on self-examination

Let’s start at the beginning, shall we? You are a human being. Though you are a person that has been born into this world with specific personality traits, etc., you are not really who you are, not yet at least. There is a sort of pre-condition to your being in the world: we are all sinners and therefore naturally imperfect. Yes, this is the great equalizer. There was a temptation to sin in the garden, our venerable mother and father failed the test and we are presently inheritors of that consequence. Once they sinned they were humiliated and longed to hide from God and from each other in their shame. This shame we also inherit at our birth. This is the precondition of our existence, such that when we live in the world we have problems from the very start; shame, guilt, sorrow, anxiety, etc – sin – sin is our point of departure into existence. This is the wall that we will continually hit our head against throughout our lives, repeatedly, over and over again. We (those who actually even notice the problem) can’t help but feel that we cannot escape this condition we are in. We are tempted to resign: “What’s the use?”, you may say to yourself in despair, clutching for meaning and purpose when all that you do just never seems to work out and you feel trapped within your own fragile frame searching for a way to escape. Only, the world cannot provide that escape for you, can it? No, all of your attempts have failed. You just want to be happy and content, but even this is denied you. The sorrow of it all is that it is you who has denied yourself, and you are aware of this but cannot do anything about it; the wall is always there mocking you and your pitiful attempts to break through its thick skin. You have failed yourself in the sense that what prevented your attempts was your own weakness or inability. What is it you do next then, dear sufferer? Where have you left to go when the problem is you and you cannot escape yourself?

Inclosing reserve [det Indesluttede] is an existential term Kierkegaard uses throughout his works for this poor spiritual condition of suffering over one’s existence. You in your awareness of your personal weaknesses and imperfections turn inward and magnify them. In fact, it is these negative facts about yourself that are brought to the forefront at all occasions. Perhaps you stutter when you get nervous around others, or you make a stupid comment or remark without thinking and thus introduce imagined spiteful glances upon yourself, and any time this happens you immediately recognize this fault and for hours and even days or weeks afterwards, screaming at yourself for your stupidity (all inwardly, let’s remember). Nothing can be done to change what happened and so you torment yourself mockingly for what you did and swear that it will never happen again as long as you shall live, but what should happen next…you do it again, perhaps that very night! In your inner anguish, you no longer seek the company of others and you reserve yourself away from everything else; you become reserved for the main purpose of examining yourself all the more closely without distraction.

Perhaps you are a Christian. Yes, of course you are: you’ve been attending church every Sunday of your life, haven’t you? You might even be looked upon as an authority in your church; people look up to you and you even fancy them saying about you: “Now that is how a Christian should act”. – Yet, only you know the truth. You’ve been so long in your reserve that you’ve even perfected a way to make your external appearance an acceptable character to others. So you use that character you’ve created to the best of your abilities, because as long as the outer is properly displayed no one would even bother with the inner. So much you thought to yourself, and you would even in your reserve work and perfect upon your character that it has given you a sort of spiteful pleasure in making your mask so cunningly normal and acceptable. You still are examining yourself on a regular basis; constantly aware of what your faults are and that you are hopeless to change them. You meet a person, a fellow Christian, and perhaps she seems to understand you. “This is a problem”, you say to yourself when you watch her reactions to what you say and you do: she doesn’t believe you. This is just more torment for you, so you go back over every minute detail of everything you have said or done in her presence, yet you cannot find a satisfactory answer as to how she knows. You performed flawlessly, yet it does not change the fact that she is the one who has seen right through you. “What am I to do about this?” you say to yourself in frustration. You resolve to reserve yourself again, for it is not safe out there anymore. Only you soon see that she will not let you alone; you see that she still comes to you provoking emotions unlike you’ve ever felt from anyone else before, at least not truthfully; she still comes to you with questions that you don’t want to answer, because to answer would ruin the whole act: to answer would leave you utterly exposed. So you lie to her, she doesn’t believe you; you run away, she finds you; you push her away, yet she still comes as before. “How can I make this end?”, you think as you submit to giving her just a little, “I say as much just to appease her enough so she will let me alone once and for all”. So she comes. You tell her a little of your personal issues and history, only surface details, for you are a good actor after all so you can make that enough, can’t you?…only she wants more. “How can she expect so much from me!”, you say to yourself in frustration. Let’s say that this time your fuse runs to its end. You lay it all out there in the open, you tell her everything; you tell her everything out of pure spite, for you want her to feel your pain in full and you want her to suffer what you have suffered. You hold nothing back as you lay scorn upon scorn: “Do you know what it feels like to live with this every day?”, you’ll scream at her, “…to live with the unbearable torture of your own self being the problem, the root of all your problems? I can do nothing to change it! Have you ever punished yourself for something that wasn’t even your fault, yet you had convinced yourself that it was you who had failed and that it could not be otherwise? You torment yourself simply out of contempt for yourself because you feel that it is what you deserve. I have a demon over my shoulder mocking me every second ‘you don’t believe in God or love, you are only lying to yourself.’ Do you know what it is like to have this darkness breathing down your neck, poking at your every weakness and magnifying it to an unbearable size that you cannot help but collapse under its weight? Do you? Wretched man that I am! Who will set me free from the body of this death?” You say all this and more to her, holding nothing back. You expect the worst and prepare to return to your hole and close yourself all over again – but something different happens this time. She smiles at you, a sweet smile of innocence; she smiles at you in love. Love, do you understand?

