Just bought myself a copy of The Jerusalem Bible a while ago, a Catholic translation famous for having J.R.R. Tolkien as one of the translators (mostly in the short book of Jonah). It’s not the best translation in the world, but some of its passages are just bristling with that sense of awe and reverence, that beauty of language, that you’d be hard-pressed to find in other modern-English translations. Here’s a sample from Song of Songs (5:2-5):

I sleep, but my heart is awake.
I hear my Beloved knocking.
‘Open to me, my sister, my love,
my dove, my perfect one,
for my head is covered with dew,
my locks with the drops of the night.

‘I have taken off my tunic,
am I to put it on again?
I have washed my feet,
am I to dirty them again?’

My Beloved thrust his hand
through the hole in the door;
I trembled to the core of my being.
Then I rose
to open to my Beloved,
myrrh ran off my hands,
pure myrrh off my fingers,
on to the handle of the bolt.

And here’s a passage from the deuterocanonical book of Sirach/Ecclesiasticus (43:1-5) that caught my eye:

Pride of the heights, shining vault,
so, in a glorious spectacle, the sky appears.
The sun, as he emerges, proclaims at his rising,
‘A thing of wonder is the work of the Most High!’
At his zenith he parches the land,
who can withstand his blaze?
A man must blow a furnace to produce any heat,
the sun burns the mountains three times as much,
Breathing out blasts of fire,
flashing rays he dazzles the eyes.
Great is the Lord who made him,
and whose word speeds him on his course.

In any case I think the Jerusalem translation can spice up anyone’s daily reading. I myself use and recommend three other modern translations of the Bible. The New International Version (NIV) is a popular standard of course, accessible to everyone. For the really serious student, a more literal translation, sticking as close to the original wording of the Hebrew and Greek, is the New American Standard Bible (NASB). And finally, also a good literal translation but which tries to retain the flavor and grandeur of the old King James is the New King James Version (NKJV). You can’t go wrong with any of these.

More and more I am beginning to believe that if all you gave me to read in my entire life was a good Bible—in fact, if you had spared from all those wasted hours of reading the world’s literature, with their consumer-designed mysteries, their hollow, ego-driven aesthetics—you would have made me blaze through this life like a shining star.

I know first-hand how superficial familiarity with everything in the Bible can rob it of the sacred. The Bible is sometimes drawn out in cartoon-imagery, in children’s stories, only to end up as a neglected relic on the shelf. For popular culture it’s the perfect wipe for jokes. No one should really take the Bible seriously—to take it seriously sends you back to the Dark Ages, where the people are closed minded and sexually repressed. Even for self-professing Christians in this day and age it’s a matter of picking and choosing. Choose only the verses which look good on you, which at least takes you on the bandwagon of peace, peace, love, love, but the rest, I mean come on, they can’t possibly be literal!

Which was how I also viewed it, until Truth broke me down and took over. The first time I finished reading through the entire Bible, I remember having this image in my mind as I pored over Isaiah and Revelation, of having my faced singed and steaming, every page pulsing with pure energy and light. And even now, as I keep reading, there is always a new insight that either calms my soul, or just shoots it upward to places I’ve never known. Now if it is something in the Bible, you can be sure I believe it.

I think one of the best ways to approach reading the Bible, especially the Old Testament, is to imagine coming across it like you would a foreign sacred text. Forget that you know. Forget all the presumptions, the childhood stories. Here is a scroll, the Vedic mysteries of the universe, drawn out by hand in the original Sanskrit. There is a desert chant in the air, and the world is young. The stars are still clear in the sky, the caravans travel through holy mountains, and the ships that sail on the sea sometimes never return.

