Benedicamus Domino!
Throughout the gospels, most notably in the Gospel of St. Matthew, Christ refers again and again to The Kingdom of Heaven. This is rather a cryptic phrase and it is used in several different contexts. Usually, it refers to a different set of values to the one which prevails among us here on earth. In Heaven's Kingdom, the typical human ideals of power and authority are turned on their heads. Selfish men are punished and poor men are given high places. Faithfulness is rewarded, but it is rewarded equally, whether the person has been faithful to God for an hour or for many years. In sum, the first here on earth are usually the last in Heaven's Kingdom, and viceversa.
So, what is the Kingdom of Heaven? Well, it is said that this "kingdom" is within man, but it is also said that we must win it, as though it is not yet ours or we are not yet a part of it. In fact, one of the most difficult verses regarding our relationship to Heaven's Kingdom is Matthew 11:12: "And from the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force." What does this mean? If we look at the Kingdom of Heaven as being a physical realm, then this verse means that it allows itself to be taken. It does not defend itself against assaults from the outside, and only the violent will be able to take it or conquer it.
Of course, the Kingdom of Heaven is not a physical realm here on earth, nor I think can it be described as a place as such. It is actually a state of being, a way of relating to God and to mankind. It need not be a part of some vague afterlife either. It can be found on this side of the grave, if we look for it. It seeks to be conquered by us, to be made a part of us, and we can only let this happen by fighting against our fallen nature and even, to some extent, against the fallen world in which we find ourselves. I don't mean that we should sit in judgment of our neighbours. In fact, this would be contrary to the values presented as being integral to the Kingdom of Heaven. However, we should realize that the world and our superficial selves are in league against us. We are our own worst enemies, in some ways, because we seek to remain comfortable in our own skin, even when we know that something we are doing or thinking will do us more harm than good. I'm not talking about what we might call major sins here. I'm talking about anger, impatience, things which seem to be just a part of daily life.
Many modern teachers in the church have stated that all the prayer and fasting and spiritual reading we do is not going to help us if we cannot refrain from yelling at another driver in a trafic jam. We have to remember where the rubber meets the road, so to speak, and we must use the tools we are given to stage an assault on Heaven's Kingdom, because the only walls surrounding it are those of our own making. Christ has, in a sense, already broken them down, but we must follow His path to realize this freedom within ourselves. The way is steep and stony, and the road is narrow, but it is straight, once we get our feet upon it, and always ahead of us is the light and freshness of true and dynamic potential, true and dynamic freedom from desires and passions so that our chief desire and our true passion for what life should be may be awakened. May God bless our steps!
Deo Gratias!
Friday, August 31, 2012
Monday, August 27, 2012
C. S. Lewis on the Eucharistic Life
Benedicamus Domino!
Again, my Twitter feed has provided me with some inspiration. I follow a tweater who posts daily quotations from C. S. Lewis, and this one came across my computer screen yesterday. It's worth pondering, methinks. "We shall draw nearer to God, not by trying to avoid the sufferings inherent in all loves, but by accepting them & offering them to Him."
Lewis was a big proponent of this idea, but even he was forced to put his money where his mouth was. When he lost his wife Joy to Cancer, he kept a journal which he later (though reluctantly) published in an edited form under the title "A Grief Observed." In it, we see a side of Lewis which many of us who are familiar with his stories and other nonfiction works may not be used to. He rages and storms. He calls God a cosmic vivisectionist. He, one of the greatest modern apologists for Christianity, calls creation a laboratory experiment and talks about his frustrations as he prays for guidance and seems to be getting nothing in return.
I recall when I first read "A Grief Observed." I myself had recently lost a loved one to Cancer, and when I read this book, I felt that Lewis was sort of a companion for me on the road of life. For this man whom I have always admired to allow people to see, however truncated, his private and intimate thoughts, was a brave thing. He finds himself doubting his own faith in God. He calls it a house of cards, for when the rubber met the road and he lost the person he loved most in the world, he wasn't able to accept it with calm or trust. It is his own anger and sadness that he finds so appalling, for if he really had faith, he writes, then he would be able to be courageous and noble and would take comfort from the thought that Joy was in God's hands now.
Still, is this what we are called to do? Are we called to live in a dream-world where everything is happy and joyful all the time? Or, and perhaps even worse, are we called to ignore our own feelings of suffering completely just because someone is said to be with God now? Is this what accepting suffering really is? Lewis, in "A Grief Observed," definitely does not come to this conclusion. He derides the people who comfort him with the platitude that "she is at peace now" or that "it was God's will that she be taken now." He has learned too much about Christian thought to take much comfort in these common sayings. He feels that he cannot with any certainty say that Joy is at peace now, because he believes in the notion of purgatory and that the reason we pray for the dead is to help them obtain God's mercy and aid in the face of their sins.
Now, I myself do not believe it works quite like this, but I do believe that praying for the dead is essential, simply because for us, death is not the end. We still exist, and prayer can help us in whatever state we find ourselves. If the saints pray for us, then surely we can pray for those who have died. But, I suppose that I'm digressing.
In his book, Lewis ponders life after death, but he also gets to the bottom of suffering through looking at his own suffering. He takes his life without Joy as simply a continuation of their marriage, and he realizes that the suffering he has undergone has been necessary for him so that he could come to terms with the fact that she has moved on but that they are still bound by love. It was his part to grieve, he concludes, but this grief could not last forever as it would both dishonour Joy's memory and would not acknowledge the comfort which God was trying to give him as time passed.
So, what does the above quote mean? Is it naive? Did Lewis recant it during his grief? Actually, I think that Lewis, whether he knew it or not in his journal, lived this quote. He may have raged and he may have stormed for a while, but at the bottom of all that grief, of which a rather large part is the whinings of the upset ego because someone which it called 'mine' was taken from it, he realized that it was his ego that was causing him not to be aware of what God was giving him and not to be grateful for his time with Joy. He began to realize what true faith in God is all about, and it isn't always pretty, and it isn't always blindly trusting. Faith is a struggle at the best of times, and even more of a struggle at a time such as the death of a beloved. One can offer one's sufferings to God as screaming, as raging, as questioning, even as challenging, and there will always be an answer. It's just that we have to let the rages calm down a bit to hear that answer. I've learned this through bitter and sweet experience.
So, are we simply to bear our sufferings patiently and without complaint? This is an ideal, but it is usually only achieved by those who have been given the grace of God to do this. Most of us have to cry and rage, scream and beat our heads against the walls, but we can usually find deeper truths by doing this than by avoiding sufferings and keeping a stiff upper lip at all costs, or pretending that they don't exist and that there's no need to grieve because everything in life is God's will. To accept sufferings as they come and to live with them while not making them into idols is the challenge. To go through them actively and to finally resign them to God is how the palms of sainthood are gained.
In my next entry, I will look more at the notion of the eucharistic life as a struggle, or perhaps my Twitter feed will inspire me to go in another direction. Till then,
Deo Gratias!
Again, my Twitter feed has provided me with some inspiration. I follow a tweater who posts daily quotations from C. S. Lewis, and this one came across my computer screen yesterday. It's worth pondering, methinks. "We shall draw nearer to God, not by trying to avoid the sufferings inherent in all loves, but by accepting them & offering them to Him."
Lewis was a big proponent of this idea, but even he was forced to put his money where his mouth was. When he lost his wife Joy to Cancer, he kept a journal which he later (though reluctantly) published in an edited form under the title "A Grief Observed." In it, we see a side of Lewis which many of us who are familiar with his stories and other nonfiction works may not be used to. He rages and storms. He calls God a cosmic vivisectionist. He, one of the greatest modern apologists for Christianity, calls creation a laboratory experiment and talks about his frustrations as he prays for guidance and seems to be getting nothing in return.
I recall when I first read "A Grief Observed." I myself had recently lost a loved one to Cancer, and when I read this book, I felt that Lewis was sort of a companion for me on the road of life. For this man whom I have always admired to allow people to see, however truncated, his private and intimate thoughts, was a brave thing. He finds himself doubting his own faith in God. He calls it a house of cards, for when the rubber met the road and he lost the person he loved most in the world, he wasn't able to accept it with calm or trust. It is his own anger and sadness that he finds so appalling, for if he really had faith, he writes, then he would be able to be courageous and noble and would take comfort from the thought that Joy was in God's hands now.
Still, is this what we are called to do? Are we called to live in a dream-world where everything is happy and joyful all the time? Or, and perhaps even worse, are we called to ignore our own feelings of suffering completely just because someone is said to be with God now? Is this what accepting suffering really is? Lewis, in "A Grief Observed," definitely does not come to this conclusion. He derides the people who comfort him with the platitude that "she is at peace now" or that "it was God's will that she be taken now." He has learned too much about Christian thought to take much comfort in these common sayings. He feels that he cannot with any certainty say that Joy is at peace now, because he believes in the notion of purgatory and that the reason we pray for the dead is to help them obtain God's mercy and aid in the face of their sins.
Now, I myself do not believe it works quite like this, but I do believe that praying for the dead is essential, simply because for us, death is not the end. We still exist, and prayer can help us in whatever state we find ourselves. If the saints pray for us, then surely we can pray for those who have died. But, I suppose that I'm digressing.
In his book, Lewis ponders life after death, but he also gets to the bottom of suffering through looking at his own suffering. He takes his life without Joy as simply a continuation of their marriage, and he realizes that the suffering he has undergone has been necessary for him so that he could come to terms with the fact that she has moved on but that they are still bound by love. It was his part to grieve, he concludes, but this grief could not last forever as it would both dishonour Joy's memory and would not acknowledge the comfort which God was trying to give him as time passed.
So, what does the above quote mean? Is it naive? Did Lewis recant it during his grief? Actually, I think that Lewis, whether he knew it or not in his journal, lived this quote. He may have raged and he may have stormed for a while, but at the bottom of all that grief, of which a rather large part is the whinings of the upset ego because someone which it called 'mine' was taken from it, he realized that it was his ego that was causing him not to be aware of what God was giving him and not to be grateful for his time with Joy. He began to realize what true faith in God is all about, and it isn't always pretty, and it isn't always blindly trusting. Faith is a struggle at the best of times, and even more of a struggle at a time such as the death of a beloved. One can offer one's sufferings to God as screaming, as raging, as questioning, even as challenging, and there will always be an answer. It's just that we have to let the rages calm down a bit to hear that answer. I've learned this through bitter and sweet experience.
So, are we simply to bear our sufferings patiently and without complaint? This is an ideal, but it is usually only achieved by those who have been given the grace of God to do this. Most of us have to cry and rage, scream and beat our heads against the walls, but we can usually find deeper truths by doing this than by avoiding sufferings and keeping a stiff upper lip at all costs, or pretending that they don't exist and that there's no need to grieve because everything in life is God's will. To accept sufferings as they come and to live with them while not making them into idols is the challenge. To go through them actively and to finally resign them to God is how the palms of sainthood are gained.
In my next entry, I will look more at the notion of the eucharistic life as a struggle, or perhaps my Twitter feed will inspire me to go in another direction. Till then,
Deo Gratias!
Friday, August 24, 2012
A Personal Story of Joy
Benedicamus Domino!
Further to my last entry, I have a story which will illustrate the fact that I learned about true joy long before I had ever read C. S. Lewis's thoughts on the subject. This is important, because when I did read Lewis's ideas about what joy was for him, I felt a sense of familiarity which was immediate and piercing. The story I'm going to tell follows.
When I was a young girl, a friend of mine and I were walking in a park on a beautiful summer's day, when we found what seemed to be a hole in the fence. The park was rather familiar to her, and she had never seen this hole in the fence, but we wanted to go through it and see what we might find. Well, we found some slightly longer grass and I could hear the fact that there was a structure of some sort nearby, but no one was around, so we lay down on our backs and talked together. We sang songs and laughed, we shared our private thoughts and intimate dreams, and then her mother called us, saying that it was time to come home for supper.
Well, we went home, and we resolved to go back again the next day to find the hole in the fence and to figure out what it really was, and when we went to the park again and found the exact spot we were looking for, no hole in the fence could be seen. We had no idea where we had wandered the day before, but we were convinced that there had been a gap in the fence through which we had gone. Now, to this day, I don't know whether we had found a gap in the fence or whether what we found was just some untrodden corner of the park, but what I do know is that I still think about that day and the fact that our little doorway was not there on the next day. For me, the hole in the fence is one of the last truly innocent memories of childhood that I possess, and it was a time when both my friend and I were genuinely happy and free from care. We were simply enjoying the adventure of finding this strange little corner of the world, and it added magic to what was already a very magical friendship.
Now, when I think of the hole in the fence, I remember the wonder with which we found it, and I find myself remembering my childhood and the magical times that I had with my friend, and over time, this has become a symbol for me of what true joy can be. One of the properties of joy is that it is fleeting, but that the remembrance of it engenders the feeling again, and sometimes it's the memory which gives the stronger impression as time passes. It is this kind of joy for which I wish to live, and while I know that it will not likely be engendered by an adventure like that of the hole in the fence, it can be found if sought. We shouldn't command it to come, however. Joy cannot be engineered. I learned that from the frustration of the day after the adventure. When we tried to find out where the hole in the fence was and went systematically to search for it, we didn't find it and we never had an adventure like that again. This taught me a very important lesson, and that was to take the opportunities that we find on our paths. Even if they come to nothing, they are experiences, and more often than not, they will lead to amazing adventures of one kind or another, and some will lead to joy beyond all imagining.
I'll never forget the hole in the fence, and I hope that this story helps others as well.
Deo Gratias!
Further to my last entry, I have a story which will illustrate the fact that I learned about true joy long before I had ever read C. S. Lewis's thoughts on the subject. This is important, because when I did read Lewis's ideas about what joy was for him, I felt a sense of familiarity which was immediate and piercing. The story I'm going to tell follows.
When I was a young girl, a friend of mine and I were walking in a park on a beautiful summer's day, when we found what seemed to be a hole in the fence. The park was rather familiar to her, and she had never seen this hole in the fence, but we wanted to go through it and see what we might find. Well, we found some slightly longer grass and I could hear the fact that there was a structure of some sort nearby, but no one was around, so we lay down on our backs and talked together. We sang songs and laughed, we shared our private thoughts and intimate dreams, and then her mother called us, saying that it was time to come home for supper.
Well, we went home, and we resolved to go back again the next day to find the hole in the fence and to figure out what it really was, and when we went to the park again and found the exact spot we were looking for, no hole in the fence could be seen. We had no idea where we had wandered the day before, but we were convinced that there had been a gap in the fence through which we had gone. Now, to this day, I don't know whether we had found a gap in the fence or whether what we found was just some untrodden corner of the park, but what I do know is that I still think about that day and the fact that our little doorway was not there on the next day. For me, the hole in the fence is one of the last truly innocent memories of childhood that I possess, and it was a time when both my friend and I were genuinely happy and free from care. We were simply enjoying the adventure of finding this strange little corner of the world, and it added magic to what was already a very magical friendship.
Now, when I think of the hole in the fence, I remember the wonder with which we found it, and I find myself remembering my childhood and the magical times that I had with my friend, and over time, this has become a symbol for me of what true joy can be. One of the properties of joy is that it is fleeting, but that the remembrance of it engenders the feeling again, and sometimes it's the memory which gives the stronger impression as time passes. It is this kind of joy for which I wish to live, and while I know that it will not likely be engendered by an adventure like that of the hole in the fence, it can be found if sought. We shouldn't command it to come, however. Joy cannot be engineered. I learned that from the frustration of the day after the adventure. When we tried to find out where the hole in the fence was and went systematically to search for it, we didn't find it and we never had an adventure like that again. This taught me a very important lesson, and that was to take the opportunities that we find on our paths. Even if they come to nothing, they are experiences, and more often than not, they will lead to amazing adventures of one kind or another, and some will lead to joy beyond all imagining.
