When We Least See Him

 When we are least able to see that God is there, or feel that He is helping us, if we wish to see Him, and we want Him to be there, and we are sad and scared for thinking He is not, it is well. All is well.

Mother's Arms

I want to wrap up everyone’s sadness in my arms and hug it until it cries itself out completely, and grieves for the fallenness of the world, and then smiles through its tears, happy, and full of joy again.

Peace

You cannot have peace without the truth. 

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.