The language of this earth you do not know. There are still secrets that can break your heart and your mind. There is a wind which is forceful though you cannot see it, and there are no such thing as myths. To even hear the voice of God is to return to dust. It is what happened to Elijah when: “The LORD said, ‘Go out and stand on the mountain in the presence of the LORD, for the LORD is about to pass by.’ Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before the LORD, but the LORD was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the LORD was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake came a fire, but the LORD was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper. When Elijah heard it, he pulled his cloak over his face and went out and stood at the mouth of the cave.” And here I imagine him crumpling to the ground with his arms round his knees, shaking back and forth, on the verge of madness.

Of course for anyone who’d even like to just browse the Bible, whether believer or not, it is best to warn you never, ever to try reading it starting from Genesis and then onward like a normal book! The Bible isn't one book, but 66 compiled (the Protestant Bible, slightly leaner than the Catholic one). I’d say start with Luke or John in the New Testament (skip Matthew and Mark for now), and then see how you do from there, perhaps try to finish it up to Revelation and then only after that do the Old Testament. But that’s just my novice advice. For those who will invest, I can only describe the fulfillment I’ve had after getting a feel of the different flavors, different variety of styles that all of the books possess. It’s like taking a tour of all the possibilities of literature, stretched across more than 3,000 years of known history. From the most profound and difficult ancient dialogues of Job, to the page-turning suspense of Esther, to the art and poetry of the Psalms, to the existential cries of Jeremiah, to the meticulous fact-finding of Luke, to the revolutionary Johannine style of John and Revelation, to the surprising metaphors of Jude, just to name a few.

For the adamant unbeliever, atheist, even anti-Christian, having read the entire Bible is I think, a prerequisite for powerful credibility, a good solid weapon. You see, a lot of the people I know who don’t believe in God don’t even know what it is they don’t believe in. It is mishmash of different conceptions, cut and pasted from a Roman Catholic childhood, from television, from reading the Alchemist, from a sub-standard philosophy class. To me personally, I am able to respect the enemy of religion who actually knows what it is he wants to miss. Because I know I can never blame him for ignorance.

For the Christian who does not even read the Bible and has no plans to—who, by God’s grace was given all the skills, knowledge, education to even just read a book—at the risk of offending, I do not think such a man can be the genuine article. Use this criteria as a filter. It’s like having the woman you love in a foreign country, yet you do not even bother to read her love letters with that insatiable and hungry passion they deserve, instead you’d rather read newspapers. Come on, do you even love her at all?

Only One thing I will ever need.

This beautiful, enraptured, dying, in the violins of evergreen fields ascending. Where death has lost its dark, lost its “de”, and peeled off its “eth”, its solemner sunset. But instead the die is cast, and the die is Christ sunkissed in vital glint of light, oh through flurry of peach-orange clouds, and memories, and the glass splinter of my inward eye!

I will tell you a secret, about how death can be transformed into a glorious warm embrace, like the hush, now, hush, now bosom of a Mother in a past life. Like sweet trembling lullabies, cooing soon love, soon, you will open your eyes. And those tender infant eyelids shall be kissed by even softer lips--this is the real second birth.

I will whisper in your ear the Godspell: that there is no real Love without sin. That there is frailty now even in your oh-so-sure-certain confidence within. Oh that through these walls and ramparts love will burst forth to reach you! But no, maybe no, maybe there is no you but only “I”, mirror-reflected in that princely ballroom of souls that dance and collide. And so as I touch your hips, and your hands, all I know is mine, is also yours, kept in the secret knowledge of the unborn.

As the green leaf slowly falls
You snuggle in your Chrysalis and turn.

Well I’ve been sick the past week, a slight flu and severe bouts of insomnia, and only now am I beginning to feel better. To tell you the truth, I almost feel like I don’t want to get well at all, since I keep on learning something that I absolutely must never forget. It’s during these times, when you’re absolutely weak and incapable, that you instinctively hang on to your Lord with everything you’ve got, without the slightest reserve. It’s when you’re too weak to even stand on one foot and have your arm round His shoulder—no, instead He has to carry you in His arms like an overgrown child. It’s the literal feeling of waking up to your miserable day, and know for certain that you will crash, you will faint, if not for Grace.

