Two of the oldest stories about fire in the world point in opposite directions. One says turn aside and take your shoes off. The other says let it go out. A man can spend a life in the wrong one and never feel the difference, because the heat is the same.
This week I wrote down the story of my cattle business for the first time, and when I got to the end I called it my dragon and my burning bush. I used the second phrase the way people do, loosely, to mean the thing that lit me up. Then a friend's film about Thomas Aquinas sent me back to the text, and the text is more exact than I was.
Moses is minding his father-in-law's sheep on the far side of the wilderness, which is to say he is forty years into a quiet life after a loud one, and he sees a fire. "And he looked, and, behold, the bush burned with fire, and the bush was not consumed." He does not fall down. He says, I will turn aside and see this great sight, why the bush is not burned. What stops him is not the fire. Fires he has seen. It is a fire that is not using up what it burns. And the first thing the voice says to him is about his feet.
"Draw not nigh hither: put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground."Exodus 3:5, King James Version
Thomas Aquinas, the thirteenth-century Dominican, read that bush as the whole of his doctrine of God in one picture, and Bishop Robert Barron's film about him ends on it. God, for Thomas, is not a thing among things. Not the biggest being in the universe, not a rival fire, but what Thomas called being itself — the reason there is anything rather than nothing. And a fire like that does not compete with the bush for the bush's own substance. It can be entirely present and leave the thing it is present to more itself, not less. Barron's phrase for it is that the nearness of this God makes the world more radiant "without consuming it." Irenaeus had said it a thousand years before Thomas: the glory of God is a human being fully alive.
The Buddha also preached about fire, to a thousand men who had worshipped it for a living. The fire sermon is short. Everything is burning, he tells them. The eye is burning and what it sees is burning; the ear, the tongue, the body, the mind — all burning. With what? With the fire of craving, the fire of hatred, the fire of delusion; with birth and aging and death, with grief and pain. And the way out is not a better fire. It is to grow tired of this one, to stop feeding it, and to let it go out. The word the tradition uses for the goal, nibbāna, is the word for a flame going out.
So here are two fires. One you turn aside for and take your shoes off. One you learn to starve.
I am not going to pretend otherwise, because the rule in my room is that a collision the adult settles was not worth bringing in. A Christian will say the Buddha is describing the fire of the self — the burning of wanting and hating and not seeing straight — and that the bush is the other fire, the one that was never about you. A Buddhist will say the bush is a beautiful story about a fire that still needs fuel, and will ask, kindly, what you are feeding it with. Thomas would have taken the objection in its strongest form before he answered, because that is how he built the Summa: the objection first, then the answer, then the replies. I will leave the objection standing.
But watch where the two of them agree, because it is the part that matters for a man at six in the morning. Thomas said the soul is not a ghost locked in a body; it is the form of the body, the whole of it in every part, and a man ought to cherish his body "by a friendship of love." The Buddha put mindfulness of the body at the front of the path. Neither of them will let you treat your body as the enemy of your purpose. The run, the cold water, the hour of sleep you keep — those are not a tax you pay before the real work. In both traditions, they are where the real work is.
Not by the heat. I know that now because I have stood in both and they felt the same. The cattle business started as a bush: a man named Meatha asked me, a stranger, to come and judge a show for the kids, for nothing, and I printed out a worksheet and said let's go, and I was more alive in that arena in my boots than I had been in years. Then it turned into money, and it kept burning, and I kept calling it the same fire. It was not. The first one left more of me. The second one used me for fuel, and used my father, and used a few animals I loved like children, and at the end there was a sale barn and an empty field.
Viktor Frankl, the psychiatrist this whole project rests on, gives the test in a sentence that has nothing to do with fire. The eye that sees itself is impaired, he says; a man is human to the extent that he forgets himself by giving himself to a cause or a person. Thomas said the same thing seven hundred years earlier in a different vocabulary: the mind and the will are made to stand outside themselves — his word was ecstasy, in its old plain sense, standing out. A fire that points away from you does not consume you. A fire that points at you does. That is the whole test, and you can run it on anything: a business, a woman, a cause, a church, a sport, a son.
"The normally functioning eye does not see itself, it is rather overlooking itself; likewise man is human to the extent that he overlooks and forgets himself by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love."Viktor E. Frankl, The Doctor and the Soul, 3rd ed. (1986)
The film has a story I keep coming back to. Thomas was five when his family sent him to the monks at Monte Cassino, and in a catechism class, after the teacher had talked about God for a while, the boy put up his hand and said: but Master, what is God? He asked it for the rest of his life and filled fifty volumes with the asking, and in the last December of his life he said everything he had written was straw next to what he had seen, and stopped.
This week two boys, fourteen and fifteen, ran past my gate at dawn, and I asked them the only question I have: what are we running for? It is the same question. A boy who can answer it any day, any hour, has the first fire. A boy who cannot is running on the second one and does not know it yet, and no one in his life is going to tell him, because they are running on it too.
I don't answer it for them. Thomas's teacher didn't answer it for him either. The question is the fire. You turn aside for it, and you take your shoes off, and you keep it burning for forty-nine years, and it does not consume you. That is how you know which one it is.
Exodus 3 in the King James text. The fire sermon is the Ādittapariyāya Sutta, Saṃyutta Nikāya 35.28, paraphrased here, not quoted. Thomas Aquinas on the soul as the form of the body: Summa Theologiae I, question 76, article 8; on cherishing the body "by a friendship of love": II-II, question 25, article 5. Irenaeus, Against Heresies IV.20.7. The film is Bishop Robert Barron's Catholicism: The Pivotal Players (Word on Fire, 2016), the Aquinas episode; the story of the five-year-old and the "straw" are his telling. Frankl, The Doctor and the Soul, 3rd ed. (1986). The test — not the heat, but what is left — is mine, and so is the field it was learned in.