Benedicamus Domino!
Well, I can't sleep and don't want to do so yet, so I thought I'd write again, and this time, the subject is names. What truly is in a name? Would a rose by any other name truly smell as sweet? Assuming that changing the name of the rose did not change its genetic structure as well, then yes, I suppose it would smell as sweet if it were called something like Stinkweed or Skunk Cabbage. However, we humans take great pride in names. Some cultures give naming a great significance, viewing the word by which one is identified as sacred. Some cultures give their children one name when they are young and a completely different name when they reach maturity. Some people change their name when they take a new religion, and people's last names often get changed when they are married.
So, why am I writing about this? Well, to speak the truth, I've had a fascination with names all my life, and there have been times when I wished to shake off the name I am legally known by, not for any really rebellious reason but merely because it seemed not to reflect the me I wanted to be. Once, I decided that I would name myself Anne, because I took Anne of Green Gables for a heroine. This was when I was nine and it never really caught on.
Then, when I was eleven, a friend and I took Les Mis names. She was Cosette, the romantic lead in the story, while I, being me, just had to be Eponine, the tragic but heroic girl in the shadows, the girl who died to save her beloved who never knew she loved him. No hearts and flowers for me then! Only blood, a broken heart and some indefinable strength, some inner heroism that went largely unnoticed by those around her. That may have seemed like a lot to think about for an eleven-year-old, but I thought about it.
Then there was my Jane phase. Jane Eyre was one of my favourite books when I was a teenager, and Jane herself stood for strength and courage, sacrificial morality, and I think she also stood for what I wanted then: a love, a partner who could love me for my wits and my nature rather than, or as well as, my looks. I never liked Catherine Earnshaw, and while something in Tess Durbeyfield appealed, she was all too tragic for me. So, friends of mine called me Jane, and one time, I think because I owned a set of Chinese harmony balls, they called me Harmony Jane! I think I still have a letter written by a friend of mine where she addressed it to: Dear Jane. It was nice!
Still, I've been left wondering why I have this fascination with renaming myself every once in a while? Once I grew up, I certainly didn't do it much, though a friend of mine and I had nicknames or other names we would call each other once, and there was a notion in Paganism of taking a sacred name, of finding a name that really stood for you and the self you wanted to become. Then, when I was a catechumen, I decided that I would take the name of a saint who meant a lot to me, but when it came time for baptism, I sort of chickened out. I mean, I had found a really neat St. Sarah to take as my namesake saint, but still, well, a part of me wished I hadn't chickened out.
Then, about two years ago, I recalled a name which I'd always loved the sound of ever since I first read it as the title of a lovely poem by Longfellow, and no, I don't mean Hyawatha! :) I mean the name Evangeline. Even the simple sound of that name evoked such a true sense of joy that I've hardly ever felt its like, but I left it alone. Who was I, a grown up woman and a Christian, to go about changing my name at the drop of a hat? Well, there was one way I could do it, and I went to spend a few months at a monastery seeing whether I truly had the will and the wherewithal to become a nun, and what I learned there was true joy unbounded!
Even amid the challenges I had there, even though I ultimately made the decision to leave, at least for a while as I thought at the time, I was sad to leave it. I was sad to leave the life I had found there, and yes, even amid all the new and wonderful joys this year of discovery has offered me, I am still a little misty-eyed at the recollections of the treasury of knowledge, compassion, dedication and wisdom I found with even a glimpse of that life.
So, I have made a decision. I intend to pursue the path of an oblate of that monastery. This basically means that I will continue to be a lay-person in the world, but that I will commit to certain monastic observances, prayers and the like, and all that sort of thing. This would not be a lifelong vow if I didn't want it to be. I could remain an oblate if I got married and such. However, I would be considered to be attached to the community of that monastery and I would be able to take some spiritual direction from there as well. I truly see no other course that makes sense, and I've discovered that this path is not so uncommon among Benedictines as I thought it was.
