Loss, grief, confusion

One of my dear friends writes lovely poetry on two different blogs, both of which I have linked in my blogroll on the side of my page. Though she has disclosed her name to me in private for the sake of including it in my prayers, most of you who have encountered her probably know her affectionately as "Rae". We first encountered each other through our shared experiences in the autistic community. Though she does not have autism, she does have close family members with autism. I also bear autism as a cross. It creates a multitude of confusion, especially with social interactions. I often have a difficult time forming and making friends because of my experiences. It is difficult for people to communicate with me as a result. For those who bear this cross or know close family bearing this cross, it is difficult to see their sufferings.

Her last poem is exceptionally beautiful. I recommend reading it several times. It is about our venturing around in this world. We find ourselves wandering around in darkness, yet as we bear this baptismal garment, there is for Christians a light that remains with us at all times. We cannot hope to fully know God in this life for our minds are too feeble to understand that infinite goodness that He is. We can only begin to grasp. Yet for Christians, we return to Him. We return to the home He has prepared for us. When we return, we will experience the full fruits of our labors. Though we are often times in confusion, pain, and suffering, we will be eternally glorified, partaking in the Divine light that shines through us, even if dimly for now.

Though this poem can be applied to all of our sufferings, she mentions that she wrote it for a woman who experienced the loss of her child and husband on the same day. One of the many crosses that are given out is that of grief. We experience and deal with grief so differently. Yet for those who are bound to the Resurrection, there remains a flicker of hope. We may not see this hope clearly in the losses that we have been inflicted with, but the hope does indeed prevail. There are many examples in Christian tradition of those who have been wounded with grief, but a particular woman in the history of Christianity comes to my mind whom this poem applies so well to.

St. Cleopatra was a widow of a Roman officer, living in Egypt, during the time of the Holy Martyr Varus. She had witnessed firsthand the sufferings of Varus. He was also a Roman officer and a Christian. Cleopatra was moved by his sufferings and also extended compassion for him as he had shared the position of her deceased husband. When he was killed, she pleaded for his relics so that she could honorably bury them, stating that her husband was an officer and that she wanted to bury his relics honorably. St. Varus was not her husband, but she took his relics and gave them honorable burial, building a Church for him. Cleopatra gave herself in devotion to the Holy Martyr from that point on.

Now Cleopatra had one son named John. Once, when praying, she asked the Holy Martyr Varus to give to her son that which was beneficial in the eyes of God. Her son, who was at an age to be enlisted into the army, became ill shortly afterward and died. In her grief, being hit with the loss of her son, she cursed at the Holy Martyr whom she had honorably buried and devoted herself to all this time. Experiencing confusion from her grief, she could no longer see what was beneficial to her son. She was losing faith from this experience. It was the Holy Martyr who appeared to her in a vision then, with her son at his side. She beheld her son in the glory of Heaven, crowned with a wreath and standing next to the martyr. Varus offered her son to her but pleaded that she would reconsider having now seen her son basking in the radiant glory of eternity. Cleopatra was called back to faith in this moment and allowed her son to remain in eternity. She would enter into eternal rest with Varus and John soon.

This life is incomplete. I grieve most for those who can only see this earthly life. Often times we want to curse at God because most of the time, we only see a tangled mess. We see ourselves apart from God, distant from God, plagued with dark and depressive thoughts, sometimes blasphemous, wondering if someone will ever lift these from us. We can always ask that the burden be made lighter, but much of the time, it is the things we overcome that make us great. I have heard how Samwise is the "true hero" of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. Frodo gave into temptations and Samwise pulled him aside, always directing him onward. We all have spiritual directors in this life who aid us in our lives. But it is not what our directors overcome that lead us to Heaven. They are helping us overcome our temptations. Frodo is at the helm of it all, bearing the ring. He is suffering the deepest conflict of all the Hobbits and all of the characters. He is tasked with the greatest burden of all. This is what makes Frodo the hero. If God were to take away our temptations, our sufferings, what triumph would we experience when they were finally thrown down. This is why a Christian should not fear death, for in death, we enter into the most splendid of eternal rest.

Much like St. Cleopatra, we have our moments where we become angry toward the God we love wondering why He has weighed us down with such a heavy burden, why He has taken away those we love so dearly. But as we wrestle through this, as we continue to see only the tangled mess of the incomplete tapestry, as we see through the glass darkly, we come to realize there is beauty in our sufferings. Whatever your cross may be, whether it is dealing with developmental disorders or standing by a loved one as they experience a battle to overcome their developmental disability, or if it is the loss of a loved one as was thrown upon the woman my friend wrote her poem for or even St. Cleopatra, or maybe your cross is something different, we all struggle through this life. But we remain connected to Him through His touch. We come to touch His grace in the sacraments. He provides warmth for us when a friend lights a blessed candle for us. He lifts our burdens when we confess our sins to Him and receive His grace in the sacrament of reconciliation and He fills us with His grace once more when we partake of the Holy Eucharist. This touch remains with us, even should He appear most distant at times.

