Letter to John

Part I
Letter to John

(Extended Version)

I am marveling at processes of self-narration and their emptiness.

Being part of a tradition offers the benefit of shared practices and stories. The self is able to stand on that soil and root into them. But there is no guarantee that these are not also illusions, regardless of the good benefits they bring. A chain of gold binds no less than an iron chain, as Vivekananda says.

Indeed it is astonishing to observe a tradition for its many protocols of self-preservation, more or less bald-faced, more or less compulsive, manipulative and machinic. Incredible to witness, above all in oneself, the amount of physico-spiritual effort it takes to maintain, not only the outward edifices and externalities of religion, but also the seemingly inward “believing manners,” the privately-propelled procedures of adherence to the traditional’s story.

So many canalizations of attention and energy through explicitly and intentionally ascertainable routes: so that the adherent may see what their effort is going toward and count credits of devotion, follow discernment tracks, fit into the pious landscape, speak the idiom, participate in the many in-group discussions about the direction of the local parish-group, the global Church, contribute to perennial theological debates, complete absolution regimens in preparation for liturgy, etc.

And behind all this: the enormous energy it takes to narrate oneself into the cosmic story of conversions, elections, confessions, ordinations, dwellings in heaven, mystical bodies, and so on— all the work it takes to hold this for true, to believe it to the maximum power of one’s soul— such that self-descriptions and universal cosmology are one.

One’s desire to “be a believer” can be so strong that one catapults oneself, without even noticing it, into a life that merely imitates a composite image of the believer one imagines one should be (a composite drawn from Church teachings, lives of the saints, theological presentations of holiness, guidance from priests, etc.).

To achieve the realization of that image, one lives a life in denial or flight from one’s incertitude over the whole engagement, preferring to persevere in the alienated image classed as “saved,” as in “good standing”— instead of trekking a more accurate, if more disquieted and rended, unallegianced (void-)self who, because not fitting the image of a believer, not “talking the talk,” risks damnation and a tradition-stripped errance.

Christian-religious conscription depends on our interpolating ourselves into the narrative arc of fall and rebirth; original mar and gratuitous healing; former waywardness and future glorification; and countless other variations on that theme, all of which have their source in our dying and rising with Christ (kenosis as plenum, living as after-life). One is to write oneself existentially into the arc of “Christian existence,” taking it as the primary and truest plot of one’s life— as if without that adjective “Christian” and all it entails, there is no “existence.” The draw here is strengthened even more for having a transcendental warrant and for carrying a threat of damnation— the coercion to be conscripted is not subtle.

This “existential plot-investment,” ensuring a burial site that will be safe for all eternity, is restaged and replayed weekly or daily through numerous embodied and obligatory acts. This repetition reinforces the identity and memory of the saved one. One’s absolute allegiance to the story of oneself as well-enlisted in the Book of Life, or as a good soldier in God’s Church, is progressively cinched. Being “reborn” in the Christian sense is inseparable from entering into this new story.

To be forgiven, in Christianity, means to continue Christ’s work by occupying a radically new character whose determination is exclusively in-Christ, to the point of this being a mystery to oneself. The Christian must receive a self-definition from beyond of all self-determination. That would be all well and good— except that this ‘beyond’ is often merely the voice of the authoritative, half-conscious Church professing to act upon us and bind us in God’s name.

**

Surveying thus the edifices of religion and its self-maintenance procedures—which put form over essence such that adherents worship form instead of essence—I ask myself:

Is it really God, or we ourselves, that imbues these “vassals” with such magic? That animate/ensoul the socialized faith-apparatuses? That endow them with the significance we so revere, as if they in particular were the one window into God— were condoned, chosen, privileged from on high?

Not that there would be anything wrong with that belief per se, from a functional perspective… Those with legs made crooked by wild goose chases need crutches to stand still.

But could we imagine a rapport to the Real that functioned for the good without requiring one maintain the narrative superstructure as embodied in the definite places, defined practices, and definite self-identities?

That never thought one moment about what it “did”? (Matt. 6:3)

That never sought a wage for its gift of self? (contra Matt. 6:4)

That never sought a surcharge of meaning by selling the superstructure to any extent—nor by decrying and destroying a superstructure, which is simply the same gesture in reverse?

Oh the power of imagination in narration of the self! Is it inescapable?

“Talisman-stripped openness”—could a man bear that state?

To hold the place of God the Father absolutely empty?

—What if religious surrender necessarily led to the surrender of all religion? Not to cease being taught by it but to cease adhering to its self-presentations and self-preserving maneuvers.

To cease to fall under the illusion of the self-narrative that the religion weaves for us as if its story alone were proper to us, alone could save us.

