Seen and Unseen (Midweek Message)

Seen and Unseen

Fr. Tony’s Mid-week Message

May 13, 2020

“We believe in One God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen.”  (BCP, 358)

We moderns often tend to look down our noses at those who have gone before as primitive, superstitious, and pre-scientific.  The great myth of human progress tells us that if they predated us, they were not yet at our level.  But this myth is in most ways a falsehood: though technology and specific areas of knowledge may have advanced, we remain very much the same creatures as those who went before.  Most of the themes and concerns of our modern literature were probed deeply long ago in the literature and culture of the ancients.  Human beings now, as then, a pretty much the same: our fears, our loves and hopes, our desires for security and prosperity, our being torn between doing what’s right and what gratifies us.  But, “the past is a foreign country: they do things differently there” (L. P. Hartley), and we tend to see foreign countries as somehow less than our native land.    

One of the areas where this is most evident is in how we account for difficult to explain things.  Most people throughout time have spoken of such unseen forces, and personified them as gods, demons, angels or spirits of one kind or another.  We tend to prefer to talk about randomness, probability, and projection of our minds’ concerns.  Or we may blame conspiracy, even though no evidence for such exists—it is the very absence of such evidence that convinces some that a conspiracy must indeed exist. 

We are often flummoxed by scriptural stories of angels and demons, and downright amused by what we see as the “naiveté” of prayers like this one found in the Celtic tradition:

Bless, O Chief of generous chiefs,

Myself and everything near me,

Bless me in all my actions,

Make thou me safe for ever,

     Make thou me safe forever. 

 

From every brownie and banshee,

From every evil wish and sorrow,

From every nymph and water-wraith,

From every fairy-mouse and grass mouse,

    From every fairy-mouse and grass mouse. 

From every troll among the hills,

From every siren hard pressing me,

From every ghoul within the glens,

Oh! Save me till the end of my day.

    Oh! Save me till the end of my day.

            (Carmina Gadelica , p. 81)

When we simply pooh-pooh such discourse as silly superstition, we miss the deep emotion behind such utterances, the real fears they expressed, and the fact that the people who used such imagery were well aware that few, if any, actually saw such things with their eyes.  They were, after all, part of the unseen world.  But that did not make them any less real for these people.   

Our current pandemic-driven shut-down of common life is lasting longer than many had anticipated; many of us, under stress, experience depression and traumatic fear.   In a real way, we are facing demons, fairies, and brownies, and sprites of our own: fear of sickness and death, anger at a loss of our personal autonomy,  deep hunger for reconnection with people, a desire to blame someone, anyone, rather than accept it as a random outbreak operating on its own epidemiological rules, unfortunately not completely clear to us now.  Depending on your ideology and tribe, take your pick of whom to blame:  the Chinese, Deep State smarty-pants behind the “PLANdemic,” or, on the other side, the President and the people supporting him, irresponsible libertarians and anti-vaxxers putting their own desires ahead of the health and safety of others.  Or we can blame ourselves (“We are being punished!” “I am being punished!”) or God himself (“This is Divine punishment for [fill in the sin of someone else you don’t like.]”)

Finding a place where the veil between this world and the unseen one is so thin as to be transparent is key in safely navigating through these rising waters so teaming in demons, nymphs, and water sprites.   Prayer is such a thin place, as is getting out into the beauty of God’s creation.  Puncturing our self-esteem and pride helps:  recognizing that we are as much at risk to unseen and difficult-to-understand forces as were our ancestors and those who we like to label as “superstitious.” 

I am not saying that we need disregard science and its difficult path of reducing uncertainty bit by bit through careful and reasoned falsification through experiment.  Science has proven, I think, its efficacy in handling problems over relying solely on mythology and symbolism.  It is important to never let faith in a time of scientific knowledge be reduced to pursuit solely in a “God of the gaps,” in charge of an ever-decreasing space of what we do not know or understand.  Since God is maker of all things, both seen and unseen, God can help us even as we try to help ourselves. 

I am also not saying that all memes and symbols have equal value in revealing truth and pointing to an ethical and efficient way forward.  When all is said and done, there may indeed be blame rightly assigned to those who have made matters worse by pursuing their own visions of the unseen and unknown while ignoring the seen and demonstrable.  Snake handlers for Jesus and wearers of tin-foil hats are heretics because they do not truly believe in a God who made the universe, seen and unseen,  and set it in motion in patterned ways that the human mind, also a creature of God, can perceive.   

Even as we follow medical and public health advice, we need to humbly admit that there are things beyond our control or understanding.  So in addition to respecting medical and scientific expertise, we need to pray, or at least let awe enter into our contemplation of the world.  Asking the “Chief of Generous Chiefs” to help us, drawing an invisible Caim circle of protection around us as we invoke the Holy Trinity, the Blessed Virgin, and Saint Michael the Archangel to defend us all against our demons—be they depression, scape-goating, PTSD, or even fairies, brownies, sprites, nymphs, or rebel angels—well, this, to my mind is right and good. 

Grace and Peace. 

Fr. Tony+