All Souls
In memory of “Baggins the Pharmacist.”
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All Souls is a day in which we commemorate the dead — our dead, our own death to come, and death generally. We celebrate these things joyfully. …
A correspondent in Alberta, now deceased, wrote several years ago that he thought Joy had been overlooked “in the meejah.” He did not try to analyze Joy, in our modern manner, of formula-seeking. The subject is too simple for that. Everyone knows what Joy is, including those who deny knowing. It is just like: everyone knows what a girl is. I have written myself about this flip side of arrogance and wilful ignorance: that we not only claim to know what we don’t know, we also claim not to know what we do know, in this world around us. Examine the inside of your own head, and you may distinguish true Joy from its surrogates and proxies; quite easily, in fact.
Baggins was concerned with Joy in the choice of attachments. By attachments he might include everything from friends to consumer durables; to ideas and opinions and beliefs and commitments. His criterion for judgement was, “Does it spark Joy?”
I was reminded of my discovery of T. E. Hulme, in the library of the Victoria and Albert Museum, a long time ago. Among his writings was a “Critique of Satisfaction.” Hulme tried very hard to be vulgar. In some ways he succeeded, while breaking through various intellectual obstacles and alternatives to Joy. Each he confronted with the question, “In what way is this satisfying?”
I, then very young and an atheist, could see where his argument was trending: straight to God. And to my horror, that it was irresistible.
In the end we can’t do with half-measures, among which we might include atheism. They are not, anyway, where we began, which was in an absolute state of Being. Birth itself is not a half-way arrangement: we already Were. And the capacity for Joy was within us. We grind away at this indestructible whole; and it is still there, after all our grinding.
Baggins looked back into his mental closet, to his stacks of old shoe boxes, containing “the little trash and trinkets of past lives and past modes of thought, past judgements, and past sins.” Was it yet time to dispose of them? Need he continue to carry them along? Did they spark Joy?
For instance, the accumulated daily wads of his “spin and opinions”?
“So months ago, I unhooked from Satellite TV, and all news programmes because they were all a near occasion of sin. I simply no longer accept any form of ‘streaming’ infotainment or fake news — which is almost everything that passes for ‘news’ these days. Yet I am no Luddite by any stretch.” … He now found fairly joyful things, even on the Internet.
The young Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu, Albanian as one might guess, felt one day that she was drawn to God, perhaps called to be a Catholic nun. Intelligent and sceptical, she went to an intelligent nun for advice, on what to make of her “feelings,” on how “a calling” might be discerned. She was asked a simple question, which might be translated, “Does it spark Joy?” (Off to Ireland, first. Later she became Mother Teresa of Calcutta.)
We live, most of us, the life of Hallowe’en, “secularized” or desanctified from ancient religious practice, with results that may be seen. But now All Saints and All Souls have arrived. There is much to put in the trash behind us; but looking forward, how shall we be guided?
What of the criterion of Joy?