15th of February, 2016

H,

It gets harder to be honest the older you get. There are these things you want and other things you want to avoid and speaking a little to the left may help you get there much faster. I have recently taking note of all the lies that I tell. I used to call them “white lies”. I used to say I meant no harm by them and surely no offense in them so there had to be some let off in the cosmic sense. This is a special kind of lie. It is the lie you tell yourself.

It is vital that you are honest. It is not merely advisable or desirable or sort of good. It is the very start of grace. There is no treatment for the denied condition and there is no light in the concealed room. When I fall off these letters and cannot write a word, it is mostly because I am avoiding something. I am trying to carve a little piece of reality into some shape I want and I cannot face the white blank page and how it demands of me complete honesty. There is no true awakening without honesty.

We have a million reasons to deny our monopoly of the truth but the main one is fear and the fear of being found out. We do not want to be seen as the cretins we truly are or we do not want the failures we carry around to be exposed to judgmental eyes. Being judgemental is a much sweeter drug than being judged. Still, we live for the promise of eternity. We live in the faith in God’s practical love that stretches into eternity. We live in this immortal line from the Apostle:

“Knowing that all that we see in this present life will eventually disappear and only eternity will remain, we should really think about the sort of person we should be now since virtue will far outlive vice.”

It is not that the things we do or the bad feelings we want to spare or avoid do not spell “terrible” but there is something more at play here. Our vices and the void are temporary set ups while the life after is permanent sunlight. The things we are ashamed of will pass into nothingness and the path we follow, narrow as it is now, will give birth to the true and holy nature of everything. It is not that we cannot see the immediate but fruitless benefits of lives hidden in anything but God, it is that we do not need to live the charade of perfection anymore. We are open books. God will read us out. The grammar and other flaws will be corrected in the reading.