Given this blog's title, I thought it was high time:
I really didn't mean it when I wished everyone a "Happy Canada Day", nor is "Happy Fourth of July" or "Happy Independence Day" anything more than a colloquial well-wishing when it passes through my lips or fingers into the realm of communication, written or spoken as the case may be. To be honest, I haven't celebrated my personal independence since it was thrust upon me a few years ago now.
The last such holiday I was anticipating in any way was when I was living for a summer back in Canada, but I had still begun seeing the holiday, which happened to be her birthday, more as a celebration of co-dependence for years already. The only thing that made this one especially anticipatory was her agreeing to spend it in Canada with me, since she had told me she loved me when I left her two months prior. Alas, she didn't make it.
I should say before I continue that I wholly support and appreciate the privilege of living in a free country, however, in so doing I fear that many people take a social principle and transform it into a personal one whereas my recent conviction is such that our freedom exists for the sole purpose of choosing who we will serve and how.
In my time, perhaps prematurely, though I've never wholly thought or felt it was so, I chose a particular individual. Ultimately, she didn't choose me. Thus, I've spent the last few years thrust into an independence I have in no way relished, appreciated or celebrated. I took a walk with a friend up a mountain earlier this week and he reiterated his concern in his way, which I know others share, and I admitted, perhaps for the first time to him, and myself, that maybe I've taken particular measures to remain in such a state, but I've most certainly not done enough to effectively alter my circumstances in any significant way (I know: Africa, now Korea, but distance is nothing to the heart and mind).
The point remains that independence has never been a sincere goal of mine. I believe whole-heartedly that this life is best served with co-dependence. The primary tenets of my faith rest on that assertion. Even the word faith, which requires a relationship with someone, something, speaks of an inherent co-dependence, partnership, or some other form of requisite connection, between two or more individuals in a situation belying some risk given failure, be it emotional, psychological or physical pain, stress, or discomfort. If your faith in a chair is betrayed, you'll fall to the gound; the height you fall from determines the cost of that betrayal. With interpersonal relationships, the complexities of the consequences are seemingly endless. That I should be over this is a common refrain, and I believe for the most part that I am, despite the daily reminders, be they willful memories or happenstance recollections, triggered from our time spent together or the resultant shards of faith from that relationship which I'm still picking out, or leaving to fester, but given all this that I know I still don't think I have a problem (even if I am the only one).
At any rate, I do believe and am opening to the possibility that there is someone out there to share these life experiences with, physical and tangible, not to say that my salvation is insuffiecient for a life well-lived, with the God who cannot leave me alone even if I think I want it so, and that is indeed my goal in my self-percieved independednce, to see that such a term is a misnomer, and that I am dependant at all times on the grace I keep reaching out to find, sometimes grabbing hold of, but still too often letting go, and perhaps that is the first step to being ready to step up on the chair again, putting my faith not on the chair, but putting it all in my constant companion, God, who, even if I'm standing on a rocking chair on a balcony, putting up Christmas decorations, twenty stories above the harsh snow-covered concrete, should the chair fail, keeping my faith and focus on God, shall keep me secure until the work I need to do is done.
So I'll still wish her a "Happy Birthday, Canada!" and a "Happy Fourth!" to my American friends, but may my sincerest wish be for a "Happy co-dependent life for all!"
- Foster
Showing posts with label Faith. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Faith. Show all posts
Wednesday, 1 July 2009
Wednesday, 17 June 2009
Faith Fills Fetid Furrows of Filth
Over the past few weeks I seem to have encountered a theme of sorts in various writings, words, messages and images. It's one I frequently find myself confronting, as a member of humanity, but I've rarely given it the thought I have of late, whether due to the frequency, poignancy, or some latent revulsion, which perhaps should be the norm, to the vile, evil, sinful, pick your euphemism, definition, or palatable poison for the term that encompasses our collective fall, and subsequent damnation outside of grace, but that's the issue.