Frankenstein, Pt. III

The conclusion of Mary Shelley's novel is the battle between creator and creature. It is the event where the Frankenstein monster shall show how he has ascended to be like his creator, no, greater than his creator. The Frankenstein monster begins to control his own creator. He stalks his creator where he travels, he infects the mind of his creator. Victor is completely given over to his scientific pursuits. When Elizabeth writes to him, it she questions as to whether he has found another love. Indeed he appears to have found another love. It is the endless battle between himself and his monster. It is his passion for the study of science that he has given himself over to. Elizabeth is quite right to presume he has found another love. Every bit of Victor's soul is consumed with his relationship with the monster. He has no way to escape from the monster.

Victor creates not out of love, but out of fear and his desire to control something. Instead, he has become controlled. He is under his monster's servitude yet he thinks himself free. In full imitation of Lucifer, the monster has declared his own creator to be his slave. And because his creator has failed to create out of love, indeed, the creator has become a slave. It is a warped relationship between creature and creator. The creature has coerced his creator to make for him an Eve, a companion whom he can relate to and love, and here, the creator is conflicted. Is it worth it to create another with the hopes that his creation will adhere to the promises that he has made shall he have his companion? Or would he end up creating two demons? Yet the Creator of All who created out of love imbibed his creation with the gift of free will. To create out of love implies risk for love implies risk. Victor continues to create as one who is attached to the idea of control. It was in the remembrance of the death of his mother that he first created, hoping to reverse the despair of losing a loved one. And it is in the effort to exert control over life that Victor chooses to create again.

Yet not knowing if he can actually control the new life form or if his creature will adhere to the promises made, Victor decides to destroy the project he is working on in front of his own creation. The monster is horrified. The monster has emotions. The monster expresses them in front of Victor. Recognizing that Victor is the creator though, the monster, in a pure Satanic act, goes after those Victor loves most. Misery loves company and so misery attempts to drag down those around Victor. Those whom Victor loves. This is the way the monster inflicts anguish upon Victor. This is a form of Satanic revenge. When Satan rebelled against God, he could not defeat even the Archangel Michael yet fell from Heaven. Seeing that he could not defeat his own Creator, Satan went for the Creator's own creation, distorting it and leading it into death.

The monster vows to be present on Victor's wedding day. Soon, Victor finds his friend Henry Clerval has been murdered by the monster. He finds himself on trial just as Justine has found herself on trial. Yet instead of being blamed for his monster's crime, his father comes to testify on his behalf and the judge sympathizes with him. Victor goes free for what his creation has done yet Justine died. He is given Elizabeth's letter which questions him on who it is he really loves. Victor has been trapped by his scientific explorations. Victor has been playing God. Victor has not been giving any love and he does not seem to desire to be loved. There are those who are willing to love yet refuse to be loved. They are without love. There are those who never give love and they also refuse to receive love. These men are the most unhappy. Victor finds himself among those men. The monster has become representative of Victor. Victor's life is identified by the monster and Victor finds himself identifying his own life with that of the monster more and more.

The monster will eventually be the one responsible for killing and destroying everything near to Victor yet it is Victor who has already held that responsibility. The creature is in many ways a metaphor for Victor. Much like the portrait of Dorian Gray becomes a metaphor for Mr. Gray's deterioration, the monster gradually kills everyone dear to Victor Frankenstein until there is just Victor left. Then, Victor, upon dying, is seen by the monster, and here begins the monster's own repentance. The monster, in many intents and purposes, is a model of who Victor Frankenstein is at his very core. Victor runs from himself and from others and isolates himself from others. Victor has put himself at enmity with himself and others. The monster only materializes what it is Victor has already done inwardly. The monster is an outward manifestation of who Victor is interiorly.

Frankenstein, Part II

In the second part of Shelley's work, we are confronted with the monster yet again. But the monster doesn't seem so monstrous when it first explains its narratives. Often times, a victim of abuse takes the eventual form of its own abuser. In the first part, we see how a materialistic worldview drives a man into the overarching realm of attempting to create life and bestow upon things gifts that he cannot rightfully bestow upon anyone. In the second part, we see him forced to confront the hideous beast that he created out of his desire to control what he could not possibly control. But the beast doesn't seem so hideous. The beast asks and demands a defense. The beast is in a situation where it is not monster, but abused by another monster. One wonders who the real beast is when the monster begins giving his narrative which leads to the death of William that Justine is unfortunately blamed for and executed for. Is the real monster the abusive creator, Victor Frankenstein, who scorns his own creation or is the real monster the creation? Is the real monster that which shows sympathy and affection for this family he finds in the woods, or is the real monster the family which will scorn him and run him out because he doesn't look like them?

