It Was Like Romance
but how could it be?
On both sides, there was in history, scarcely anything like it. It was like Romance.
Nikolay Rumiantsev to John Quincy Adams as France prepared to invade Russia and England was on the eve of its invasion of America.
This past week I have been reading a biography of John Quincy Adams by James Traub as a dessert to my Bible in a Month Schedule.
Two hundred years ago the United States’ sixth President was still a diplomat on assignment in Saint Petersburg. Emperor Tsar Alexander was known as The Blessed and a mystic at a time when the mystics were fading from the West. A man named Napoleon was seeking to swallow Europe and England again sought to extinguish America.
In those years, while the White House burned and the Kremlin was in flames, it would have seemed here were the end of days. How could it be like Romance?
Do not be afraid. Stand firm and you will see the deliverance the Lord will bring you today. The Enemy you see, you will never see again. The Lord will fight for you; you need only to be still.
Excerpt from Exodus 14
The House of Hanover pressed John Quincy to sue for peace. Napoleon postured the same to Alexander and his armies. Then came Winter. While God promised He would never again flood the Earth, the Lord showered seas of snow from Siberia to the Superior. The French fell back with a fraction of their force. The English recalled regiments without recourse. The wars went to those stilled by the Lord.
Winter for me is the season of victory. Every frozen day reminds me of my own escape from a dying state. The Promise Land in every man is unconquerable if uninhabitable by his belligerents.
Too often I see spiritual seekers in suspense for the supernatural but it is nature that should stupefy us. Here sustenance and siege and surrender all fall from the skies yet evil men seduced by lonely sciences still rise. To those who seek the supers of greatness and glory there is but one true story:
Unless you turn and become like little children, you will never enter the Kingdom of Heaven.
Excerpt from the Gospel according to Matthew 18
The Romance of Religion is much like War, not like the Belligerent, but like Children rejoicing in the Storms.
Until next week,
-Steven
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I'm saving this one. Well done.
Steven - I'm taking unnameable nourishment from this piece. In Buddhism there is a term called "twilight language" which describes a form of communication that delivers multiple meanings at the same time. Your essays are often successful in seeding something in me that I can't describe or understand with my mind, which prevents the usual mode of "understanding" something to occur so one can move on. I don't know if this is deliberate on your part, but I see it as the function of the mystical, to evade our capacity to intellectually package life up and move on so we can avoid being undone by the divine complexity of its nature. "Every frozen day reminds me of my own escape from a dying state." There is a whole world, a whole life in this statement. I am tempted to ask for you to expand and elaborate, but that would just be my usual way of being trying to stamp out the arresting curiosity that leaves me hanging on the words. Instead, I'm going to let them linger.