THIS post is dedicated to my dear friend, Lawrence Auster, who died of pancreatic cancer nine years ago today. As fate (or as Mr. Auster would say, “synchronicity,”) would have it, I will be doing an interview later today that touches on some of his ideas. And so, sadly, I will have to postpone visiting his grave until tomorrow. But when I do, I take with me all the good intentions of those whom he touched in his years as a writer, laying some flowers (artificial so the deer won’t eat them) on his grave and praying for his eternal rest.

I choose these words on spring not just because Mr. Auster died on Good Friday in spring, but because he understood what this author is saying: we are not walking abstractions, souls with inconvenient bodies, but, like our magnificent Redeemer, we are incarnated in physical creation. And this creation, despite its imperfections, is good. The modern Manicheans would have us despise ourselves and become a disembodied, abstract “humanity.” Is a daffodil guilty for being a daffodil? Should it be a representative of all flowers instead? Mr. Auster detested the homogenizing ugliness of modern egalitarianism.

I also like this excerpt because it mentions gratitude for simple things. I feel grateful today for something so simple as a true friend. He who is a friend at death is a friend forever, his companionship an uplifting consolation through the years he will never see.

Anyway, this is from “Catholicism And The Modern Mind” (1928) by Michael Williams:

There was that morning in springtime when I suddenly stood still before a bush in a little suburban town through which I had been walking, as if an invisible hand had halted me, and an unheard voice was speaking, and my vision was enlarged, so that I could see beyond the reach of my eyes. I could see where the extremest point of the most tiny and fragile of the roots of that bush, down in the earth, amid the moist soil, drew from the earth those fructifying elements distilled by the mysterious chemistry of spring that its life required, together with those even more impalpable, yet not the less real, elements which the most delicate filaments of its top-most twig, so slender and fine that it melted away into the air around it, drew, as our lips draw down, the sunshine and the air. And where the lucent green of the tiny buds, with their little hearts pinker than the inside of a baby’s lips, touched the clear, rain-washed black of the bark a black as radiant with life as the green itself I, for one instant of an instant, glimpsed and almost (Ah, but the immeasurable gulf of that “almost”) understood the mystery of the transmutation of spirit into matter, and their union. But if I could not really understand, I could, however, do something even better: I could worship, I could praise, I could thank, I could love the God whose will was working its unending work of love in that dear bush, by the side of that mean [road.]

…

Nature, itself, is sacramental. On earth, in the limits of time, spirit operates in and through matter. This is the real reason why saints, made powerful through sanctity, are able to work what we, in our wonderment, call miracles. It is the reason why poets may penetrate, by flashes of genius, the obscure frontier between nature and supernature and thrill our souls with intimations second only to the revelations of God of the beauty within and above all that visible beauty which is one of the myriad minor street, on the lawn of somebody’s humble home.

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