So, what does this have to do with names? Well, I decided that if I were given the choice, I would take the name Evangeline if I became a nun. I still intend to take it as an oblate. One can do this if one wishes. However, I don't want to wait till then. This blog is about discovering new things and living for joy, and I have discovered that my true name, my real name is Evangeline. Of course, there's nothing formal or official about this name-change, and people are free not to use it if they wish not to, but it's there.
Evangeline is a name which has to do with the Annunciation of Mary, and her response to the miraculous tidings that Gabriel brought were to allow them to come to pass by giving her "Amen" to his words. The moment she said "Alright" was the moment when the actual conception happened in a miraculous fashion, and this is how I want to be. This is how I have to learn to be if I am a Christian, even if it means confronting hard truths and acknowledging difficult-to-acknowledge things about myself. All the good deeds and prayers and fasting and memorized Bible verses will do us no good at all if we do not allow God to work as unhindered by us as possible in our lives. Of course the process of becoming less of a hindrance is a slow and lifelong one, but I wish to be the change I want to see, as Gandhi would say, and so I'm taking a name which means what I want to be and to do. I am, at least in some sense, coming to a new birth. I am learning who I am and who I should be, just as this blog and this journey toward joy was supposed to help me to do, and who I am and who I want to be is summed up in the name Evangeline. So, I claim it now for myself, and hope to have it conferred upon me as an oblate.
What's in a name? Maybe nothing really, but for me, they seem to mean a lot! Of course, my legal and baptismal name is still Sara and will be so, but well, Sara has a lot of associations that I'm trying to distance myself from, a lot of pains and sorrows that I just don't want in my life anymore. Saul became Paul on the road to Damascus. He called himself Paul because he thought of himself as the least of the Apostles. I wish to call myself Evangeline as a reminder of the path I'm on and how far I still have to travel, but also as a reminder of the wonder and awesomeness of the tidings of how Christ has conquered death and has made it so that we all can be renewed and filled with true and undimming joy, if we will but say: "I'll let You change me. I'll let You love and heal me. I'll even let You tell me that I've gone wrong, because that's what loved ones do."
I've always been afraid of that changing. I've always been afraid to really let Him work on me. I've always held something back, some small part of me. I didn't want to get "drawn in" by Him, but all these fears and hesitations are needless! He's not going to destroy the stuff that is really me! His fire will consume all the useless bits, yes, but not the me He has made, and if I ever do appear shining white in glory, it will be His glory in which I'm covered. It will be Him who makes me whole, and no one or nothing else. My soul is the bride, poor and unlovely next to Him who is its rightful Bridegroom, but He will give me a wedding garment to wear which is much better than the garment I currently have on, that fume and fret of emotions and desires which I call myself but which is merely my ego, merely a puppet which I have created in my pride and vanity. I'm finally really learning, really beginning to take my first timid steps out of the nursery. I don't believe in Christ as such. I must learn to be His follower now. I must learn to know Him.
A friend once told me that she thought that I'd take one of two paths as a Christian. She thought I'd either mellow out of my first zeal or would become a nun. Well, in typical Sara fashion (or should I say Evangeline fashion?) I have chosen neither path. Mellowing out just means to me watering things down, compromising. It's true I've found balances and such, but mellow out? God forbid! I've been entirely too mellow as it is! It's time to stop being mellow! However, this needn't mean running off to become a missionary or even becoming a nuhn. What it does mean is finally just being me, being unreservedly and unapologetically me, which has always been difficult for me. I am an inate people-pleaser. I want people to think well of me. I find rejection of any sort rather difficult to deal with, and so I often hide parts of myself away or pretend to be something I'm not, and I just can't do it anymore! It feels wrong and it's time all the pretense stopped. So, as this Lent continues and as the joyous season of Pascha enters in, I hope to bring this new birth of sorts to true fruition. I hope to continue to feel revitalized and freed, and as always, I hope to continue living for joy!
Deo Gratias!
Tuesday, April 16, 2013
Strange Days
Benedicamus Domino!
