Sunday afternoon and I am caught napping by the sound of brushing. Inside, outside, I don’t know where the sound is coming from in the confusion between the dream which has been banished from memory, the sound, the possible time and day, and where I might be. This morning Gerald commented in relation to a conversation about memory and certainty, he used the word ‘fluid’. A world in flux, a world on which one has little handle. Like Noah we are supposed to grab what we can of our possessions or our cultural heritage and build a boat in order to affirm our potency in the face of the inundation of fluid conditions. I would dearly love to go back to sleep. The residual taste of the dream is sweet and attractive. But the need to discover the source of the brushing demands priority. I must stand up and go to the window and yes, there is a man, a builder by the look of it, crouching down outside my window with his dustpan and brush. OK! He’s working on the windows upstairs and felt impelled to clear up some of the mess he’s made. OK. But sleep is gone. The sky is still blue. A fine winter’s day in the middle of January, in the middle of weeks of rain? Presumably the rain will return tomorrow.
Miroslav Holub says, ‘Go and open the door’.
The question of sex remains unresolved. Despite the fluidity, nothing has been forgotten.
‘That shared life of friends is made possible by the grace of justification given in Jesus’ act of declaring us henceforth to be his friends. But the shared life of friends is made actual by the grace that makes us holy; not only do friends “know one another’s business,” they love one another and all else that they love with a shared love, loving with a single will; and they place their trust in one another in the pursuit of the objects of their love.”
(Thomas Aquinas by Denys Turner page 160)
Caritas rather than Eros. Though Eros does not stay still, a slippery shape-changer. Our image of Aquinas is a man, a monk of considerable girth. Weight might be put on to hold us steady, anchor us physically to one spot, one chair. The pope, the king forever on a throne placed above us so that we might have something to look up to. A weight to obliterate Eros, squash him.
On what is our humanity based? The work, the task given to us? Our relationship to reality (God)? Our wish for pleasure? The flood creeps up higher. The lower dwellings are already half under water. Soon the water will be lapping at my toes. Will I be able to rouse myself into activity?
Perhaps after a nap.