And for me it is during times like this that intimacy becomes the most pure. When absolutely everything you thought you could depend on fades away. When even your very own will, that deepest core of your being, betrays you and fails you, mocks you even. When you look around, aggravated and panic-stricken, and ask in an almost half-offended manner, “What’s left? What’s left? How dare (you whisper: “You”) take this away?”

And then, in a cool and comforting kiss, in prayer, you shiver, and you realize that sometimes sickness can be the best and most timely of all gifts. Because you were beginning to become too focused on a speck of dust—your life, and all that you are and all that you own—that you couldn’t see the intense glow of the sun, hovering over a wide and endless ocean. And you realize that the very fabric of reality is woven in dependence, and humility, and absolute thanksgiving. That you do yourself a favor in joining all of creation as they grab at the hem of His robe. That for the first time, like scales falling from your eyes, you see—oh, not with transient vision, but with an everlasting incision—that God is all you will ever need. And not God a ghost, God the concept, God the word, but my dear God, who draws me close, who speaks words of comfort, who tells me everything that I have ever done, and tells me great and unsearchable things I do not know. It is when I lose so many things that I my eyes are opened to what I truly have: Oh great vision! oh ineffable situation! some landscapes we can keep and cherish only to our most secret selves.

Times like this I almost don’t want to get well. Because after having an entire day’s rest, when your health and energy comes back, that’s when you start the voluntary forgetting. What is really hard is not depending on God when everything is taken away—that’s the easy part—it’s much harder when He gives you back seven times as much, and you start flirting with what the world mistakenly loves: freedom, independence, liberation. But freedom to me means no more than the freedom to giggle madly over a speck of dust, sing odes of praise to a mote, while beauty, splendor and love sadly passes you by. No, instead my one goal in life is to be frail and helpless and carried all the way, because that’s when you gain the freedom to lean on His breast, and stare up, stare up, stare up into those Eyes, stare up into the face of Christ.

===

On one of my wrecked mornings, down and guilt-stricken because of another stupid sin, I had the privilege to read Brother Lawrence’s The Practice of the Presence of God for a second time. It’s so funny, and so ironic, how in a little tiny pamphlet just a few centimeters thick, you can have something worth infinitely more than entire shelves of books, something so honest and so dense in it’s sincerity and having been ‘lived-out’ to serene fulfillment, that I began to feel how I would gladly trade my entire book collection (not that it’s impressive in any way, mind you), for this single one. That I would exchange all my years of academic education to simply learn what this man can write in a single letter.

===

I heard a little, sensitive boy mutter in his peculiar shyness: Oh dear, as all my earthly loves sublimate into Love as high as the stratosphere, my love for her is consummated even before it’s begun! How embarrassing, embarrassing, and this out-of-my-league blush is almost a joyful proposing.

To see whether it would console me,
I drew near a green pine,
To see whether it would console me.

Seeing me weep, it wept;
And the pine, being green,
seeing me weep, wept.

===

Oh my weakness, and all the things that I can fail to confess. Oh my sorrow, and the little wooden statues that I think I will miss! Oh my forgetfulness, and the way I can easily betray with a kiss. And oh my distractedness, that my heart can run into a desert where I will find no rest.

If I could list down all my shortcomings, and all my mistakes, you would be appalled. That even in the midst of faithful Love, still, sometimes, because I expect too little, dream too little, I give in. And so more and more I know who I am, in my frailty, my humanity, I have nothing else to say but this: a mouth pursed in silence.

What does it mean to confess? It is knees scraping the rough cement. It is the shattered glass of brokenness. What does it mean to sin? It is turning your back to the One you love, even for a blinking moment. But it is no, more than that; it is you caught red-handed, warm-handed, with your arms round another woman’s shoulders. These are the days when idols turn into goddesses turn back into idols. These are the days when even a wandering eye makes for painful betrayal.

