The cold weather broke this week. It’s far from spring, but the light is growing stronger, the grass shows a pale green at the base of its winter-dead brown, and there is something in the wind besides bitter teeth. I saw a downy woodpecker tapping away at the bark of one of the trees on campus, and there’s some kind of finch singing his head off outside my office window.

Of course we all know winter gives way to spring, but somehow that rational knowledge fails to impress the feelings. At times like these reason seems the most useless of faculties. The animal follows almost everything else, driven by the chameleon hindbrain to adapt, adapt or die. We don’t mind being animals so much when the sun is shining, she loves us, our friends are generous and amusing, pockets crammed with dead presidents, and it’s the best of all possible worlds. But how much more often it’s more than rain: she’s incomprehensible and indecisive, friends take more than they give, and every choice is between a field of dangerous, painful, and potentially harmful actions. And reason, which ought to give us some kind of guidance, or at least say that the world is great and glorious, is strangely mute or downright contrary. Holding on to what one knows to be true takes every bit of strength. We are prone to fall back on our most persistent illusions, to take refuge in sentimentalism, to deceive ourselves and let the world take care of itself.

Laura, Tyler, and I went to see Poulenc’s Dialogue of the Carmelites on Tuesday. Someone, I think maybe Dombrovsky, wrote that martyrs are impossible to work with dramatically. That may be so, but opera has dimensions not available to the dramatist, and Poulenc is a genius of musical color and expression. Words which would seem pious and self-absorbed are able to speak of the internal struggles that form faith’s true substance. The soul becomes visible as it trembles before a God who is terrible and dark.

I have never quite understood those who set faith and reason against one another. They are no more opposed than action and planning. Or those who see faith as a sort of blind certainty. Anyone who undertakes to believe in something, whether it is the inherent rationality of the world or the goodness of another person, will find a far, far harder road than could ever have been imagined. But who wants to be limited to what he can imagine?

(cdm | AscendingMtCarmel )