The beast tells his story of how he comes across a family living a small house in the woods. How he acquires knowledge of both the language and the behavior of humans from studying their movements, their tongue, and their way of life. The beast realizes the father of this family is blind and cannot see. The beast has been discriminated against in his early life for how he appears to other people. In secret, he provides help to the children of this blind man in their daily tasks. The beast is successful in the first part of his story in earning one's sympathies for him. As his story continues, one is drawn to show compassion for the beast in his circumstances. How could his creator have left him in such a condition? Then, when he decides to finally reveal himself, he shows himself to the blind father. Lady Justice always wears a blindfold. It can only be a blind man who can adequately judge the character of the individual heart, and so the beast shows himself to the blind man, hoping that his character can be judged and not his appearance. But the children see him and the son of the blind man begins attacking him and beating him. The monster can do nothing but bear the punishment. It is too great. They care nothing for how he has assisted them during his time in the woods. They care only about his appearance.

In this time, he finds many works to read including the notes of Victor Frankenstein regarding his creation and the work Paradise Lost by John Milton. It is Paradise Lost that catches the beast's attention the most. He finds himself like Adam in that he has been created for a unique purpose. But he finds himself like Satan in bringing liberty to people, suffering from an oppressive Creator. Frankenstein's notes regarding this monstrous creation of his only serves to convince him more about this. Frankenstein has a rejection for his creation. Unlike God, who declares His creation good, Frankenstein declares his creation in the most downcast terms as possible. One wonders if the creation of a monster has more to do with what is felt in the creation of it or in the actual heart of the monster itself. Should Frankenstein have called his creation "good", would his creation have been "good" in appearance and in heart? It seems as if the creation here is "good" in heart, but not in appearance. Frankenstein constantly attacks the nature of the appearance of the beast over and above all other things.

But more importantly, the monster feels alone. The monster sees in Paradise Lost how God created for Adam a mate, Eve. The monster finds himself more like Lucifer because he has been abandoned by his own creator, dejected, and does not know his own creator. The monster wants to be Adam. The monster compares himself to be a monster but the monster desires himself to be a human. The monster has human emotions. This is the creation of Victor Frankenstein. Frankenstein has created "life" through a means of perversion and has abused his own creation throughout its making. As a result, he has ended up with a perversion that desires revenge on his creator. But the monster does not want that revenge. The monster wants to be given a chance to be a creation. The monster desires accompaniment because he knows it is not good to be alone.

Shelley attacks a commonly held view of God here that is found in certain strands of Protestant theology. Unironically, this strand of Protestant theology originated in Geneva where Frankenstein's hometown location is. In studying and comparing Victor Frankenstein to the God of Genesis, one sees in Frankenstein, aspects that are much more like that of the Calvinist Deity than the true God. The Gods are quite different in both nature and reason, actually. The God of the Scriptures is a God of compassion, co-suffering, seeks to benefit and know His creations, calls His creations good, and desires relation. That is a God who is Love. But the God of the Calvinists is much more like Victor Frankenstein. The God of the Calvinists despises his creations, does not desire intimacy, picks and chooses where ultimately they end up, does not view all of his creations as good, and does not care if certain creations are left alone. The God of the Calvinists is incapable of desiring an individual soul because the God of the Calvinists loves only communally. The God of the Scriptures loves according to the individual heart. The Calvinist Deity is a sharp contrast to the True God, for while God is Love, the Calvinist Deity despises certain men and blesses other men. The Calvinist Deity creates certain humans directly for the Hellfire. The Calvinist Deity is incapable of stepping outside himself and stretching down to love each unique human individual or providing for their needs.

The beast starts his mission in seeking out Victor Frankenstein in order to enact revenge on the maker for detesting him. When one is bound to the Calvinist Deity, this is only a natural act of regression. The Calvinist Deity creates to oppress. It does not matter what the creation does, everything is fixed for the creation. There can be no chance of intimacy. Thus, the beast, seeing himself rejected by both creator and man, burns down the house of the family he claimed and thought of as his friends, then he seeks to carry out vengeance upon the very one who made him. The beast seeks out Frankenstein in his hometown of Geneva and seeing the innocent William, realizes this is a Frankenstein, and has no sympathy upon the relation of Victor. But seeing the woman's picture, he begins to think of Adam and Eve again and he begins to desire that intimacy that Adam and Eve were given. He demands that Victor create for him an Eve. It is unknown whether the monster will carry out his promise after Eve is created, to leave the town alone, but Victor must comply with the demand.

