A Sublimated Desire for Heaven

I am now at one of those points where I don't like Australia. The foreign-ness has lost the new-veneer and has become rather an irritant. I have days where I think, "And why did we come here?" or "I even miss Lucy and Momo." The candy wrapper is off and the candy turns out to be a date-bar--just another place, full of imperfect people, like we are imperfect.

Though life has become rather more grind now, I still don't have the sweet balm of friendship...until my sister hugged me at the Sydney airport. It is kind of like being with a second-self, being with a sibling. Even though we are profoundly different in some ways, we speak a more common language than is possible with anyone else, a language born of common childhoods. We know why we can't stand lakes, or why she likes blue and I like red--likes and dislikes that don't even need the boulders of words around them.

As she sits opposite on her i pad, exhibiting the same expressions and quiet demeanor, I read a thesis by a student--and friend--from Wyoming. The thesis is a profile of grief, the grief she is bearing as a result of her sister's sudden death last May.

I look at my sister, I look at my small griefs, and I drink in what Lorine is saying...it is a profound exposition of how love is both purified and deepened, and born, through grief. The idea that Mary the Mother of God was given the most profound griefs because of the most profound love a human could experience--between the Mother of God and God--is something to contemplate long-term; the idea that her ability to be the Mother of the Church, that the largeness of her heart was in part accomplished by the sharing in the suffering of her Son clears so much up for me, as a former Protestant; it is like looking upon a new and beautiful landscape, through the gift of a young woman who risked so much to put her grief on paper in a college thesis.

There are some things that make the grind and foreign-ness recede into proper perspective, yet I also think that having the experience of being displaced has its own lesson, its own beautiful landscape.

As a Third Culture Kid, I've never really felt at home anywhere, except perhaps for a brief few years on Anatolia College's campus. That was the world, those were the years, when I remember unassailed, cloudless happiness. The world was magical, Narnia was alive and well just above the clouds or behind the German House on the Boy's Side, and God was speaking through the quiet wind dancing with the pines in the forest. Thumper the basset hound was our quarry, and the world of clear water was a car ride away with Dad driving. Adult concerns were a far away rumble, and I knew every rock and path and tree as a friend.

I realized the other day that some part of me is still that nine-year-old, wondering why on earth I have to think about issues like justice, why every landscape, every place, every person (including myself) becomes sooner or later a deep burden, full of issues and problems and the grind. I feel deeply tired in the soul, a petty grief of grind--nit-picky issues in every area, health issues that have to be managed, bills managed, meals made...and the attempt to Keep Calm and Love Australia.

This week, I also taught the first part of St. Augustine's The City of God. As usual, the students themselves taught me so much, and as always, their youthful hope and certainty is like aloe vera on a burned soul like mine.

We talked about justice. St. Augustine is making the distinction between the City of God and the City of Man, and I realized that my soul is thirsting for that City of God, and that I sometimes feel I have either got too comfortable in the City of Man, or have been simply ground down by it, by trying to expect from it a justice that it cannot have.

Justice is difficult to define, because it is both universal and very particular--in fact, it is very difficult to universalize justice, because what it requires can change with a change of persons and situations. It is both a standard, an Idea, and an art, a Practice. St. Augustine says, "Justice is love serving God only, allowing one to rule well all other things."

The key word, we decided, is St. Augustine's inclusion of the word 'love' in the definition. In the City of Man, we most often see justice as a kind of contract delineating a person's obligations to another. This can become less about love than just protection of interests.

To me, the fundamental insight of St. Augustine is that justice is truly determined, in a universal way, by the choice of and orientation towards an end. In other words, what is your highest end? Is it the self, like it is for so many of us? Or is it, in a less selfless way, the orientation of Aeneas--towards the common good of a certain city-state, like the founding of Rome?

Aeneas' orientation towards Rome as the highest good becomes clear in his choices around justice. He can commit what we might call injustice to Dido, the woman he lives with and leaves, or to Turnus, the man from whom Aeneas takes a bride, because his highest end is the foundation of a particular city. His acts of justice are not universal, or based in true charity, because not everyone is for the good of Rome; when a person becomes an obstacle to that end, their claims to justice and mercy become disposable, and it becomes virtue to dispose of them.

If the end is the self, then projects or even apostolates or mission work can become warped--because they are all tending towards what the self wants them to be...and justice becomes a matter of everyone serving one's own ideal--in reality, everyone should start to serve the self, and a kind of small pseudo justice-in-practice takes over. But it feels like justice, because it does serve an end.

I thought more about St. Augustine's use of the phrase "love serving God only" and I realized that justice in the City of God is about orienting all the parts towards the whole, Love, towards a common good that reaches the good of all people because this common good is sourced in the Creator of All, who is also Love itself. It must be a selfless, kenotic (self-emptying) justice if it is to have true, clear sight, if it is to have anything to do with Agape. Only this kind of justice can truly satisfy us, can truly answer us. It is born, though, of the will to suffer, to empty oneself, to get oneself out of the way. To become part of a universal one must leave the selfish needs behind. Only then can one rule well.

I remember a leader I respect saying, "I realized that I had to have tremendous patience to lead well; that I had to suffer the needs of others, their weaknesses, and my own." This is a man heading towards true justice, in which the institution at hand can have an address in the City of God. Patience is love. We have the least patience when most enamoured of ourselves, of our own ideals, our own gifts. The signs of a just man are these: He does not speak about himself, but focuses on realizing the gifts of others, allowing them to, in some way, eclipse him; he is a facilitator, not a guru; he is patient with himself and others; he is not threatened or paranoid, because his end is Love, and not his own success. He is then sharing in the suffering--and the love--of Christ. He becomes Christ.

When a leader or any person is oriented towards God, it is love--it must be, to be true orientation, because God is Love. In this love, the Whole is aspired to, not secondary or lesser ends, and so justice then, and only then, becomes universalized and true. All else are copies, or attempts, or mere contracts.

Love gives clear sight, and the love of God gives wholistic sight, which can then be a true platform for ruling all else. Any other end only produces slavery, not justice.

I thought, too, as I spent another delightful week with St. Augustine, that Fr. Seiker was right when he told me that "You have a sublimated desire for heaven." I am searching for the City of God, but I have been searching for it like one searches for an ideal homeland in the physical world. A fruitless search.

At the time Fr. Seiker said this to me, I was yet again going through some homesickness for Greece, for the time of my life when I was childlike and I was happy, before all the "sh- hits the fan" as my friend Steve likes to say. Perhaps some of it is wanting Dad to drive and do the taxes; perhaps some of it is wanting just the freedom that you think an adventure like moving to another country will afford you.

But all these things fail eventually. Fr. Seiker said, "Your homesickness for Greece, for that time, is a sublimated desire for heaven." At the time, I wanted to say, "Shut up." I didn't say it, of course, but that was the reaction immediately from the tired soul I am.

Over the months, especially in actually moving, I see this more clearly as truth. I am looking for Home, for my proper end; only through this orientation will I find justice, and love--and be just myself.