This is the beauty of Christian love. The task is to love your neighbor as yourself, without distinction, even in their sin and imperfection. Our reserved individual is suffering from pride, or self-love in the wrong way. You may ask how that is so, but is it not pride after all that would place such importance on one’s weaknesses? The pride results from one not being able to feel pride in their weaknesses; the despair results from not being able to feel prideful about oneself. This is an interesting dialectical twist, isn’t it? What once was considered weakness has been turned into pride. Isn’t that the goal of the clever masks we create for ourselves? We are able to create an external self that can replace what we perceive our weaknesses to be with attributes that we can in turn be proud of. So, attention is now drawn to the consequences of the mask and defenses we put up around others. We are essentially being inauthentic selves and denying who we really are for this lesser copy. We are afraid of people finding out who we really are so we hide away, does this sound familiar? Yes, do not be fooled, we have come no further than the garden. That is our precondition so if one is still hiding behind the mask he has not fully become who he really is yet, his eternal self. Therefore, one cannot love nor experience real love, Christian love, yet because he has not recognized himself eternally. Christian love is an eternal love, an infinite love. In order to give this love to others, one must possess it himself, but in order to possess it himself he must be in the right condition to receive it from God, because all love comes from God who himself is love. So you see how our natural self-love must turn into self-love in the right way. Yet, as is clear from the start, Love can only come from God. We are all sinners, let us never forget this, so we can only receive love from God’s hand and not on our own. Only once we have received this love from God can we give it to others; and we can give it freely to all, as we shall do, because the love comes from an eternal source. It is in love that the infinite and the finite meet and through love one is able to be one with his spirit and rest transparently in his Creator.

This love requires transparency. You cannot hide before God and all is made open before him. This is terrifying because we naturally are shameful and anxious about being so completely exposed. So we fear God’s presence and try to get as far away as possible, only this is not possible and at one time or another we are put before God. Inclosing reserve is an example of this hiding, only here you are even hiding before others. Yet, we are called to bear one another’s burdens and this is an act of love for one another. The young girl saved the man because instead of turning from him, she accepted his outpourings in love and was willing to bear his burdens so he did not have to carry it any longer. This is love, unselfish love: Christian Love. An important aspect of this love is its eternal nature. Love, being eternal, is a becoming. In this sense, one is never complete because the source is eternal: one gains more and more each day. This removes any semblance of presumption because we are all a becoming in this Love. None of us is higher than the other. Look at the gravestones! Their lives have ended and yet after their final moments all the worldly distinctions their lives were dedicated to establishing fade away into eternity in an instant; all that is left to show of their time on earth is a stone with a name: just like their brothers. This is not meant to discourage, but to prove that worldly distinction is meaningless when compared with eternity; we have a task and our time is short to complete it. Yet, it is not a race but a becoming, don’t you see? It is not about who wins but about how you came to win at all. Love is how we accomplish the task and the task requires selflessness, so everything becomes about the other and helping one another along in their faith. You may be further along than your brother, your job is to help and love him so that he may receive the joy that you also have. Only remember that you only have that joy because of your relation to God, which is what this all turns on. Those without this relation are missing out on the most important thing of all – salvation in eternity. This is only accomplishable through love.

