Chad Comello

Tag: synchronicity

  • Deep & The Divine Milieu

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    At one point in Richard Linklater’s Boyhood, Mason asks his father if there’s magic in the world. Probably not literal magic, his dad replies. But then he asks the boy: if you didn’t know what a whale was and someone told you there was a giant mammal that lived underwater with a heart as big as a car and arteries you could crawl through, wouldn’t you find that pretty magical?

    I’d say so. But more than that, I’d call it divine. Scientists, I’m sure, would frown upon using a religious word to describe biological processes and characteristics, but I find it quite appropriate, especially after learning about the profundities of the ocean from James Nestor’s new book Deep: Freediving, Renegade Science, and What the Ocean Tells Us About Ourselves.

    Perhaps it’s because the book I read before Deep was Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s The Divine Milieu, a meditation on the earthly omnipresence of the divine. Consistent with the Jesuit motto of “finding God in all things,” Teilhard, a Jesuit priest and archaeologist, saw the natural world’s evolution not in conflict with the eternal Divine, but convergent with it. Thus the “divine milieu” is not just in heaven but on earth too, manifest in the world around us. Deep, though a study in scientific phenomena, aligns in fascinating ways with the spiritual phenomena described in The Divine Milieu.

    Consider the “master switch of life,” a term that refers to the physiological reflexes in the human body that are triggered when we enter the water and intensify the deeper we go. This transformation, writes Nestor in Deep, “protects our organs from imploding under the immense underwater pressure and turns us into efficient deep sea-diving animals.” But this isn’t an automatic switch. It requires intensive training, coupled with total peace of mind and body, to fully realize its power and unlock the so-called “doorway to the deep,” the point at about 40 feet down where the ocean stops trying to spit us out and instead draws us down. Surrendering to the immersive power of the ocean is the only way to survive.

    Likewise, writes Teilhard in The Divine Milieu: “The man who abandons himself to the divine milieu feels his inward powers clearly directed and vastly expanded by it with a sureness which enables him to avoid the reefs on which mystical ardor has so often foundered.” Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that the freedivers Nestor meets all describe their underwater experiences in spiritual, almost mystical terms: “transcendent, life-changing, purifying. A new shimmering universe.” They could see new things in a way that a life on land couldn’t fathom.

    The ocean, like the world itself, seems suspended between the tangible and mysterious, the clearly natural yet utterly magical. Nestor’s book is an ode to the people who inhabit that space in-between, who plunge into the unknown to push the limits of human understanding, like theologians of the sea. (Is sea-ologians a word? It should be.) The water beckons us to explore, to contend with the mystery of the divine as Paul does in Ephesians 3:18-19: “I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.”

    A dive into the water, taken on faith but also with a clear mind, transforms and renews us all. Only when we’re in over our heads, holding our breath as we’re baptized into the deep, do we really live. Sounds like a divine milieu to me.

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  • The Ballad Of X

    Francis Spufford, Unapologetic:

    “It would be nice if people were to understand that science is a special exercise in perceiving the world without metaphor, and that, powerful though it is, it doesn’t function as a guide to those very large aspects of experience that can’t be perceived except through metaphor.”

    Wendell Berry, Life Is A Miracle:

    “If modern science is a religion, then one of its presiding deities must be Sherlock Holmes. To the modern scientist as to the great detective, every mystery is a problem, and every problem can be solved. A mystery can exist only because of human ignorance, and human ignorance is always remediable. The appropriate response is not deference or respect, let alone reverence, but pursuit of ‘the answer.’ This pursuit, however, is properly scientific only so long as the mystery is empirically or rationally solvable. When a scientist denies or belittles a mystery that cannot be solved, then he or she is no longer within the bounds of science.”

    N.D. Wilson, Notes from the Tilt-A-Whirl:

    “My father uses a blue highlighter to remind him of the good bits he reads, but it has trouble sticking to sunsets or thunderstorms or the cries of the meadowlark in the spring. His guitar is more helpful.”

    Sometimes, solving for x requires writing a song.

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  • Dorothy Day and the Noah Way

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    A passage early on in Paul Elie’s The Life You Save May Be Your Own popped out when I first read it and stuck with me as I watched Darren Aronofsky’s remarkable Noah.

    Elie’s book chronicles the intersecting lives and spiritual journeys of four influential Catholic writers: Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Walker Percy, and Flannery O’Connor. I’m still working my way through it, but from the get-go I was hooked by Elie’s weaving narrative of literature, faith, and pilgrimage in the lives of these four exceptional figures. The passage that stood out to me described a moment in Dorothy Day’s bohemian days in New York City as a young socialist and hard partier. She was returning home at dawn from another booze-soaked bacchanalia when she felt inspired to stop at St. Joseph’s Church for the 5 a.m. Mass:

    She knelt in a pew near the back and collected her thoughts. She was twenty-one years old. All her life she had been haunted by God. God was behind her. God loomed before her. Now she felt hounded toward Him, as though toward home; now she longed for an end to the wavering life in which she was caught. …

    For the time being, she began to pray. “Perhaps I asked even then, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner.’” Perhaps she told herself, kneeling there, that “I would have to stop to think, to question my own position: ‘What is man that Thou art mindful of him, O Lord?’ What were we here for, what were we doing, what was the meaning of our lives?”

    I wonder now if Aronofsky read this book while working on Noah, because the same thoughts that haunted Day also haunt Aronofsky’s Noah. Except the God that Dorothy Day sought and implored and felt haunted by was not the same God that Noah knew. God is known in the film as The Creator, the celestial deity that everyone in this ancient time knew to be the creator of the world and everything in it. The Creator is everywhere and is in everything. (“God was behind her. God loomed before her.”) And this Creator haunts Noah: with dreams of a great flood; with preternatural visions showing the weight of sin on the world; and with an overwhelming mandate from above to carry out justice on the wicked.

    How Noah and his family deal with this is one of the key threads of this film, a miracle of a movie. I call it a miracle not to discount the massive amount of creative work put in by Aronofsky and his team to get it on the screen, nor to minimize the miraculous works from scripture depicted in the film; it’s a miracle because it’s good.

    Again, I’m not discrediting Aronofky’s directorial prowess. The opposite, in fact. Christian movies (rather, movies made by Christians with explicit Christian messages marketed chiefly to Christian audiences) just aren’t that good. They too often focus on the transmitting the message (or The Message) instead of making good art. But great films can do both well without sacrificing either. Films like Noah and The Tree of Life and Short Term 12 and Ikiru and Into Great Silence and Winter Light and so many others aren’t worried about whether viewers “get” the message. They are art. They are beautifully created, and they are OK with asking questions and not hearing back about them. They ought to haunt you as they are haunted, by something deeper and bigger than themselves.

    I’m grateful to Aronofsky for rendering this story for the screen with such theological savvy and care for craft. Noah isn’t perfect, but neither was Noah. Yet the Creator used him anyway. And why that is haunts me.

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