Friday, November 30, 2012

In deepest solitude there is a road right out of the self


The Lord looked down from heaven upon the children of men, to see if there were any that did understand, and seek God. They are all gone aside, they are all together become filthy: there is none that doeth good, no, not one. Psalm 14:2-3

Indeed we have all become filthy, the sort of playing about in the sewage sort of filthy. My perspective, priorities and habits have all become encrusted with those of a broken world.    Selfish, judgmental, and hopeless thoughts abound, and I chase them about my mind in futility, sort of like chasing those big creepy drainage pipe cockroaches with a feather duster.  

Or worse, I merely shrug.  I have grown accustomed. Permeated with the stench.  My eyes have adjusted to the shadowed lowercase truth.

Oh woe is me.  Exactly.

The trudging marks my footsteps.  Bleak follows bleak.  I have lost my sense of glory and wonder.  

One of the last lines, or the last line, or anyways, it has been many, many years since I have read and reread the book Christy, but I certainly packed away and will never forget the line, “The joy of the children was in his voice.”  Dr. McNeil had lost his light in the feudal backlands of the Appalachians.  Anger or disappointment at man and God bubbled through his dedication and good deeds like so many sulphuric gas bubbles rising up from the thick black mud at the bottom of a meadow lake.  Not noticing the sunlit children dabbling along the shoreline, laughing and calling out loud to each other as they raced across the tossing meadow.

Which brings to mind C. S. Lewis.  Surprise.  

Surprised by Joy.  

“Really, a young Atheist cannot guard his faith too carefully. Dangers lie in wait for him on every side. All my acts, desires, and thoughts were to be brought into harmony with universal Spirit. For the first time I examined myself with a seriously practical purpose. And there I found what appalled me; a zoo of lusts, a bedlam of ambitions, a nursery of fears, a harem of fondled hatreds. My name was legion.”

“I was still young and the whole world of beauty was opening before me, my own officious obstructions were often swept aside and, startled into self-forgetfulness, I again tasted Joy.”

“I was driven to Whipsnade one sunny morning. When we set out I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the son of God, and when we reached the zoo I did. Yet I had not exactly spent the journey in thought. Nor in great emotion. “Emotional” is perhaps the last word we can apply to some of the most important events. It was more like when a man, after a long sleep, still lying motionless in bed, becomes aware that he is now awake.”

“I had been…wrong in supposing that I desired Joy itself. Joy itself, considered simply as an event in my own mind, turned to be no value at all. All the value lay in that of which Joy was the desiring. And that object, quite clearly, was no state of my own mind or body at all. In a way, I had proved this by elimination. I had tried everything in my own mind and body; as it were, asking myself, ‘Is it this you want? Is it this?’ Last of all I had asked if Joy itself was what I wanted; and, labeling it ‘aesthetic experience,’ had pretended I could answer Yes. But that answer too had broken down. Inexorably Joy proclaimed, ‘You want – I myself am your want of – something other, outside, not you nor any state of you.’ I did not yet ask, Who is the desired? only What is it? But this brought me already into the region of awe, for I thus understood that in deepest solitude there is a road right out of the self, a commerce with something which, by refusing to identify itself with any object of the senses, or anything whereof we have biological or social need, or anything imagined, or any state of our own minds, proclaims itself sheerly objective. Far more objective than bodies, for it is not, like them, clothed in our senses; the naked Other, imageless (though our imagination salutes it with a hundred images), unknown, undefined, desired.”

“Who can duly adore that Love which will open the high gates to a prodigal who is brought in kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance of escape? The words compelle intrare, compel them to come in, have been so abused by wicked men that we shudder at them; but, properly understood, they plumb the depth of the Divine mercy. The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of man, and His compulsion is our liberation.”

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