encyclopedia ei ( エイ ) do ( ド ) li ( リ ) ca ( カ )

We got the keys last Friday. After a surprise mid-March where it was apparent my roommate and I would have to choose to stay and buckle through construction for an indeterminate amount of time, or announce our non-renewal and find some new living arrangement — that we only had ten days to decide — I scrambled to secure a place and managed to get it in place early April. Now it’s nearly June, and an empty apartment sits across the city with my life ebbing into it.

I’ve taken to bringing over books. A backpack at a time, myself, on foot, taking the 45 minutes to bring thirty pounds at a time, all various books from different stages of my life stacked against the wall like the sediment of prior selves. There’s Sartor Resartus – did I ever think I was going to read that? Do I recognise the Matilde that dug into Burke? There’s some ancient manga, there’s SICP and my faded binding of St. Augustine’s Confessions, translated by Sheed. I remember doing the comparison between translations and feeling so moved by his prose that I found whatever contemporaneous binding I could to bring it closer.

Now it’s sitting with Gregory Baum and Christopher Alexander and the .hack manga, lonely in a dark and empty apartment. Someone else will come crashing into it. Something new will be born between the deposits. For now it’s part of a pilgrimage in this transient moment. And here I say that all the time – it’s liminal, it’s transient, it’s spurious. I’m between things. Going somewhere. A time of transition.

It’s been hard for me to recognise constancy. I believe I’m in flux, I am nothing, I am going somewhere without a core, but I get told by old friends that I’m not even remotely different from younger versions of myself. The fixations change, but the restless energy is persistent. The melancholia has always been there. It’s true that it can be easy to fetishise the ontological position of the Other. To dream about how the other half lives. To pursue it, to obtain it, to become something new. It’s hard to recognise what truly won’t change, what one will hold onto. I think if I were to reincarnate there are stable facts about myself that would feel not only erroneous but abhorrent – some fundamental parts of myself that seem so inescapably ‘me’.

It’s come to mind as of late as I’ve been pursuing some changes in my own position in the Church. That is, I’ve been with the Anglican Church for five years. I wasn’t raised Anglican, but Roman Catholic; and I’ve never really had to commit to a change in position. You don’t need to give up your passport, so to speak, if you want to hold onto these parts of yourself. Something in me has felt Roman Catholic, and Anglicanism felt like the vantage point through which I relate to a community, through which I relate to God, but I didn’t need to wear it, synthesise it, take it into my numbers. But alongside some notes about more formally dictating a Christian life for myself, it’s also become apparent that I may need to formally be received.

And why is that so scary? What is that giving up? To Rome, nothing is happening – you can just come back later and apologise. But to Anglicanism, it’s formally claiming me. I don’t really like being claimed, I suppose.

So I’ve visited Roman Catholic churches lately. It’s nice, in a childhood sense. I recognise what’s going on but in a looser format; that is, they do an old ritual but in a much less formal manner. They stop and tell jokes! There’s a unified presentation to it; we get an introduction to the theme of the service, we stop and bring it up again in the homily and then again … near the consecration? It feels like I’m getting a heart to heart with a friend telling me some simple truths.

But is this mine? Well, no, all I could think about is how much it isn’t the Book of Common Prayer mass, or all the little things about the Tridentine Rite (rather, the English Missal) that I’ve done, heard, said so many times.¹ At some point Anglo-Catholicism became mine, a part of me, something that now feels strange when it’s missing. But somehow I think that I couldn’t belong to it?

I’ve been starting my way through Thornton’s English Spirituality and feeling as though I could occupy this space, that I have been occupying this space. I’ve felt this before – this need to commit to who I’m literally with, with what my community is. But it’s felt as though I was an exile in several places. Most recently, the Pope’s latest encyclical made me feel so in tune that I felt shaken. How many times have I spoken about encounter? Technological abstraction? The emphasis on the human person? In my beliefs about the world I firmly stand in Vatican II – but in my practice – the foundations of my contemplative life – it all starts with Augustine, the Prayer Book, the patristic emphasis that crawls its way through branch theory to the world I live in now.

This notebook may end up with infrequent posts for a moment while my life finds stillness. I’d like to make some notes on life formation, on finding quiet, on meditation and discipline, all ora et labora. I’d like to write more collects. I’d like to write more poetry. I’d like to pick up some books off the floor and in some way pick up myself. I don’t remember all my parts unless prompted, and I need to continuously prompt myself into place. That is, I think, what formation is; these specks of sand in steady rapture, the possibility that this dirt might by some miracle imitate the divine love that shaped it into being.