I'll never forget the hole in the fence, and I hope that this story helps others as well.
Deo Gratias!
Tuesday, August 21, 2012
A Reminder of What I Mean by 'Joy'
Benedicamus Domino!
Today, as I was searching for something to write about in this blog, the following quotation from C. S. Lewis came across my Twitter feed: "All joy emphasizes our pilgrim status; always reminds, beckons, awakens desire." This is what I mean by 'joy.' It is not simple happiness or contentment. Joy is more ecstatic than that. It is a thing both vividly clear and also elusive. It hits us like a thunderbolt, but then it fades almost as soon as we have grasped it.
At least, this is how it appears to us. It is my contention that 'joy,' as used in this very specific way, is the way it is for us because of our own nature, and not only because of what it is. If we could truly grasp this most real of realities, then we would, by our mere possessiveness, twist it and distort it until it was not itself anymore. How many beautiful things do we destroy on a regular basis? Humanity is rather a selfish species, but 'joy' is the ultimate gift, for as much as it does awaken our desire and stir our hearts to follow where it leads, it also causes us to feel dwarfed by it. In fact, in the very moment that we exult in it, the exultation comes because of its heart-piercing strangeness, its otherness when compared to much of our daily experience. True 'joy' is wild and uncontrolable, but there is also a kind of dignity in it. We recognize it because it is somehow familiar to us, but we also marvel at it because it lifts us to a higher plain of existence, if only for a moment.
I believe that we must all look for our 'joy' and follow it. There may be many things trying to look or sound or feel like 'joy,' but true 'joy' is unmistakeable to the heart which is open to receive it. It will be intimately yours but at the same time unpossessable. It will call you onward but it will never be caught, and yet, the heart will not become frustrated with this state of affairs, for it is in the freedom of 'joy' that we learn what path we must travel and what kind of people we are supposed to be. 'Joy,' therefore, is like a mirror; it reflects God's plan for us and also shows us our true selves. There will be more on 'joy' in the next entry.
Deo Gratias!
Sunday, August 19, 2012
Being A Spiritual Warrior
Benedicamus Domino!
Ever since I have identified myself as having some sort of spiritual belief-system, I have also described myself as a spiritual warrior. I have never thought of myself as a particularly adept one, but I have described myself as one nonetheless. For me, keeping my beliefs in the face of other ideas has often seemed like a fight, and I have also long held the belief that any kind of spirituality that exists nowadays is under constant threat from a culture which forever seeks to depersonalize life and to reduce it to metaphor and symbolism, or else to state that any experience which we call spiritual really has to do with our brain waves or certain chemicals firing at certain times.
Part of the reason that I'm keeping this blog is to have a place to state my beliefs without apology and without relativizing them to fit my culture's expectations. For me, God is God. God is not a personification of our morals and values, nor is He a synonym for the abstract concept of The Universe. God is not The Divine, or Spirit, or anything else. God is The Father, The Son, and The Holy Spirit, the Triune Creator of all things. Christ is both a real, living man who taught wise things and did miracles, but He is also the uncircumscribeable and infinite Logos, the Word of God who spoke light out of darkness. Do I believe this merely because some authority says so? I'd have to say 'no' to that, because if I did, those beliefs would crumble into dust at the slightest provocation. I know, because I had this kind of belief once.
No, what I have is something more, and I could not create it in myself. It is a knowing that goes beyond intellectual knowledge. It is not an emotion, though it's true that emotions get mixed up with it at times. It is simply a certainty, the same certainty that a child has that only one of two women who look, sound and act exactly alike is its mother. It is a certainty which remains, even through times of doubt, and it came to me by grace alone.
One day, I was riding home from university on a bus, and at this time, I was a Pagan. It is true that I was going through a spiritual dry-spell, but I thought little of it, seeing that they do tend to happen periodically. Well, I was reading a book for school, a Christian book as it happened, and I went to put it down and relax a bit while the bus roled me out of the city in which my university was and home to my parents' house. Well, as I sat and pondered what I had just read, suddenly everything changed. Suddenly, as I thought about Christ as He was being presented in this book, some deep part of myself knew that He was the Son of God and that God was there. It had the ring of truth about it, and it was--well--it was as though I had fallen in love. It was against my own will, to begin with. I didn't want to acknowledge this new thing. I wanted to forget it had ever happened, but I couldn't.
The whole weekend while I was home, I found myself reading bits of The Bible and pondering what all this would mean for my life. As I was going through The Bible, I landed on the passage where Elijah hears the still, small voice, and that voice says to him: "Elijah, what doest thou here?" Elijah is hiding in the wilderness, but God needs him to go and be a prophet again and to speak the truth to Israel. To me, that question rang in my soul. I felt as though I had been hiding in the wilderness, licking my spiritual wounds, (the wounds which made me step away from Christianity,) but now, I was being called again. I was being led homeward again.
August 19th is the Feast of The Lord's Transfiguration on Mount Tabor, or it is the date of the feast for those who use the Julian calendar to date liturgical times and seasons. The Julian calendar is thirteen days behind our modern Gregorian calendar, so that August 19 on the modern calendar is August 6 on the Julian. Anyway, during the Vespers service of Transfiguration, that very reading about the still, small voice is part of the Old Testament readings, and I have always found this fitting. I found that reading during a transfiguring time in my life, and it is used as a reading in Eastern Orthodox circles to celebrate the Eve of the Lord's Transfiguration.
So, after all this, am I still a spiritual warrior? Yes, I believe that I can still call myself this, because I am still fighting against the watering-down of belief and tradition, but I am fighting against it in myself first and foremost. I'm a child of my generation, and as such, I am constantly trying to apologize for my faith, or to soften it or to change it because I am terrified of looking like some kind of unenlightened idiot. Still, I do believe that it is quite possible to have a sincere and unalloyed faith in Christ and to be a thinking and intellectual person, because I know that I am not blindly following what some authority teaches. In fact, there are many times when the authorities of my church drive me crazy with their politics and bickering amongst themselves, but I know that Christ transcends all of that. I know this in my blood and in my deepest being, and it is this knowledge that keeps me going.
We all have our journeys to take, and we all have our paths to tread. I do not believe that all paths lead to the same place, but I do believe that many paths in this world are going in the right general direction. Any path or tradition or teaching which seeks to find the true self behind all the masks we wear is worth fighting for. Any path which emphasizes the fact that we are all together on this journey through life is worth fighting for, so I still call myself a spiritual warrior, and if I can keep the fight alive within my own self, with God's help of course, then perhaps someday I will be able to answer that still, small voice loudly and clearly, with the unclouded and undistorted truth, which I will only see after this life is through. I'm not here to convince anyone else to fight under this banner, but I am here to fight side-by-side with anyone who wishes to stand up and fight for their beliefs amid a culture which loves to create Spirituality Lite again and again. The truth is not always pretty. The truth is not always peaceful, but the truth is always the truth, and we all have to seek it in our own ways.
Deo Gratias!
Ever since I have identified myself as having some sort of spiritual belief-system, I have also described myself as a spiritual warrior. I have never thought of myself as a particularly adept one, but I have described myself as one nonetheless. For me, keeping my beliefs in the face of other ideas has often seemed like a fight, and I have also long held the belief that any kind of spirituality that exists nowadays is under constant threat from a culture which forever seeks to depersonalize life and to reduce it to metaphor and symbolism, or else to state that any experience which we call spiritual really has to do with our brain waves or certain chemicals firing at certain times.
Part of the reason that I'm keeping this blog is to have a place to state my beliefs without apology and without relativizing them to fit my culture's expectations. For me, God is God. God is not a personification of our morals and values, nor is He a synonym for the abstract concept of The Universe. God is not The Divine, or Spirit, or anything else. God is The Father, The Son, and The Holy Spirit, the Triune Creator of all things. Christ is both a real, living man who taught wise things and did miracles, but He is also the uncircumscribeable and infinite Logos, the Word of God who spoke light out of darkness. Do I believe this merely because some authority says so? I'd have to say 'no' to that, because if I did, those beliefs would crumble into dust at the slightest provocation. I know, because I had this kind of belief once.
No, what I have is something more, and I could not create it in myself. It is a knowing that goes beyond intellectual knowledge. It is not an emotion, though it's true that emotions get mixed up with it at times. It is simply a certainty, the same certainty that a child has that only one of two women who look, sound and act exactly alike is its mother. It is a certainty which remains, even through times of doubt, and it came to me by grace alone.
One day, I was riding home from university on a bus, and at this time, I was a Pagan. It is true that I was going through a spiritual dry-spell, but I thought little of it, seeing that they do tend to happen periodically. Well, I was reading a book for school, a Christian book as it happened, and I went to put it down and relax a bit while the bus roled me out of the city in which my university was and home to my parents' house. Well, as I sat and pondered what I had just read, suddenly everything changed. Suddenly, as I thought about Christ as He was being presented in this book, some deep part of myself knew that He was the Son of God and that God was there. It had the ring of truth about it, and it was--well--it was as though I had fallen in love. It was against my own will, to begin with. I didn't want to acknowledge this new thing. I wanted to forget it had ever happened, but I couldn't.
The whole weekend while I was home, I found myself reading bits of The Bible and pondering what all this would mean for my life. As I was going through The Bible, I landed on the passage where Elijah hears the still, small voice, and that voice says to him: "Elijah, what doest thou here?" Elijah is hiding in the wilderness, but God needs him to go and be a prophet again and to speak the truth to Israel. To me, that question rang in my soul. I felt as though I had been hiding in the wilderness, licking my spiritual wounds, (the wounds which made me step away from Christianity,) but now, I was being called again. I was being led homeward again.
August 19th is the Feast of The Lord's Transfiguration on Mount Tabor, or it is the date of the feast for those who use the Julian calendar to date liturgical times and seasons. The Julian calendar is thirteen days behind our modern Gregorian calendar, so that August 19 on the modern calendar is August 6 on the Julian. Anyway, during the Vespers service of Transfiguration, that very reading about the still, small voice is part of the Old Testament readings, and I have always found this fitting. I found that reading during a transfiguring time in my life, and it is used as a reading in Eastern Orthodox circles to celebrate the Eve of the Lord's Transfiguration.
So, after all this, am I still a spiritual warrior? Yes, I believe that I can still call myself this, because I am still fighting against the watering-down of belief and tradition, but I am fighting against it in myself first and foremost. I'm a child of my generation, and as such, I am constantly trying to apologize for my faith, or to soften it or to change it because I am terrified of looking like some kind of unenlightened idiot. Still, I do believe that it is quite possible to have a sincere and unalloyed faith in Christ and to be a thinking and intellectual person, because I know that I am not blindly following what some authority teaches. In fact, there are many times when the authorities of my church drive me crazy with their politics and bickering amongst themselves, but I know that Christ transcends all of that. I know this in my blood and in my deepest being, and it is this knowledge that keeps me going.
We all have our journeys to take, and we all have our paths to tread. I do not believe that all paths lead to the same place, but I do believe that many paths in this world are going in the right general direction. Any path or tradition or teaching which seeks to find the true self behind all the masks we wear is worth fighting for. Any path which emphasizes the fact that we are all together on this journey through life is worth fighting for, so I still call myself a spiritual warrior, and if I can keep the fight alive within my own self, with God's help of course, then perhaps someday I will be able to answer that still, small voice loudly and clearly, with the unclouded and undistorted truth, which I will only see after this life is through. I'm not here to convince anyone else to fight under this banner, but I am here to fight side-by-side with anyone who wishes to stand up and fight for their beliefs amid a culture which loves to create Spirituality Lite again and again. The truth is not always pretty. The truth is not always peaceful, but the truth is always the truth, and we all have to seek it in our own ways.
Deo Gratias!
Saturday, August 18, 2012
Living The Eucharist: A Continuing Struggle
Benedicamus Domino!
In my last entry, I spoke about how a eucharistic lifestyle, if lived as fully as possible in this fallen world, would manifest itself as a kind of countercultural movement in this age of rampant individualism and competitiveness. We all seek to possess more, to one-up our fellow in some way, whether we want to admit this or not. I, for instance, have always been one to state that I am not ambitious for power or money as our world defines those things, but I'd be deluding myself if I said that I never felt jealous or envious of something that another person has. It's simply a part of who we are, and it takes a very hard struggle to overcome this need to be 'me' at all costs.
If we are to live Eucharistically, this involves first acknowledging that there is a God to whom we are grateful for our lives and everything we are. Then, we must acknowledge that He can do for us an infinitely greater amount than we can do for Him. In this acknowledgement, there must be a cognisance of our fallenness and our need for His aid, and then there must be a realization that He is always with us, and in a way, that everything we do is a holy thing, a sacrament or a mystery to be performed for His glory and in His praise. This is what Christian monastics seek to do. The Benedictines have very specific teachings on the subject, so that even the careless breaking of a dish becomes something for the monastic to be mindful of, as that dish, be it the humblest plate, ought to be treated with the greatest of care as though it were the chalice of Communion itself. It is this attitude that the monastic seeks to find amid the silences and the orderly progression of each day, and it is this, I submit, that any Christian should attempt to cultivate. It is, quite simply, a state of prayerfulness: a state in which God is thought of as always interacting with us on a real and objective level.
In all of this, there is something which runs directly counter to much of what our culture dictates for us, and that is this; as we become more prayerful, we feel less and less entitled to our own personal rights and more and more concerned with the welfare of others and of humankind as a whole. We become more communally-minded. Of course, as with anything in this life, this becoming more communally-minded may need several tries before it really gets going, but once it does, it fundamentally changes a person. There are stories of Christians who began as rich and ambitious people and ended by donating all of their money to charities and giving up the power which they previously held. Is this what every Christian needs to do? Perhaps not outwardly, but inwardly, the change must be accomplished.
The great thing about all this is that it is not all on our side to do the changing. It is true that we should be making efforts, but we have to keep in mind one of the prerequisites for living Eucharistically, and that is that God can do for us more than we can even imagine. If we simply offer Him ourselves, our flawed and world-weary selves, He will take them and transform them. The catch is that this must be a daily, an hourly, a minute-by-minute offering, because we are forever letting ourselves fall pray to that ego which I talk about so much here. We can't bust through this ego on our own, but we can learn to be more aware of its presence and try to starve it, to set it aside as much as possible, and God will be able to help us more freely if we are helping to keep the connection open, as it were.
Deo Gratias!
In my last entry, I spoke about how a eucharistic lifestyle, if lived as fully as possible in this fallen world, would manifest itself as a kind of countercultural movement in this age of rampant individualism and competitiveness. We all seek to possess more, to one-up our fellow in some way, whether we want to admit this or not. I, for instance, have always been one to state that I am not ambitious for power or money as our world defines those things, but I'd be deluding myself if I said that I never felt jealous or envious of something that another person has. It's simply a part of who we are, and it takes a very hard struggle to overcome this need to be 'me' at all costs.
If we are to live Eucharistically, this involves first acknowledging that there is a God to whom we are grateful for our lives and everything we are. Then, we must acknowledge that He can do for us an infinitely greater amount than we can do for Him. In this acknowledgement, there must be a cognisance of our fallenness and our need for His aid, and then there must be a realization that He is always with us, and in a way, that everything we do is a holy thing, a sacrament or a mystery to be performed for His glory and in His praise. This is what Christian monastics seek to do. The Benedictines have very specific teachings on the subject, so that even the careless breaking of a dish becomes something for the monastic to be mindful of, as that dish, be it the humblest plate, ought to be treated with the greatest of care as though it were the chalice of Communion itself. It is this attitude that the monastic seeks to find amid the silences and the orderly progression of each day, and it is this, I submit, that any Christian should attempt to cultivate. It is, quite simply, a state of prayerfulness: a state in which God is thought of as always interacting with us on a real and objective level.
