”I am the Ghost of Christmas Past”
“Long Past?” inquired Scrooge: observant of its dwarfish stature.
“No. Your past.”
Good evening dear friends,
I suppose we all live among the Spirits, mostly unseen, glowing out from behind the screen of the world. I suppose we are each sometimes beneficiary to their intervention.
Tomorrow, Ryan Penner makes his final delivery of cut timbers to the carpenters yard, while Matt Sanbury continues his work of laying out walls and preparing joinery. Over the course of the coming week, we shall move from horizontal foundation beams to vertical posts, and enter a new dimension.
Some weeks ago we spoke of archaeology, which we defined as the study of the human past through the investigation of its material culture. I asked a ten-year-old at the carpenters yard last week if he knew what archaeology means. Without hesitation he answered, "digging things up from the past." That pretty well says it all.
Taking one step further back to active participation in that past, we have spoken of "experimental archaeology," the more familiar cousin of which is "living history," such as is practiced at Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia and the Plimoth Patuxet Museums in Massachusetts. Both experimental archaeology and living history involve the fashioning and use of period artifacts under recreated circumstances to test hypotheses about past culture.
Beyond archaeology and history, we coined a new phrase, "experimental archetypology," which keeps company with the past for a distance, even into the archaic ages, until that past at last gives way to eternity: to the "archetypes" that presumably precede material creation "in the mind of God." Archaeology, archetype, archaic—these words all derive from the Greek arkhē, meaning simply, "the beginning."
Our Virginia House Project is a deliberate search for the material beginnings of what we are now, in order to regain what Emerson called "an original relation to the universe." That sounds sorrowfully esoteric, as if one had to be initiated into the Mysteries to understand it. But we know from our years of experience with the California House that the case is almost opposite to that.
Ask a ten-year-old what archaeology is and they'll tell you straight out. Ask an eight-year-old to draw a house, and they'll sit straight down and draw you an Innermost House. I have watched plenty of third graders do exactly that, and so have you. Door, window, wall, roof, chimney. The past is native to us, and requires little more than an inward remembering to recollect, if sometimes along with a little digging.
Ours is a search for beginnings, for the seed of things, for the ground of being. Not for the ground of some esoteric being, but of our being. "I am the Ghost of Christmas Past," the spirit announces in A Christmas Carol. "Long Past?" inquired Scrooge: observant of its dwarfish stature. "No. Your past."
A constant advisor to our projects, Dr. Robert Gross, has a marvelous theory of Transcendentalism. Bob proposes that the transcendental is always present as the light that glows from behind the screen of the world, but which shines on us directly only in times of crisis, when one age is giving way to another. The transcendental is the light that shines out from between worlds in collision.
If ever there were a tale of Transcendentalism, it is Dickens' Christmas Carol. If ever there were a Realist, an unrepentant Materialist, it is Scrooge before the Spirits. If ever there were a man transformed, an Idealist, a Transcendentalist, it is Scrooge on Christmas morning. One glimpse of the spiritual light, of the archetypes of birth and death and love and loss and meaning, and he is changed forever. "I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future! The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me!”
When I write to you next, it will be a new year. Everything will change. What was prone will stand upright. What was dark will move toward the light of a growing season. I do not entirely know what happens next, but together I feel we are prepared to meet it.
Happy New Year dear friends. May this year to come bring the world much good.
Yours always,
Michael
The Innermost House Foundation remains an entirely volunteer organization,
dedicated to renewing transcendental values for our age.
IMAGES
Sol Eytinge: “A Retrospect”
Sol Eytinge: “Scrooge Awakes”
QUOTATIONS
”I am the ghost of Christmas Past. . .” Charles Dickens “A Christmas Carol”