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Grace
There's a long quote from Paul Tillich about the nature of grace,
p206 ... "You are accepted. You are accepted, accepted by that which is greater than you, and the name of which you do not know. Do not ask for the name now; perhaps you will find it later. Do not try to do anything now; perhaps later you will do much... Simply accept the fact that you are accepted." If that happens to us, we experience grace. After such an experience we may not be better than before and we may not believe more than before. But everything is transformed. In that moment, grace conquers sin, and reconciliation bridges the gulf of estrangement. And nothing is demanded of this experience, no religious or moral or intellectual presupposition, nothing but acceptance.
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p207 If you are passionately in love with a person [see chapter on George Eliot], you naturally seek to delight her all the time. You want to buy her presents... This is a replica of the way those who feel touched by grace seek to delight God. [I'm sticking with my notion that it works the other way, that grace is an extension of the other love.] They take pleasure in tasks that might please him. They work tirelessly at tasks that they think might glorify him. The desire to rise up and meet God's love can arouse mighty energies.
...In prayer, people gradually reform their desires so that more and more they want the things they believe will delight God rather than the things they used to think would delight themselves.
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... One day you turn around and notice that everything inside has been realigned...
I suppose the high you get at the end of a workout is a kind of grace. And if you chase that high, you will indeed slowly change yourself as you get in better and better condition. I'm not even going to judge people who chase the high that follows pain -- as in S&M. But to personify the source of this feeling and then draw moral conclusions (out of what, exactly?) is where I think people start running into trouble.
Is a convoluted narrative about an invisible sky fairy really any worse than an odd (to me) S&M fetish scene? Probably not. And it obviously works for some people -- at least in the same sense that methadone maintenance "works."
p210 Describing a spiritual conversation Augustine had with his mother shortly before her death, ...the tumult of the flesh was hushed, all dreams and shallow visions were hushed, tongues were hushed, everything that passes away was hushed, the self was hushed in moving beyond the self into a sort of silence... And Augustine and Monica heard God's word "not through any tongue of flesh, or Angels' voices, not sound or thunder, nor in the dark riddle of similitude," but they heard "his very Self." And they sighed after a moment of pure understanding.
Clearly a meditative state. I'm even thinking of Zen here, like the moment in The Elegance of the Hedgehog when Paloma is alone in the kitchen watching a flower petal (?) fall. And I'm much more comfortable with that interpretation.
Augustine is describing a perfect moment of elevation... All the clamors of the world slip into silence. Then a desire to praise the creator comes over them, but then even that praise is hushed amid the kenosis, the self-emptying. And then comes the infusing vision of eternal wisdom, what Augustine calls the "glad hidden depths." ...
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p211 ... If you set out trying to achieve inner peace and a sense of holiness, you won't get it. That happens only obliquely, when your attention is... focused on something external. That happens only as a byproduct of a state of self-forgetfulness, when your energies are focused on something large.
Now, of course, I'm thinking of Levin as well as of Paloma, but I don't get the "something large."
I'm not at all confident that my "Methodist" interpretation of Absalom Absalom! would be shared by the author, but I have more confidence (thanks to our shared interest in philosophy) that Barbery would share my focus on these two apparently isolated passages in Hedgehog. Tolstoy would give Levin's moment of grace a Christian interpretation probably also involving kenosis. But I think Barbery would be interested in what his moment scything away in the fields had in common with Paloma's moment of Zen satori. And it only makes my skin crawl when you try to bring in "The Book."
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