I am certain that the thing on many people's minds this week is the horrifying tragedy of the bombings in Boston on Monday. Whoever has done this, it is clear that they wanted to cause definite harm by loading the bombs with ball bearings. How can we make sense of this? It is really impossible to even try, but the real question is: why does this surprise us?
I mean, I know why it surprises us. I know why evil deeds which seem simply to cause harm and to have no possible redemptive purpose surprise us, but should they? They should shock us. They should offend against our sensibilities, because even in our fallen state, we have a sense of fair play and a sense of honour. However, I sometimes think that the fact that we're all not out there just beating each other up every day is surprising. I often think myself at any rate above that sort of thing. What need have I for violence whether of word or deed toward my neighbour? I live in a civilized culture, don't I? Well, if I were really to look at the thoughts, every little thought I mean, that swirl around in my brain, I'd soon realize that my thoughts are just as bad as, if not worse than, the kind of thoughts which lead people to attack others in this massive and grotesque manner. The truth also is that I am capable of wounding just as deeply with my words as with those ball bearings. It gives one pause to think this way.
Of course, the other question that gets asked at times like this is: how could a benevolent God allow such a thing to happen? Why is there still so much horror caused by man's inhumanity to man? It's simple and yet not simple. First, we have free will, and this doesn't mean that our wills are free to a point. This means that we are free to choose to do *anything* we wish to do. God can perhaps warn us. He can perhaps give us morality or a sense of honour to combat and to check our free will, but if we throw all that away, and we can do it if we set our minds and souls to it, then nothing stands in our way. We still have the wills which were given us when our destiny was to become rulers of the earth, but we lack or only have fragments of the God-given wisdom to exercise our wills correctly.
As Christians, we believe that God came to us as a man so that we might be made like Him, so that we might be made into the kind of noble and powerful beings that He always wanted us to be. I only pray that those killed in the bombings will rest in peace, and I further pray that those responsible will be brought to earthly justice. I actually don't wish Heavenly justice on them, because I don't know what that would mean. I'd rather see them be healed and forgiven for whatever deeds they have done. Still, that takes an act of will on our part as well as an act of unbounded mercy on God's. We have to ask to be forgiven. We have to know ourselves to be in need of help. This is a difficult thing to know in a middle-class Western life such as mine anyway. I also pray and hope that charity and mercy will come out of this tragedy, that people will help each other and support each other as neighbours and fellow pilgrims on this earth. That's all that can be done now by the average person. We can't investigate or hunt culprits down or anything. All we can do is lend what strength we have and what prayers we have and hope that some good can come from the ashes of this evil!
Deo Gratias!
I am certain that the thing on many people's minds this week is the horrifying tragedy of the bombings in Boston on Monday. Whoever has done this, it is clear that they wanted to cause definite harm by loading the bombs with ball bearings. How can we make sense of this? It is really impossible to even try, but the real question is: why does this surprise us?
I mean, I know why it surprises us. I know why evil deeds which seem simply to cause harm and to have no possible redemptive purpose surprise us, but should they? They should shock us. They should offend against our sensibilities, because even in our fallen state, we have a sense of fair play and a sense of honour. However, I sometimes think that the fact that we're all not out there just beating each other up every day is surprising. I often think myself at any rate above that sort of thing. What need have I for violence whether of word or deed toward my neighbour? I live in a civilized culture, don't I? Well, if I were really to look at the thoughts, every little thought I mean, that swirl around in my brain, I'd soon realize that my thoughts are just as bad as, if not worse than, the kind of thoughts which lead people to attack others in this massive and grotesque manner. The truth also is that I am capable of wounding just as deeply with my words as with those ball bearings. It gives one pause to think this way.
Of course, the other question that gets asked at times like this is: how could a benevolent God allow such a thing to happen? Why is there still so much horror caused by man's inhumanity to man? It's simple and yet not simple. First, we have free will, and this doesn't mean that our wills are free to a point. This means that we are free to choose to do *anything* we wish to do. God can perhaps warn us. He can perhaps give us morality or a sense of honour to combat and to check our free will, but if we throw all that away, and we can do it if we set our minds and souls to it, then nothing stands in our way. We still have the wills which were given us when our destiny was to become rulers of the earth, but we lack or only have fragments of the God-given wisdom to exercise our wills correctly.