Real love will never compromise.

And so, we learn, it is through the tear in the canvas that the most glorious sun will shine, filling and illuminating that entire darkness with an intoxicating light. It is through the sins of the unfaithful lover that the holier Lover forgives. It is the moon basking in the light of the sun despite its darker face, until it glows completely whole. It is depravity that meets divinity and then breaks itself apart. It is the weight of it all, redeeming my weighty fall. There is, I now know, a love that surpasses all reason and knowledge.

To you, dear friend, I say I am never perfect, and never will be, surely not in this life. In fact I become more and more attuned to this truth, that I am the worst of all sinners. But take heart with me as I say that salvation loves to descend, that it needs the very weak to give it its strength. And there is no room here for holier than thou’s, not when we’re too busy weeping. I am the least of all men, the least of all men, and that is why I hope to be taken. And when the Pharisee prayed out loud in the synagogue that he was not like the rest of mankind, the tax collector could not look to heaven but cried and beat in his breast, “Lord have mercy on me, a sinner.”

Once not so long ago I really used to love the Surrealists, and those painters associated with the movement, particularly Max Ernst and Giorgio de Chirico. But all of a sudden I’ve lost the taste for symbolism that particularly goes nowhere, labyrinths of beautiful things without any exit, except into the chambers of an empty, creative soul—yes, I think souls can be empty and wildly creative at the same time. It’s the same experience with—no matter how much I gave it a chance—an intense boredom with James Joyce, and my waning and half-extinguished love for Kafka. In all these things I never considered myself an expert, and thank God. Sometimes I feel like dipping and dabbling in the superreal fancies of prodigious painters, but fortunately I never sank into an unhealthy, obsessive love. With more open eyes, I think now that so much of art, especially those advertised as the most stimulating and unique, function just a little more like candy, like sweet candy you leave in your mouth as you sleep, to dream sweeter dreams—while your teeth starts to rot.

But my disillusion isn’t really what I was going to talk about. I was just going to mention the privilege of having encountered the grandfather of the Surrealists, Hieronymus Bosch, as I tried redeeming the Surrealist experience for myself. This man was way ahead of his time, say 500 years ahead of his time, as he lived in the 15^th Century. Carl Jung calls him “the master of the monstrous… the discoverer of the unconscious.” This encounter was one that graphically plunged me into the Middle Ages, into a time when people knew they were depraved, and I guess, exaggerated the truth a scary bit, and when the prospective torment of hell fire was the best strategy of the Church. Though some of the Surrealists acknowledge the influence of Bosch in their art, his work doesn’t really glorify the wayward subconscious as much as it demands intense symbolic comprehension, and much of the visual idioms of his place and time have now been lost to modernity.

Nevertheless, his greatest triptych masterpiece, “The Garden of Earthly Delights”, still provides us with something to talk about, and I think though the details need some help in fully appreciating them, the general atmosphere is pretty vivid and straightforward. The triptych format was three wooden panels, with the two outer ones folding in on the larger middle panel. Usually the middle panel represented something of earthly life, and lo, Bosh paints his most famous scene:

The picture speaks, even serenades, well enough on its own. Remember to situate it within the grim and stern sensibilities of 15^th Century Europe, and you can imagine what kind of advanced innovation this must have been. Naked and lithe bodies frolicking over green fields and glittering lakes. A juicy and voluptuous variety of gigantic fruits. In the very center you have a carousel of virile beasts and their male riders circling in on a lake of very open women. And all throughout nude bodies accomplishing feats of impossible sexual acrobatics. The whole scene is abounding with erotic symbolism and imagery, and yet at the same time there is a very dreamlike innocence, drawn out by the absence of anything negative, drawn out by bright, almost luminescent colors.