To enact before religion a disadherence, yet neither from within nor from without. Quasi-indifferent for having never really been conscripted by it, rather called through it to a duty that remains interior, intimate to us and well beyond any narrative (including that of a rebirth): an inner responsibility, an inner capacity for keeping promises to Mystery—a “secret promise” that is fundamentally invisible to every religious structure, even if the latter, at its best, serves the former as vassal, crutch, transitional narrative arc, etc.

To never let an image replace what Is.

To never hold for true anything less than the Pulse, though it be utterly signalless.

To divest the psyche of whatever substitutes for the Real, even if it means holding itself at a precipice where no more significations hold, and all the fancy words—Grace, the Divine, the Light—equalize in a shared terminus with the Rend, the Gulf, the Surd.

**

I’ve veiled being explicit about my own personal stakes so far. These are noticings after weeks now of not going to daily Mass, of skipping my Ignatian spiritual exercises, in favor of poetry work, time with Diane, the Quignard translation, and inhabiting the Dzogchen mindset (so to speak).

Oh this discordant fragmentation in the narration of the self! We do not need to project the discord back onto the self however. It is the narration that fails us, not the truth of being. And if it fails us, it can only be because we preferred a narration, an image, to the truth of being. We mistook one for the other. Worshipped an idol of the Real. Snook a talisman into every corner, afraid of being left without a story, without a legacy, without a name. Desperate to leave a mark somewhere as a saint, a teacher, an adept, a contributor, a lover, a friend, a poet, a caring human being. Investing stock into the construct of what we could be, even anonymously, in the Eye of Heaven— which, if we are honest, we struggle to tell apart from the Eye of the Ideal Other Man, which is so often our own Eye.

May there be nothing clever in the dissolution of that Eye, nor yet more nihilism! Only the clarity of the earth as it ages. A consecration without finery.

I do not know the meaning of burrowing back into the truth of naked being. Is it an abandonment of the call of Jesus? Is it a coward’s retreat from the demands of a life of sacrifice to the Church?

In letting the superstructures of belief-manner, prayer-language, and faith-outlook shift and reconfigure, one risks abandoning ever prior form, support, and safety measure, every prior shelter. But if one suspects that the latter do not actually correspond to essence/emptiness (kenotic Christ/dharmakaya), does one have any other choice? One either forges ahead in unknowing trust, or one draws the veil over one’s intellect and hypnotizes oneself into defunctness even further.

This unknowing trust is not directed to any superstructure, of course—but then to what is it directed? For no name, not even the sublimest, is free of its relation and networking in a superstructure— even if it be the subtle superstructure of a mystical treatise, devotional poem, or romantic whisper.

The name of That in which we trust can only be discerned and redesignated by context. It calls for a living love for That which . It calls us to the Dharmakayic Non-Buddha, the Lamb of God Slain from the Foundation of the World, the Supracosmic Lord Shiva, the generous ascension of non-objective Nature as it amuses itself in its objective Supernature.

In the discordance of languages used to not refer to That (to non-refer), one can take for granted an unrestricted access to all symbols, beyond verification procedures. Loving-naming carries us beyond any possibility of verification—one cannot “prove” the existence of love—, because it is based in an awareness of the inadequacy of all names and systems of naming— of all theology.

The lover knows that any fetishization of the name will immediately or eventually lead to a betrayal of the Beloved, a privileging of form over essence. Of course one can always default to a given name like “God,” “the Beloved,” if context calls for that (and it will). But even then one should stay aware: there is no given name for That; language fails radically at that very point; in truth there is no inscription of the Spaciousness one loves, because It immediately calls the namer back to the undesignatable source beyond all names.

In other words, every act of naming That in which one trusts should be identical with the act of trust itself: identical with Its inhabitation, contact, consecration, love. That is the ideal no word could accomplish, because words cannot accomplish it.

Perhaps one can only stay Christian by ceasing to be a “Christian”: deeper realizations of its essence can only come as its form is stretched beyond recognition— indeed raises the stakes on following Christ in the desert to the Cross— such that the form of one’s faith becomes unrecognizable to anyone who privileges form over essence, while nonetheless porting the essential into new configurations and realizing an ‘evangelical’ impulse outside all expectations.

At the very least, the objective form of historical Christianity cannot be the criteria for comprehension and enactment of the meaning of “Christian.” At the limit a Christian will be non-Christian, not as a rejection of Christianity per se, but as a dynamic reality of its purification: the force of the Cross, of the ‘secret promise’, of the renewing Spirit, as it comes into contact with the stultified superstructures of extant Christianity and destroys them

**

But a narrative of a life outside superstructures, that too would be illusion! In that sense, no plan or counter-plan is possible. Our negotiation cannot be premeditated, only “spontaneous” in Longchenpa’s sense.