In all of this, there is something which runs directly counter to much of what our culture dictates for us, and that is this; as we become more prayerful, we feel less and less entitled to our own personal rights and more and more concerned with the welfare of others and of humankind as a whole. We become more communally-minded. Of course, as with anything in this life, this becoming more communally-minded may need several tries before it really gets going, but once it does, it fundamentally changes a person. There are stories of Christians who began as rich and ambitious people and ended by donating all of their money to charities and giving up the power which they previously held. Is this what every Christian needs to do? Perhaps not outwardly, but inwardly, the change must be accomplished.
The great thing about all this is that it is not all on our side to do the changing. It is true that we should be making efforts, but we have to keep in mind one of the prerequisites for living Eucharistically, and that is that God can do for us more than we can even imagine. If we simply offer Him ourselves, our flawed and world-weary selves, He will take them and transform them. The catch is that this must be a daily, an hourly, a minute-by-minute offering, because we are forever letting ourselves fall pray to that ego which I talk about so much here. We can't bust through this ego on our own, but we can learn to be more aware of its presence and try to starve it, to set it aside as much as possible, and God will be able to help us more freely if we are helping to keep the connection open, as it were.
Deo Gratias!
Friday, August 17, 2012
A Eucharistic Lifestyle: The New Counterculture
Benedicamus Domino!
I've been pondering what exactly I am trying to accomplish by keeping this blog. Every now and again, it's good to think about why we're doing a given project, and this appears to be my day for taking stock. So, here's what I've come up with.
I am writing this blog as a way both to realize in my own life and to define for anyone else who may be interested what 'living for joy' and 'living a eucharistic or sacramental life is all about. One thing I've discovered over the course of this blog is that it is very difficult to live this kind of life in the cultural milieu in which I find myself, and here's the reason why.
We are a culture, we here in the west, which is built on competition and individualistic belief. We talk about searching for meaning in our own lives, but if once we come up against something which could have repercussions for us that cut across our own assumptions and beliefs, we find it difficult to find these things palatable. I mean, when I was a Pagan, I really was free to believe anything I wanted, because dogma is not a huge part of that collection of beliefs, practices and traditions the way it is with faiths such as Christianity. However, when I realized that I needed to become a Christian again, a part of me was--well--almost disappointed in myself. A part of me felt that I was taking a step backward, was retreating into what I perceived then as my culture's expectations of me. In short, when I was a Pagan, this part of me felt that I was bucking certain cultural trends, but when I realized in a deep part of myself that I had to become a Christian again, this same part of me was afraid that I was simply bowing to some mass hegemony of will by leaving Paganism behind.
However, as I really looked at Christianity's place in our culture, I realized that the path I had moved to was just as much a kind of counterculture as Paganism can be perceived to be. While I concede that much of our culture owes a lot to the Judeo-Christian morality that we have inherited, I submit that this is about all that it gets from faiths such as Christianity. Whatever is left of Christianity as it is generally seen in our culture is not so much. A lot of our history and beliefs have slowly been eroded by secular thought, unless we're willing to learn about the fullness of our beliefs through the centuries and to begin to embrace them again, and you know? I'm not even talking about Orthodox Christianity here. I'm talking about any Christian confession. I think it's very important for us as Christians to know the roots of our beliefs, to acknowledge fully how our brand of Christianity seeks to shape us and what it has done over the years of its existence.
The two extremes that I see currently going on in popular Christianity both have to do with us trying to make it fit into this culture. One is that God becomes all warm and fuzzy, a non-descript entity whose sole purpose in life seems to be to give us whatever we pray for, or else He becomes the embodiment of our morality. God is a vending machine for healing, miracles, even money, or else He is nothing but a banner under which we march while we are helping to improve society! This doesn't cut it for me in the least. The other extreme is that God is unpredictable, quick to anger and to cast people into Hell, and that only by believing in Christ will we be able to dare to approach God without being killed. Somehow, belief in Christ is some sort of a password to allow God to forgo His default response of casting humanity body and soul into some eternal punishment.
The common thread in these extremes is a depersonalization of God, and in my opinion, this is more insidious than any kind of Deistic or Atheistic thought. God as a vending machine turns prayer into a very mechanical process, whereas God as a vengeful horror for whom belief in Christ is some sort of appeasement causes us to view ourselves as forever being in danger of His terrible wrath.
Now, the truly problematic thing with these two extremes is that they mix truth with exaggeration. God should not be thought of as a big mush-ball with only the power to be 'nice' all the time, because if God is a personal God, then He is actually a perceiving being who will react to events as He sees them. So, a default response is hard to predict, and in this sense, we can see God as unpredictable, but should this mean that we should see Him as being capricious and quick to anger? Well, this would make God little more than a fallen human being, and if we believe that He is omnipotent and omnipresent in some way, then it stands to reason that His modes of perception are much different than ours.
So, where does this leave me and the part of me which was reluctant, and sometimes still is reluctant, to fully embrace the type of Christianity which is mine? The fact is that I carry a bit of our current culture inside of me, and to fully embrace Orthodox Christianity does involve calling into question certain assumptions that our culture makes about life. The interesting thing is that once I do call those things into question, I realize that I really do believe and have always believed the things which my church teaches about human nature and the nature of life here on earth. Does this mean that I am at peace with all of it? No. I will likely always question, but if I'm going to live a Christian life, it has less to do with being 'good' or 'nice' than it does with confronting the parts of the self that are not so good and acknowledging them as ours and then trying to move away from them, while asking for God's help. Individualism is one of those parts. I mean, yes, we are unique people, but must we step on each other to get places in life? Christianity would say no, but our culture is fundamentally based on possession and competition. So, this means then that Christianity should, in fact, function as a kind of counterculture, and in fact, this is true of Christianity down through the centuries. Even in purportedly Christian countries, there have always been a few who have embraced their faith to such an extent that it worried the established culture. The tricky part, however, is to simply embrace Christianity for itself, and not for some perceived political agenda which we seem to find within it. As far as I can determine, Christianity is a faith which deals with political things in a very interesting way. For one thing, it is taught that authority is set over us as a way to prevent total chaos, so that even a tyrant can be said to be given his power by God's providence. This doesn't necessarily equal the Divine Right of Kings, but there is a notion that we should respect authority for its own sake. So, hierarchy still exists. However, we know that Christians have always practiced charity and kindness to those less fortunate than themselves, and that the faith itself cares not for class or gender or race. Christ was a little bit anti-establishment, or He was perceived to be that way by said establishment. However, if we look at what He did as it's presented in The Bible, we find that He generally upheld the Jewish law, while mixing it with common sense. Every culture has people like the Pharisees of Christ's time, those who will uphold every little point in a given law but are actually engendering fear, mistrust and hate by doing this. Christ was all about overturning some hierarchies, but He was not about anarchy. So, it's better for us to take Him for what He seems to be, rather than to slap a political framework onto him and to call him a socialist or an elitist or a capitalist.
I have more thoughts on this, but I think I'll wait until tomorrow to discuss them. Till then!
Deo Gratias!
I've been pondering what exactly I am trying to accomplish by keeping this blog. Every now and again, it's good to think about why we're doing a given project, and this appears to be my day for taking stock. So, here's what I've come up with.
I am writing this blog as a way both to realize in my own life and to define for anyone else who may be interested what 'living for joy' and 'living a eucharistic or sacramental life is all about. One thing I've discovered over the course of this blog is that it is very difficult to live this kind of life in the cultural milieu in which I find myself, and here's the reason why.
We are a culture, we here in the west, which is built on competition and individualistic belief. We talk about searching for meaning in our own lives, but if once we come up against something which could have repercussions for us that cut across our own assumptions and beliefs, we find it difficult to find these things palatable. I mean, when I was a Pagan, I really was free to believe anything I wanted, because dogma is not a huge part of that collection of beliefs, practices and traditions the way it is with faiths such as Christianity. However, when I realized that I needed to become a Christian again, a part of me was--well--almost disappointed in myself. A part of me felt that I was taking a step backward, was retreating into what I perceived then as my culture's expectations of me. In short, when I was a Pagan, this part of me felt that I was bucking certain cultural trends, but when I realized in a deep part of myself that I had to become a Christian again, this same part of me was afraid that I was simply bowing to some mass hegemony of will by leaving Paganism behind.
However, as I really looked at Christianity's place in our culture, I realized that the path I had moved to was just as much a kind of counterculture as Paganism can be perceived to be. While I concede that much of our culture owes a lot to the Judeo-Christian morality that we have inherited, I submit that this is about all that it gets from faiths such as Christianity. Whatever is left of Christianity as it is generally seen in our culture is not so much. A lot of our history and beliefs have slowly been eroded by secular thought, unless we're willing to learn about the fullness of our beliefs through the centuries and to begin to embrace them again, and you know? I'm not even talking about Orthodox Christianity here. I'm talking about any Christian confession. I think it's very important for us as Christians to know the roots of our beliefs, to acknowledge fully how our brand of Christianity seeks to shape us and what it has done over the years of its existence.
The two extremes that I see currently going on in popular Christianity both have to do with us trying to make it fit into this culture. One is that God becomes all warm and fuzzy, a non-descript entity whose sole purpose in life seems to be to give us whatever we pray for, or else He becomes the embodiment of our morality. God is a vending machine for healing, miracles, even money, or else He is nothing but a banner under which we march while we are helping to improve society! This doesn't cut it for me in the least. The other extreme is that God is unpredictable, quick to anger and to cast people into Hell, and that only by believing in Christ will we be able to dare to approach God without being killed. Somehow, belief in Christ is some sort of a password to allow God to forgo His default response of casting humanity body and soul into some eternal punishment.
The common thread in these extremes is a depersonalization of God, and in my opinion, this is more insidious than any kind of Deistic or Atheistic thought. God as a vending machine turns prayer into a very mechanical process, whereas God as a vengeful horror for whom belief in Christ is some sort of appeasement causes us to view ourselves as forever being in danger of His terrible wrath.
Now, the truly problematic thing with these two extremes is that they mix truth with exaggeration. God should not be thought of as a big mush-ball with only the power to be 'nice' all the time, because if God is a personal God, then He is actually a perceiving being who will react to events as He sees them. So, a default response is hard to predict, and in this sense, we can see God as unpredictable, but should this mean that we should see Him as being capricious and quick to anger? Well, this would make God little more than a fallen human being, and if we believe that He is omnipotent and omnipresent in some way, then it stands to reason that His modes of perception are much different than ours.
So, where does this leave me and the part of me which was reluctant, and sometimes still is reluctant, to fully embrace the type of Christianity which is mine? The fact is that I carry a bit of our current culture inside of me, and to fully embrace Orthodox Christianity does involve calling into question certain assumptions that our culture makes about life. The interesting thing is that once I do call those things into question, I realize that I really do believe and have always believed the things which my church teaches about human nature and the nature of life here on earth. Does this mean that I am at peace with all of it? No. I will likely always question, but if I'm going to live a Christian life, it has less to do with being 'good' or 'nice' than it does with confronting the parts of the self that are not so good and acknowledging them as ours and then trying to move away from them, while asking for God's help. Individualism is one of those parts. I mean, yes, we are unique people, but must we step on each other to get places in life? Christianity would say no, but our culture is fundamentally based on possession and competition. So, this means then that Christianity should, in fact, function as a kind of counterculture, and in fact, this is true of Christianity down through the centuries. Even in purportedly Christian countries, there have always been a few who have embraced their faith to such an extent that it worried the established culture. The tricky part, however, is to simply embrace Christianity for itself, and not for some perceived political agenda which we seem to find within it. As far as I can determine, Christianity is a faith which deals with political things in a very interesting way. For one thing, it is taught that authority is set over us as a way to prevent total chaos, so that even a tyrant can be said to be given his power by God's providence. This doesn't necessarily equal the Divine Right of Kings, but there is a notion that we should respect authority for its own sake. So, hierarchy still exists. However, we know that Christians have always practiced charity and kindness to those less fortunate than themselves, and that the faith itself cares not for class or gender or race. Christ was a little bit anti-establishment, or He was perceived to be that way by said establishment. However, if we look at what He did as it's presented in The Bible, we find that He generally upheld the Jewish law, while mixing it with common sense. Every culture has people like the Pharisees of Christ's time, those who will uphold every little point in a given law but are actually engendering fear, mistrust and hate by doing this. Christ was all about overturning some hierarchies, but He was not about anarchy. So, it's better for us to take Him for what He seems to be, rather than to slap a political framework onto him and to call him a socialist or an elitist or a capitalist.
I have more thoughts on this, but I think I'll wait until tomorrow to discuss them. Till then!
Deo Gratias!
Thursday, August 16, 2012
More on Love
Benedicamus Domino!
As discussed previously, human love should never be thought of as the be-all and end-all of fulfillment, because it is very difficult for us to love disinterestedly--that is, to love without some kind of selfish, or egoish motive. Even the best of us seeks something in return, or this is my experience. This in itself need not be a bad thing, but if the one that we love does not somehow measure up to what we feel that we are owed, then that's where the trouble begins.
Alright then, so what is supposed to fulfill us? Why do we desire to be fulfilled, and why do we seem, perhaps especially today, to feel a sense of incompleteness in our lives? Well, I believe that it's because something is missing. We aren't fully human in our current state. God, and I'm not qualifying this word as being a metaphor or a force or anything else, created us to be more than we currently are, so it is natural that we would desire to better ourselves. However, because we have these pesky little egos ruling us, what was once a desire to grow along with God's guidance has become a desire to set ourselves against God and to become little captains of our own ships. I only say this out of experience. It is very difficult for me to trust a human being enough to let them choose something for me, and as for God, well, it is an ongoing struggle.
However, what God wishes for his creatures is to become like Him, to be healed of our wounds and to live in union with Him and with each other. This is no mere pretty notion. Union does not involve some political alliance. Union is deeper than this. The church teaches that we should strive to know God as a man knows his wife--I mean in the biblical sense. Christ didn't die and rise again so we could have a ticket to Heaven or so that we could be granted miraculous powers. He died and rose again so that we could learn to see ourselves aright and move beyond the distorted and misshapen egos which are the little puppets that we call ourselves. This isn't an easy journey, but real love isn't about making things easy. It's about doing what is needful and in the best interest of the person who is loved. Real and unclouded love can burn like the sun or be as soft as a moth's wing, but it is uncompromising. It will fight and it will dare, and yet it will not compell. Real love demands the freedom of choice of the one being loved. We must choose to love and to allow ourselves to be loved. This goes for human interactions as well as those between us and God.
Marriage, the church teaches, is akin to martyrdom. This sounds like a silly joke, but it's not. When you marry someone, you are binding yourself to that person. You are saying to each other that you will be partners in each other's journey towards salvation. This need not mean that one partner should stay if another partner is being abusive, but it does mean that the choice has been made consciously by two people to enter into this union. You know, the church takes a lot of flack for the "wives, submit yourselves unto your husbands" bit in Paul's writings, but there's another part of this little marrital equasion, to wit: "Husbands, love your wives as Christ loves the church." And how does Christ love the church? How does Christ love all men? First, He became incarnate as a man. He, the Logos of God, became bound into a human body. Then, He did a lot of good works and miracles. Then, He submitted Himself to ignominy and shame and allowed Himself to be put to death. This was no mere sacrifice or atonement offering, but something much greater. He showed us how to kill our ego, and to let Him help us to unearth our true self.
How does this translate into marriage? Well, while the wives are busy submitting unto their husbands, the husbands are supposed to actually 'man up' and be there for their wives. The husbands are supposed to stand by their wives, to support them, to humble themselves as well, so it's a mutual humbling, a mutual offering of each other to each other in a very eucharistic sort of way! This may not mean hearts and flowers all the time, but it should mean devotion to each other's welfare and a willingness to go the distance to see that the other's needs are met. Of course, seeing as we are fallen humans who are struggling with our egos, this will also mean a lot of falling and getting up again, but if pride can be kept to a minimum, then love will find its way through into a good and abiding marriage.
