Thursday, December 18, 2008

Presence

What hope there is in finding someone who reaffirms your most private convictions, your deepest unspoken passions, who has the courage and opportunity and freedom to stand on the rooftops and holler out your personal treatise.  Emerson says, "The young man reveres men of genius because, to speak truly, they are more himself than he is."  They're called mentors, heroes.  People who stand up for the things we long to find the courage to stand up for, too.  

            It brings me to that heartbreaking presence/absence binary.  What we humans do is ache for Edenic presence.  We spend our lives trying to find a place where the presence of God is with us again.  We want kinetic communion with Holiness and Divinity.  I think we all know that there is something terribly strange about this condition of ours; the placement of an immortal soul inside of a perishable container – I don’t think we get it.  I know that I don’t. 

            In asking why it is that we are all here, I know that it has to be something we experience in the transcendent moments. Are they enough to justify the whole thing?  And how could an entire existence be created around a few fractions of seconds of “getting it”?  And are there people who never will get it?  Are there people who never will transcend, through fault of their own or not?  I know I have before, and I know I will again.  But what do I do with the rest of my life?  I understand why people renounce the world and become mystics.  I want to be a mystic.  And yet I love the world, and I feel so connected to it.  It is a part of me. 

            Mom was explaining a most basic concept of string theory to me last night.  Scientists can tell that there are particles even smaller than the nuclei of atoms.  There is something that we cannot see that strings together little bits of matter, tiny yet inextricably bonded ropes of energy that flow and move together – connected. 

            There is something basic and abstract in me that understands this synaptic chord.  I get it.  The strings in my molecular makeup are somehow able to communicate to me their perfection.  I hear a song they make that regulates the beat I move to.  Because all things, in all their mass and weight, rest on these tiny threads – wrongness doesn’t really register with me.  For this, I do not recoil from cruelty when I walk with it, nor am I confounded by injustice.  We are all certainly woundable, but only when the world’s conflict with the strings surpasses my own understanding of them.  

There is a hero in my life who sees the world just like this.  In a way, I see this person as my own potential fully realized.  It makes me worry that I will never be like him - that I'll get in my own way and throw stumbling blocks in my own path.  This is why I tremble with frustration that I do not know which career to pursue.  I wonder if it will ever take a linear form.  Will it be chaotic?  I hope not.  I am not a chaotic person.  I want to meet with success but so much more than that I want to be fulfilled.  I want to do something with my life that involves presence.  I want to move one step closer to the center, to do something new and different that has never been done before.  And I am slowly freeing myself from obsession with magnitude – it can be small.  Nobody else even has to know about it.  I ache for presence.  

Saturday, October 18, 2008

Being Young and Doing the Right Thing

How troubling it is to look at my youth and question whether I am using it to its fullest advantage.  People often pacify my frustrations by telling me that I’m yet a young pup, and therefore needn’t expect too much of myself right now.  Just be twenty-two – it’s okay.   

But I ask, if I am not performing to my utmost potential right now, when will I start to?  I find out time after time that the writers I admire most made their splash when they were in their twenties, and so many were dead in their forties.  Perhaps mediocre people are fine being mediocre in their twenties, because so shall they remain for the rest of their lives.  But then again who is mediocre?  I have yet to meet anyone.  And thus my point is moot.

I badly want to be someone who produces.  I want to be creative.  Prolific.  I want to know what I think.  I often question the relationship between my thoughts and my emotions.  When am I thinking and when am I feeling?  There is something that I cannot entirely support that thinks emotions are vastly inferior.  I don’t know why I think that, but I do.  I never want to be someone who acts on emotions and unfailingly “follows my heart,” but I don’t know why I want that.  I want to be a devotee of logic and mindfulness.

Kierkegaard says that faith is absurd and uncanny, and that its binary couple is doubt, associated with the rational side.

