Sins of Oblivion

I am tempted to oblivion. Not always, not incessantly, not even often, but tempted still. I have wanted to be overwhelmed with the pleasures of some sin so that I might be free from mental puzzles I cannot solve and free from the discomforts that exasperate me.

I splash ankle-deep in these waters from time to time, binge-watching tv or lost in a social media loop on my phone. Many years ago I waded into the waist-high water with underage drinking, lasciviousness, infidelity, and so on. In the midst of this episode I ended up at a small but vile party that included a giant burning cross. I was disturbed by the desecration of a symbol that I knew was sacred, and it deeply impressed upon me that there was a dread impossible to avoid except by extinction

over the Baltic sea

over the Baltic sea

To surrender to the vices of oblivion (or don't all vices lead there?) is really to give in to hopelessness. 

Then as now, the lure to drown myself in some sea of forgetfulness is as strong as my patience is weak. (I prefer the term patience rather than the archaic term longsuffering because I prefer to avoid the truth that patience means suffering.) Impatience is short-suffering, short because it can't hold fast hope. >> 

The waiting is in vain. There's nothing that's worth enduring this. Better to be destroyed by this vicious pleasure than to withstand desire and to enjoy the nourishing fruit of virtue. 

Diving into oblivion––utter forgetfulness––is seen as the coward's end, running away from one's problems and all that. But I think we should consider that it may also be an act of aggression, an attempt to overcome the enemy by overwhelming it and eventually destroying it.  –if the enemy is the mind.  –if the enemy is the conscience. –if the enemy is discomfort, frustration, pain, sense. -if the enemy is the self.

How can one overcome the enemy that is oneself, that is one's own self? It does not seem possible to obliterate the enemy without ending one's mind in oblivion or ending one's existence in death. 

 

"Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us." Rom 8:37

"thanks be to God, who giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ." 1 Cor 15:57

"I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave Himself for me." Gal 2:20

"...Christ in you, the hope of glory." Col 1:27

You Find It In Yourself

On the occasion of my thirty-second birthday I am thinking about age, of course, and this poem by John Koethe is the perfect companion for such thoughts. What does it mean to be young or even to feel young? How do we feel age at all?

Enjoy the excerpts below, but take 5 minutes to read the original magnificent piece, too. It is so good that I find it sends me to different paths of wonder and delight each time I read it. I dare you to read it and let it lead you to contemplate the beauty of your life.

 

A Private Singularity 
by John Koethe

I used to like being young, and I still do,
Because I think I still am. There are physical
Objections to that thought, and yet what
Fascinates me now is how obsessed I was at thirty-five
With feeling older than I was: it seemed so smart
And worldly, so fastidiously knowing to dwell so much
On time — on what it gives, what it destroys, on how it feels.
And now it’s here and doesn’t feel like anything at all [...]

You find it in yourself: the ways that led inexorably from
Home to here are simply stories now, leading nowhere anymore;
The wilderness they led through is the space behind a door
Through which a sentence flows, following a map in the heart.
Along the way the self that you were born with turns into
The self that you created, but they come together at the end,
United in the memory where time began: [...]

It feels like such a miracle, this life: it promises everything,
And even keeps its promise when you’ve grown too old to care.
It seems unremarkable at first, and then as time goes by it
Starts to seem unreal, a figment of the years inside a universe
That flows around them and dissolves them in the end,
But meanwhile lets you linger in a universe of one — 
A village on a summer afternoon, a garden after dark,
A small backyard beneath a boring California sky.
I said I still felt young, and so I am, yet what that means
Eludes me. Maybe it’s the feeling of the presence
Of the past, or of its disappearance, or both of them at once — 
A long estrangement and a private singularity, intact
Within a tinkling bell, an iron nail, a pure, angelic clang — 
The echo of a clear, metallic sound from childhood,
Where time began: “Oh, beautiful sound, strike again!”

 
New South Wales

New South Wales

waiting on the Lord

To WAIT ON THE LORD is not like waiting for the tide (it just basically has to come to you, doesn't it?), and to WAIT ON THE LORD is not like waiting for your ride to show up (they may never come at all). 

To WAIT ON THE LORD is like waiting for a person --- a wise and loving person who never forgets --- is like waiting on a promise that is not obligated out of gravity but out of everlasting kindness --- is like waiting on a kindness that cannot lie. 

So we will never be put to shame. 

No one whose hope is in you
will ever be put to shame. 

psalm 25:3

And we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God. Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.  Romans 5:2b-5

thin faith

When put into a narrow place, a strait and still straiter space,
the impulse of the breath is up up up and in
to rearrange the organs and turn sideways the gait
to make the self disappear and the breath turn thin.

The mountain range is an insistent endless danger. 
The hope to see the summit has gone dry.
---Hope now to shrink our bodies, and hurry in anger
at ourselves for childish feelings and long lives.

Whatever pocket once held the mustard seeds
had some hole, eaten through maybe in our sleep?
We ask nothing of these cliffs, this sea,
but to spare us. They have no promises to keep.

So we force ourselves thin to fit, to slide
unsuccessfully past the crush of narrow paths
---or, fat, we succumb and try to hide
beneath falling rocks, to feel their fatal wrath.

No one is casting any mountains in the sea or begging
for the crooked ways to go straight.
The problem is not with the landscape, we reckon,
but with our bodies. So we lose weight.

 

 

queensland