As Christians, we believe that God came to us as a man so that we might be made like Him, so that we might be made into the kind of noble and powerful beings that He always wanted us to be. I only pray that those killed in the bombings will rest in peace, and I further pray that those responsible will be brought to earthly justice. I actually don't wish Heavenly justice on them, because I don't know what that would mean. I'd rather see them be healed and forgiven for whatever deeds they have done. Still, that takes an act of will on our part as well as an act of unbounded mercy on God's. We have to ask to be forgiven. We have to know ourselves to be in need of help. This is a difficult thing to know in a middle-class Western life such as mine anyway. I also pray and hope that charity and mercy will come out of this tragedy, that people will help each other and support each other as neighbours and fellow pilgrims on this earth. That's all that can be done now by the average person. We can't investigate or hunt culprits down or anything. All we can do is lend what strength we have and what prayers we have and hope that some good can come from the ashes of this evil!
Deo Gratias!
Monday, April 15, 2013
Speak your Truth Quietly and Clearly!
Benedicamus Domino!
I may have used this subject-line in another entry, but it seems very applicable today. The line comes from a strange and interesting little meditation on life called Desiderata. It's by a man named Max Ehrmann, and I've always loved it. "Go placidly amid the noise and haste and remember what peace there can be in silence!" I think I'm misquoting, but well, man! How can you go wrong with something like that? It contains many maxims which I have tried to take for my life. One of these is: "Be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars." This is a great truth. I don't think it means that you should just let yourself be or not pay attention to what needs improvement, but rather, I think that it means that it is right to seek for healing, right to end old patterns and find more healthy ones perhaps, or to find new ways of dealing with old wounds. Sometimes, the old advice from our mothers is true: "For heaven's sake, don't pick at it!" Sometimes, letting the wound be a wound is best, and sometimes finding a good ointment or medicine is best. Whatever happens, doing the kindest thing for yourself must in the end result in a better self, a more well-developed and less broken self.
For me, the path to wholeness is with Christ. For others, it may lie elseware, and whether I believe your path leads to the same place to which the one I'm on leads doesn't really matter. Most of the time, no matter what we like to say in this age of tolerance and non-judgmentalism, differing paths do not end up at the same place. One only needs to look deeply into any philosophy or religion or worldview to know where it claims to lead, and while a lot of the outer trappings may be the same, a lot of the moral framework is there, the insides are fundamentally different in most cases, with Christianity perhaps being the most different of them all. It is radical to be a Christian. It is radical to believe that God, the Creator of the Universe, became a man, a true man, and truly died, and truly rose from the dead. The very idea is utterly incomprehensible to the human mind! However, does this mean that I can disparage someone else who doesn't know Christ or has chosen not to know Him? (To say "believe in" is just difficult here, so I'm saying something else to make it clearer.) No, I cannot do that. All I can do, all any of us can do, is speak our truths quietly and clearly. The other side of the coin is that we must also listen. We must also really hear, even if we don't want to hear what is said, even if we find what is said repugnant. We must be willing to set that aside, to listen, and then to speak in our turn. Only then can a true connection be made. Only then can true understanding emerge!
All this pussyfooting around, all this choosing just the right words to convey something so as not to offend someone else, it's just got to stop! Words in themselves should not be offensive! Words should not be loaded with baggage from the past. Of course they are, of course we live in a society filled with loaded words, but what if we all agreed to just put the baggage down? What would happen then? Might the barriers between "us" and "them" actually come down? Might we actually live in a society which truly gives us the right to free speech and free fellowship? There was a woman I knew who was fired from her job because she went against the job's policy of saying "happy holidays" and said "merry Christmas" to someone on the phone. The truly absurd thing about this is that the client on the phone had said "merry Christmas" first and the person in question was just returning the greeting! Has it really come to this?
