Need as Love - Food, Drink, Sleep

 I hear a lot of complaint about the need to keep eating food to sustain ourselves, to drink water to sustain ourselves, to need sleep to sustain ourselves.

I have not fully understood why we should complain so much about it, particularly those of us who can choose how, and when, to satisfy these needs. We can pick what we eat to some extent, and make the need be fulfilled in a way that pleases us (even if just a little). It seems like our ungratefulness that gets frustrated and impatient with the continued need to fulfill what our bodies need.

To me, it is a lovely thing that we should continue to need to do things. Of course it bothers me if I need to do something else (or tell myself I need to), and the need for food, drink, or sleep gets in the way of that. But that is a passing frustration that I easily realise is kind of silly. I also do enjoy to eat, so it's not so hard for me. It's odd to me that one wouldn't enjoy eating; what would be difficult to deal with is wanting to eat and not being able to.

In the need of my body, I get a sense of God's love- He made us need food, and we can sate it in a pleasurable way. Food can be good. It can also not be good, which is interesting in itself as I find out what I like and don't like, and then get to wonder why I don't like something.

Sleeping is good (as long as it works well enough) because of rest and peacefulness in that. It is nice to have seasons within a day where different things have to happen, and seasons within a year, when things are more slow, and then they move faster (as they might in more of an agrarian society).

Thirst is lovely to quench, if you can quench it. I actually love to feel thirsty as long as I can sate it because how it feels when I've drunk water after that is so, so good! I actually am frustrated in recent years that I don't usually feel actually thirsty, but just know I ought to drink because I can see the signs of slight dehydration (getting a bit tired and lethargic is one way I can sense it happening).

The other aspect of God's love in this is that He did give the means to fulfill these needs. The Fall, I believe, takes away our ability to sate these God-given needs. We are creatures that are made to enjoy a plethora of different sensations, both bodily and spiritual (by which I mean anything non-bodily, including intellectual 'gratification' as I'd call it). God gave the means by making us fit in this world in such a way that we can get answers, and we can get what we need, out of the created order. The created order affirms our neediness, and fulfills it, and that is God's love constantly giving over and over, as we are filled, get hungry again, eat again, and are content again.

The constant feeling over and over of contentment, of being re-satisfied, is very pleasant when one s not too cynical to appreciate it.

I am hoping I can learn to appreciate these things again, instead of living in a Scrooge-ish illusory world of hatefulness; believing that God is holding out on me.

Regretting Past Actions

The inability to look at my failures in the past, my foibles, and the silly, arrogant things I said and wrote, is an inability to see, and face, the sin within me, and my own shame. The inability to stare it in the face, and not be afraid if others see it, is only because of my own fear… as if I could withhold from God all the sins I’ve committed. If only I did not live in a delusion that I could actually hide.

It's not like one ever really can. To hide, all I did was I just hid from myself knowledge of all the silly things I've done, the things I can't stand; I turned my face away from seeing my own shame so I could believe it was not there. I just blinded myself to reality, refused to see my impact on the world, because it was all making me feel so ashamed.

So I put myself in an enchantment.

Is There a Point?

Will all things fall to pieces in my hands, all things I touch turn to dust? It seems that everything I touch becomes a tormented nightmare. I cannot live but that things turn into sawdust in my mouth; as I taste, all things become death. The life, the liveliness, it is vain. All is vain. Mere breath, vanity. It is nothing but sorrow, nothing but cheating fancy. Carrots dangled before you, never being reached. Life is a lie, an illusion, a taunting temptation.

It's hard to put something here for you all that sounds so dismal, but I have realised if I don't let out what I'm facing inside, there's no likelihood I can break the spell. I have a fog over me, and part of this blog is to try to dispel it by making myself say truths. But to say good truths, one seems to have to own the bad 'truths' one is believing.

Every one of us believes a great many things that aren't true, that mess up our whole lives. The impact of what you believe on how you live your life is immense. I believe what we do comes directly out of what we think. So therefore, we must work to change what we think about the world.

But you can only change something if you know it is there. Sometimes it is too hard to face what one believes alone- sometimes it is so dark, you can't do it without going to the worst possible place (imagine, if you dare).

We have to drive ourselves to face what we are really thinking, and take ownership of what we believe. Then we get to decide: do I want to keep believing this, even as it tears my life into pieces, and turns all sanity in the world into chaos before my eyes? Do I want to believe things that only crush me into despair, and turn the world around into a grey monotony?

That is another choice: as someone whose mind tends to head towards seeing the world as a sort of depressed cause-and-effect machine, am I going to believe that that is all there is to the world, or am I going to listen to the part of me that says, in a very small, squeaking voice, that since that kills all motivation to live, maybe there is something actually logical in believing in Meaning and Purpose?

Am I going to open myself up to the possibility that good is ultimate over badness? I get to choose this.

But still, I am stuck in the haze of not being willing to hope. It's too scary to open myself to being disillusioned again. I don't know if I could stand it one more time in my life.

Because I struggle with this, I have had to think about a lot of the things I've written on this blog. It has been a sort of mammoth effort to keep myself afloat by forcing myself to think about the logic of reality and to force myself to see the good in things, and to force myself to justify it logically as far as possible so that I cannot deny it is there. But I think I may have left my feelings behind, and I'm not sure where I left them, and how to pick them up again. But we'll see...

Learning from Stories

I wrote this once for another blog, and now I'll share it here, without editing (maybe someday I will edit it), because otherwise I won't be likely to post it.

 

When looking back at my childhood, many things seem odd about it. One thing that is perhaps odd, but definitely interesting to me, is how I learned what I know. It is very likely that I do not really know the whole case at all, but I will attempt to speak about one aspect of it at least.