We are also dealing with a love that looks past the finite externalities of man and looks instead at the eternal within. See, Christianity is not concerned with the external, because the external is not your true self, it is the inner. In your inwardness is where Christianity rests. Our love for our neighbor should be a love that is unconditional and not determinant on what they do so much, because they are sinners, as we all are. It is our expectation of others that leads us to pass judgment and thus we create barriers for ourselves that prevent us from loving one another in truth. Our neighbor is human, as you also are, and therefore subject to be a disappointment to our expectations. But, is the failed expectation just the other not being who you would like them to be? What is it that disappoints you – is it not their relation to how they affect you? The barrier to you loving them in truth is you yourself in your self-love. No! Christianity demands selflessness and requires that you love your neighbor as yourself, without distinction, even in their sin and imperfection. The sin in others should not be a barrier for you, because to judge others because of their sin is to claim that you who judges is without sin; thus, you become a hypocrite. You have not right to judge another. We are all guilty before God and before all. Yes, we are guilty before one another as brothers, bearing each other’s burdens and helping one another along on their walk in faith. Dostoevsky speaks of this love: a love that loves all without distinction; a love that loves the sin in man, because that is ‘divine love’ and the ‘summit of all love on earth’. Is this not a beautiful representation of what it means to love one another? We are to cast off all prejudices and become guilty before all, no one greater than the other. Jesus says that we are to hater our mother and father, brother and sister, etc., and this represents our absolute duty to God. We are to love our neighbor without distinction, and yet we have barriers to this love as well. We construct hierarchies of love and we love each only according to their due. This is how we often love our neighbors. We love them according to how they affect us. But Christianity presents a challenge that offends reason as it demands that we love the unlovable. Loving those whom we have placed higher up on our hierarchies is no task. No! The task is to love those whom we rank low on our list or who do not rank at all. Jesus even says that we should love our enemies. Does this not offend your reason as it doesn’t make sense at all? But, ask yourself why it doesn’t make sense to you. Is it not because there is no advantage in loving the unlovable? With our highly ranked persons, we receive things and love from them in return, but with these others we do not receive anything; we are forced to love selflessly and this affronts our nature as we would rather not give our love to someone who may not even give it in return. Do not forget though that your love is not a love that will run out if you give it away to someone who doesn’t return it; your love is endless if it has its root in the eternal. To love and love without expectation of reward or reciprocation is the task.

Perhaps we should examine ourselves and our love for others as to whether we are loving one another in truth. I have the ability to say all this here to you, but to act it out in truth is an entirely different matter altogether. Christian Love has thus become something far more difficult than we think of it daily. This offense is necessary to our growth in faith, because the struggle is our becoming that is testament to our learning what it means to live the Christian life. What you are fighting is that wall we fought against earlier, only now we have a better understanding of what it is we are up against and we now have the eternal on our side. Without this inner struggle we would have no inner peace; if you are not struggling, then you are not growing.

Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth. –I John 3:18

your crystal palace is falling

'...for we are all divorced from life, we are all cripples, every one of us, more or less. We are so divorced from it that we feel at once a sort of loathing for real life, and so cannot bear to be reminded of it. Why, we have come almost to looking upon real life as an effort, almost as hard work, and we are all privately agreed that it is better in books. And why do we fuss and fume sometimes? Why are we perverse and ask for something else? We don't know what ourselves. It would be the worse for us if our petulant prayers were answered. Come, try, give any one of us a little more independence, untie our hands, widen the spheres of our activity, relax the control and we ... yes, I assure you ... we should be begging to be under control again at once. I know that you will very likely be angry with me for that, and will begin shouting and stamping. Speak for yourself, you will say, and for your miseries in your underground holes, and don't dare to say all of us - excuse me, gentlemen, I am not justifying myself with that 'all of us'. As for what concerns me in particular I have only in my life carried to an extreme what you have not dared to carry half-way, and what's more, you have taken your cowardice for good sense, and have found comfort in deceiving yourselves. So that perhaps, after all, there is more life in me than in you. Look into it more carefully! Why, we don't even know what living means now, what it is, and what is it called? Leave us alone without books and we shall be lost and in confusion at once. We shall not know what to join on to, what to cling to, what to love and what to hate, what to respect and what to despise. We are oppressed at being humans, humans with our own real bodies and blood; we are ashamed of it, we think it a disgrace, and we keep trying to be some sort of fairy-tale universal beings. We are stillborn, and for generations past have been begotten, not by living fathers, and that suits us better and better. We are developing a taste for it. Soon we shall contrive to be born somehow from an idea. But enough; I don't want to write anymore from Underground.