I mean, if Christianity truly became the hegemony that everyone thinks it is, I still would have a problem with a policy which disallowed me to return someone's greeting using the wording of their choice. I'm not, for instance, going to tell a Jewish person who practices their faith "Merry Christmas." If they said it to me and if it was Chanukah, I'd wish them a happy one of those. If they said "merry Christmas" to me and it was not Chanukah, then I would likely say: "happy holidays," because presumably they'd be on holiday from their work or something. But all this watering down of things just has to stop! We are not all the same, we will never be all the same. We are all gloriously and wonderfully different, and it's time we all got to grips with that and stopped worrying so much about offending each other or being offended in turn!
So, there's my truth for the day, spoken perhaps loudly and opaquely, but there it is nonetheless. I refuse to allow the English language to be reduced to Orwellian Newspeak!
Deo Gratias!
I may have used this subject-line in another entry, but it seems very applicable today. The line comes from a strange and interesting little meditation on life called Desiderata. It's by a man named Max Ehrmann, and I've always loved it. "Go placidly amid the noise and haste and remember what peace there can be in silence!" I think I'm misquoting, but well, man! How can you go wrong with something like that? It contains many maxims which I have tried to take for my life. One of these is: "Be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars." This is a great truth. I don't think it means that you should just let yourself be or not pay attention to what needs improvement, but rather, I think that it means that it is right to seek for healing, right to end old patterns and find more healthy ones perhaps, or to find new ways of dealing with old wounds. Sometimes, the old advice from our mothers is true: "For heaven's sake, don't pick at it!" Sometimes, letting the wound be a wound is best, and sometimes finding a good ointment or medicine is best. Whatever happens, doing the kindest thing for yourself must in the end result in a better self, a more well-developed and less broken self.
For me, the path to wholeness is with Christ. For others, it may lie elseware, and whether I believe your path leads to the same place to which the one I'm on leads doesn't really matter. Most of the time, no matter what we like to say in this age of tolerance and non-judgmentalism, differing paths do not end up at the same place. One only needs to look deeply into any philosophy or religion or worldview to know where it claims to lead, and while a lot of the outer trappings may be the same, a lot of the moral framework is there, the insides are fundamentally different in most cases, with Christianity perhaps being the most different of them all. It is radical to be a Christian. It is radical to believe that God, the Creator of the Universe, became a man, a true man, and truly died, and truly rose from the dead. The very idea is utterly incomprehensible to the human mind! However, does this mean that I can disparage someone else who doesn't know Christ or has chosen not to know Him? (To say "believe in" is just difficult here, so I'm saying something else to make it clearer.) No, I cannot do that. All I can do, all any of us can do, is speak our truths quietly and clearly. The other side of the coin is that we must also listen. We must also really hear, even if we don't want to hear what is said, even if we find what is said repugnant. We must be willing to set that aside, to listen, and then to speak in our turn. Only then can a true connection be made. Only then can true understanding emerge!
All this pussyfooting around, all this choosing just the right words to convey something so as not to offend someone else, it's just got to stop! Words in themselves should not be offensive! Words should not be loaded with baggage from the past. Of course they are, of course we live in a society filled with loaded words, but what if we all agreed to just put the baggage down? What would happen then? Might the barriers between "us" and "them" actually come down? Might we actually live in a society which truly gives us the right to free speech and free fellowship? There was a woman I knew who was fired from her job because she went against the job's policy of saying "happy holidays" and said "merry Christmas" to someone on the phone. The truly absurd thing about this is that the client on the phone had said "merry Christmas" first and the person in question was just returning the greeting! Has it really come to this?
I mean, if Christianity truly became the hegemony that everyone thinks it is, I still would have a problem with a policy which disallowed me to return someone's greeting using the wording of their choice. I'm not, for instance, going to tell a Jewish person who practices their faith "Merry Christmas." If they said it to me and if it was Chanukah, I'd wish them a happy one of those. If they said "merry Christmas" to me and it was not Chanukah, then I would likely say: "happy holidays," because presumably they'd be on holiday from their work or something. But all this watering down of things just has to stop! We are not all the same, we will never be all the same. We are all gloriously and wonderfully different, and it's time we all got to grips with that and stopped worrying so much about offending each other or being offended in turn!