So that is my discussion of love. Who knows what tomorrow will bring?
Deo Gratias!
As discussed previously, human love should never be thought of as the be-all and end-all of fulfillment, because it is very difficult for us to love disinterestedly--that is, to love without some kind of selfish, or egoish motive. Even the best of us seeks something in return, or this is my experience. This in itself need not be a bad thing, but if the one that we love does not somehow measure up to what we feel that we are owed, then that's where the trouble begins.
Alright then, so what is supposed to fulfill us? Why do we desire to be fulfilled, and why do we seem, perhaps especially today, to feel a sense of incompleteness in our lives? Well, I believe that it's because something is missing. We aren't fully human in our current state. God, and I'm not qualifying this word as being a metaphor or a force or anything else, created us to be more than we currently are, so it is natural that we would desire to better ourselves. However, because we have these pesky little egos ruling us, what was once a desire to grow along with God's guidance has become a desire to set ourselves against God and to become little captains of our own ships. I only say this out of experience. It is very difficult for me to trust a human being enough to let them choose something for me, and as for God, well, it is an ongoing struggle.
However, what God wishes for his creatures is to become like Him, to be healed of our wounds and to live in union with Him and with each other. This is no mere pretty notion. Union does not involve some political alliance. Union is deeper than this. The church teaches that we should strive to know God as a man knows his wife--I mean in the biblical sense. Christ didn't die and rise again so we could have a ticket to Heaven or so that we could be granted miraculous powers. He died and rose again so that we could learn to see ourselves aright and move beyond the distorted and misshapen egos which are the little puppets that we call ourselves. This isn't an easy journey, but real love isn't about making things easy. It's about doing what is needful and in the best interest of the person who is loved. Real and unclouded love can burn like the sun or be as soft as a moth's wing, but it is uncompromising. It will fight and it will dare, and yet it will not compell. Real love demands the freedom of choice of the one being loved. We must choose to love and to allow ourselves to be loved. This goes for human interactions as well as those between us and God.
Marriage, the church teaches, is akin to martyrdom. This sounds like a silly joke, but it's not. When you marry someone, you are binding yourself to that person. You are saying to each other that you will be partners in each other's journey towards salvation. This need not mean that one partner should stay if another partner is being abusive, but it does mean that the choice has been made consciously by two people to enter into this union. You know, the church takes a lot of flack for the "wives, submit yourselves unto your husbands" bit in Paul's writings, but there's another part of this little marrital equasion, to wit: "Husbands, love your wives as Christ loves the church." And how does Christ love the church? How does Christ love all men? First, He became incarnate as a man. He, the Logos of God, became bound into a human body. Then, He did a lot of good works and miracles. Then, He submitted Himself to ignominy and shame and allowed Himself to be put to death. This was no mere sacrifice or atonement offering, but something much greater. He showed us how to kill our ego, and to let Him help us to unearth our true self.
How does this translate into marriage? Well, while the wives are busy submitting unto their husbands, the husbands are supposed to actually 'man up' and be there for their wives. The husbands are supposed to stand by their wives, to support them, to humble themselves as well, so it's a mutual humbling, a mutual offering of each other to each other in a very eucharistic sort of way! This may not mean hearts and flowers all the time, but it should mean devotion to each other's welfare and a willingness to go the distance to see that the other's needs are met. Of course, seeing as we are fallen humans who are struggling with our egos, this will also mean a lot of falling and getting up again, but if pride can be kept to a minimum, then love will find its way through into a good and abiding marriage.
So that is my discussion of love. Who knows what tomorrow will bring?
Deo Gratias!
Wednesday, August 15, 2012
To Love and Be Loved
Benedicamus Domino!
To love and to be loved are two of the things which most of us count as being truly fulfilling, I think. Whether we have the perfect job or the perfect house, this tends to be less important than developing loving relationships in life. This may not be true for all people, but I'd say that in my experience, the vast majority of people really do seek something lasting and meaningful in their lives which involves other people. By 'love,' I mean any kind of love: platonic, romantic, filial or spiritual.
So, why do so many of us feel alone and isolated from this magical thing called love? What is it that blocks our way to this fulfillment? First, I really believe that our western culture has gotten things grossly incorrect in its current definition of love. It states that love should be unconditional, which is technically correct, but it also seems to state that love is all about the receiving and not so much about the giving. It states that we ought to 'love ourselves,' which tends to amount to telling ourselves exactly what we want to hear. It is even beginning to state, however slow these beginnings are, that intimate/romantic human love should be the most complete thing we could ask for, so that if one partner doesn't fulfill us, we should go and find others that will.
Love is a very special thing, but it is not a noun, but rather a verb. It is a continual giving and receiving, and human love is not necessarily about total and complete fulfillment. I believe that there should be a very deep communion available to two intimate partners, but to expect another person to be your all-in-all is really quite unfair to the other person. By the same token, I feel that to create a complete experience of love by having relationships with more than one person is, well, sort of like trying to eat everything at a buffet. You end up sampling rather than savouring.
So then, what is love? Love is hard freaking work! Love is sticking by someone even if you can't support the choices they've made. Love is about the person, not about their actions. Love is having the courage to tell the other person something that you know they do not want to hear and that might make them angry with you. Love is sacrifice and love is sympathy. Love, sometimes, is even leaving. Sometimes it's necessary for a loving person to leave someone's life in order for that someone to learn to stand on their own. Love, in short, is not so much about possessive fulfillment, but it is about acknowledging a bond between yourself and another person through good times and through bad, through hot times and through cold.
I have been speaking here about human love. We are called by God to love our neighbour. What does this mean? It means that we are to be charitable to anyone we meet around us, and though this may begin with deeds, it should eventually progress to thoughts and attitude. We all have biases and prejudices, but these are usually the result of fear or misunderstanding. If we really see everyone around us as unique persons, and this can take a lot of work, then we will be able to love them just as we would ourselves.
So why do we feel incomplete, if it's not up to others to fulfill our deepest desires? Where do we turn if the popular idea of a 'soulmate' is not to be the answer to all our needs? That is a subject, I think, for another discussion. Till then!
Deo Gratias!
To love and to be loved are two of the things which most of us count as being truly fulfilling, I think. Whether we have the perfect job or the perfect house, this tends to be less important than developing loving relationships in life. This may not be true for all people, but I'd say that in my experience, the vast majority of people really do seek something lasting and meaningful in their lives which involves other people. By 'love,' I mean any kind of love: platonic, romantic, filial or spiritual.
So, why do so many of us feel alone and isolated from this magical thing called love? What is it that blocks our way to this fulfillment? First, I really believe that our western culture has gotten things grossly incorrect in its current definition of love. It states that love should be unconditional, which is technically correct, but it also seems to state that love is all about the receiving and not so much about the giving. It states that we ought to 'love ourselves,' which tends to amount to telling ourselves exactly what we want to hear. It is even beginning to state, however slow these beginnings are, that intimate/romantic human love should be the most complete thing we could ask for, so that if one partner doesn't fulfill us, we should go and find others that will.
Love is a very special thing, but it is not a noun, but rather a verb. It is a continual giving and receiving, and human love is not necessarily about total and complete fulfillment. I believe that there should be a very deep communion available to two intimate partners, but to expect another person to be your all-in-all is really quite unfair to the other person. By the same token, I feel that to create a complete experience of love by having relationships with more than one person is, well, sort of like trying to eat everything at a buffet. You end up sampling rather than savouring.
So then, what is love? Love is hard freaking work! Love is sticking by someone even if you can't support the choices they've made. Love is about the person, not about their actions. Love is having the courage to tell the other person something that you know they do not want to hear and that might make them angry with you. Love is sacrifice and love is sympathy. Love, sometimes, is even leaving. Sometimes it's necessary for a loving person to leave someone's life in order for that someone to learn to stand on their own. Love, in short, is not so much about possessive fulfillment, but it is about acknowledging a bond between yourself and another person through good times and through bad, through hot times and through cold.
I have been speaking here about human love. We are called by God to love our neighbour. What does this mean? It means that we are to be charitable to anyone we meet around us, and though this may begin with deeds, it should eventually progress to thoughts and attitude. We all have biases and prejudices, but these are usually the result of fear or misunderstanding. If we really see everyone around us as unique persons, and this can take a lot of work, then we will be able to love them just as we would ourselves.
So why do we feel incomplete, if it's not up to others to fulfill our deepest desires? Where do we turn if the popular idea of a 'soulmate' is not to be the answer to all our needs? That is a subject, I think, for another discussion. Till then!
Deo Gratias!
Tuesday, August 14, 2012
More On Life and Death
Benedicamus Domino!
Yesterday, I spoke about the differences between how I view death currently as a Christian and how I viewed it as a Pagan. As I stated then, I developed a fascination with the question of whether there is life after death relatively early in my life. This was coupled with a fascination with psychic phenomena and other paranormal things, and to speak the truth, I am still fascinated with all of this stuff to some extent. Are there other senses available to us than the usual five? Does the unseen world of spiritual things ever impinge upon our visible and tangible world? In Christian belief, the answer to both of these questions is a resounding "yes."
We believe that there is a mode of perception by which we can come to know God, and that this is a kind of spiritual sight. This kind of spiritual sight is a function of what is termed in Greek the 'nous' and is sometimes translated into English as 'the spiritual eye' or 'the intellect.' Another function of this noetic vision is to perceive the existence of unseen spirits in and around us: angels and demons generally.
So, if we all have this inner sight, then why are we not regularly able to perceive God's presence or the fact that we have guardian angels with us? Well, when man fell, our senses were scattered and isolated, and the 'nous' sort of fell asleep. I personally believe that there are some people born with a more awakened 'nous' than others, but this is just my own opinion. So, a part of our journey toward God is to clear away all the junk that gets in the way of the 'nous' and to allow it, little by little, to emerge. And what is the junk that gets in the way? Say it with me: the ego and its passions! Only a peaceful heart can access the 'nous,' and that can only come through a life of prayer and repentance. I do believe that in some people, the 'nous' functions beyond their control, but again, this is my own opinion.
So what does all this have to do with the question of life and death? Well, I believe that the 'nous' is the means of perception which is a part of the soul. However, it is intimately connected to the body while the body is alive, and so the body after death cannot simply be treated as a shell. In many cultures, the body is burned or drowned or buried, but it is perceived now as an empty husk which will never be anything but food for other life on earth.
We see it differently. For us, the body is indeed dead. In fact, many of the hymns of an Orthodox funeral have to do with the transience of life and the fact that the body is dead and will decay. In the East, there is a custom of reverencing the body by kissing it, since it is an icon of Christ, and some bodies of the saints are preserved as holy relics. However, there is no doubt that death is a real thing, a real thing that happens to a given body. Of course, as we discussed yesterday, this isn't the end of the story.
The truth of the matter is that for Christians, death, while being seen in all its reality, is not viewed as being a natural thing for humans as God created us. It only came as a result of the fall, in order that there might be a limit to how far we could fall. Still, we say that Christ came to abolish death and to herald the universal resurrection at the end of all things. So, while the death of the body is focused on during the funeral, there is also great hope for the soul. Prayers for its rest are offered, but there is always an eye to the new resurrection which will happen, in which corruption will put on incorruption, and mortal will put on immortality.
The idea of death not being a natural state for man came home to me once when I told a friend of mine, herself a Christian while I was not, that it seemed to me as though my fiance had died too soon. I expected her to say something about it being God's will, that the Lord would have taken him in His own good time, but instead, she said the last thing I would have expected: "Well, this is a fallen world, after all." In short, she acknowledged the imperfectness of the situation, and it was then that I realized that there was more to Christianity than what I had originally thought. It was a long time before I found myself being led back to Christ again, but I believe that that small comment was a seed planted in my soul.
So, what does all this have to do with a journey toward joy? Well, the fact is that 'joy,' as I've described it in this journal, is the fulfillment that comes with a communion with God, and while this can happen during this life, it becomes even more intimate after death, and even more dynamic in the renewal of creation which I believe will happen. So, joy is not mere happiness. This tends to depart rather quickly in life. Joy is something more abiding, and it goes beyond emotion. It is a kind of inner singing, a kind of certainty which is in the blood, the bone and the soul. I can say that I have experienced it, but only in very fleeting moments. However, I know that this is what will fulfill me, so I am continuing my journey for as long as I am granted to live upon this earth.
Deo Gratias!
Yesterday, I spoke about the differences between how I view death currently as a Christian and how I viewed it as a Pagan. As I stated then, I developed a fascination with the question of whether there is life after death relatively early in my life. This was coupled with a fascination with psychic phenomena and other paranormal things, and to speak the truth, I am still fascinated with all of this stuff to some extent. Are there other senses available to us than the usual five? Does the unseen world of spiritual things ever impinge upon our visible and tangible world? In Christian belief, the answer to both of these questions is a resounding "yes."
We believe that there is a mode of perception by which we can come to know God, and that this is a kind of spiritual sight. This kind of spiritual sight is a function of what is termed in Greek the 'nous' and is sometimes translated into English as 'the spiritual eye' or 'the intellect.' Another function of this noetic vision is to perceive the existence of unseen spirits in and around us: angels and demons generally.
So, if we all have this inner sight, then why are we not regularly able to perceive God's presence or the fact that we have guardian angels with us? Well, when man fell, our senses were scattered and isolated, and the 'nous' sort of fell asleep. I personally believe that there are some people born with a more awakened 'nous' than others, but this is just my own opinion. So, a part of our journey toward God is to clear away all the junk that gets in the way of the 'nous' and to allow it, little by little, to emerge. And what is the junk that gets in the way? Say it with me: the ego and its passions! Only a peaceful heart can access the 'nous,' and that can only come through a life of prayer and repentance. I do believe that in some people, the 'nous' functions beyond their control, but again, this is my own opinion.
So what does all this have to do with the question of life and death? Well, I believe that the 'nous' is the means of perception which is a part of the soul. However, it is intimately connected to the body while the body is alive, and so the body after death cannot simply be treated as a shell. In many cultures, the body is burned or drowned or buried, but it is perceived now as an empty husk which will never be anything but food for other life on earth.
We see it differently. For us, the body is indeed dead. In fact, many of the hymns of an Orthodox funeral have to do with the transience of life and the fact that the body is dead and will decay. In the East, there is a custom of reverencing the body by kissing it, since it is an icon of Christ, and some bodies of the saints are preserved as holy relics. However, there is no doubt that death is a real thing, a real thing that happens to a given body. Of course, as we discussed yesterday, this isn't the end of the story.
The truth of the matter is that for Christians, death, while being seen in all its reality, is not viewed as being a natural thing for humans as God created us. It only came as a result of the fall, in order that there might be a limit to how far we could fall. Still, we say that Christ came to abolish death and to herald the universal resurrection at the end of all things. So, while the death of the body is focused on during the funeral, there is also great hope for the soul. Prayers for its rest are offered, but there is always an eye to the new resurrection which will happen, in which corruption will put on incorruption, and mortal will put on immortality.
The idea of death not being a natural state for man came home to me once when I told a friend of mine, herself a Christian while I was not, that it seemed to me as though my fiance had died too soon. I expected her to say something about it being God's will, that the Lord would have taken him in His own good time, but instead, she said the last thing I would have expected: "Well, this is a fallen world, after all." In short, she acknowledged the imperfectness of the situation, and it was then that I realized that there was more to Christianity than what I had originally thought. It was a long time before I found myself being led back to Christ again, but I believe that that small comment was a seed planted in my soul.
So, what does all this have to do with a journey toward joy? Well, the fact is that 'joy,' as I've described it in this journal, is the fulfillment that comes with a communion with God, and while this can happen during this life, it becomes even more intimate after death, and even more dynamic in the renewal of creation which I believe will happen. So, joy is not mere happiness. This tends to depart rather quickly in life. Joy is something more abiding, and it goes beyond emotion. It is a kind of inner singing, a kind of certainty which is in the blood, the bone and the soul. I can say that I have experienced it, but only in very fleeting moments. However, I know that this is what will fulfill me, so I am continuing my journey for as long as I am granted to live upon this earth.
