The Meek Shall Inhere in the Vertical

I read a couple of things this morning that got me to thinkin'. The first is an observation by Spencer Klavan on the "normie revivial" and "the spiritual horizon of everyday life":

It may surprise our readers to learn this, but most people are normal. By definition, we can’t all win extraordinary recognition or wealth. So, also by definition, widespread happiness depends on the possibility of achieving fulfillment without the glamor and excitement of becoming a world-historic figure. 

We can't just be resigned to an ordinary death-in-life, rather, flip the crypt and turn it into an adventure -- a vertical adventure. 

Surely this was a massive part of the appeal of Jesus' message -- for example, in the Sermon on the Mount, wherein he articulates a total inversion of the world's values and instead privileges the humble, the persecuted, and the poor in spirit. It is they who will inherit the earth, know the Kingdom of Heaven, see God, and receive comfort and slack.

Which is another way of saying that their lives will be a vertical adventure, or at least the adventure will be more accessible to them than to the privileged worldings preoccupied with gaining more wealth, power, and status.

If there's no reward for life on offer besides the worldly goods of money and fame, normalcy becomes drudgery. This is probably why a purely secular society is doomed to generate mass discontent: by its nature, it can never satisfy most of its members.

We will all fall short of the glory of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, and if there is no vertical, then that's the end of it: a life of envy, frustration, and resentment, with no earthly way out:

I think it follows that the test of true religion is whether it can make an adventure out of being merely human. 

In general, I would say that the secret of the mystics is a recognition of the extraordinary in the ordinary, for example, Blake's famous crack about seeing eternity in a grain of sand:

The fact of existence, rather than nothingness, is itself astonishing. In the same vein, Isaiah once stressed that the messiah would look like any other human, with “nothing in his appearance to attract our attention.” From this I gather that what looks outwardly like normalcy is already, inwardly, a miracle.

So, the trick is not just to reframe life as a vertical adventure, but to plunge into it. 

Which reminds me of that story at the beginning of Kallistos Ware's The Orthodox Way, about "a celebrated recluse, a woman who lived always in a small room, never going out." A wandering Desert Father who was skeptical of her way of life called on her and asked, Why are you sitting here?, to which she responded I am not sitting, I am on a journey.

Every Christian may apply these words to himself or herself. To be a Christian is to be a traveller.... We are on a journey through the inward space of the heart, a journey not measured by the hours of our watch or the days of the calendar, for it is a journey out of time and into eternity. 

Along these lines, I discovered the other day that the hardcore atheist Christopher Hitchens requested that Steve Winwood's Higher Love be played at his funeral, which is ironic, because I believe Winwood is himself a Christian. Gemini?

Yes, Steve Winwood is a Christian. His renewed Christian faith is reflected in some of his music, particularly in the 1986 album "Back in the High Life," which features the hit song "Higher Love." This song contains spiritual themes and alludes to a return to faith.

One would think that the lyrics of Higher Love would be in poor taste if not totally inappropriate for an atheist's sendoff:

Think about it, there must be higher love / Down in the heart or hidden in the stars above / Without it, life is wasted time 

Is Hitchens trolling us from the grave?

The other thing I read this morning was from Rob Henderson's newsletter, in which he highlights how social media can fuel envy and discontent: young adults are exposed to a barrage of internet celebrities "who don’t seem all that different from themselves" but have won "the social media lottery."

Imagine you’re 22 or 23, just out of college, and scrolling through Instagram. You see someone your age who looks like you and has a similar level of intelligence or talent (maybe the person has no talent at all), but they’re making a living as an influencer.....

Young people might think, “Why not me? Why can’t I have that kind of job?” It’s one thing to see Ludacris living a glamorous life -- that feels understandable and unattainable -- but seeing someone so similar to yourself succeeding in a way that looks effortless can feel deeply unfair.... 

This is because similarity is one of the strongest predictors of whether you envy someone. The people you envy are those that you could imagine yourself being. The key components are similarity, and achievement in a domain that is relevant to yourself.... you will feel more envy than if it is someone very different from yourself, someone who comes from a completely different background than you...

Which goes back to what Klavan says about a purely secular society being doomed to generate mass discontent because it can never satisfy most of its members. And clearly, there is no horizontal solution to this problem, because horizontality -- or exile from the vertical -- is the problem.

Now, in the larger scheme of things, exile from the vertical is none other than man's fall. Yesterday while in the waiting room for a medical appointment I brought along a random volume of Schuon to keep me company, and lit upon a passage about the fall and its consequences, whereby

the link with the divine Source was broken and became invisible; the world became suddenly external to Adam, things became opaque and heavy, they became like unintelligible hostile fragments. This drama is always repeating itself anew, in collective history as well as in the life of individuals.

As a result, man looks for God in all the wrong places, from matter to ideology to internet fame, each concealing a kind of covert idolatry. It also results in an ever-multiplying surfeit of "meaningless knowledge," which is "not a knowledge that enriches, but one that impoverishes." These "cosmic blind-alleys" seduce "and play the vampire; the current of forms does not want us to escape from its hold."

Which is to say, the hold of horizintality, which superimposes itself on the vertical, such that man is "engulfed in the anxious and deceptive turmoil of superfluous things" both "delusive and perishable." 

Then the nurse called, so that was the end of that. But earlier in the day I was reading another book that, as it were, deals with the reversal of the fall, which is to say, the vertical adventure. But I see that I've already exceeded my allotment, so to be continued.