So, there's my truth for the day, spoken perhaps loudly and opaquely, but there it is nonetheless. I refuse to allow the English language to be reduced to Orwellian Newspeak!
Deo Gratias!
Thursday, April 11, 2013
Always, We Begin Again!
Benedicamus Domino!
This is the first anniversary of the day on which I began this blog. Though its seeds were planted elseware on the net, it was not begun in earnest until April 11, 2012. I'm not going to do a year in review, as I already did something of the kind at New Years, but I will reflect a little bit on the last year and whether my journey has indeed taken me anywhere.
I began this blog as a way to define for myself what it is to live authentically, to live more for eternal things than for those things which are fleeting in this world, but what I've come to realize during this last year is that it's fine to embrace the transitory so long as we know that it is transitory and fully acknowledge this. The catch is that our whole culture is based on trying to live as though the things which do not last in this world should last, and if they don't, we're somehow doing something wrong or should do something right to make them last. This isn't far from certain ancient faiths which involved doing rituals and propitiating gods or ancestral spirits to ensure fertile crops or healthy children. I suppose we will always make these equasions in our minds: if I do X just right, I'll get Y. However, the danger here is trying to make something mortal into something eternal by sheer effort of will or by following fads which promise much but deliver very little.
The fact is that we live in a world that is filled with death--with decay. However, in the midst of this tendency to decay or to run down, the universe gives us brilliant signs of life, of life deeper than what our senses can perceive, though even that life is pretty amazing to contemplate! And as a Christian, I believe that Christ's incarnation, death and resurrection has actually reversed this principle of decay, or has shown us how to leave it behind in favour of the life that is in Him. And what is this path? It is summed up in the words of Mary at her Annunciation: "Behold the handmaid (servant) of the Lord! Be it unto me according to thy word!" Gabriel gave her a message which she could hardly credit, but although she questioned him about it, in the end, she said: "So be it. I won't oppose this. I won't stand in the way of this strange and somewhat frightening thing." This is what we have to do. We have to learn to listen for God in our lives and then to say: "Amen!" This is how the thief on the cross repented. It was in a single moment as he was being punnished for admitted crimes.
God quite simply wants to dwell within us and to change us from the inside out, and we're really the only obstacle in His way. We have spent ages as a race building walls, temples, altars to ourselves. We have sacrificed others on those altars, stepping on them to cause our own stars to rise higher and higher. Unfortunately, what we call stars are only mere candles or sparks in comparison to the light which God gives to us, and they burn out all too soon, but while they burn, they set others on fire and cause conflagrations which destroy whole civilizations and perhaps worse, sometimes even individual souls.
The problem is that these sparkes are untamed. They blow around on the winds of change and chance, but we have the ability to change this. We have the agency in our universe to still our little spark and to fuel it with God's flame. It will steady us and cause our destructive sparks of fallen life to be changed into true stars, true suns around which others will orbit. But first, we have to allow what we think is our life to be killed. We must stop building the temple to the self, must stop constructing the wall of ego and passion. God's fire is ten million times more consuming than our little feeble spark. It will, if we give it the chance, burn down the walls separating us from Him, and it will transmute us, will lessen the death that is in us and give us new life. The wheat must be buried in order to come to life! The ego must be burned away for the God-created self to emerge and to flourish in the light of day.
This, in the last analysis, is what living for joy for me is about. I seek God's joy, God's life, because quite simply, without Him, I'm dead. I must learn to be grateful for every day I'm given and to make each of those days an offering in return, to say with Mary every day: "Behold the handmaid of the Lord! Be it unto me according to Thy word!" Of course, Rome wasn't built in a day. I cann't be like the thief on the cross. My spirit would do it! Perhaps even my heart would do it, but there is still the wall, still the ego to deal with and to oppose. As St. Benedict says: "Always, we begin again." Always, we're being shown how far we have to go, but this should not be a cause for despair. It should fill us with happiness. We should be filled with joy, because once we know there's a wall, we can learn to stop building it higher and we can let God's all-consuming fire work on us, for though it destroys, it also gives life and causes our little spark of soul to be blown into a true and steady flame of love and mercy. This is what we do it all for: to become more loving, more charitable, more merciful, more truly human than we can be on our own and in our fallen state.
