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There are times when I miss living alone. Not always, not even in sum — in practice, the experience left me anxious, paranoid, lonely — but I do like my own company. There have been times when I’ve shared a place with others and been left alone for half the week, and those were the most harmonious. The issue is that communal life reshapes myself; I am constantly in reaction; there is no more internal monologue, only indefinite ‘nows’ where ingredients sit in a pot, constantly commingling, constantly threatening but never quite simmering away their peripheries. There are only things to do, and presences that require my attention, and so I lose track of who I am alone.

The main detriment is that I have found it difficult to centre myself back toward contemplation of God. It’s something important to my life, my self-regulation, the ongoing repetition of speech and behaviour that reminds myself of who I am. I’ve also blamed this on my work life in the past: that I hollow out, abandon all hobbies and interests, that I lose track of everything else that matters to me. But that’s unfair; this is all me, this is my choice, becoming reaction to what’s before me. I inadvertently submit to everything.

I think less now that Neoplatonism itself gives a sort of impotent eulogic outlook — maybe more that it opens the door to a sort of open-minded equivocation. All goods become deficient Good, cousins close enough that better or worse becomes personal taste. I think you have to believe that you have witnessed a Truth, witness to a revelation that has reorganised your life, driven by the yearning knowledge that this force that called you can itself be partaken in, striven toward. I remember being told once that Christ accepts you as you are, but then He does call you to change, to become better, and the demands of Christianity are almost unbearable. To love intensely, to hope intensely, to forgive all things, to find, somehow, a conduit within you to an endless faith that the pain of this world will lead to the reconciliation of all things.

In Martin Thornton’s book, English Spirituality, he calls the process of incorporating reminders of Christ in one’s life ‘habitual recollection’ — my partner does this when she says grace before accepting any food or water, no matter how small; I do feel the compulsion, I feel the need to give thanks for getting food at all, and that’s one step. He notably gives no rubric; it has to be individual. Personally, I think it also has to encompass the calendar, the timetable; at some point it has to integrate within one’s life as something that simply cannot be foreclosed; not as a reminder on your phone, but as something that feels integral to you.¹ Insofar as we are in a state of reaction, we are not in a state of separation; we don’t stand apart from the world or from other people. In order to be anything, you have to be yourself in spite of other people.

This is what it is to be such a one with form, a being unlike water. Two hundred years ago the Unitarians and the Deists would act as though God simply benevolently wished us well, and then did not intervene at all; in such a case, as F. D. Maurice argued, why does one even need to consider God? There would be no metanoia, no sudden revelation. It would be a far crueler God who leaves us all to sin and suffering. There is a place for mercy and there is a place for repentance and I think my outlook, my theology, strangely requires more judgment in it.

Maurice, however, also saw that the revelation of God was that even one’s existence was fundamentally built on a relational ground,

The truth is that every man is in Christ; the condemnation of every man is that he will not own the truth, he will not believe that which is the truth, that, except he were joined to Christ, he could not think, breathe, live a single hour. ²

Maurice didn’t really like focussing on sin and punishment as a theological basis; he saw it as “measuring a straight line by a crooked one.” What underlies the world is divine love; He intervenes, subtly, through grace.

And so is my diagnosis wrong, then? If it is not enough judgment, enough conviction; if the fault is merely in right relationality, the ongoing truth and witness that we are already existing together in Christ, then we are back to this unresolved tension, to equivocation, to formlessness.

It is that a right relationality involves one’s self at all; if one is in reaction to others, then there is no one there to witness that there is a relation. That is actually the sin itself; there has to be a me and a you and I have to love the you and the me too; it is a challenge of habitual recollection to understand that we are already bound, grounded together in Christ.

Insofar as we are in a state of reaction, we are not in a state of relation; we don’t stand with the world or with other people because we are not even with ourselves. In order to be anything, we have to be in contemplation of the full circuit and its constituents.

To be in denial of this is to be diminished, separated; the search for solitude and self is a heavy-handed retreat for being unable to have a being-with. And to see people suffer and to inflict suffering on others is what requires that endless hope that makes being a Christian so unsatisfyingly difficult. You want to have the power to fix it, to do it yourself, and in some sense all you have in your hands is this intangible, indirect, impotent hope — and you have to know that else everything falls toward the worship of power, evaporates under the demands of instrumentalising that power …

And so I guess what it is I’m asking for is to have that hope; to receive the grace to hold form. All of this, just to make such a regular collect. Ah well. Amen.