The Ides of March

A friend who shepherds a school, emailed to say, he was to be counted as a fourth reader after our “three readers” article. A neighbor makes the fifth one. He admonished a fortnight ago that I be careful on which Religious Order I assign monks and monastics, priests and friars to, a parade of my irreverent pseudo-learning.

I called Martin Luther a Dominican monk; he was an Augustinian friar. The battle lines between the Augustinians and the Dominicans are clearly drawn and well laid. There is no love lost between the Orders and to mistake one for the other shows supreme ignorance. It is just like identifying a betel nut chewing indigene a cultural relic that must be preserved. Adding insult into injury, I called the Doctor of the Church, Thomas Aquinas, as belonging to the Society of Jesus, when the SJs did not yet exist. He was a Dominican. Mea Culpa. Mea Culpa. Mea maxima culpa.

The Ides of March preceded the Catholic Church, or, at least, Shakespeare’s version that dramatized the assassination of Roman warrior par excellence, Julius Caesar. The hero was stabbed in the Senate Forum in 44 BC, an event that triggered a Civil War, a turning point in Rome’s history. Octavius Caesar grabbed power and on Julius’ 4th year death anniversary, he executed 300 members of the Senate in retaliation against the assassination.

The Ides of March before Caesar was a famous Roman holiday observed on the first full moon of the solar New Year.  Shakespeare’s celebrated story has a seer warning Caesar to “beware of the Ides of March.” On the designated day, Julius ran into the seer on his way to the Forum, blithely telling her that the Ides had come and nothing has happened, to which the seer replied, “Yes, … but not gone.” Great story by a great storyteller!

Destiny, of course, is neither determined by the formation of stars, or the reading of bird entrails; not even by a finger of fate that purports to direct one’s future. Destiny is the product of choice, if not physiologically based, at least, psychologically related.  I choose the perspective I bring to any given situation, the situation itself being neutral.

The world of spirits as an Other World beyond this world is passé, truthful as a metaphor in the time of superstition but toothless before the ordinary power of choice, and it is in there that we locate the profundity of our humanity.

Depth on the foreboding characterizes this day; also occasions dramatic turning points to occur. But there is nothing automatic. It occurs or it doesn’t. One thing for sure can happen; we can choose to make it happen, or not happen. The happenstance of choice reigns supreme. We make it happen, or it does not happen at all!

In an era of selfies, I sound like an oracle for self-righteous deliverance. Well, I do stand for the self-sustaining, the self-reliant, self-confident, in short, the self-conscious mode of existence. Moralists among us have nothing to do with the “self” as it allegedly stands on the way of relating meaningfully to others. But the “self,” fully understood, is the physiology, the psychology, and the relational that are not only personal but also social and planetary.

The “self” realistically defined is an act of self-consciousness, and if that consciousness is realistic, it will define itself in relation to its dependence and interdependence with other human beings and to an organic as well as dynamic planet. Others fling that self-consciousness in the eternity of time and the infinity of a universe, inviting the ancient practice of paying obeisance to the unknown, in the poet’s language, the “unknown Unknown!”

In the famous Kierkegaard formula: “The self is a relation which relates itself to its own self, or it is that in the relation that the relation relates itself to its own self; the self is not the relation but that the relation relates itself to its own self.”  Huh?  That a worship of a god?  Søren adds: “The most common form of despair is not being who you are.”

My self-consciousness is limited, 86 years of being me, my covenant with life in which I play out my unique, unrepeatable gift of life into human history, same as everyone else.  “There has never been one like me before, nor will there be another one ever again,” just like you.  I am not overly concerned about being remembered, nor am anxious to lay out an inheritance for the incoming generation.  My glory is with the 86 years I appropriated as my jig in this planet; everything else is gravy!

Am I repeating myself? Well, for more than 2,000 years, we’ve treated this first full moon of the New Year as a day of “bad luck.” Mayhap, it is time to turn it around and make it a day for constructing and innovating, creating and birthing something new. The self senses, feels, and thinks.  The self’s “does”, so I can decide this day to be the glorious self I know I am.  It is plain and simple.

Fortune and misfortune happens because we make them happen. Period. Decide well.