The recent fixation settled in and culminated with some recent blogs in this small community (for me at least). When I read Butterfly Dreamer's blog, "Howl on Baby..." I had just recently finished reading the long-censured chapter of Fyodor Dostoevsky's "Devils", wherein a man confesses to what I (and most) have always thought to be the most horrendous crime imaginable. Still the confession is preempted by a question: "...can you move a mountain or not?" and the response of the isolated, aesthetic, monk is: "If God bids me move it, I can." The monk's reaction to the horrific tale told by the amoral confessor is one of the hardest depictions of grace for me to fathom; I'm not sure such forgiveness is in me, but I'm sure such forgiveness exists.
So when I read about embracing our dark side my initial response was that I've been trying not to associate humanity with darkness, or, in failing that, to be grateful for the greater things that aid us in rising above our "humanity" to become something even better:
Grace, Love, Hope, Faith, Truth, Peace, Forgiveness, Patience, Peace, every (capital letter) virtue we can name that acts as light - and darkness is nothing but the absence of light.
Thus my rebuttal to any proclamation that professes that darkness is the, or one of the primary defining aspects of the human condition, is: I'd rather not be human.
However in reading Ronnie Kerrigan's recent post, "The Human Condition, Indifference, and Evil", and having subjected myself, in degrees, to the dredges of depravity in beginning to read "American Psycho" and having watched a few random horror movies online, among them the infamous Hostel 2, (we had just booked a Hostel for our upcoming China trip) though I well knew what was awaiting me in these endeavors, I found the conclusion that "we are not all cut from the same cloth" to be slightly misleading.
I think we are cut from the same cloth, however some of us, through the accident of birth, through choice and consequence, through the guidance, care, and concern of others, but all ultimately by grace, fall into the hands of a skilled tailor, and are thereafter wrought with beautiful embroideries and embellishments, cared for, having our frayed or loose ends cut away, our tears mended, or stains cleaned, whereas others fall themselves victim to the abuses, if not of a willful other, than life at large, definitely through some volition, but without the guiding influence of those care-filled skilled hands to help, to form, to free us to be something far more than the filthy rag we could all become besides.
I try to live in the light, but there are aspects of the effort that are outside of my control. It's taken me a long time to recognize that striving for perfection is a futile endeavor. All of us need some measure of grace in our lives because we all make mistakes, willful, ignorant, or otherwise. We are all in need of someone, some human, who has endured to perfection, overcome where we have failed, stood where we have fallen, tread where we would not follow, lived in a way we wish we could, and died for all that all might live, and we can find bits and pieces of that person in the greatest people and characters in our lives, in history and in literature, but there is only one who fits the bill, and paid it in full. Perfection has been purchased for us and is offered as a gift.
We often take gifts for granted, not realizing their costs, and cost is relative, but the cost of grace is one we can all appreciate if we look at our culminated mistakes, misdeeds, and miseries and realize that they are gone, wiped clean, erased from the record of our lives except so far as the consequences play out in the here and now among our equally flawed contemporaries, but the perfect abundant grace of the only judge of life that matters has deemed that the debt is paid in full, if one would simply accept the gift.
It's not easy. There are things I've never done that I want to say are worse than those I have. The things I have done seem to me to account for a pittance of pain in the whole of existence, and of that I hope the majority has been my own, but that pain is enough to warrant the need of perfection to pay the price.
- Foster
PS: I would not recommend "Devils". It's long and I found it less engaging than Dostoevsky's other works that are among my favorites, and the passage I refer too is difficult to say the least.
PPS: I neither recommend "American Psycho" nor "Hostel 2". I feel like I am covered by grace in having subjected myself to them, but while "everything is permissible, not everything is beneficial" (1 Cor. 10:23) and I do feel all the worse for the wear, but I'm still reading the book... go figure.
PPPS: I would recommend "The Passion of the Christ" which depicts depravity, (and is equally difficult to watch at times) but those instances, those images, pale and pass in comparison the revelation of the light of the grace that shines through. So may it be for you, and I, and all.