This year has been intense for me. Have all my goals been met? Not yet. Have I learned much? Definitely, and the best part is that the journey isn't over yet! It will never end unless I end it. I will never stop growing unless I kill it. I intend to let it grow, even if it means admitting hard truths. God, Christ, what He wants to make humanity and the whole universe is more than worth a little difficulty on my part! So, onward I go, wherever my path leads me!
Deo Gratias!
This is the first anniversary of the day on which I began this blog. Though its seeds were planted elseware on the net, it was not begun in earnest until April 11, 2012. I'm not going to do a year in review, as I already did something of the kind at New Years, but I will reflect a little bit on the last year and whether my journey has indeed taken me anywhere.
I began this blog as a way to define for myself what it is to live authentically, to live more for eternal things than for those things which are fleeting in this world, but what I've come to realize during this last year is that it's fine to embrace the transitory so long as we know that it is transitory and fully acknowledge this. The catch is that our whole culture is based on trying to live as though the things which do not last in this world should last, and if they don't, we're somehow doing something wrong or should do something right to make them last. This isn't far from certain ancient faiths which involved doing rituals and propitiating gods or ancestral spirits to ensure fertile crops or healthy children. I suppose we will always make these equasions in our minds: if I do X just right, I'll get Y. However, the danger here is trying to make something mortal into something eternal by sheer effort of will or by following fads which promise much but deliver very little.
The fact is that we live in a world that is filled with death--with decay. However, in the midst of this tendency to decay or to run down, the universe gives us brilliant signs of life, of life deeper than what our senses can perceive, though even that life is pretty amazing to contemplate! And as a Christian, I believe that Christ's incarnation, death and resurrection has actually reversed this principle of decay, or has shown us how to leave it behind in favour of the life that is in Him. And what is this path? It is summed up in the words of Mary at her Annunciation: "Behold the handmaid (servant) of the Lord! Be it unto me according to thy word!" Gabriel gave her a message which she could hardly credit, but although she questioned him about it, in the end, she said: "So be it. I won't oppose this. I won't stand in the way of this strange and somewhat frightening thing." This is what we have to do. We have to learn to listen for God in our lives and then to say: "Amen!" This is how the thief on the cross repented. It was in a single moment as he was being punnished for admitted crimes.
God quite simply wants to dwell within us and to change us from the inside out, and we're really the only obstacle in His way. We have spent ages as a race building walls, temples, altars to ourselves. We have sacrificed others on those altars, stepping on them to cause our own stars to rise higher and higher. Unfortunately, what we call stars are only mere candles or sparks in comparison to the light which God gives to us, and they burn out all too soon, but while they burn, they set others on fire and cause conflagrations which destroy whole civilizations and perhaps worse, sometimes even individual souls.
The problem is that these sparkes are untamed. They blow around on the winds of change and chance, but we have the ability to change this. We have the agency in our universe to still our little spark and to fuel it with God's flame. It will steady us and cause our destructive sparks of fallen life to be changed into true stars, true suns around which others will orbit. But first, we have to allow what we think is our life to be killed. We must stop building the temple to the self, must stop constructing the wall of ego and passion. God's fire is ten million times more consuming than our little feeble spark. It will, if we give it the chance, burn down the walls separating us from Him, and it will transmute us, will lessen the death that is in us and give us new life. The wheat must be buried in order to come to life! The ego must be burned away for the God-created self to emerge and to flourish in the light of day.