This, according to Bosch, is what the world can offer in its gaiety, in its most hypnotic colors and contours. And I knew what I was talking about when I said Bosch was way ahead of his time, for in this landscape he paints a scene that curls warmly into our modern sensibilities, a depiction of the apparent innocence of a life of pleasure and free, unbridled love. And on the surface everyone feels so happy and carefree, as each one whirls himself into a pleasure-intoxicated crowd, and nibbles on giant fruits and on each other. If all we had was the middle panel then we would praise Bosch for being a spokesperson of the future, someone who, bless this man, let his sexual fantasies run unrestrained and free.

But sorry to disappoint the libertine, because a triptych must have three panels, and the Garden of Earthly delights is flanked by a right and a left. And on these Bosch paints his Medieval morality in the strictest either-or:

But before one quickly discounts his side-panels as prime examples of medieval backwardness and the repressiveness of a Catholic Church, one should know, oh one should know, that the “Garden of Earthly Delights” is painted in such a way to emphasize its illusion. Its playfulness is a tease, a sleight-of-hand, and also a captivating lie. In the modern world people dance and play to the same tune, yet you need only scrape a very thin surface to find out the truth. One thing you will notice is that all the characters in the Garden are in the prime of their lives; there are neither children nor aged people with failing, withering bodies, in fact one could call them ageless. It is the worship of eternal youth, the hurry to experience ‘heaven’ on earth, and the sunny promises of pleasure.

But step outside this middle panel, to the right or to the left, talk to real people with real souls, and you will know where the Garden of Earthly Delights can lead. Because in the real world I do not see people satisfied in their carousing, but instead lives wrecked as the father leaves his wife and children for a younger, more supple bodied woman. And I see children not embraced as blessings from God, as precious symbols of a lifetime commitment, but as rude interruptions, as unfortunate mistakes: “…if only you had taken precautions.” I see men and women panting for the next thrill like dogs in heat. People exchange partners and i-love-you’s like eating and drinking, like a merry-go-round that never dies down. And hearts are broken and chewed out like the fruits, tossed around like apples, and stepped on the grass.

Because there is something I need to tell you and you need to listen very closely, because when Bosch paints the left panel he paints Paradise before the Fall. Do you think that the escape from the Garden of Earthly Delights simply means a superficial fidelity, sticking to one man and woman and that’s that? Do you think it is simply a matter of just saying ‘No’? Or do we both know that genuine loyalty requires much more, not just a physical faithfulness but a complete, inward faithfulness? Isn’t this fight not just against the promiscuity of the body but against the promiscuity of the heart and mind? Because the Garden of Earthly Delights continuously invades the dreams of men, offering surreal pursuits that lead nowhere, except into a fire-blackened pit. And a man can dance the surreal orgy all in his head, and no one will know any better to warn him—until it’s too late and he suffers the diabolic consequences.

I have said this before and I will keep saying it. Real love means not just being One, but being the Only One, clearly defined and painted in the center of a picture—are you surprised that Bosch paints Three? Kierkegaard explains this real love when he says: “The love-relationship requires threeness: the lover, the beloved, the love–but the love is God.” For Love, being One, must also be a Trinity. The everlasting relationship of Father and Son, with the Holy Spirit moving in between them. And the man and woman make their marriage vows before God and no one else, for Love to move between them, for Love to paint and define them. And it happens in such a way that when Adam gazes up at the face of the Father in honest inquiry, God holds on to the wrist of Eve almost in stern warning: “Would you be ready to stick by this woman even if she causes your fall and the fall of mankind?”

And who still wonders if Adam said ‘Yes’?

The man, exasperated, cries out!

“Not your lab! Like overfed and bleary eyed pigeons! Going crroo, croo, and wobbling pudgy from side to side. Surely not that! Not batting eyelashes and demure flirtations! and tiny hearts all twinkling around a first-sight romance. Please not the sexy-pinks, and the hunky-hunks, and the innocent innuendos. And all this amounting to a little more than a thin string attachment: your lab, or luv, or anything a letter less than.