The recent fixation settled in and culminated with some recent blogs in this small community (for me at least). When I read Butterfly Dreamer's blog, "Howl on Baby..." I had just recently finished reading the long-censured chapter of Fyodor Dostoevsky's "Devils", wherein a man confesses to what I (and most) have always thought to be the most horrendous crime imaginable. Still the confession is preempted by a question: "...can you move a mountain or not?" and the response of the isolated, aesthetic, monk is: "If God bids me move it, I can." The monk's reaction to the horrific tale told by the amoral confessor is one of the hardest depictions of grace for me to fathom; I'm not sure such forgiveness is in me, but I'm sure such forgiveness exists.
So when I read about embracing our dark side my initial response was that I've been trying not to associate humanity with darkness, or, in failing that, to be grateful for the greater things that aid us in rising above our "humanity" to become something even better:
Grace, Love, Hope, Faith, Truth, Peace, Forgiveness, Patience, Peace, every (capital letter) virtue we can name that acts as light - and darkness is nothing but the absence of light.
Thus my rebuttal to any proclamation that professes that darkness is the, or one of the primary defining aspects of the human condition, is: I'd rather not be human.
However in reading Ronnie Kerrigan's recent post, "The Human Condition, Indifference, and Evil", and having subjected myself, in degrees, to the dredges of depravity in beginning to read "American Psycho" and having watched a few random horror movies online, among them the infamous Hostel 2, (we had just booked a Hostel for our upcoming China trip) though I well knew what was awaiting me in these endeavors, I found the conclusion that "we are not all cut from the same cloth" to be slightly misleading.
I think we are cut from the same cloth, however some of us, through the accident of birth, through choice and consequence, through the guidance, care, and concern of others, but all ultimately by grace, fall into the hands of a skilled tailor, and are thereafter wrought with beautiful embroideries and embellishments, cared for, having our frayed or loose ends cut away, our tears mended, or stains cleaned, whereas others fall themselves victim to the abuses, if not of a willful other, than life at large, definitely through some volition, but without the guiding influence of those care-filled skilled hands to help, to form, to free us to be something far more than the filthy rag we could all become besides.
I try to live in the light, but there are aspects of the effort that are outside of my control. It's taken me a long time to recognize that striving for perfection is a futile endeavor. All of us need some measure of grace in our lives because we all make mistakes, willful, ignorant, or otherwise. We are all in need of someone, some human, who has endured to perfection, overcome where we have failed, stood where we have fallen, tread where we would not follow, lived in a way we wish we could, and died for all that all might live, and we can find bits and pieces of that person in the greatest people and characters in our lives, in history and in literature, but there is only one who fits the bill, and paid it in full. Perfection has been purchased for us and is offered as a gift.
We often take gifts for granted, not realizing their costs, and cost is relative, but the cost of grace is one we can all appreciate if we look at our culminated mistakes, misdeeds, and miseries and realize that they are gone, wiped clean, erased from the record of our lives except so far as the consequences play out in the here and now among our equally flawed contemporaries, but the perfect abundant grace of the only judge of life that matters has deemed that the debt is paid in full, if one would simply accept the gift.
It's not easy. There are things I've never done that I want to say are worse than those I have. The things I have done seem to me to account for a pittance of pain in the whole of existence, and of that I hope the majority has been my own, but that pain is enough to warrant the need of perfection to pay the price.
- Foster
PS: I would not recommend "Devils". It's long and I found it less engaging than Dostoevsky's other works that are among my favorites, and the passage I refer too is difficult to say the least.
PPS: I neither recommend "American Psycho" nor "Hostel 2". I feel like I am covered by grace in having subjected myself to them, but while "everything is permissible, not everything is beneficial" (1 Cor. 10:23) and I do feel all the worse for the wear, but I'm still reading the book... go figure.
PPPS: I would recommend "The Passion of the Christ" which depicts depravity, (and is equally difficult to watch at times) but those instances, those images, pale and pass in comparison the revelation of the light of the grace that shines through. So may it be for you, and I, and all.
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