though I am not equal to the challenge

Commenting on one of Rainscape's recent posts, Pseudonoma has once more made reference to the "hierarchical reception of the sacred" and to the rebuke such a hierarchy would present to the common notion that the liberal arts can be taught as the liturgy is offered. I am aware that in mentioning such a hierarchy in light of what follows I am probably only rendering it more obscure, tempering the requisite boldness, enacting the reason for reluctance, and yet . . .

It is as if the word equality is not really at play in this discussion--as if it is only used in order to give a ready word to the notion that the exception of visible goodness is the rule of its possibility for all. After all, the founder himself could discriminate:

Heaven help those who have no way of dividing themselves from these influences and who permit themselves through ignorance to be deformed by this cultural desert! (1981 Newsletter)

The sterility of these influences, according to Dr. Sampo, is expressed not only by the "the loss of self-sacrifice, of courtesy, of generosity," nor just through the statistical accounts of suffering and selfishness that have begun to ground persuasion in our culture; its expression culminates, rather, in the "backward glance" of the liberal arts student himself who, having been removed from their presence, becomes a burier of photographs, a champion of utopias, a crying infidel. The deformation, then, of which Sampo speaks is not rectified by knowledge acquired at a liberal arts college, which knowledge is still capable of failing to expose the root of alienation from the presence of the sacred (there is always the danger that we will simply heap more dirt on the Creator's coffin). It is, most of all, the rendering upon one's heart of the active and passive failure to witness the "almost" miraculous appearance of the student in the classroom.

TMC, as I have known it, has only ever claimed for itself the desire to make recognizable the form from which such an almost-miracle springs--most especially through encouraging the habit of conversation. Its failures, however numerous, can never be mentioned without simultaneously acknowledging the failure of its students--even its best students who, in any other place, might have been set apart and preserved (in theory, at least) from common ignorance. All were capable of more than they gave--and in that we have been shown to be most equal. But the abiding hope must remain: that in this out of the way place there is a greater, angular kind of equality.