Deo Gratias!
Monday, August 13, 2012
Life and Death
Benedicamus Domino!
Well, it seems that I'm getting rather ambitious in these little discussions. I hope that my head's not getting too big for my hat, but I found yet another text upon which I feel the need to voice my opinion. The interesting thing is that I actually have had, in my lifetime, two differing opinions about the gyst of this message, and it is these divergent views that I wish to share. Here, first of all, is the text in question.
If I had read this text about ten years ago, I would have positively reveled in its beauty. I would have found it to encapsulate a lot of my beliefs about death and dying as they were then, and as I was going through the loss of a loved one at that time, it would have comforted me very much. I recall when I first learned the rule that energy can never be created nor destroyed, but only changed. It was in a Grade Eight science class, and I found the concept utterly fascinating. However, even then, I was thinking about it in more of a metaphysical way than I'm sure my teacher meant me to. I remember thinking that this was proof that death is not the end. This, at last, was proof of what I longed to know more about: ESP, ghosts, spirits and the like. If energy could never be destroyed but only changed, I thought, then maybe our life-energy was something more coherent than mere electricity, and maybe we had something which many people liked to call a soul.
I think I expressed this differently at this young an age, but I did think about it. At this time, I would describe myself as little more than a glorified Pagan with vague monotheistic leanings. I said that I was a Christian, but I didn't have the first idea about what that really meant. However, here was this lovely concept about the perpetuation of energy which made me feel that something must be keeping the universe going.
Well, let's return to ten years ago. If the piece above had been around at that time, I would have found it wonderfully moving and comforting, because ten years ago, I was truly a Pagan and my notions of the immortality of the soul were, I think, platonist at best. I had some ideas about what happened after death, reincarnation being a part of the whole process, so to read this piece would have been exactly like that day in my Eighth Grade science class; it would have confirmed my thinking.
Now, what really happened in the order of events was this. I read this piece last week, and I found myself seeing it with a kind of double-vision. I do this a lot, actually, contrasting how I as a Pagan would have viewed a given thought process as compared to how I view it now. Now, I do not find that piece in question comforting, though as I stated before, I can understand how people of a more secular turn of mind could. It takes out all the nasty bits of death which many of us learned about at our mothers' knees. It not only reduces the idea of immortality of the soul down to atomic diffusion across the universe, but it creates a very comforting idea that death has a purpose. And what is that purpose? Why, death releases our energy to continue to fuel new life. We need no longer pray for anyone's soul or speculate on where people go when they die, because where they go is everywhere. The atoms of a given human are released and then smash into other atoms to create new thermodynamic reactions which create more living creatures, or stones, or pond-scum. Take your pick!
Again, we return to yesterday's idea of Atomism. This states that we are nothing more than collections of atoms which are cohesive in our current forms for a limited amount of time and then which break up and form new bonds. For me, this idea just does not cut it. Ten years ago, it would have, and as I stated before, I can see how it could be very comforting. If death is the mere release of energy, then it is nothing to be feared or approached with awe. it is simply a change. It is, as Kalil Gibran has it, "to stand naked in the wind or to melt into the sun." But, to quote the Peggie Lee torch-song, "is that all there is?"
I admit that for me, it is difficult to say 'no' to this question, because when I do, I am forced to come to grips with the fact that death is a fearful thing, though not exactly for the mere ceasing of vital function in the body. It is fearful because of what awaits me, according to my Christian beliefs, on the other side. God will be revealed to us then, and we, as souls,, will know Him. But this is not even the end of it. There will be, we say, a universal resurrection in which we, all of humanity and all of creation itself that is, will be reintegrated into some sort of bodily life. Then will come the universal judgment, and that, so we believe, will be dreadful, because our choices in our past lives will be taken account of.
Then we come to the bit about Hell, which I've always had a problem with emotionally and intellectually, but which I know, somehow, is a true idea. however, this deserves some qualification. The word "hell" is a Norse word. it refers to the fiery roots from which the world was eventually created by the gods. "Hell," for the Norse, is sort of like the realm of Chaos as Milton depicts it in Paradise Lost:
"a dark
892: Illimitable Ocean without bound,
893: Without dimension, where length, breadth, and highth,
894: And time and place are lost; where eldest Night
895: And CHAOS, Ancestors of Nature, hold
896: Eternal ANARCHIE, amidst the noise
897: Of endless warrs and by confusion stand.
898: For hot, cold, moist, and dry, four Champions fierce
899: Strive here for Maistrie, and to Battel bring
900: Thir embryon Atoms; they around the flag
901: Of each his faction, in thir several Clanns,
902: Light-arm'd or heavy, sharp, smooth, swift or slow,
903: Swarm populous, unnumber'd as the Sands
904: Of BARCA or CYRENE'S torrid soil,
905: Levied to side with warring Winds, and poise
906: Thir lighter wings."
Now, this picture of nature gone mad or fire unquenchable is really hard to take for the modern mind. Still, if we remember back to yesterday's discussion, we will remember that God does not permit our acts to go without consequence. As man fell, so fell the world, we believe, because we were created to be its rulers, but became instead, almost its slaves. So, what about our meeting with God? Will our lives go unnoticed by Him? We believe not. Those who have found their ways towards God and away from their little selves will find God to be familiar to them, if terrible. Those who have remained inside of their little selves will confine themselves in darkness and deafness to God's call as they did in life.
So, does Hell really exist? I believe that it does. Is it a lake of fire and brimstone? I really don't know, but I personally believe that we create our own little hells both in life and after death. We choose to isolate ourselves. We choose to be trapped in our own minds.
Do I have an understanding of who will be going to Hell? No. I can never say that definitively, because salvation is a lifelong process, and if God is a personal God, as Christians believe, than I cannot but think that the dynamism of the relationship between God and man continues after this life is done.
Do I know that I will be going to Heaven because I'm a Christian? No. I do not believe in "blessed assurance," as such. Will a non-Christian go to Hell by the very fact of his or her being a non-Christian? God forbid that I should ever say a difinitive 'yes' to that! The truth is that we do not know till we go, as it were. We really don't know what will await us till we get there. Still, I can't help believing that it will be an adventure! Our personhood just can't be reduced to a bunch of atoms. We have to be greater than the sum of our parts. at least, this is what I believe now.
So, again we come back to living a eucharistic life while we're here on earth. If we can learn to believe that our time and even ourselves are not solely our own, but are gifts from God, then this is a good place for us to start to escape our egos, to throw off 'the old man,' as we call the fallen self, and to embrace what needs to be done to be born again anew in Christ, the second Adam, the 'new man.' If joy can be tasted in this life, then it is fulfilled beyond this life. If life is brief and transitory, there is also a life that is eternal and dynamic. How, you may ask, is this different from the physicist's explanation of things?Well, there is one law upon which we have not touched with regard to energy, and this is the law or theory of entrapy, for while energy is perpetually changing, no new energy is being created and it also tends to break itself down into less coherent bits. We believe that death is more than this, and yet there is no attempt to gloss over the fact that the death of the body is a real and important thing.
This aspect of things will be discussed in tomorrow's entry. Till then!
Deo gratias!
Well, it seems that I'm getting rather ambitious in these little discussions. I hope that my head's not getting too big for my hat, but I found yet another text upon which I feel the need to voice my opinion. The interesting thing is that I actually have had, in my lifetime, two differing opinions about the gyst of this message, and it is these divergent views that I wish to share. Here, first of all, is the text in question.
“You want a physicist to speak at your funeral. You want the physicist to talk to your grieving family about the conservation of energy, so they will understand that your energy has not died. You want the physicist to remind your sobbing mother about the first law of thermodynamics; that no energy gets created in the universe, and none is destroyed. You want your mother to know that all your energy, every vibration, every BTU of heat, every wave of every particle that was her beloved child remains with her in this world. You want the physicist to tell your weeping father that amid energies of the cosmos, you gave as good as you got.
And at one point you’d hope that the physicist would step down from the pulpit and walk to your brokenhearted spouse there in the pew and tell him that all the photons that ever bounced off your face, all the particles whose paths were interrupted by your smile, by the touch of your hair, hundreds of trillions of particles, have raced off like children, their ways forever changed by you. And as your widow rocks in the arms of a loving family, may the physicist let her know that all the photons that bounced from you were gathered in the particle detectors that are her eyes, that those photons created within her constellations of electromagnetically charged neurons whose energy will go on forever.
And the physicist will remind the congregation of how much of all our energy is given off as heat. There may be a few fanning themselves with their programs as he says it. And he will tell them that the warmth that flowed through you in life is still here, still part of all that we are, even as we who mourn continue the heat of our own lives.
And you’ll want the physicist to explain to those who loved you that they need not have faith; indeed, they should not have faith. Let them know that they can measure, that scientists have measured precisely the conservation of energy and found it accurate, verifiable and consistent across space and time. You can hope your family will examine the evidence and satisfy themselves that the science is sound and that they’ll be comforted to know your energy’s still around. According to the law of the conservation of energy, not a bit of you is gone; you’re just less orderly. Amen.”
— Aaron Freeman, “You Want A Physicist To Speak at your Funeral”
If I had read this text about ten years ago, I would have positively reveled in its beauty. I would have found it to encapsulate a lot of my beliefs about death and dying as they were then, and as I was going through the loss of a loved one at that time, it would have comforted me very much. I recall when I first learned the rule that energy can never be created nor destroyed, but only changed. It was in a Grade Eight science class, and I found the concept utterly fascinating. However, even then, I was thinking about it in more of a metaphysical way than I'm sure my teacher meant me to. I remember thinking that this was proof that death is not the end. This, at last, was proof of what I longed to know more about: ESP, ghosts, spirits and the like. If energy could never be destroyed but only changed, I thought, then maybe our life-energy was something more coherent than mere electricity, and maybe we had something which many people liked to call a soul.
I think I expressed this differently at this young an age, but I did think about it. At this time, I would describe myself as little more than a glorified Pagan with vague monotheistic leanings. I said that I was a Christian, but I didn't have the first idea about what that really meant. However, here was this lovely concept about the perpetuation of energy which made me feel that something must be keeping the universe going.
Well, let's return to ten years ago. If the piece above had been around at that time, I would have found it wonderfully moving and comforting, because ten years ago, I was truly a Pagan and my notions of the immortality of the soul were, I think, platonist at best. I had some ideas about what happened after death, reincarnation being a part of the whole process, so to read this piece would have been exactly like that day in my Eighth Grade science class; it would have confirmed my thinking.
Now, what really happened in the order of events was this. I read this piece last week, and I found myself seeing it with a kind of double-vision. I do this a lot, actually, contrasting how I as a Pagan would have viewed a given thought process as compared to how I view it now. Now, I do not find that piece in question comforting, though as I stated before, I can understand how people of a more secular turn of mind could. It takes out all the nasty bits of death which many of us learned about at our mothers' knees. It not only reduces the idea of immortality of the soul down to atomic diffusion across the universe, but it creates a very comforting idea that death has a purpose. And what is that purpose? Why, death releases our energy to continue to fuel new life. We need no longer pray for anyone's soul or speculate on where people go when they die, because where they go is everywhere. The atoms of a given human are released and then smash into other atoms to create new thermodynamic reactions which create more living creatures, or stones, or pond-scum. Take your pick!
Again, we return to yesterday's idea of Atomism. This states that we are nothing more than collections of atoms which are cohesive in our current forms for a limited amount of time and then which break up and form new bonds. For me, this idea just does not cut it. Ten years ago, it would have, and as I stated before, I can see how it could be very comforting. If death is the mere release of energy, then it is nothing to be feared or approached with awe. it is simply a change. It is, as Kalil Gibran has it, "to stand naked in the wind or to melt into the sun." But, to quote the Peggie Lee torch-song, "is that all there is?"
I admit that for me, it is difficult to say 'no' to this question, because when I do, I am forced to come to grips with the fact that death is a fearful thing, though not exactly for the mere ceasing of vital function in the body. It is fearful because of what awaits me, according to my Christian beliefs, on the other side. God will be revealed to us then, and we, as souls,, will know Him. But this is not even the end of it. There will be, we say, a universal resurrection in which we, all of humanity and all of creation itself that is, will be reintegrated into some sort of bodily life. Then will come the universal judgment, and that, so we believe, will be dreadful, because our choices in our past lives will be taken account of.
Then we come to the bit about Hell, which I've always had a problem with emotionally and intellectually, but which I know, somehow, is a true idea. however, this deserves some qualification. The word "hell" is a Norse word. it refers to the fiery roots from which the world was eventually created by the gods. "Hell," for the Norse, is sort of like the realm of Chaos as Milton depicts it in Paradise Lost:
"a dark
892: Illimitable Ocean without bound,
893: Without dimension, where length, breadth, and highth,
894: And time and place are lost; where eldest Night
895: And CHAOS, Ancestors of Nature, hold
896: Eternal ANARCHIE, amidst the noise
897: Of endless warrs and by confusion stand.
898: For hot, cold, moist, and dry, four Champions fierce
899: Strive here for Maistrie, and to Battel bring
900: Thir embryon Atoms; they around the flag
901: Of each his faction, in thir several Clanns,
902: Light-arm'd or heavy, sharp, smooth, swift or slow,
903: Swarm populous, unnumber'd as the Sands
904: Of BARCA or CYRENE'S torrid soil,
905: Levied to side with warring Winds, and poise
906: Thir lighter wings."
Now, this picture of nature gone mad or fire unquenchable is really hard to take for the modern mind. Still, if we remember back to yesterday's discussion, we will remember that God does not permit our acts to go without consequence. As man fell, so fell the world, we believe, because we were created to be its rulers, but became instead, almost its slaves. So, what about our meeting with God? Will our lives go unnoticed by Him? We believe not. Those who have found their ways towards God and away from their little selves will find God to be familiar to them, if terrible. Those who have remained inside of their little selves will confine themselves in darkness and deafness to God's call as they did in life.
So, does Hell really exist? I believe that it does. Is it a lake of fire and brimstone? I really don't know, but I personally believe that we create our own little hells both in life and after death. We choose to isolate ourselves. We choose to be trapped in our own minds.
Do I have an understanding of who will be going to Hell? No. I can never say that definitively, because salvation is a lifelong process, and if God is a personal God, as Christians believe, than I cannot but think that the dynamism of the relationship between God and man continues after this life is done.
Do I know that I will be going to Heaven because I'm a Christian? No. I do not believe in "blessed assurance," as such. Will a non-Christian go to Hell by the very fact of his or her being a non-Christian? God forbid that I should ever say a difinitive 'yes' to that! The truth is that we do not know till we go, as it were. We really don't know what will await us till we get there. Still, I can't help believing that it will be an adventure! Our personhood just can't be reduced to a bunch of atoms. We have to be greater than the sum of our parts. at least, this is what I believe now.
So, again we come back to living a eucharistic life while we're here on earth. If we can learn to believe that our time and even ourselves are not solely our own, but are gifts from God, then this is a good place for us to start to escape our egos, to throw off 'the old man,' as we call the fallen self, and to embrace what needs to be done to be born again anew in Christ, the second Adam, the 'new man.' If joy can be tasted in this life, then it is fulfilled beyond this life. If life is brief and transitory, there is also a life that is eternal and dynamic. How, you may ask, is this different from the physicist's explanation of things?Well, there is one law upon which we have not touched with regard to energy, and this is the law or theory of entrapy, for while energy is perpetually changing, no new energy is being created and it also tends to break itself down into less coherent bits. We believe that death is more than this, and yet there is no attempt to gloss over the fact that the death of the body is a real and important thing.
This aspect of things will be discussed in tomorrow's entry. Till then!
Deo gratias!
Sunday, August 12, 2012
Selfhood and Subjectivity Continued
Benedicamus Domino!