But something else please, because you know that the world is a dreary place, with people dying on the streets, and night-crimes being done in the deeper alleys of our souls. And they’re building railways and overpasses and wire fences now over our sacred spaces, and malls are popping up like happy tumors. Where from every side we are being crushed and smothered by Monoliths of desire: to buy, and taste, and discard. And yet forever cursed to be regretful and guilty, like groggy aftersex mornings. And all you can muster in self-defense are your fluffy-liberal clichés, about life, about love in general, garnered from an award-winning indie movie and the newest erotic novel. And all you have as a shield is a see-through sentimentality, like a silkscreen, to thwart the clawing, rapacious, demons.

But please, rather, give me Love! Oh, dear Lord, Love as deadly and lean as a Knife! Something to slice all these excesses, these kinky-eyed sentiments that grow like a sultry fungus. Give me Love like Blinding Light, like a Laser, to cut out the world’s ever growing cancer. Lay me down on the operating table, and open up my innermost being to perform open heart and open mind surgery. Give me love that is willing to die, willing to bleed, willing to thrust my own Heart with a rusty blade. Give me love that seeks purity through the furnace, the love that knows what Sacrifice is, and Faith, and seeks to pay what can never be repaid.

Give me Love, like the red, glowing Sun, laughing, laughing, over the city rooftops. Like the Sun, serene and severe, as it hovers above the Holy horizon, and above the mighty messes of men.”

It’s official: Olivier Messiaen is now my favorite composer of all time.

I finished listening to Quatuor pour la fin du Temps (Quartet for the End of Time) yesterday, and just now I’m still swooning from the breathtaking glimpse—like through a tear in the world’s dull fabric—of Heaven I got from Turangalila Symphonie. Since I’m no music expert, and I’m not even a classical musician, I can only draw the experience through personal symbols and vague expressions, along with golden sighs.

Turangalila Symphonie is a “Love Song”, but not just any love song. The title is derived from two Sankskrit words: turanga and lila, roughly meaning: “Love song and hymn of joy, time, movement, rhythm, life and death.” To me the whole work represents an exuberant cosmic dance of supernatural proportions. It’s the peak of what avant-garde majesty can be—breaking down pillars and stone structures to replace with a surreal tower. It’s the single picture of the love between man and woman, the typical pattern of Tristan and Isolde, reflected a thousand times into itself to catch a faint glimmer of the ineffable, cosmic romance. The theme is so simple, and yet the manifestation is eternally complex.

It is therefore more than just a love song, it is the soaring, flying towards the source of Love itself. And in true Messiaen style, it is an exotic and equally mystical experience. Filled with Hindu rhythms, replicated birdsongs, and one of the earlier electronic instruments, the Ondes Martenot, all of the ten movements move passionately from kisses, touches, embraces to a final annihilation of all human dreams—not into a void, but into serene, colorful satisfaction. It’s precisely the sense of wholeness that a purely temporal and carnal love will keep on missing. It is the thicker layer, flowing thickly like lava, beneath the crust of physical appearances. It’s the Logos of Love, the Subterranean, the nuclear fusion of every soul into Sacred Consummation.

There can be no words to capture Real Love. Poetry will come close, but it can venture only to the very fringes. All language, insofar as it is leavened with rationality, with the imperfectly human, will disintegrate before it ever comes close to the inner sanctuary, the Holy of Holies. In this temporal life Love flares and supernovas only in the speechless, in the aural, aerial abstract—in music. That is why no one will ever seriously try to answer what Love is, because even in its most naive form it is a deluge of overlapping, cascading emotions, like waterfalling melodies, like sea waves, sound waves, shimmering and then fleeing. It is the setting sun that dreams and the dreaming that dawns. It is God, the ineffable, unapproachable, the Glorious. It is everything that you cannot really say, and neither would you really want to.

Here’s a rather nice, introductory video to the 5th movement, The Joy of the Blood of the Stars (the performance is a little messy though):