The Heart Wherein to Forgive is Joy

'...if ever I offended against you in any matter great or small, forgive me now.'

'Dear King,' said the Unicorn, 'I could almost wish you had, so that I might forgive it.' 

~ The Last Battle, by C. S. Lewis

This is the gift that C.S. Lewis gives us. Showing us the joyful heart that wishes to do virtue, to have every opportunity to show love that it can be given. Where sin's existence causes no fear, because where there is sin and evil, that person knows Grace and Forgiveness may and will abound more.

We should not fear sin and evil because God has made a way that all can be made right. And God wishes deeply that in every case of our sin, His grace may be shown to be greater. Our thoughtless sin, done out of forgetfulness, should not impede our trust in God, because God is much greater than sin and evil. He wishes to show us His bounty in the face of darkness. He wishes us to have faith. Our own faithlessness is what will impede us; never God being unwilling to bestow gifts.

Whenever I have found myself to rest peacefully, believing God, then I begin to see graces hither and thither all around me. It is either as if all the good things that were become bright like stars, or else it is that more good is happening. It is impossible for me to know which- it might as well be one and the same.

In a heart of faith, opportunities are made visible. They might have been there before, but when we have faith, 'eyes to see,' we actually see them, and can catch them in our hands. Every little tiny blessing is an opportunity to praise God, and every moment of praising God is a grace to us. It lightens our hearts, it softens our hearts so that we are more malleable to the good around us, it braces us against the oncoming tide of darkness, and it becomes a shield and armour against the onslaught of life.

But instead of a heavy shield and armour, it is light, it makes our feet skip and dance, it makes us like a ninja. As the Bible says, sin is a weight... darkness in our hearts weighs us down. To be filled with God is to be filled with light and with lightness, with weightlessness, but interestingly (I dare say) a weighty weightlessness. A real weightlessness. Not vanity.

In the joyful, forgiving heart of faith, a person is able to rise above the trees and see the picture of life from above, and he is no longer afraid of what he sees. While he is weighted down, 'within' the world (in and of it, instead of in and not of it), he cannot see the path ahead, and that the story of life is a wielding of blows between good and evil, with good always having the upper hand.

I'm reminded of something I heard continuously through my life (perhaps it is from the picture in The Lion, the With and the Wardrobe of Aslan and the Stone Table), that death cannot hold Him. God is so great that no bands of evil could ever withstand Him.

(In saying that we should not fear sin, I mean also that the sorrow and grief sin evokes in us should also not be a tether: to be sorrowful is right, and it frees us to forgive others, and to submit ourselves to the forgiveness of others. It is freedom to feel even the pain of sin. All correct reactions to things are freeing.)

Not Trusting

I realise I spend so much of my life controlling. I try to know what's going on, why things are happening, so that I can control how things unfold, even when I am not directly involved. It's like being a hawk, watching the world, wanting to steer things, but not able to. I am not involved. I can watch from afar and feel very much involved in what is going on; my own distance from a problem means nothing if I understand the problem.

This is such a drain. I put such a strain and pressure on myself to be correct, not to say anything I can't back up (at least in my own head). It doesn't serve any purpose because I can never be one hundred percent sure. It merely exhausts me.

This need for certainty is usually brought on by what may happen in the future, hence why I bring it up. I write out of a drained feeling- a feeling of hopelessness, because I can't seem to break myself from this notion that I do not deserve a good future, so I have to work hard to earn it from God. I have to think the right thoughts, do the right things, never make a mistake. I feel as if, if I have not gotten what I want now, I must not be allowed to have it (which then distances me from God- why ask for anything?).

I have been reading The Knowledge of the Holy by A. W. Tozer. In the chapter on The Wisdom of God, it says, near the end, 'Trust me, be not afraid.' The idea is: God knows just what ought to happen, and He knows just how it should happen. He leads the blind on in the way they should go; they never knowing where, and perhaps feeling reticent, but always it leads to the right place.

This is what I was leaning into as a young teenager, but let go of as I began to be more exposed to adults. I always imagine that we have a very strong culture nowadays that leans away from merely trusting ourselves to God to take us on the path we must take. It is not necessarily true that this is our culture; it might just be that I am seeing it around me more than other messages because I am discouraged myself.