And hasn’t this always been the only case for us? We send out grappling hooks like comic book characters to the eaves on the high rooves— these are our dreams about what we’ll be and do— but the scene is archetypally foiled. The roof-klatch zips us back to the same ground. It falls tinkling down, to poke our eyes which keep skying to see— with a hope we know must be incompletely sighted— where next to shoot the grappling hook. Meanwhile, we are returned upon the Day, where we stood in “spontaneous negotiation” with the nothing-doing of the going we *-cept.

What then of aspiration? Can nothing be constructed— only shifts in what forever will be less than the Being that we want, yet are before we even wanted to be ourselves?

A life that never charged a surcharge on its own meaning, that did not even utilize tradition and its sign to reconfigure a new sort of following, movement, philosophy— Wouldn’t that be a life whose only purpose was to cancel the illusion of a debt?

That taught “basking in the simplicity of no-wealth”? A non-trajectory of (self-)emptying which could not, itself, keep anything “on track”?

How far could “poverty of spirit” run?

In discourses, I weakly take stances and distances—but could a heart reach a limit of trappinglessness, such that it did not even need to whisper secrets of the Cross? Could be buried “in peace” without a threaded bead to count accumulations of its love?

A spirit radically without “habit”, without talisman, without picture.

An agendaless vagabond of the heart.

A sort of fecund obliviousness of “surrender”—though without making a trade, without an intention, I even want to say: a surrender without knowledge of itself.

An oblivingousness which simply could not be clarified any further.

Which capsized in an ocean of trust— not even needing to guess into what or into whom it drowned and died.

As lacking in projections and ideations of God as a non-believer, yet trusting <…> so outrageously that no posture of religion was necessary or left.

Asking nothing in prayer, directing no prayer— as if the grounds for petitionary prayer were so dispersed away from all the forms and significations possible to state, the prayer became a non-prayer, an act of trust identical to life, which did not need anymore the effort of intentionally-directed thought-prayer, because it was so lost in the “spontaneous epiphany” (but without sign) of the answer to all prayer (which simply cannot be further canonized, symbolized, or declared, not even as invisible or infinite or regular or rare).

**

What if there is a truth of being we have only complicated by narrativizing its loss?

We invest in structures of compensation for this loss, why? To remind ourselves we are found?

Christianity ought to teach precisely this: that the debt is cancelled without our having merited it. We were found before realizing how lost we were. Only this can get at the truly total, global scope of the action of Christ: no one escapes the “gift of forgiveness.” Being-forgiven is not a discrete moment in time but a conversion of existence which precedes any decision on our part. It does not require administration. Baptism and the rest are outward signs— conveniences, compromises, compensations for beings who need a smack over the head, a reminder of how much they are loved, an epicenter of grace to return to so that the implicit reality of being-forgiven is not occluded by more regressions into sin-cycles.

Yet how often the investors prefer to remain lost in the compensation, complaining, agitated, resentful, sniping— prefer the convenience of a narration, a visible shelter, over the painful collapse into discordance, which is inevitable once the simple truth of being emerges to silence them and restore them to the birthing point which knows no signs?

That discordance is not chaos or a return to the undifferentiated, though from the perspective of a sclerotic system it may appear so. Rather, it is the very momentum of Christ, who tears the temple veil in two, who casts out the money-changers, who escapes the crowd that is avaricious to categorize him, who refuses any manoeuver of self-defense.

That discordance is the creativity of the Spirit, whose designs are absolutely incommensurate with every form of human practice and knowledge, so that to ‘collapse’ into it is like a return to the Uncreated point, which ‘reigns’ (we are at its mercy) prior to (and more humbler than) any created power— it is the beyond-ascertainable.

Religion, philosophy, art, cannot “integrate” that point because to do so would be to contain and control it, which cannot be done and would be a farce to try to do, for it is “the freedom of the children of God.” It will always remain a force of negation over every superstructure that man devises, for it is the very principle and force of no-image, of an innocence of the constructed world that has returned to the wonder (thaumazein) of childhood. The no-image is the “invisible origin” of all images and their final referent. Man, who is made in its image, must suffer the limbo between a consciousness of it that cannot be described, cannot be circumscribed by space or time, cannot be localized in a self or a body, although it determines them; and his compulsion and love to describe and design it through all the manners of the material world— to exalt and worship it through to the deepest recesses of his heart, to ornament its creative display through his own never-ceasing outbursts of images in religion, philosophy, and art, through which he clarifies to himself and communicates to others the full stake of it and this freedom.

Not a force of destruction, destructuration, or deconstruction; rather the insistence of the point à part, the inexplicable spacing which never entered the phenomenal-objective realm, even if it exerts an all-compelling influence and draws the latter ever back to itself.