When last we communed, I began a discussion about what the self really is. I divided the self into two parts: the ego, which is the part of us which desires to possess and is angered when it cannot have what it wants, and the deep self, which is the part of us that is underneath the froth, the tide of soul which truly forms our unique personhood. Here is a bit of writing which reduces several thousand years of philosophizing about the self and its relation to the world around it to nothing more than a bunch of brain-waves which happened by some mere trick of chemistry to be put down on paper by a few people who were nothing more than collections of brain-cells and neurotransmitters. I think I'm stating that without bias, but judge for yourself. This was printed in The National Post.
"Exerpt from Free Will by Sam Harris
The question of free will touches nearly everything we care about. Morality, law, politics, religion, public policy, intimate relationships, feelings of guilt and personal accomplishment - most of what is distinctly human about our lives seems to depend upon our viewing one another as autonomous persons, capable of free choice. If the scientific community were to declare free will an illusion, it would precipitate a culture war far more belligerent than the one that has been waged on the subject of evolution. Without free will, sinners and criminals would be nothing more than poorly calibrated clockwork, and any conception of justice that emphasized punishing them (rather than deterring, rehabilitating, or merely containing them) would appear utterly incongruous. And those of us who work hard and follow the rules would not "deserve" our success in any deep sense. It is not an accident that most people find these conclusions abhorrent. The stakes are high.
In the early morning of July 23, 2007, Steven Hayes and Joshua Komisarjevsky, two career criminals, arrived at the home of Dr. William and Jennifer Petit in Cheshire, a quiet town in central Connecticut. They found Dr. Petit asleep on a sofa in the sunroom. According to his taped confession, Komisarjevsky stood over the sleeping man for some minutes, hesitating, before striking him in the head with a baseball bat. He claimed that his victim's screams then triggered something within him, and he bludgeoned Petit with all his strength until he fell silent.
The two then bound Petit's hands and feet and went upstairs to search the rest of the house. They discovered Jennifer Petit and her daughters --Hayley, 17, and Michaela, 11 - still asleep. They woke all three and immediately tied them to their beds.
At 7: 00 a.m., Hayes went to a gas station and bought four gallons of gasoline. At 9: 30, he drove Jennifer Petit to her bank to withdraw $15,000 in cash. The conversation between Jennifer and the bank teller suggests that she was unaware of her husband's injuries and believed that her captors would release her family unharmed.
While Hayes and the girls' mother were away, Komisarjevsky amused himself by taking naked photos of Michaela with his cell phone and masturbating on her. When Hayes returned with Jennifer, the two men divided up the money and briefly considered what they should do. They decided that Hayes should take Jennifer into the living room and rape her - which he did. He then strangled her, to the apparent surprise of his partner.
At this point, the two men noticed that William Petit had slipped his bonds and escaped. They began to panic. They quickly doused the house with gasoline and set it on fire. When asked by the police why he hadn't untied the two girls from their beds before lighting the blaze, Komisarjevsky said, "It just didn't cross my mind." The girls died of smoke inhalation. William Petit was the only survivor of the attack.
Upon hearing about crimes of this kind, most of us naturally feel that men like Hayes and Komisarjevsky should be held morally responsible for their actions. Had we been close to the Petit family, many of us would feel entirely justified in killing these monsters with our own hands. Do we care that Hayes has since shown signs of remorse and has attempted suicide? Not really.
What about the fact that Komisarjevsky was repeatedly raped as a child? According to his journals, for as long as he can remember, he has known that he was "different" from other people, psychologically damaged, and capable of great coldness. He also claims to have been stunned by his own behavior in the Petit home: He was a career burglar, not a murderer, and he had not consciously intended to kill anyone. Such details might begin to give us pause.
Whether criminals like Hayes and Komisarjevsky can be trusted to honestly report their feelings and intentions is not the point: Whatever their conscious motives, these men cannot know why they are as they are. Nor can we account for why we are not like them. As sickening as I find their behavior, I have to admit that if I were to trade places with one of these men, atom for atom, I would be him: There is no extra part of me that could decide to see the world differently or to resist the impulse to victimize other people.
Even if you believe that every human being harbours an immortal soul, the problem of responsibility remains: I cannot take credit for the fact that I do not have the soul of a psychopath. If I had truly been in Komisarjevsky's shoes on July 23, 2007 - that is, if I had his genes and life experience and an identical brain (or soul) in an identical state - I would have acted exactly as he did. There is simply no intellectually respectable position from which to deny this. The role of luck, therefore, appears decisive.
Of course, if we learned that both these men had been suffering from brain tumors that explained their violent behavior, our moral intuitions would shift dramatically. But a neurological disorder appears to be just a special case of physical events giving rise to thoughts and actions. Understanding the neurophysiology of the brain, therefore, would seem to be as exculpatory as finding a tumour in it. How can we make sense of our lives, and hold people accountable for their choices, given the unconscious origins of our conscious minds?
Free will is an illusion. Our wills are simply not of our own making. Thoughts and intentions emerge from background causes of which we are unaware and over which we exert no conscious control. We do not have the freedom we think we have.
Free will is actually more than an illusion (or less), in that it cannot be made conceptually coherent. Either our wills are determined by prior causes and we are not responsible for them, or they are the product of chance and we are not responsible for them. If a man's choice to shoot the president is determined by a certain pattern of neural activity, which is in turn the product of prior causes - perhaps an unfortunate coincidence of bad genes, an unhappy childhood, lost sleep, and cosmicray bombardment - what can it possibly mean to say that his will is "free"? No one has ever described a way in which mental and physical processes could arise that would attest to the existence of such freedom. Most illusions are made of sterner stuff than this.
The popular conception of free will seems to rest on two assumptions: (1) that each of us could have behaved differently than we did in the past, and (2) that we are the conscious source of most of our thoughts and actions in the present. Both of these assumptions are false.
But the deeper truth is that free will doesn't even correspond to any subjective fact about us - and introspection soon proves as hostile to the idea as the laws of physics are. Seeming acts of volition merely arise spontaneously (whether caused, uncaused, or probabilistically inclined, it makes no difference) and cannot be traced to a point of origin in our conscious minds.
A moment or two of serious self-scrutiny, and you might observe that you no more decide the next thought you think than the next thought I write."
So, there we have it. There's a whole book out there which claims that we as human beings are nothing more than walking brains. The 'mind,' apparently is an illusion, and free will does not exist. This is patently untrue, and very disturbing! In short, I would take the Richard Dawkins form of humanistic atheism over this guy's form any day.
As a Christian, free will means a lot to me. It is free will which is the proof that God really created us to grow and to learn. He could have created us as moving machines, but he didn't. He gave us the ability to choose, and what's more, he lets us choose and lets us live with the consequences of our actions. The Fall, we believe, occurred because of a choice made long ago, a choice made by people who lived in a deeper communion with God than fallen man is able to do. Whether an actual fruit was involved, who knows? All I do know is what I believe, and I believe that we were created as more than we are now. Our senses did not exist separately from one another, for instance, but functioned in a communion which allowed us to perceive God as being active with us in our world.
Eden is given a place on a map in The Bible, but if man had not chosen to separate himself from God, then Paradise itself would have spread out from Eden, because Paradise was able to dwell with unfallen man. Unfallen man was stronger, less dependent on the needs of the body than we are. The resurrected Christ shows us this. He could move through locked doors, but he was still in his body. I don't know of unfallen man could do anything like this, but we believe that they were somehow more than we are now.
If free will didn't count for anything in God's eyes, then man would not have fallen. God would have forgotten the transgression which basically gave birth to the ego, and would have made it as though the act had never been done. However, the fact is that once the choice was made to gratify the self first, to become all-wise if it were possible, then this ego was born, and it became a barrier to man's knowledge and perception of God. Suddenly, God was to be avoided, to be placated with justifications. From the moment they made their choice, therefore, they were weakened, and all of God's actions after that were to help them to become stronger again.
Death came to man at this time, and so did hard toil and labour, but even so, God stated that man would not always be weak. He would, in time, tread on the serpent and crush its head. We believe that Christ's coming was the fulfillment of this prophecy.
If we really followed Sam Harris's logic, then no one would ever be held to account for anything. Psychosurgery would come back into fashion, and humanity as a reasoning species would cease to exist. By his logic, we are little more than rats in a maze, being stimulated to go in certain directions by electrical impulses. This, I refuse to believe! This, I challenge and will challenge as long as I am on this earth! Nietsche believed something of this kind, or at least he believed it about 'the herd.' There were 'supermen,' he thought, who were capable of willing, but general humanity, he said, needed moral and ethical constraints to help them to get through life. Without right and wrong, he said, humanity in general would not have the capacity to make choices.
And this, really, is the crux of the matter. What is left when you take away the very thing that makes us human? What is left when God and humankind are both reduced to circuits and wires? The answer is: nothing, and yet, that's not all the answer, because nature, as science has proven, abhors a vacuum. Nietsche knew this when he wrote the following: "when you look into the abyss, the abyss looks into you." He divorced himself from all other relations both human and divine. He admitted that he himself was nothing, that the self itself was an illusion, and yet even he, in this strange state, knew that something was looking at him, some emptiness which had sentience. In short, though God for him was simply a mask for the moral imperative which guides the mass of humanity, he recognized the abyss. He recognized some sentient power to which he had lain himself open. We call that power Satan, and he speaks to us very clearly through the ego.
So, in the end, it's the ego itself that has to die. It is only the true self, the unsundered self which can be unearthed and healed by God's grace that can see through all the lies that we tell ourselves in the darkness, and this is what I'm out to find: my unique personhood and that of all others. However, selfishness does tend to prevail, so that to begin to kill it, the eucharistic life is needed. Yet, baby steps are necessary, and there will be many stumbles and falls, but the important thing is to get up again as much as possible. Christ is the doorway back into Paradise. By His death, he showed us how to die to our egos. It's not enough to be good or respectable. It's not enough to go to church all the time or even to read The Bible until we know it backwards and forwards. God wants more from us than that. He wants us to become better people, to grow and learn in this life as a preparation for a more dynamic and a deeper communion with Him later on.
And what do I mean by 'later on'? That will be discussed tomorrow.
Deo Gratias!
When last we communed, I began a discussion about what the self really is. I divided the self into two parts: the ego, which is the part of us which desires to possess and is angered when it cannot have what it wants, and the deep self, which is the part of us that is underneath the froth, the tide of soul which truly forms our unique personhood. Here is a bit of writing which reduces several thousand years of philosophizing about the self and its relation to the world around it to nothing more than a bunch of brain-waves which happened by some mere trick of chemistry to be put down on paper by a few people who were nothing more than collections of brain-cells and neurotransmitters. I think I'm stating that without bias, but judge for yourself. This was printed in The National Post.
"Exerpt from Free Will by Sam Harris
The question of free will touches nearly everything we care about. Morality, law, politics, religion, public policy, intimate relationships, feelings of guilt and personal accomplishment - most of what is distinctly human about our lives seems to depend upon our viewing one another as autonomous persons, capable of free choice. If the scientific community were to declare free will an illusion, it would precipitate a culture war far more belligerent than the one that has been waged on the subject of evolution. Without free will, sinners and criminals would be nothing more than poorly calibrated clockwork, and any conception of justice that emphasized punishing them (rather than deterring, rehabilitating, or merely containing them) would appear utterly incongruous. And those of us who work hard and follow the rules would not "deserve" our success in any deep sense. It is not an accident that most people find these conclusions abhorrent. The stakes are high.
In the early morning of July 23, 2007, Steven Hayes and Joshua Komisarjevsky, two career criminals, arrived at the home of Dr. William and Jennifer Petit in Cheshire, a quiet town in central Connecticut. They found Dr. Petit asleep on a sofa in the sunroom. According to his taped confession, Komisarjevsky stood over the sleeping man for some minutes, hesitating, before striking him in the head with a baseball bat. He claimed that his victim's screams then triggered something within him, and he bludgeoned Petit with all his strength until he fell silent.
The two then bound Petit's hands and feet and went upstairs to search the rest of the house. They discovered Jennifer Petit and her daughters --Hayley, 17, and Michaela, 11 - still asleep. They woke all three and immediately tied them to their beds.
At 7: 00 a.m., Hayes went to a gas station and bought four gallons of gasoline. At 9: 30, he drove Jennifer Petit to her bank to withdraw $15,000 in cash. The conversation between Jennifer and the bank teller suggests that she was unaware of her husband's injuries and believed that her captors would release her family unharmed.
While Hayes and the girls' mother were away, Komisarjevsky amused himself by taking naked photos of Michaela with his cell phone and masturbating on her. When Hayes returned with Jennifer, the two men divided up the money and briefly considered what they should do. They decided that Hayes should take Jennifer into the living room and rape her - which he did. He then strangled her, to the apparent surprise of his partner.
At this point, the two men noticed that William Petit had slipped his bonds and escaped. They began to panic. They quickly doused the house with gasoline and set it on fire. When asked by the police why he hadn't untied the two girls from their beds before lighting the blaze, Komisarjevsky said, "It just didn't cross my mind." The girls died of smoke inhalation. William Petit was the only survivor of the attack.
Upon hearing about crimes of this kind, most of us naturally feel that men like Hayes and Komisarjevsky should be held morally responsible for their actions. Had we been close to the Petit family, many of us would feel entirely justified in killing these monsters with our own hands. Do we care that Hayes has since shown signs of remorse and has attempted suicide? Not really.
What about the fact that Komisarjevsky was repeatedly raped as a child? According to his journals, for as long as he can remember, he has known that he was "different" from other people, psychologically damaged, and capable of great coldness. He also claims to have been stunned by his own behavior in the Petit home: He was a career burglar, not a murderer, and he had not consciously intended to kill anyone. Such details might begin to give us pause.
Whether criminals like Hayes and Komisarjevsky can be trusted to honestly report their feelings and intentions is not the point: Whatever their conscious motives, these men cannot know why they are as they are. Nor can we account for why we are not like them. As sickening as I find their behavior, I have to admit that if I were to trade places with one of these men, atom for atom, I would be him: There is no extra part of me that could decide to see the world differently or to resist the impulse to victimize other people.
Even if you believe that every human being harbours an immortal soul, the problem of responsibility remains: I cannot take credit for the fact that I do not have the soul of a psychopath. If I had truly been in Komisarjevsky's shoes on July 23, 2007 - that is, if I had his genes and life experience and an identical brain (or soul) in an identical state - I would have acted exactly as he did. There is simply no intellectually respectable position from which to deny this. The role of luck, therefore, appears decisive.
Of course, if we learned that both these men had been suffering from brain tumors that explained their violent behavior, our moral intuitions would shift dramatically. But a neurological disorder appears to be just a special case of physical events giving rise to thoughts and actions. Understanding the neurophysiology of the brain, therefore, would seem to be as exculpatory as finding a tumour in it. How can we make sense of our lives, and hold people accountable for their choices, given the unconscious origins of our conscious minds?
Free will is an illusion. Our wills are simply not of our own making. Thoughts and intentions emerge from background causes of which we are unaware and over which we exert no conscious control. We do not have the freedom we think we have.
Free will is actually more than an illusion (or less), in that it cannot be made conceptually coherent. Either our wills are determined by prior causes and we are not responsible for them, or they are the product of chance and we are not responsible for them. If a man's choice to shoot the president is determined by a certain pattern of neural activity, which is in turn the product of prior causes - perhaps an unfortunate coincidence of bad genes, an unhappy childhood, lost sleep, and cosmicray bombardment - what can it possibly mean to say that his will is "free"? No one has ever described a way in which mental and physical processes could arise that would attest to the existence of such freedom. Most illusions are made of sterner stuff than this.
The popular conception of free will seems to rest on two assumptions: (1) that each of us could have behaved differently than we did in the past, and (2) that we are the conscious source of most of our thoughts and actions in the present. Both of these assumptions are false.