At any rate- I have felt that I must choose to turn away from listening to and minding the culture I find myself in now. I do not feel at all a part of it- I am an alien, but I am not yet believing I am also a free alien, free to do what I think is right. I am not standing on my own two feet, standing in God, which is the only place I could stand; the only place where what I desire most, and believe is true, exists. I have felt lost my whole life, when I try to stick myself in other people's shoes and understand their thinking, because the 'thinking' I have seen there has never seemed rich enough, robust enough, to encompass all of reality that has to be explained.

(I also likely try to put myself only in the shoes of people with whom I disagree, which means my brain has this notion that I am in opposition to everyone, but that's merely because I never really Register people who agree with me.)

At any rate! This was a conglomeration of confusion. When I am in this mental state, I am only confusion.

About Comment Notifications

I haven't been receiving emails about approving people's comments- I'm very sorry about that. I'll keep an eye on it from now on! I would have approved them if I'd known, but I haven't been writing posts (as you can tell) for awhile now, so my eye hasn't been on this ball.

Thank you all for reading my posts, and for your comments! I really, really appreciate it.

Technical Difficulties

So, apparently Blogger refuses to let me get text in a post to be the way I ask it to in editing. So, for whatever reason, until it will just magically work, some posts might look a bit wonky font-size-wise, perhaps otherwise, too.

I've had difficulties like this with Blogger in past posts and the only thing I could do was keep editing and wish it would 'stick' eventually. It's preposterous. So we'll see.

Edit: So far I got it to work (by selecting each paragraph separately and changing it! What on earth, Blogger?). I get really towards not wanting to write blogs when the platform creates issues like this- I had issues with Wordpress before, and gave up on it, and now Blogger.

Consider this post a warning that this will probably happen again and posts could, for no reason I know of, look out of the usual format.

Life is a Dance

Ordinary life is a dance, work itself is a dance… it is a dance with time, a dance with need, staring poverty in the face and choosing to fight that possible future, to create instead a bountiful (or bountiful enough) future.

It is no life to live not realising that catastrophe is possible, that the safety and comfort of the present could suddenly turn to naught. It is no life to act as if pain and death do not exist. It is an empty life, a fearful life, because we deep down do know we could not get what we want… we can’t face that fact. We can’t face that reality is full of futures we might not wish to have. We want to hide with our heads in the sand, face away from the window of our room, just so as to avoid the ‘dark futures.’ We cannot look in the face of the pain and loss others we know face, or the pain and loss evident in history and in other places far away.

And when we fear pain and loss, we are the worst comforters to those who go through it. And then when we go through it, we know that since we didn’t wish to go deep into another person’s darkness and grief, nobody else will do that for us! It is what in our minds we think is normal- avoiding the pain and facing hard reality is normal to us, so we cannot grieve. We think we have to pull ourselves up from it, and that inevitably includes ignoring it, I have found.

It does not mean you can’t tilt your hat at its existence, say words that acknowledge that pain was there, but you can’t face it. You can say, detaching your heart from your words, that you’re sad that someone died. But if you were to look at it, you’d see that it opens up a whole train of thought that alludes to the fragility of life, which we hate to face. We wish to extend life, and because we are so hell bent on that, we cannot stare life in the face- part of knowing about life is knowing about death. You don’t know life unless you know that it could-have-not-been.

You can’t fully live if you do not face that life is that dance at the edge of death. Life could so easily be put out, like a bit of breeze puts a candle out all of a sudden. Life is as fragile as a candle’s light, as fragile as a crystal glass or a bit of expensive china. But also it is akin as precious, comparatively, as those things- we wish our lives, and the lives of those around us, to continue just as fervently, or rather much more fervently, as we wish for our precious crystal and china to last. We take care with our lives as we take care with a fragile object.

We should not be afraid to see that. It does no good to turn away from that fact, that any random accident could happen. It is all in the air around us to fear this fact, so we are addicted to safety, to finding all ways we can to prevent calamity, to prevent that little wind from coming and puffing out our candle of life, puffing out our fragile civilisation.

