knowledge. If it’s fair to say that truth, beauty., and love are “what in heaven is,” then it’s also fair to say that the infant is engaged with the “teacher within” as it learns to form harmonic sounds suspended in time and express them melodically in real time. To all appearances it is increasing love … as the infant draws nearer to the highest state of beauty … that sustains their interest and draws out the realization of purity and perfection. At a non-intellectual stage this is all intuitive, but since producing harmonic sound and melodic intervals is a bodily activity of nerves and muscles, we can also surmise an accumulation of bodily knowledge, which a developing intellect would later be able to analyze and make sense of. Humans were making flutes with tone holes very near to perfect fifths and pure thirds for many thousands of years before Pythagoras was able to mathematically define what they were. Eventually, we could articulate the absolute truth (mathematical measure) of the highest state of beauty, but that only really mattered to people designing instruments and philosophers trying to demonstrate a connection between what they thought to be a model of perfect harmony in the heavens (astronomical objects) and an earthly system of harmony (musical notes). For the rest of us simple folk, the intuited truth that “the teacher within” drew out of us through love of and desire for beauty was enough.

Now … let me try to bring this all home. The one teacher, the Christ, isn’t looking to put a band together. Music is just a means to “faith and spirit.” We need to have faith in our inner sensibilities and trust in the spirit of love in order to know “what in heaven is”: the beauty of the Father, the truth of the Son, and the love of the Holy Spirit. Any individual piece of music or phrase of melody is entirely subjective, but the atoms of music—the proportional measures of the intervals—are entirely objective. An octave is 2:1, fifth 3:2, third 5:4. Almost nobody cares about or is even aware of these numbers anymore from an intellectual perspective, but we still recognize and feel them as perfect and pure. What’s more, the same proportionality corresponding to beauty in music is foundational of beauty in dance and the visual arts. In general, love for beauty orients us to the heavens. But when approached through the truth of the heartfelt purity and perfection, we find ourselves drawn to the Father (beauty) through the Son (truth) in the love of the Holy Spirit. We never actually get to the Father, though. We’re always approaching through the Son by being members of the Body of Christ. At best, we’ll be seated at the right hand of the Father at the end of times, as one within the Body of Christ.

The “end of times” is too unreal to think about. The end of an individual lifespan, on the other hand, is too real not to think about. Life begins in simplicity where the one teacher, the Christ, engages the newborn’s innate love for beauty in a manner that draws forth a mind appreciative of and longing for truth while fostering faith in the spirit. From there life gets more complex. We reach a peak of physical and mental strength, and then as the body winds down, we find ourselves returning to an elevated type of simplicity that is ideally marked by wisdom and warmth of heart. To me, the characteristics of wisdom and warmth come from looking at subtler and broader truths intertwined with an opaque beauty that often requires a generous proportion of forgiveness. They also arise from within rather than as something acquired from a book or a seminar or podcast. At the same time, however, wisdom and warmth of heart don’t come about in isolation. They come from being in communion with others. Not even an isolated contemplative can come to wisdom or warmth of heart outside of communion with the Eternal and by extending the scope of meditations to others, be they people, animals, celestial spheres, or even a simple blade of grass. That’s all part of being one in the Body of Christ. Now this is the tricky part: if “the one teacher, the Christ” is within each of us simultaneously, then, while we may be students within ourselves, we’re also teacher to others at the same time.

John didn’t teach me to write classical music, but through his faith and spirit, he got me to look inside myself and listen to the teacher within. When my father had his stroke, it was out of love for his spirit that the teacher within me stimulated an interest in music and movement therapy. Not in how they’re currently approached, but in a manner by which the teacher within each patient can reorient them to know and embrace “what in heaven is”—a return to something more basic and primal. Something closer in approach to what the one teacher, the Christ, used to prompt my infant Dad toward the proportionality that led to his acquisition of linguistic abilities and rational thought. This brought on extensive reading on neuroscience, autism, and childhood development. I hadn’t considered Alzheimer’s or dementia until John’s diagnosis, but I found that the question was the same: how to reach persons on a primal level whose intellect has deviated from what is considered the norm. Not to try to remake them in our image but to come to their fullness within the Body of Christ as both student and teacher.

Neither John nor my Dad was able to learn anything from me once their afflictions had taken hold. I can only hope that my love reached them in some manner that their teacher within could use in some mysterious way. But both of them were teachers by drawing out of me faith in the need for therapies to reach beyond physical results and for pastoral care to reach beyond what mere words can convey. And as long as I hold them in memory, trying to understand them and persist in a will to reach others in similar plights, they are still teaching me—in communion—as living members of the Body of Christ; and maybe … just maybe … the intensification of my drive somehow teaches them something in the afterlife that benefits them, us, and those to come in our never-ending perichoresis of perfectible harmony.