Aweikin: Monday, 30th of November, 2015

H,

Psalm 16:5

“All which I took from thee I did but take,
Not for thy harms,
But just that thou might’st seek it in My arms.

-Francis Thompson “The Hound of Heaven”

It is hard to get the full idea of God’s idea of love. How do we know what it means in any real way? It is common to start this by mentioning all the suffering in the world and proselytizing that there is no sense in thinking up or of some sort of deity. Yet when we say this what we really mean is that He or She has not been true to us. It is not that God has let the world suffer, it is that He has let us suffer. It is okay, I guess, to make the basis of our approach personal but private emotions and private adventures cannot explain the nature of reality. What happens to us is vital to how we perceive the high and low plains of life but it is not conclusive proof for or against the presence of a benevolent or malevolent Spirit governing the universe. Could it be that atheists and deists sometimes make the same mistake? Do both groups perceive that if there was a being it will matter much how we can sense such a thing or person and which of our senses we use?

 Anyway, I digress. I was trying to talk about God and disappointment. The sort that the Israelites must have felt when they crossed the red sea and saw the miracle of leaving their old oppressors only to start a long trek in the desert. Is it our destiny to move from the miracle to the mundane? The heights of the divine to the murk of the human? This seems to be the constant struggle. The life after the defining event. The day to day up against the moment of epiphany. It is that sense you get, if you are lucky enough to ever have it, of climbing to the mountaintop and seeing things from the perspective of the sublime. All troubles look smaller. This is until we come back down and realise there is still the business of the thing before you and it is not as small as it looked when you were flying above it.

Or let me put this another way. The common problems of living make all of us common. We do not want to be. We have been raised on the idea of exceptionalism and competition. Our enjoyment is tied to the lack of others. Our winning is tied to the losing of someone else. But we are not winning every hour and we are not enraptured by joy in every minute. We have the downtimes where life comes to us exactly as it is: a collection of Sisyphean acts that have no staying power.

This may seem bleak but this is where Christianity speaks. This is the hunger that the Gospel answers. This is the thing that puts joy in the mundane and wholeness in the ordinary. This is the thing that tells you that the epiphany was pointing to larger things and that the mountaintop was just a stop and not a plateau for the whole experience. “Blessed are those who have not seen but still believe”, Christ said of those who do not need to see evidence of things beyond evidence. He is trying to make us the sort of Christians that are not for signs and wonders but for love, hope and faith. He is trying to make us into eternal beings not moved by the temporal ups and downs of life on this side. He is trying to show us that all our inheritance, all our fullness of joy and all our truth of living is found in His arms and there alone.

Aweikinin 09/11/2015

H,

I have not written you a letter in a long time. I started to today and so I went back in time to the old letters to try and get a sense of what I used to say. The chords were all old. I understood the music being played but the recent upheavals had become distance between the ideal and the real person beyond my best intentions. As Chris would say: “Marcus Aurelius had a dream. This is not it. This is not it.”  Or something to that effect.

Yet before I bore you with tales of how I did not become my own dream for myself I should ask how you are doing. How are you? We talk all the time but it is not really talking. It is all business and avoidance and trying to keep up with things. It is like when we were younger and it was somehow easier to talk. Now, life is political. We are always looking for the right thing to say or the right person to be. We are avoiding things. We are holding on for dear life more than just living a full life. We are talking more but saying less of anything substantial. Life has become a sequence of transactions where we vainly strive to find relevance in other lives and then smart and snort when they do not crown us kings of the jungle. We are running to make up time but we are further away than when we first believed. Well, at least it feels this way.

I do not need to explore in detail the great changes that have occurred in my life. You know that story all too well. My reaction has been odd, even to myself. I have seen outside my own personal narrative. In the very objective view of things this is a crash landing into open seas. In the much more universal sense of the reality we truly believe in, there is no difference. I have   always been this fallen and I have always been this lost. I thought I needed a few turns left or right but I was nowhere near that old sense of self. The thing has happened to me in a series of slight twists and the drama is episodic. I do not need to declare it in one long sentence. This is a long life. I have time to get where I am going.

Isn’t it funny that waking up to God is slower than we imagine? It is a long series of false starts and failed trips to glory until we let true glory in. I do not even think I have hit it yet. There are still vestiges and castles of wrongdoing that have mounted sentries and dug in for a long war. The long winter of the soul may come soon.

Yet, I fell in love with this idea a long time ago. It hit me in the playgrounds of my very young mind that the world was not random and there was a message in the well of being alive. It hits me still now. This is the point where I give up. This is the point where I say I have done too many things wrong and too little things right and there is no use for me. But I am not sad. I am not even scared. I am certainly not giving up. Another story is building in my ear and in my heart. It is a beautiful piece of literature and it claims it has the song of the eternal in it. It makes all foibles of this dress rehearsal life seem like the passing of things so that the things that will not pass may arrive. I feel in my tired soul, the pressure of a deep sleep coming. Yet, I am not afraid. Sleep is just the other side of waking up.

Amen.