What if we stopped fearing this? How could it be better for us?

Joyful Self-Discipline

I have a tendency to turn my self-discipline into a sort of hard pushiness. I too easily want to tell myself I am doing things 'wrong.'

I effectively (emotionally) forget that self-discipline is a glorious, wonderful, freeing thing. If you can, in fact, make yourself do what you know you ought to do, what you know you long-term would like yourself to do, it is incredibly nice. Or so I found. I would call it a kind of Narnian self-discipline. A joyous discipline that knows that every step you take now will lead to great fruit later- a hopeful outlook.

I am very numb these days, so it's hard to remember this. I am very hopeless, downtrod. I used to take great, great pleasure in seeing myself improve- seeing myself become wiser and stronger, and also more happy. To be capable, to be able, to be able to feel all the ups and downs without the downs SMITING you, is wonderful. To know there is a future, and that it is not all in your control- that you can let go that tight monster-grip on the future.

This, of course, only works for me because I believe that God ultimately has the reins, even though I don't feel as if I believe that right now. One goes emotionally through ups and downs. So I can lean into this, and lean into the beauty of self-discipline- it is a part of sanctification, and sanctification is the most beautiful thing that can happen to me!

The hard work of self-discipline goes through also the path of being able to accept our weakness, which is probably what is hardest for me to accept (perhaps would be for anyone?). We all have different forms of weakness. For me at least right now, I am seeing that I want to be able to do whatever I 'should be able to,' which is also what I want, because I love to be capable long-term. But I have lost sight of the love and gone solely at this as 'I NEED TO BE CAPABLE,' thus losing sight of what would motivate me to be capable in the first place! I thrive on motivation, I thrive on intense enjoyment of reality, and without it, when I am numb, I am hopeless and desperate.

This is morphing into talking about the love aspect: my goal needs to be the love of 'what is right,' because that actually helps me, rather than the 'need to be capable,' which is rather utilitarian and devoid of meaning. I can ignite it with meaning, and then immediately I go back to an infatuation with the beauty of Humans As Creative Beings.

So I just get back to where I started years ago, and that's good. But- to feel it! How to feel it?

Dietrich von Hildebrand on Beauty in Light of Redemption

My dear Madame W. shared this chapter, 'Beauty in the Light of the Redemption,' which relates to previous posts about beauty, completion, perfection.

It was a wonderful post which I will still be mulling over- it is hard for me to accept that this Highest Beauty can be a real, true thing that I am allowed not to shun. I have been damning it in my mind for a long time because I have most strongly desired it. I felt as a child that beauty could not be God, but I also knew that I was 'overthinking things.' It is an odd situation. I told myself that what I wanted could not be what was.

I was playing a kind of self-hatred game with myself my whole life, trying to bereave myself of everything that made life worth living, as if that makes one righteous.

I know that if I opened myself to believing Beauty to really be Good, I would have to deal with my tendency to make Beauty and other un-primary things primary. I probably am doing it subconsciously even as I am 'damning' it within myself.

If I am indeed damning it within myself, and it is truly 'of God,' then that would mean I am sinning in that respect. I'm not afraid of this: it is actually a relief to realise it might be wrong, but I am 'damning' Beauty because I imagine it to be for some higher good that I am damning it, but I think it is going about things the wrong way. The way to put Beauty in its actual place is to seek first the Kingdom of God. Then 'all these things' will be added unto me. God created this world and all that He intended is meant to be. He did not create an accident that is to be 'put away' when some process is done with. The world is part of the end. The goal, the telos. We are creaturely things, the world our setting.

I immediately think: then I must fight with myself, make myself see Beauty as good! But again, this is looking at this wrong. I look at everything as a fight, as me having to punch myself around till things fall into their proper place. I need to stop it. Stop looking at myself as something to be pushed around and forced into its place. To be sorted, to be dealt with. It is very, very hard to shed this... and at this very moment, I am in a bit of a rut and can't for the life of me see how I would begin to relax into not damning Beauty.