Now and again I think I catch some truth by the sweat of its Rhythm.
Often I read the Beatitudes in the Sermon on the Mount and feel their
truth in the blood-sweating tune of their Rhythm--Rhythm unspeakable
and ecstatic.
The prophet Christ believed himself divine and was all Rhythm in his
utterances: and so sounds true as the scheme of digestion and the
laws of hygiene.
He said, Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.
Everybody who has tried it knows that to be true with the flawless
Rhythmic truth of health and illness.
Mourn frightfully a day and the next day will be a day of soothed
warmth and quiet like a grateful pitiful heat current in the breast.
Mourn a week and that will come the week following. Mourn a year and
the next year will be the year of peace. For anguish: peace. For
peace: anguish. It never fails.
The great thing lacking in Christ, the sense of humor, permitted
his perfect personal Rhythm. Humor oddly wants Rhythm. The human
race is made in Rhythm like its beating heart: but humor is an
‘extra.’ Everybody is so full of lies that humor, an ‘extra,’ always
wonderfully appetizing and out of season, and inexplicably God-given,
feels like a great keystone of the race. So it is: but in a lying
race. And Christ in his beautiful dual rôle _would_ lack humor. As a
God come among the human race to save it, knowing it as he did: his
measureless worldly wisdom being paramount even to his gentleness:
his mind and his personal tenor could be set only in intense terrific
gloom.
The Rhythm in the Beatitudes is equal Rhythm of sense and Rhythm of
sound: Rhythm of music and Rhythm of meaning. Equally, half and half.
The most Rhythm thing in it is: Blessed are the pure in heart: for
they shall see God.
I feel it soft-prickling just under my skin. Rhythm--Rhythm and
ecstasy!
I have read it many times since I was a child: till I know it in my
brain, in my Soul, in my hands, in my breast, in my throat, in my
forehead, in my gray eyes, in my aching left foot. I know it and feel
it by its Rhythm. There is barbarous justice in it. It cuts everybody
off from seeing God.
Pure in heart I take to mean pure in motive. A fool has an equal
chance with a philosopher: a harlot with a horse-thief: a nasty
rag-picker with a small sweet child. But none is pure in motive.
Of other persons I don’t judge. But me I know to be murderously
un-pure of heart.
If I could open a window or unlock a door with only the simple
mechanical motive in the act-- But I can’t. There’s a romantic
impurity in even the look of my hand as it touches the window-sash or
the door-key. There’s a pervasive delicate infusion of impure motive
all over me, Soul and bones, as I perform the act. It is one curse in
the Necklace which God himself bestowed on me so long ago.
It is not my fault that I am un-pure in heart.
And it is not God’s. It is a comfort to me that I can reason out
that it is not God’s fault. He knew I needed the Necklace and
each blue-green stone in it to rhyme and balance me. In the wide
surprisingness of the universe everything will be rhymed and
balanced. In me, being savagely complex, that balancing took a bit
of doing: hence my unusual Necklace. It comforts me that I can reach
that analytic point. It leaves me a lightning conviction that God is
worth seeing.
And if a day dawns for me when I can open a door with no ulterior
motive: thinking only of the door and the fine small muscular power
of smooth hand and supple wrist given me to open it: thinking only
that I want to get the door open: then back of _that_ door I know I
shall see God!
It is so written in that barbarous blood-sweating worldly Rhythm on
the Mount.
_A prayer-feeling_