But the deeper truth is that free will doesn't even correspond to any subjective fact about us - and introspection soon proves as hostile to the idea as the laws of physics are. Seeming acts of volition merely arise spontaneously (whether caused, uncaused, or probabilistically inclined, it makes no difference) and cannot be traced to a point of origin in our conscious minds.
A moment or two of serious self-scrutiny, and you might observe that you no more decide the next thought you think than the next thought I write."
So, there we have it. There's a whole book out there which claims that we as human beings are nothing more than walking brains. The 'mind,' apparently is an illusion, and free will does not exist. This is patently untrue, and very disturbing! In short, I would take the Richard Dawkins form of humanistic atheism over this guy's form any day.
As a Christian, free will means a lot to me. It is free will which is the proof that God really created us to grow and to learn. He could have created us as moving machines, but he didn't. He gave us the ability to choose, and what's more, he lets us choose and lets us live with the consequences of our actions. The Fall, we believe, occurred because of a choice made long ago, a choice made by people who lived in a deeper communion with God than fallen man is able to do. Whether an actual fruit was involved, who knows? All I do know is what I believe, and I believe that we were created as more than we are now. Our senses did not exist separately from one another, for instance, but functioned in a communion which allowed us to perceive God as being active with us in our world.
Eden is given a place on a map in The Bible, but if man had not chosen to separate himself from God, then Paradise itself would have spread out from Eden, because Paradise was able to dwell with unfallen man. Unfallen man was stronger, less dependent on the needs of the body than we are. The resurrected Christ shows us this. He could move through locked doors, but he was still in his body. I don't know of unfallen man could do anything like this, but we believe that they were somehow more than we are now.
If free will didn't count for anything in God's eyes, then man would not have fallen. God would have forgotten the transgression which basically gave birth to the ego, and would have made it as though the act had never been done. However, the fact is that once the choice was made to gratify the self first, to become all-wise if it were possible, then this ego was born, and it became a barrier to man's knowledge and perception of God. Suddenly, God was to be avoided, to be placated with justifications. From the moment they made their choice, therefore, they were weakened, and all of God's actions after that were to help them to become stronger again.
Death came to man at this time, and so did hard toil and labour, but even so, God stated that man would not always be weak. He would, in time, tread on the serpent and crush its head. We believe that Christ's coming was the fulfillment of this prophecy.
If we really followed Sam Harris's logic, then no one would ever be held to account for anything. Psychosurgery would come back into fashion, and humanity as a reasoning species would cease to exist. By his logic, we are little more than rats in a maze, being stimulated to go in certain directions by electrical impulses. This, I refuse to believe! This, I challenge and will challenge as long as I am on this earth! Nietsche believed something of this kind, or at least he believed it about 'the herd.' There were 'supermen,' he thought, who were capable of willing, but general humanity, he said, needed moral and ethical constraints to help them to get through life. Without right and wrong, he said, humanity in general would not have the capacity to make choices.
And this, really, is the crux of the matter. What is left when you take away the very thing that makes us human? What is left when God and humankind are both reduced to circuits and wires? The answer is: nothing, and yet, that's not all the answer, because nature, as science has proven, abhors a vacuum. Nietsche knew this when he wrote the following: "when you look into the abyss, the abyss looks into you." He divorced himself from all other relations both human and divine. He admitted that he himself was nothing, that the self itself was an illusion, and yet even he, in this strange state, knew that something was looking at him, some emptiness which had sentience. In short, though God for him was simply a mask for the moral imperative which guides the mass of humanity, he recognized the abyss. He recognized some sentient power to which he had lain himself open. We call that power Satan, and he speaks to us very clearly through the ego.
So, in the end, it's the ego itself that has to die. It is only the true self, the unsundered self which can be unearthed and healed by God's grace that can see through all the lies that we tell ourselves in the darkness, and this is what I'm out to find: my unique personhood and that of all others. However, selfishness does tend to prevail, so that to begin to kill it, the eucharistic life is needed. Yet, baby steps are necessary, and there will be many stumbles and falls, but the important thing is to get up again as much as possible. Christ is the doorway back into Paradise. By His death, he showed us how to die to our egos. It's not enough to be good or respectable. It's not enough to go to church all the time or even to read The Bible until we know it backwards and forwards. God wants more from us than that. He wants us to become better people, to grow and learn in this life as a preparation for a more dynamic and a deeper communion with Him later on.
And what do I mean by 'later on'? That will be discussed tomorrow.
Deo Gratias!
Saturday, August 11, 2012
Selfhood and Subjectivity
Benedicamus Domino!
During my university days, I took a lot of classes which revolved around questions of identity and agency in various types of literature. The word 'subjectivity' came up so often that it began to lose all meaning for me, and I jokingly stated to some friends of mine that I was going to write all my papers for all my courses that term with the same title: Selfhood and Subjectivity in the Writings of X author. Now, it's true that this was a joke at the time, but the joke was made in frustration for the kind of academics that we were practicing.
I felt as though we had lost site of something, some purer kind of academics or something. I felt as though I were spending my time psychoanalyzing texts, or else merely sticking convenient political and philosophical theories onto them as a way to justify the fact that we read books instead of engaging directly with the world around us. I felt as though the English department wanted so desperately to be taken seriously that it had to make sure that it tackled real, living issues through the lens of prose and poetry.
As the years have passed, I look back on that time. I look back on the talk of gender-roles and normative behaviours and hegemony and floating signifiers and it still causes me no end of impatience. However, I think that the reason for this is because of how I now view things like selfhood and subjectivity. In one way, I view them as being real things, but in another way, I view them as traps that we fall into. The ego, by which I mean the little selfish self that always wants stroking and praising, tends to play a more central part in our lives than I believe it's meant to.
It is this thing, this ego that we construct for ourselves. Sometimes it is a bruised and broken thing which causes what we call low self-esteem, and sometimes it is an overly confident and swolen thing which can turn a human being into a psychopath. However, most of the time, it just gets in the way. It tells us that we need to be praised and validated all the time. It tells us that we are entitled to love, but the kind of love which tells us what we want to hear, and if we don't get this, we feel lonely and bitter, and then the ego tells us that we don't need anyone or anything in our lives but ourselves. I say this because I've experienced all this, and it's only now that I have truly come to believe that the ego is a real problem and must be reined in.
The Buddhists describe selfhood as an illusion, stating that individualistic thinking is the cause of all the suffering in life. I believe this, for with the notion of 'me' comes the notion of 'mine,' and this kind of possessiveness leads to competition and to greed and to pretty-well all the ills with which we have to contend in this life.
So, what is the solution? Well, I can't tell anyone else what to do, but for me, the solution is trying very hard not to put my ego first. The ironic thing is that if the ego is put on the back-burner in favour of something more charitable or loving, then the true self, the real human being behind all the petty desires and urges which chain us to our own bodies and minds begins to wake up, and when that happens, then the soul's eyes are opened and we can see all those little wants and urges for what they are. In the light of the deeper self, the little happinesses and annoyances of the ego fall to nothing, because the deep self knows what it wants, and I believe that it wants a relationship with God. The ego tells us that being us is the most immportant thing, even if it means that there is a 'them' which has to be stepped on. The deep self tells us that we are nothing in ourselves, but only something when we participate in something dynamic and fluid, whether it be the human community or the communion with God. This, at any rate, is what I have come to learn.
tomorrow, we'll discuss another attack upon the true self of humanity which involves reducing all choice and all decision-making to the firing of chemicals in the brain.
Deo Gratias!
During my university days, I took a lot of classes which revolved around questions of identity and agency in various types of literature. The word 'subjectivity' came up so often that it began to lose all meaning for me, and I jokingly stated to some friends of mine that I was going to write all my papers for all my courses that term with the same title: Selfhood and Subjectivity in the Writings of X author. Now, it's true that this was a joke at the time, but the joke was made in frustration for the kind of academics that we were practicing.
I felt as though we had lost site of something, some purer kind of academics or something. I felt as though I were spending my time psychoanalyzing texts, or else merely sticking convenient political and philosophical theories onto them as a way to justify the fact that we read books instead of engaging directly with the world around us. I felt as though the English department wanted so desperately to be taken seriously that it had to make sure that it tackled real, living issues through the lens of prose and poetry.
As the years have passed, I look back on that time. I look back on the talk of gender-roles and normative behaviours and hegemony and floating signifiers and it still causes me no end of impatience. However, I think that the reason for this is because of how I now view things like selfhood and subjectivity. In one way, I view them as being real things, but in another way, I view them as traps that we fall into. The ego, by which I mean the little selfish self that always wants stroking and praising, tends to play a more central part in our lives than I believe it's meant to.
It is this thing, this ego that we construct for ourselves. Sometimes it is a bruised and broken thing which causes what we call low self-esteem, and sometimes it is an overly confident and swolen thing which can turn a human being into a psychopath. However, most of the time, it just gets in the way. It tells us that we need to be praised and validated all the time. It tells us that we are entitled to love, but the kind of love which tells us what we want to hear, and if we don't get this, we feel lonely and bitter, and then the ego tells us that we don't need anyone or anything in our lives but ourselves. I say this because I've experienced all this, and it's only now that I have truly come to believe that the ego is a real problem and must be reined in.
The Buddhists describe selfhood as an illusion, stating that individualistic thinking is the cause of all the suffering in life. I believe this, for with the notion of 'me' comes the notion of 'mine,' and this kind of possessiveness leads to competition and to greed and to pretty-well all the ills with which we have to contend in this life.
So, what is the solution? Well, I can't tell anyone else what to do, but for me, the solution is trying very hard not to put my ego first. The ironic thing is that if the ego is put on the back-burner in favour of something more charitable or loving, then the true self, the real human being behind all the petty desires and urges which chain us to our own bodies and minds begins to wake up, and when that happens, then the soul's eyes are opened and we can see all those little wants and urges for what they are. In the light of the deeper self, the little happinesses and annoyances of the ego fall to nothing, because the deep self knows what it wants, and I believe that it wants a relationship with God. The ego tells us that being us is the most immportant thing, even if it means that there is a 'them' which has to be stepped on. The deep self tells us that we are nothing in ourselves, but only something when we participate in something dynamic and fluid, whether it be the human community or the communion with God. This, at any rate, is what I have come to learn.
tomorrow, we'll discuss another attack upon the true self of humanity which involves reducing all choice and all decision-making to the firing of chemicals in the brain.
Deo Gratias!
Friday, August 10, 2012
A Hermit's Song and Thoughts Engendered Thereby
Benedicamus Domino!
The following is a translation of an Irish poem from the 9th century. I fell in love with it when I read it in Thomas Cahill's book, How The Irish Saved Civilization. Here's the poem.
"A Hermit's Song
I long, O Son of the living God,
Ancient, eternal King,
For a hidden hut on the wilds untrod,
Where Thy praises I might sing;
A little, lithe lark of plumage grey
To be singing still beside it,
Pure waters to wash my sin away,
When Thy Spirit has sanctified it.
Hard by it a beautiful, whispering wood
Should stretch, upon either hand,
To nurse the many-voiced fluttering brood
In its shelter green and bland.
Southward, for warmth, should my hermitage face,
With a runnel across its floor,
In a choice land gifted with every grace,
And good for all manner of store.
A few true comrades I next would seek
To mingle with me in prayer,
Men of wisdom, submissive, meek;
Their number I now declare,
Four times three and three times four,
For every want expedient,
Sixes two within God’s Church door,
To north and south obedient;
Twelve to mingle their voices with mine
At prayer, whate’er the weather,
To Him Who bids His dear sun shine
On the good and ill together.
Pleasant the Church with fair Mass cloth,
No dwelling for Christ’s declining
To its crystal candles, of bees-wax both,
On the pure, white Scriptures shining.
Beside it a hostel for all to frequent,
Warm with a welcome for each,
Where mouths, free of boasting and ribaldry, vent
But modest and innocent speech.
These aids to support us my husbandry seeks,
I name them now without hiding
Salmon and trout and hens and leeks,
And the honey-bees’ sweet providing.
Raiment and food enow will be mine
From the King of all gifts and all graces;
And I to be kneeling, in rain or shine,
Praying to God in all places."
When I read this poem for the first time, I almost wept for joy. It was several years ago and I was taking a Religious Studies course about the trials and tribulations of the Christian Church from the time of the Jesus Movement until 1500 AD. I was rather bogged down in the politics and doctrinal disputes that we were studying, but I had decided to do a project on the Celtic Church, if indeed we can say that there was one Celtic Church. It was a little more loosely governed than the other local churches at the time, but it existed in Britain and Ireland for about three-hundred years before it was taken under Rome's mantle. The British and Irish churches did have a few differences, I think, and for my purposes at the time, I focussed mostly on the Irish church.
They had a deep sense of solitude, and even after Rome took them to itself, the monasteries of Ireland were numerous and learned institutions. They were modeled on Egyptian monasteries. There were collections of huts and monks lived there in community but also apart. I was intrigued by this way of life, and by the many stories of saints who lived very much with nature as their close companion.
I found that this way of life resonated deep within my heart and soul. Whether or not I could actually live that way, it really didn't matter. It was the idea of it that fueled something unnamable inside me. A part of me still becomes misty when I read the above poem and poems like it, and I'm sure this will always be the case. For me, joy is found not only in the tangible things of life, but in the glorious and intangible moments of true wonder which can be experienced even in a simple set of words on a page.
Deo Gratias!
The following is a translation of an Irish poem from the 9th century. I fell in love with it when I read it in Thomas Cahill's book, How The Irish Saved Civilization. Here's the poem.
"A Hermit's Song
I long, O Son of the living God,
Ancient, eternal King,
For a hidden hut on the wilds untrod,
Where Thy praises I might sing;
A little, lithe lark of plumage grey
To be singing still beside it,
Pure waters to wash my sin away,
When Thy Spirit has sanctified it.
Hard by it a beautiful, whispering wood
Should stretch, upon either hand,
To nurse the many-voiced fluttering brood
In its shelter green and bland.
Southward, for warmth, should my hermitage face,
With a runnel across its floor,
In a choice land gifted with every grace,
And good for all manner of store.
A few true comrades I next would seek
To mingle with me in prayer,
Men of wisdom, submissive, meek;
Their number I now declare,
Four times three and three times four,
For every want expedient,
Sixes two within God’s Church door,
To north and south obedient;
Twelve to mingle their voices with mine
At prayer, whate’er the weather,
To Him Who bids His dear sun shine
On the good and ill together.
Pleasant the Church with fair Mass cloth,
No dwelling for Christ’s declining
To its crystal candles, of bees-wax both,
On the pure, white Scriptures shining.
Beside it a hostel for all to frequent,
Warm with a welcome for each,
Where mouths, free of boasting and ribaldry, vent
But modest and innocent speech.
These aids to support us my husbandry seeks,
I name them now without hiding
Salmon and trout and hens and leeks,
And the honey-bees’ sweet providing.
Raiment and food enow will be mine
From the King of all gifts and all graces;
And I to be kneeling, in rain or shine,
Praying to God in all places."
When I read this poem for the first time, I almost wept for joy. It was several years ago and I was taking a Religious Studies course about the trials and tribulations of the Christian Church from the time of the Jesus Movement until 1500 AD. I was rather bogged down in the politics and doctrinal disputes that we were studying, but I had decided to do a project on the Celtic Church, if indeed we can say that there was one Celtic Church. It was a little more loosely governed than the other local churches at the time, but it existed in Britain and Ireland for about three-hundred years before it was taken under Rome's mantle. The British and Irish churches did have a few differences, I think, and for my purposes at the time, I focussed mostly on the Irish church.
They had a deep sense of solitude, and even after Rome took them to itself, the monasteries of Ireland were numerous and learned institutions. They were modeled on Egyptian monasteries. There were collections of huts and monks lived there in community but also apart. I was intrigued by this way of life, and by the many stories of saints who lived very much with nature as their close companion.