The ‘incarnation’ of no-substitute will bring to ruin every substitute, including those that think they do their work in the incarnation’s name, but only because those substitutes cannot in the final analysis exist. The undermining effect of this nameless point on superstructures is non-directive, non-intentional; that is why a superstructure can persist as “vassal” of the Is which slowly erodes any need for this persistence.

Discordance is the liberation of the spontaneous from its hyperbolic appropriation into performances of reverence for itself. It marks a primitive-pristine “incontinuity” that cannot be corralled into a place or dialect. Not a matter of dissembling, disassembling, or dissymbolizing, — but simply a radically anti-caterwauling attitude vis-à-vis the literally unmarkable Real.

“Encountering” or “suffusing into” this Real means a subtle but decisive— and daily, incessant— upheaval that will always cause even the most exalted and sanctified self-narrative to dismantle into the raw impoverished stuff of spiritual energy at attention, storyless because surrendered to the storyfree Is: the Universal Submergent. An upheaval restores to blindness on the path, which participation in religion will never and should never mend.

The inexplicable drives into a night of languageless consecration, an uncategorizable self-giving that no one, not even oneself, can see, and waits for the consequences to unfold.

It is the vertical sacrificed on the Cross of the horizontal. A David and Goliath match between the meek and invisible force-of-love and the power-engorged superstructures which, pretending to administer the vertical, tend rather to pummel it into submission to its own orders. But although the horizontal seems to win, the vertical transforms it. Out of its endless reservoir of strength, the vertical can ‘afford’ to lose. It uses its loss for a greater gain, since in truth there is no loss in its sphere. At the intersection of vertical and horizontal, consecration on the vertical “is” only the attitude and strategy vis-à-vis the horizontal that is required for the latter to tip its way— the rest is work and patience.

This is a secret conscription beyond identity and structure, without philosophy and, in the end, without any chance of being evaluated.

It is a fall into total misapprehendability. Without a shred of ulterior expectation or complaint, invisible to the end.

*Note: This letter was preceded by a poem I sent to John on May 30th, 3023, “Wiseacre/Wisdom Ticket”, which is published in Part III. For information on this series, see the “Epilogue” at the end of this post.

Epilogue

Between May 2021 and May 2023, I ventured into Catholicsm in a way that I thought would lifelong. I was confirmed on Easter 2022, and by then I was already attending daily Mass and going to Eucharistic adoration regularly. In the second year, I did the 19th Annotation of St. Ignatius’ Spiritual Exercises. Because I was earnest about “working in the fields of the Lord” and because my way into the Church was led by Jesuits– Balthasar, Rahner, de Lubac, Teilhard de Chardin– I became an inquirer with the Society of Jesus. This brought me to many Come and Sees and retreats. I also spent time at St. Anselm’s Abbey in Washington, D.C. and did an 8-day silent retreat. All throughout, I wrote Christian essays, poems, psalms, and created YouTube content with the aim of fostering Catholic sanctity (search for “Marian Weigh” to find that).

Throughout this time, I was holding back objections and suspending other intellectual questions and influences to make my allegiance to the Church and its teachings possible. On May 30, 2023, I let the dam break, and this took the immediate form of a Letter to John. That letter, much expanded, is published above as Part I. Part II is a compilation of notes I took in the months immediately following which I consider a part of my deconversion and also to John. Part III collects the poems and piths written during this period.

These other intellectual influences accompanied my deconverstion: Dzogchen-Buddhism via Longchenpa’s Spaciousness; Non-philosophy via Laruelle’s Clandestine Theology; the literary calling expounded in Pascal Quignard’s The Answer to Lord Chandos (forthcoming, Wakefield Press); Vijnana Vedanta via Upanisads, Shankara, Ramakrishna Order; Gnosticism via Jacques Lacarriere and original sources; Biblical Criticism via Bart Ehrman; Peter Sloterdijk’s Making the Heavens Speak; Carl Jung on psychology and religion (East and West); then Hegel and Jacques Lacan‘s Ecrits. Most of this was not new to me and had been investigated for years prior to my becoming Catholic. I am thankful they returned–who could have prevented it?– to overturn the sacrificium intellectus which had at least partially taken me over.

In the course of all this, I also spent over six months editing my first published book of poems The Altar-Gray Gaze of A Showman on the Brink. This revisitation of poetry was another primary reminder of the more singular vocation that I dare not refuse.

My Letter to John was a crucial part of this story. It gives the underbelly, some truth of the excursion out, of the dehiscence from May 30, 2023 onward that gave voice to the deconversion, the recession, remembrance, and resurrection, whose skeletal frame I have pointed out above.

Why, you ask, did I write to John? For that, a single word will have to suffice for now: friendship.