Frankenstein vol. 1

Mary Shelley's classic horror novel, Frankenstein, begins with Victor Frankenstein aboard Walton's ship, explaining the creature he references as a daemon. He begins the narration of his events by focusing on his childhood and growth to the point where he would be pushed into the natural philosophies by his father. His mother's death has a very grand impact on him and he references it again once the creature he creates is resurrected. It is shortly into his studies that he begins his alchemical work on the monster. Being sucked into such work, he condemns himself for the loss of relations he suffers in its making.

"If the study to which you apply yourself has a tendency to weaken your affections, and to destroy your taste for those simple pleasures in which no alloy can possibly mix, then that study is certainly unlawful, that is to say, not befitting the human mind."

Consumed by the task of the creation of life, he is ecstatic when he finally has completed his project. But he describes vividly in his dream how he embraces his cousin Elizabeth, only to witness her form turn into that of the corpse of his own deceased mother. There seems to be a reflection in this of the loss of life and the desire to create new life after witnessing such death and decay. People, I have noticed, seem to always want to control the things they cannot control. They try to accumulate control over these things when they've seen the moments of their own weaknesses. Hence, the death of one's mother leads Victor to begin creating life.

But he begins to see how his resistance to affections has poisoned even his own creation. When he travels with his friend Clerval, he receives a notice from his father that his younger brother William has been murdered. How dreadful that such a young one has been murdered. In Shelley's nihilism, she views death is something that severs one from the eternal presence of their loved one. There is nothing after death, this life is all there is. Thus, Clerval reflects on the Stoic position but then promptly rejects it.

"His friends mourn and weep, but he is at rest: he does not now feel the murderer's grasp; a sod covers his gentle form, and he knows no pain. ... Those maxims of the Stoics, that death was no evil, and that the mind of man ought to be superior to despair on the eternal absence of a beloved object, ought not to be urged. Even Cato wept over the dead body of his brother."

The dead may be at rest, but they are eternally apart from us. This is the emptiness that the Stoic philosophy leads. There can never be an eternity so any death must naturally perpetuate an eternal absence from our loved ones, even if they may now be in a state where there is no pain. A contrast to this is seen in Justine's response to her own death.

Realizing that the murderer of his brother had been his own creation, Victor seeks out to defend as innocent the accused Justine. But it is to no avail. The jury has been rigged against her. She is to be sentenced to death for a murder she had not committed. She confesses to the crime knowing full-well she did not commit the crime. But there is circumstantial evidence and a confession nevertheless. This is all there is needed for the jury to irk themselves to ire over what has happened to William. They seek a scapegoat, and it is Justine who is penalized. Justine is to be put to death. Elizabeth cannot fathom how her dear friend could have betrayed her so much. It is the betrayal that hurts her more than the fact that her friend has been unjustly tried. But Justine embraces a different metaphysic of the other world. It is one that acknowledges that this unjust death she will suffer will be for her sanctification.

"Dear, sweet Elizabeth, do not weep. You ought to raise me with thoughts of a better life, and elevate me from the petty cares of this world of injustice and strife. Do not you, excellent friend, drive me to despair."

It is sharp contrast to the thoughts of Clerval which are more echoing of Shelley's than Justine's are. Justine welcomes the death for this unjust cause because she acknowledges that there is an eternity to fly to. But Clerval has no knowledge of that. He rejects it. This sharp contrast between nihilism and eternity shows how the characters and the storyline plays out in the acceptance of death both in our own world and in Frankenstein. We see this even today in our own world. There is a population of people that looks forward to eternity and has no fear of death. These people are currently feared by those who fear death. The people who fear death the most are the people who try to prolong life, even by trying to create life and perform experimentations to extend and prolong the natural span of life. But such experimentations lead to evil ends and are based on evil means.

Victor, upon seeing the condemned Justine, reflects upon his own guilt. He knows that he should have been condemned, not the innocent Justine. But he refused to stand up for her. The blood-guilt of two murder victims must then be on his head for he has allowed this to happen to Justine.

"Thus the poor sufferer tried to comfort others and herself. She indeed gained the resignation she desired. But I, the murderer, felt the never-dying worm alive in my bosom, which allowed of no hope or consolation."

But one wonders why he does not confess his guilt. He knows yet another innocent will die because of him. Yet he keeps silent. He fears his testimony will not be believed. But perhaps he also takes a nihilistic approach. For is death ends all things, then there can be no repentance. If all of this life is the material, repentance is futile. There can be no more hope for man than what he can make in this life. Thus, the Hell he feels is only temporary, though he knows he is responsible for the murder of two innocent victims.