I found that this way of life resonated deep within my heart and soul. Whether or not I could actually live that way, it really didn't matter. It was the idea of it that fueled something unnamable inside me. A part of me still becomes misty when I read the above poem and poems like it, and I'm sure this will always be the case. For me, joy is found not only in the tangible things of life, but in the glorious and intangible moments of true wonder which can be experienced even in a simple set of words on a page.
Deo Gratias!
Thursday, August 9, 2012
Tea is for Me!
Benedicamus Domino!
You may wonder why I have decided to write a post about tea. What on earth does tea have to do with living a eucharistic life? For me, tea is one of the defining signs of hospitality, and hospitality is the beginning of mercy, and mercy is the doorway to true and unselfish charity, which is the goal of a eucharistic existence.
Alright, so now that I have justified this entry, let me explain the justification. Whenever I am offered a cup of tea, I automatically feel at home. I feel as though I am someone's honoured guest. Even if tea-making is a common occurrence for my host, the fact that they have chosen to make it for me makes me feel as though they are taking time from their day to help me to feel comfortable.
Maybe it feels so special to me because I didn't grow up with it as a rule. Tea was not a common drink in our household. Instead, there was the ubiquitous and ever-present coffee, for which I never really cared that much. It's true that there is some coffee that I like, but I'm far too picky and require special blends like Jamaica Blue Mountain to satisfy me, so I tend to stay away from coffee as a rule.
How then did I discover tea? Well, the first time I really recall drinking tea was at my school. I had learned to boil a kettle during a life skills class. This was a class which showed blind and low-vision students how to do the little day-to-day tasks of everyday life safely and confidently. So, my teacher wanted me not to be afraid of hot water, so we boiled the kettle and made a cup of tea. I think I took sugar in it at the time, but then, I was nine or ten, so I think I put sugar on everything.
This was a simple cup of tea, but from the first sip, I felt as though I was entering a new world. You see, long before I ever tasted tea seriously, (I had certainly had the canned and bottled lemmon-laden product called iced tea in the past, but that doesn't count,) I read about people drinking tea in lots of books. So, from the day I first sipped this dark liquid, I decided that tea was my hot drink of choice.
Even so, I was not and have never been a tea-drinking fool, though as time goes on, it is becoming more evident that I can do it. It is in me to become a tea connaisseur, I think, though my true love affair really didn't begin until I tasted Earl Grey for the first time! I only tried it because it was the tea of choice for Captain Jean-luc Picard on Startrek, The Next Generation, but once I had it, I could never go back.
Here's the other thing I love about tea. It is meant to be sipped slowly and to be shared. With tea comes conversation, and conversation is one of the true joys of life. I have had some of my best conversations over cups of tea! It has been around for thousands of years, and has been a sacred drink in one way or another for all that time. People seen to equate tea with good will and fellow-feeling. Tea is about banding together in a crisis. It's about taking time from life to share a moment of true communion. It's about hospitality and healing, and of course, it's about being able to make that perfect cup for a friend or a loved one. Somehow, once you know how someone likes their tea and can brew it perfectly to taste, you feel a sense of joy that you are able to give them this little token of your esteem and affection, or well, I do anyway.
Deo Gratias
You may wonder why I have decided to write a post about tea. What on earth does tea have to do with living a eucharistic life? For me, tea is one of the defining signs of hospitality, and hospitality is the beginning of mercy, and mercy is the doorway to true and unselfish charity, which is the goal of a eucharistic existence.
Alright, so now that I have justified this entry, let me explain the justification. Whenever I am offered a cup of tea, I automatically feel at home. I feel as though I am someone's honoured guest. Even if tea-making is a common occurrence for my host, the fact that they have chosen to make it for me makes me feel as though they are taking time from their day to help me to feel comfortable.
Maybe it feels so special to me because I didn't grow up with it as a rule. Tea was not a common drink in our household. Instead, there was the ubiquitous and ever-present coffee, for which I never really cared that much. It's true that there is some coffee that I like, but I'm far too picky and require special blends like Jamaica Blue Mountain to satisfy me, so I tend to stay away from coffee as a rule.
How then did I discover tea? Well, the first time I really recall drinking tea was at my school. I had learned to boil a kettle during a life skills class. This was a class which showed blind and low-vision students how to do the little day-to-day tasks of everyday life safely and confidently. So, my teacher wanted me not to be afraid of hot water, so we boiled the kettle and made a cup of tea. I think I took sugar in it at the time, but then, I was nine or ten, so I think I put sugar on everything.
This was a simple cup of tea, but from the first sip, I felt as though I was entering a new world. You see, long before I ever tasted tea seriously, (I had certainly had the canned and bottled lemmon-laden product called iced tea in the past, but that doesn't count,) I read about people drinking tea in lots of books. So, from the day I first sipped this dark liquid, I decided that tea was my hot drink of choice.
Even so, I was not and have never been a tea-drinking fool, though as time goes on, it is becoming more evident that I can do it. It is in me to become a tea connaisseur, I think, though my true love affair really didn't begin until I tasted Earl Grey for the first time! I only tried it because it was the tea of choice for Captain Jean-luc Picard on Startrek, The Next Generation, but once I had it, I could never go back.
Here's the other thing I love about tea. It is meant to be sipped slowly and to be shared. With tea comes conversation, and conversation is one of the true joys of life. I have had some of my best conversations over cups of tea! It has been around for thousands of years, and has been a sacred drink in one way or another for all that time. People seen to equate tea with good will and fellow-feeling. Tea is about banding together in a crisis. It's about taking time from life to share a moment of true communion. It's about hospitality and healing, and of course, it's about being able to make that perfect cup for a friend or a loved one. Somehow, once you know how someone likes their tea and can brew it perfectly to taste, you feel a sense of joy that you are able to give them this little token of your esteem and affection, or well, I do anyway.
Deo Gratias
Wednesday, August 8, 2012
Early to Bed, Early to Rise!
Benedicamus Domino!
I have never been what you'd call a morning person. In fact, experience seems to bear out my conviction that I am, rather, a night-owl. I read, write and think at night when I really should be sleeping. This is not true of every night by any means, but it does seem to happen often.
The rub here is that I have always desired to be a morning person. I have always wished to wake up with the dawn and to greet the day head-on. There's something sacred about letting the night be used for its proper purpose and letting the day wake you up when it shows itself. Melanie, the folk-rock singer, wrote a song whose lyrics go something like this.
"Why sleep when the day has been called out by the sun
From the night 'cause the light's gonna shine on everyone
Why sleep when the sleep only closes up our eyes
Why sleep when we can watch the sun a-rise
We were meant to see the beginning of the day
I believe it was planned to lift us this way
Take you an apple and take you a song
And watch a baby day be born
Take you an apple and take you a song
Watch a baby day be born." (Melanie: Baby Day)
This is a good expression of my desire to be more in rhythm with my surroundings, and yet the next verse expresses how I often feel when I try to achieve this goal.
"Quite quite, said I that's all very well to say
But I rose before the dawn to your singing yesterday
I couldn't see the rising 'cause the dark was in my sky
I couldn't see the sun 'cause the sun was in my eye."
Yes. Whenever I do wake up early in the morning after a good night's sleep, something still manages to make me feel annoyed or sluggish or something. Even when I do what I desire, I myself am a barrier to the positive effects of waking up early.
This is a really good metaphor for the barriers we all erect between ourselves and the state of joy. Living a eucharistic life can help to break down those barriers, but too often, we let our transitory aches, pains, worries and fears overwhelm us, or at least I do. Add to this the passions to which we are all prey, and we have a lot to deal with.
However, changing this state of affairs can be as simple as changing one's attitude. Whether it be waking up early in the morning or rousing the soul from its slumber, all we often need is to look at things differently. In the case of the morning, I need to realize that the earlier I go to bed and the earlier I wake up, the longer I have to be productive in a day.
In the case of spiritual alertness, it is necessary to remember that life is brief, and God is there. God is there to free us from the barriers we erect for ourselves if we wish, but we must make the first step. We must actively try to change, and also ask for guidance and help.
This, in the last analysis, is what this journey toward joy is all about: learning to feel less entitled to things and more grateful, as well as learning to give more freely and to love without condition or reservation. Love is an active force. It tends to motivate others, and this is what the Christian is called to do. It is love, after all, that we are told ought to be our identifying mark, and this is what I am seeking to achieve, one early morning at a time.
Deo Gratias!
I have never been what you'd call a morning person. In fact, experience seems to bear out my conviction that I am, rather, a night-owl. I read, write and think at night when I really should be sleeping. This is not true of every night by any means, but it does seem to happen often.
The rub here is that I have always desired to be a morning person. I have always wished to wake up with the dawn and to greet the day head-on. There's something sacred about letting the night be used for its proper purpose and letting the day wake you up when it shows itself. Melanie, the folk-rock singer, wrote a song whose lyrics go something like this.
"Why sleep when the day has been called out by the sun
From the night 'cause the light's gonna shine on everyone
Why sleep when the sleep only closes up our eyes
Why sleep when we can watch the sun a-rise
We were meant to see the beginning of the day
I believe it was planned to lift us this way
Take you an apple and take you a song
And watch a baby day be born
Take you an apple and take you a song
Watch a baby day be born." (Melanie: Baby Day)
This is a good expression of my desire to be more in rhythm with my surroundings, and yet the next verse expresses how I often feel when I try to achieve this goal.
"Quite quite, said I that's all very well to say
But I rose before the dawn to your singing yesterday
I couldn't see the rising 'cause the dark was in my sky
I couldn't see the sun 'cause the sun was in my eye."
Yes. Whenever I do wake up early in the morning after a good night's sleep, something still manages to make me feel annoyed or sluggish or something. Even when I do what I desire, I myself am a barrier to the positive effects of waking up early.
This is a really good metaphor for the barriers we all erect between ourselves and the state of joy. Living a eucharistic life can help to break down those barriers, but too often, we let our transitory aches, pains, worries and fears overwhelm us, or at least I do. Add to this the passions to which we are all prey, and we have a lot to deal with.
However, changing this state of affairs can be as simple as changing one's attitude. Whether it be waking up early in the morning or rousing the soul from its slumber, all we often need is to look at things differently. In the case of the morning, I need to realize that the earlier I go to bed and the earlier I wake up, the longer I have to be productive in a day.
In the case of spiritual alertness, it is necessary to remember that life is brief, and God is there. God is there to free us from the barriers we erect for ourselves if we wish, but we must make the first step. We must actively try to change, and also ask for guidance and help.
This, in the last analysis, is what this journey toward joy is all about: learning to feel less entitled to things and more grateful, as well as learning to give more freely and to love without condition or reservation. Love is an active force. It tends to motivate others, and this is what the Christian is called to do. It is love, after all, that we are told ought to be our identifying mark, and this is what I am seeking to achieve, one early morning at a time.
Deo Gratias!
Burning The Hut
Benedicamus Domino!
There's a story I heard several years ago which has stuck with me. It's about a hermit-monk named John the hut-burner. He lived a curious kind of life when viewed by our modern standards, for he took time to build a hut, and then after living in it for some time, he suddenly burned it down and moved to another place and began the cycle all over again.
It is a good story, filled with wisdom for our modern age about the virtue of detachment. I myself have loved this story for so long, because there is a lot that I need to learn about this virtue. What John can teach me about detachment goes far beyond the mere physical acquisition of things, though this in itself is a good lesson for me to learn. However, the best thing that this story can teach is how to love disinterestedly and how to let things go if they need to be let go.
I am a collector of things, and also a collector of emotions and thoughts, of loves and hates, yes, and even of wrongs. It is this last thing which can be the most destructive to a soul, for to remember wrongs is to hold grudges and to build up resentments and bitterness, and this hardens us and allows us to wall ourselves off from our fellow human beings.
So, as I think of John and his cycle of building, living, burning and rebuilding, I think of myself and the things in my life that need to be consumed in the fire of God's love. Too often, I hold onto things of an emotional nature until they become caricatures of their former selves, and as they grow bigger and more distorted, they get in the way of what is really going on in my life. However, as John knew, life is far too short to be attached to too many things unnecessarily. His way of coping with this grasping sense of entitlement was to burn the very roof under which he lived and to surrender himself to nature's bounty. My way is not so dramatic, but it does involve a decluttering of both my physical and my mental/emotional/spiritual life. Simplifying is the order of the day, and with simplicity will come freedom and less worry, and eventually, with God's help, the peace that passeth all understanding.
So, on I go in my journey toward joy, and whenever a hut needs to be burned, I hope I shall have the strength to strike the match.
Deo Gratias!
There's a story I heard several years ago which has stuck with me. It's about a hermit-monk named John the hut-burner. He lived a curious kind of life when viewed by our modern standards, for he took time to build a hut, and then after living in it for some time, he suddenly burned it down and moved to another place and began the cycle all over again.
It is a good story, filled with wisdom for our modern age about the virtue of detachment. I myself have loved this story for so long, because there is a lot that I need to learn about this virtue. What John can teach me about detachment goes far beyond the mere physical acquisition of things, though this in itself is a good lesson for me to learn. However, the best thing that this story can teach is how to love disinterestedly and how to let things go if they need to be let go.
I am a collector of things, and also a collector of emotions and thoughts, of loves and hates, yes, and even of wrongs. It is this last thing which can be the most destructive to a soul, for to remember wrongs is to hold grudges and to build up resentments and bitterness, and this hardens us and allows us to wall ourselves off from our fellow human beings.
So, as I think of John and his cycle of building, living, burning and rebuilding, I think of myself and the things in my life that need to be consumed in the fire of God's love. Too often, I hold onto things of an emotional nature until they become caricatures of their former selves, and as they grow bigger and more distorted, they get in the way of what is really going on in my life. However, as John knew, life is far too short to be attached to too many things unnecessarily. His way of coping with this grasping sense of entitlement was to burn the very roof under which he lived and to surrender himself to nature's bounty. My way is not so dramatic, but it does involve a decluttering of both my physical and my mental/emotional/spiritual life. Simplifying is the order of the day, and with simplicity will come freedom and less worry, and eventually, with God's help, the peace that passeth all understanding.
So, on I go in my journey toward joy, and whenever a hut needs to be burned, I hope I shall have the strength to strike the match.
Deo Gratias!
Tuesday, August 7, 2012
The Perfection Imperative
Benedicamus Domino!
As those who have read this journal before will know by now, I have been off the grid for a few months now. This is because I fell out of the habit of writing every day. The reason for this lapse is--shock of all shocks!--that I am not perfect!
I realized my need to appear perfect about six weeks into my hiatus from keeping this journal. I found myself frantically trying to compose entries for the days which I missed so that it would appear to the world that I had not missed them. God forbid that I should appear to lapse or to leave something incomplete!
So, I'm saying here and now that I have been away from this journal and my project as well for about three months. It's time I get back into it again, and I will try again to keep the journal every day, but if I skip a day, I'll just write again the next day. What usually happens in my life is that if I miss one thing, I throw the whole scheme away in frustration. Well, this is not going to happen this time.
So, here we go again, living for joy!
Deo Gratias!
As those who have read this journal before will know by now, I have been off the grid for a few months now. This is because I fell out of the habit of writing every day. The reason for this lapse is--shock of all shocks!--that I am not perfect!
I realized my need to appear perfect about six weeks into my hiatus from keeping this journal. I found myself frantically trying to compose entries for the days which I missed so that it would appear to the world that I had not missed them. God forbid that I should appear to lapse or to leave something incomplete!
So, I'm saying here and now that I have been away from this journal and my project as well for about three months. It's time I get back into it again, and I will try again to keep the journal every day, but if I skip a day, I'll just write again the next day. What usually happens in my life is that if I miss one thing, I throw the whole scheme away in frustration. Well, this is not going to happen this time.
So, here we go again, living for joy!
Deo Gratias!
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