This, in the last analysis, is what living for joy for me is about. I seek God's joy, God's life, because quite simply, without Him, I'm dead. I must learn to be grateful for every day I'm given and to make each of those days an offering in return, to say with Mary every day: "Behold the handmaid of the Lord! Be it unto me according to Thy word!" Of course, Rome wasn't built in a day. I cann't be like the thief on the cross. My spirit would do it! Perhaps even my heart would do it, but there is still the wall, still the ego to deal with and to oppose. As St. Benedict says: "Always, we begin again." Always, we're being shown how far we have to go, but this should not be a cause for despair. It should fill us with happiness. We should be filled with joy, because once we know there's a wall, we can learn to stop building it higher and we can let God's all-consuming fire work on us, for though it destroys, it also gives life and causes our little spark of soul to be blown into a true and steady flame of love and mercy. This is what we do it all for: to become more loving, more charitable, more merciful, more truly human than we can be on our own and in our fallen state.
This year has been intense for me. Have all my goals been met? Not yet. Have I learned much? Definitely, and the best part is that the journey isn't over yet! It will never end unless I end it. I will never stop growing unless I kill it. I intend to let it grow, even if it means admitting hard truths. God, Christ, what He wants to make humanity and the whole universe is more than worth a little difficulty on my part! So, onward I go, wherever my path leads me!
Deo Gratias!
Monday, April 8, 2013
Thoughts
Benedicamus Domino!
I usually come to this journal when I'm feeling pensive, and tonight is no exception. I just heard of the death of a man whom I only vaguely knew. He appears to have died in his sleep of what may be a heart attack. He was in his forties. I saw him in January and he seemed in good spirits, but he didn't know the end was coming. He had no way of knowing it. Indeed, very few of us do know when our lives will end, none of us very precisely at any rate. It always gets me when I hear of deaths like this, deaths not due to accident or anything but which happen while a person is asleep or in some instantaneous way which is completely unforeseen by the person or unpreventable.
As a Christian, I'm supposed to sort of take these things in stride. I'm supposed to remember that death comes to us all and that we know not when our souls will be required of us, to speak biblically about it, but it still gets me. It still shakes me up. It still makes me feel like I've wasted my life or am wasting it, that I take time for granted and not as a gift to be treasured and used productively. This man has left children behind, older children yes, but they are barely out of their teens. What could be the reason for that? I know what the reason is according to the theology to which I subscribe. We live in a fallen world, a world filled with death, that is with decay. Things in this world are transitory, including our mortal lives. Did God take him as some sort of mercy? I'll never know of course until my own life ends in this world. Still, this news has come as a shock and a troubling thing. It is good to be troubled, for the pot to be stirred, so I have decided to let this troubling news act on me as it is supposed to. I will embrace it and learn its lessons. May this man, who will remain unnamed in this journal, rest in peace, and may his memory be eternal!
Deo Gratias!
I usually come to this journal when I'm feeling pensive, and tonight is no exception. I just heard of the death of a man whom I only vaguely knew. He appears to have died in his sleep of what may be a heart attack. He was in his forties. I saw him in January and he seemed in good spirits, but he didn't know the end was coming. He had no way of knowing it. Indeed, very few of us do know when our lives will end, none of us very precisely at any rate. It always gets me when I hear of deaths like this, deaths not due to accident or anything but which happen while a person is asleep or in some instantaneous way which is completely unforeseen by the person or unpreventable.
As a Christian, I'm supposed to sort of take these things in stride. I'm supposed to remember that death comes to us all and that we know not when our souls will be required of us, to speak biblically about it, but it still gets me. It still shakes me up. It still makes me feel like I've wasted my life or am wasting it, that I take time for granted and not as a gift to be treasured and used productively. This man has left children behind, older children yes, but they are barely out of their teens. What could be the reason for that? I know what the reason is according to the theology to which I subscribe. We live in a fallen world, a world filled with death, that is with decay. Things in this world are transitory, including our mortal lives. Did God take him as some sort of mercy? I'll never know of course until my own life ends in this world. Still, this news has come as a shock and a troubling thing. It is good to be troubled, for the pot to be stirred, so I have decided to let this troubling news act on me as it is supposed to. I will embrace it and learn its lessons. May this man, who will remain unnamed in this journal, rest in peace, and may his memory be eternal!
Deo Gratias!
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