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Gregory Douglas Wredberg

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Near the beginning of *The Fourth Stage of Meaning* :

[[ CWL = Collected Works of Lonergan [ Bernard ] ]

... i don’t recall reading Vignette 10 nor any of the Interior Lighthouse essays after reading Bill’s

draft, though I may have. What I recall was revisiting Prehumous 4-8, emailing Mike Shute to ask

him what he was working on, and – thanks to Prehumous 8 – sharing some of CWL 8 The

Incarnate Word (2016) with Bill as possibly relevant to his work-in-progress. I was delighted to

talk to these two about what they were working on because they seemed to be focusing on

what got me seriously interested in Phil in the first place: the fifth chapter of Wealth of Self

(1975), “The Inside-Out of Radical Existentialism.” It was around my twenty-first birthday. I was

a senior philosophy major in Bill’s Theory of Knowing course in the fall of 2010.

By the time we got to that chapter, I had already come to think of “radical existentialism” as

Phil’s name for a habitual focus on the roots of one’s intentionality that would help one in the

revision, maintenance, and formation of one’s habits. The idea came to me in the context of his

clues about the axial period, which ends with an endnote referring the reader to Quaestio 21 of

De Deo Trino II (1964):

Here one may move to the positive aspects of the fruit of methodology: for

self-attentive methodology offers man the possibility of getting to grips with his meaning

at its focus. Existentialism and historical consciousness have succeeded in underlining

man’s creativity of his own essence. That emergent essence is centrally on the level of

mind, and the more man appreciates the nature of the emergence of meaning, the more

adequately will he contribute creatively to that emergence. That appreciation will enable

him to move from a state of spontaneous use of his intelligence in his doing to a level of

intelligent guidance of that use.2

2

Ibid., p. 8.

1

Ibid., p. 8.

1

Before figuring that much out, I recall vividly, with the music of Rage Against the Machine in the

background, reading the words “my interest is in the abolition of slavery of minds at its roots.”

3

It was important to me that Phil talked about me getting a grip on myself in the context of

history getting a grip on themselves. But it wasn’t until reading “The Inside-Out of Radical

Existentialism” that I realized what I was doing with Phil, in spite of his claim in the

introduction’s endnotes that he would be restricting our “considerations to historical reality in

its nonreligious dimensions,”

4 was deeply religious.

- by Robert-Gabriel Aaron Mundine

and Philip McShane

[:

1Gregory Douglas Wredberg

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In the summer of 2005, I went on a trip with my church youth group to host a “vacation Bible school” in a rural community near Santa Fe, New Mexico. My MP3 player was loaded with Demon Days (2005), Steal This Album (2002), Lateralus (2001), Ænima (1996) to name some of the memorable albums. Lyrics like “oh green world/ don’t desert me now / made of you and you of me / but where are we?” and “your sacred silence, losing all violence/ stars in their place, mirror your face / I need to find you, I need to seek my innervision” and “I embrace my desire to / swing on the spiral / of our divinity and / still be a human” and “I've been crawling on my belly / clearing out what could've been / I've been wallowing in my own confused / and insecure delusions / for a piece to cross me over / or a word to guide me in / I want to feel the changes coming down / I want to know what I've been hiding / in my shadow” were very powerful, moving images for me in my search for the meaning of life. Incidentally, I met an older teenager our first day in the village we were visiting who was interested in Shakespeare, the Mars Volta, and shamans. Romero and I got along very well, and I spent as much time as I could with him during our stay, even though my girlfriend was on the trip too. He guided me in exercises in paying attention to the sights and sounds and smells of natural things, in using my imagination, with the assistance of rhythmic drumming, to journey into the underworld, and in keeping track of these exercises in a journal. He talked to me about how he was raised Catholic, but found this way of exploring inner space, seeking the invisible essences of things, and meeting the Spirit within more helpful, and it was okay because this Spirit is the core of all the great religions. All of these intimations of meaning were held together for me by Alex Grey’s Dissectional album art for Lateralus, which had been a seriously puzzling image for me. When it was time for me to go back to Texas, he gave me his copy of the book he had learned all this from. I cannot recommend the book now, but it allowed me to continue what I had started in New Mexico. Without my friend’s enthusiasm, I couldn’t take the “vision quests” seriously very much longer, although I liked the drumming, but I continued to tune my senses, focus on 4 Ibid., p. xvi, en. 5. 3 Ibid., p. xiv. 2 the aliveness of things, and try to make contact with the Spirit within, and I made a point of doing my spiritual exercises outside in the field behind my house. The following year, I worked my way through Betty Edwards’ Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain (1979). Besides becoming better at drawing, finding greater delight in visual art, growing in my appreciation of modern art, and learning to notice more visual details in my environment, I learned to notice what I see rather than what I thought I saw. Initially this sensitized me to the messiness of my visual spread, which presented far more strange lines and irregular shapes than straight lines and geometrical shapes, especially when I went from inside my house to outside in the field. The year after that, my interest in Radiohead led me to read The Crying of Lot 49 (1965). The meaning of the novella promised to me “a real alternative to the absence of surprise to life that harrows the head of everybody you know.” The silence of the Holy Spirit before Pentecost is a theme of the book, and thanks to passages like the following, I began to wonder about not just my intent to contact the Spirit within, but the Spirit’s intent to contact me: