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A book that is a Rhapsody to LIFE!

BLOWN HAIR IS SWEET
BROWN HAIR OVER THE LIPS BLOWN -
DISTRACTION, MUSIC OF THE FLUTE - STOPS AND STEPS OF THE MIND
OVER THE THIRD STAIR...
T.S. Eliot, Ash Wednesday

When T.S. Eliot penned these pensive lines in the Thirties, he meant by ‘stair� The Stairway of Perfection, an amazing mystical book written by the great medieval author Walter Hilton.

The THIRD Stair evokes the infamously treacherous False Dawn one thinks one sees, as a believer, during what a few centuries later would be described by Juan de la Cruz as the Dark Night of the Soul.

There, one encounters the spiritual “distractions� that can so easily derail nascent Faith.

Creative Evolution was seen as just such a False Dawn to settled 19-century Christians.

But to young and depressive Jacques and Raissa Maritain, it marked the Dawn of insight that led to their induction into the Church.

(Though you have to factor in to that equation the anomalous fact that over in Ireland, George Bernard Shaw’s socialism and anticlericalism were nourished and strengthened by it!)

And many others, in their enthusiasm, rejected God altogether...

As Tolstoy might have said, all believers look much the same; but all agnostics look vastly different. Agnostics of the world, unite? I doubt it - they're just like your antsy neighbours and, in fact, the rest of us misfits!

The point, Bergson says, is not Christian unity but Christian inspiration.

At least Shaw identified the Prime Mover with the Life Force.

And wasn’t Nietzsche, who started all this haranguing apotheosis of Life ruling over mediocrity in Thus Spake Zarathustra, just trying to feed his disciples with his atheism -

Over the aging and feeble body of the nineteenth-century European Church?

Yikes. A poor way to skin the cat.

The only way, infers Bergson, that we can truly LIVE our life is by being open to it.

And though Husserl in phenomenology was soon to insist upon putting all judgments in brackets -

And Heisenberg in Quantum Physics was to posit his Uncertainty Principle -

Surely the most important lesson for us is Bergson’s Openness to Life, for that’s how WE evolve into real, honest-to-goodness Adults.

And THAT - by way of illustration - is why Creative Evolution can be, to us conforming believers, at first a misleading proposition.

Though taken further as sheer insight into the power of God rather than as a pretext for further proselytising - it is the Morning Dew of Healing Grace...

Yes, exactly.

And Grace is LIFE ITSELF! Endless and unbounded.