Some ethicists say that ethics are morals born of rational thought instead of emotions, which do more to point TO faith in God than away from it (as Kierkegaard would argue).  But what is rational about ethics?  I think this argument depends on where you want to place ethics – I agree that ethics do point to God, but I also think that they are absurd, so I would put them in the same camp with faith (and then they cannot be disconnected from emotions).  Our rational side does not point us to love and sacrifice and to do the right thing, the “ethical” thing.  The rational is not the ethical.  At least mine isn’t.  I think the soul trained to act in love and self-sacrifice defines “rational” completely differently than the soul who thinks being rational means trying to survive.  How do you define that?

I think this explains why I go crazy when I look at the course catalogue at the beginning of every semester.  There are countless course titles that jump out at me because I know they would change my life.  And because I am not able to take them, I am turning away from that change that might happen, for the knowledge, for that which would make me that much more of a mindful, thoughtful, careful person.  There is goodness and rightness in the lectures those professors would give, in the papers I would write for those classes.  And it kills me that I have to turn away from them because my schedule is too full. 

That’s why I think I could get bachelor’s degrees forever.  I want to learn a broad spectrum of everything.  But then, also, I am only scratching the surface of the truths I’d learn.  And I might not even remember them.  My memory is my worst enemy – I encounter something beautiful and good and then it leaves me.  And I see something horrible and evil, and I forget that, too, which is often even more detrimental.

  

Wednesday, August 27, 2008

"There are nights when the wolves are silent and only the moon howls." - George Carlin

How fitting a time to begin this blog.  How strange it feels to write for an audience and not omit my own cerebral meanderings.  I like the progressive nature of this exercise; it's not a published piece I worked on and perfected, but rather something organic that waxes and wanes with my own fluxuating vulnerability.  

Vulnerability.  How like are we to the moon that reveals itself in various stages - at times an intriguing and anticipatory sliver and at others the bare-faced and cathartic full sphere.  It's strange to remember each night that the light we see is nothing of the moon's but a reflection of the sun.  How entranced we are when the celestial bodies align in a way that allows the sun's light to illuminate that entire bald surface.  I'm sure we can each remember a time when a full moon was bright enough to reveal an entirely new noctural world in blue coolness.  I remember a few times when the moonlight was bright enough to keep me awake, and I felt like it was an appointment I was obligated to keep.  

How similarly we ourselves are designed.  Whatever small portion of our faces we turn toward Christ is luminous, in our own perception and in that of others; how glorious are the moments when we turn our gaze directly toward our Light and see a world, cool and serene, as we have never seen it before.  How t
hat reflection can bless others, showing how we have been blessed to reflect a portion of the light of God when the source is invisible.  

I think also of how the dark side of the moon is always dark, meaning that even as it orbits our moon never turns its back on the sun.  It is we who only see in portions the illuminated part.  Might I be reminded that the fullness of light always shines directly upon me, whether I can see it or not.  
This observation convicts me to make my nose the needle on my compass and turn my face always into the warming light of God.  I flip through my journals (which is probably unnecessary because these moments are unforgettable) and find my delight as I read about the time another person's gaze was so steadfastly fixed on Jesus that I saw my world anew in the reflection.  I hope I have let you know it.  May we all take our turns at this post.  

I am reminded of a gorgeous idea I heard at a C.S.Lewis conference at Oxford from an Eastern Orthodox priest named Kalistos Ware.  He spoke about the human component that bears the Imago Dei, the image of God.  He said that we bear the image all along, and through our journey come to attain a likeness.  He alters the speech we use to describe our Christian walk: instead of saying "I am saved," he urges us to believe, "I trust that by God's grace I am being saved."  We do not claim to know God, but instead rejoice in the gift that we might devote our breath and life to getting to know Him.  

It was he who gifted me with the title I gave this blog - he closed his talk with J.R.R. Tolkein's concluding words in The Hobbit, "Roads go ever on."  The universe continues to expand outward from the Big Bang.  The grace of God only abounds.  And so do these roads go on, and shall continue to do as we find our bliss in their exploration.