One thing my siblings and I benefited from was being read to a great deal by our mother, and occasionally our father. We would all load up on or around my mother’s recliner armchair, and try to see the books ourselves (selfish imps). She collected (not sure how, actually) books that she felt were good literature, with nice illustrations. Older books, perhaps, in general, but some might have been quite new, too. I do not know for sure.

I must have taken these stories seriously, but not that I imagined them to be part of life; I never seemed to really do that. Instead, I took very seriously the elements implied in them, and seemed to subconsciously divide truth from the fantastical. Probably, it seems to me now, very intensely. It is very hard to articulate what I was doing, and how it was; I do have a grasp of this in my head, but it is hard to grasp at, like one talks of clouds being. I learned a great deal from this, nonetheless.

As I wander around life now, I find out more and more things that I must have learned from those books, and from books read later in my life. But the earliest books we read were perhaps the most informative, being read to me in the time when I was more capable of ‘forming impressions’. It seems that the more rational you get, the more things cover up the absorbing of new things, as, perhaps, you spend time consciously bothering your head about previously absorbed information.

I feel that in hearing those books, I formed a clearer idea of how the world works in a big-picture way; the sort of patterns the world holds, and thus what sort of things make sense, and what don’t, so I can distinguish between logical  and illogical more quickly.

People do put a lot of import on stories for forming, and I believe it is probably partly due to seeing many different parts of the world in a way that takes you in, so you care about it. I do not think we necessarily read a great variety of stories, but for whatever reason, it was instrumental in giving me a concept of how varied the world really is, to the point that I am not easily surprised by things now.

The climax of this story-learning was when I read The Lord of the Rings when I was eleven. It seems that then, as had never happened before, the Picture fell into place simply and profoundly, and I could see the world properly for the first time. Somehow, in the conscious bit of my brain, things didn’t make much sense to me previous to my eleventh year, and when I read The Lord of the Rings, that more unconscious bit of me finally pushed its leaves out of the dirt and came to the light of the sun. It was as if the framework necessary for knowledge itself was finally put into place.

And I insist that this is in no wishy-washy, fantastical way, as I am not exactly a fairy-tale person. But you can believe me or you can not.

 

As a parting note, I believe it matters what sort of stories one is reading, that they be good stories. That will be for another time, if ever, but I do not believe all such things are equal, except if you wish to simply be informed of the wisdoms and stupidities of human beings as a study, and you don't intend to necessarily become wiser at the same time. 

Do We Deserve Anything?

(I’m aware the following could seem a rather confusing, twisting-and-turning exploration of this topic, but hopefully it makes sense. I may read it someday later and find out how insane it is, but I’m in The Thick of Things right now so I can’t quite tell if it’s sane.)

People often throw around phrases like: ‘you deserve it!’ to encourage other people. It’s always hit me as very hollow; it doesn’t have truth backing it up. I know I do not deserve anything, or, at least, in my deeply cynical state I certainly cannot believe it.

I have for years let myself act as if maybe I’m wrong that I don’t deserve anything, but I can never shake that looking at the world that way always seems to be the right way, the way that rings true with everything.

No: I don’t deserve anything. Nobody, especially not God, is obliged to give me anything, to do me any good. I can feel very deeply that I have done wrong, and that every thought in my mind is bent in the wrong way: every single thing that gets inside my skull becomes perverted by my way of thinking about it.

Perhaps this is shame-speak, and it is not wholly true, depending on how you reason it out, but it is also definitely the idea.

It especially scares me when Christians who acknowledge human sinfulness talk as if anyone deserves something. Maybe it’s just that I haven’t yet fully internalised that Christ died for our sins, thus making us deserving… and that is how I am sure I will come to see it when I get out of the Dark Woods of Doubt.

But the stage of feeling one’s complete unworthiness is actually one of the stages of coming to God, to repentance. No person can possibly admit their sin and thus allow God and Christ to make them New again if they do not… actually have sin that makes them totally unworthy of God’s giving them good things.

The penitent sinner feels so frustrated, so lost in the extent of their complete depravity that they are forced to go to God, even against their own wills… even against what they want to do, because of the shame of being naked before God, of being seen as ugly, repulsive, and so-to-speak belching-out-uncleanness.

I am lost as long as I have any part of myself that still imagines it can make me good. Any part of myself that imagines it’s in my own power to follow The Law (as Paul talks about in Romans) causes my own undoing because I can never actually do everything right. I will always slip up, forget things, mess up here or there. If I am my own god, then I will always fail (at least considering the kind of person I am and how I think I ought to behave).

Until I get so to the end of myself that I am sick of being In Control of every aspect of my life, so exhausted by trying to keep up appearances and to do everything The Best Way One Can, I will never be able to be free from the overpowering sense of undeserving… I will only continue trudgingly attempting to deserve by doing things as well as I can.

Everything I do, then, is done with this aura of having to do it right because it is my way of earning what I want in life, earning God’s grace to me, because unless I do the right things I couldn’t possibly deserve help.
The point of this is just that I don’t have any part of me that can possibly believe I could deserve things; I can’t reason with myself to show myself that’s an actual possibility. I hope to talk about this more in the future; I’ve been wrestling with this idea since I was a child, so I have a lot of different angles I’ve wondered about, and different logickings I’ve thought through.

Essentially the years of thinking about it brought me to think: alright then. I don’t deserve anything. It’s pointless to worry about deserving things… and the only thing that seems to have any point is to feel how undeserving I am so I stop essentially living like a Pharisee, trying to earn my salvation; so that, essentially, I am completely morally undone and have no other choice but to give every bit of control up to God.

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.