-underground man

post-nothing

Things don't seem to be as easy
As they used to be
It's getting harder every day
To think of better things to say
About what's going on around you
And what's happening inside you
When it's time to change you won't know how
It won't matter years from now

No matter what you think or do or say
Everything turns grey

This is it, the darkest hour
Isn't it depressing how our
Minds create an atmosphere
That won't happen here
Unless we make some new demands
To grasp the future in our hands
You know I wish I could but it's too late
For senseless minds that love to hate

No matter what they think or do or say
Everything turns grey

agent orange - "everything turns grey"

This is a song I’ve always enjoyed. I rediscovered it recently and remembered just how much I love this song. I was impressed by this lyric, especially such a lyric coming from a punk band in the early-80s. One is struck immediately by the cynicism of his words as he tells of a world that is falling into a state of confusion where everything is turning grey each moment and nothing seems to matter. The second verse leads you into a possible solution, but no ‘it is too late’, he says, ‘for senseless minds that love to hate’; and once again everything turns grey. These are scathing words aimed at the indifference and busyness of the present age. The lyric proclaims a lamentation of the way things stand, and laments further that the problem can be fixed if only it wasn’t already too late.

Is it too late? This is the question, isn’t it? Welcome to the present age. The immense cacophony of noise that floods through the media per second is absolutely overwhelming; every advertisement, every form of media is aimed at you: not the you that you are, but the you they have created for you to be; everything is directed at you, telling you who to be and who not to be; yet, there is no standard or cohesion among the mass and so every voice is a contradiction demanding something of you – this is the present age. Where are the individuals? I see only the masses. One is encouraged not to be who they are in truth, but to be their other self, their public self. The noise directed at you is there to help you construct your mask and costume; the media will even be so nice as to tell you what does not work as well as what does – even tell you when you have gone out of style and must put on the new costume. So seductive they are! No one is free of their clutches: no one.

I’m sitting here critiquing them, but am I not a product of my age? Have I not been raised in the post-modern tradition of science over belief, of speculation over choice? Am I not wearing the clothing they have chosen for me? Yes, call me a hypocrite if you will – I will not deny it. Yet, more and more I feel as though I am being awakened. Christianity is perfect for this awakening; it is designed specifically for that purpose. In Christianity, only there can you be who you really are. The mask is ripped from your face as you are thrown and humbled before God, in full consciousness of your sin and guilt before Him. Yes, here is your safe haven – if only you could escape there. But you cannot do that because you are forced to live in the world; you are forced to live in the midst of the noise and confusion and still attempt to live the Christian life. Who has the strength for this? the courage? Yet, this is the task.

The 20^th century has left us in an awkward position, philosophically speaking. With the immortal proclamation that ‘God is dead’ at the turn of the century, it sent us all scrambling for meaning. Post-modernity brought us face-to-face with the absurd, in the negative sense, and we cowered in fear before it. We saw the horrors that man is capable of and we failed in all attempts to govern ourselves and our lives. So either one lived in defiance towards the absurd (Camus, Sartre, etc) or one withdrew completely (Beckett, etc). So here we are now. We have inherited this tradition of meaningless and unfortunately it has become so deeply rooted in ourselves and in what we hear that we are ever skeptical of that which proposes to give life an eternal meaning. Yes, we great scientists have speculated and doubted ourselves into oblivion and now we live in fear of commitment to anything, especially if the commitment is to one thing. No, we are much too busy to commit to only one thing; we have so many options available, why choose only one when you can have all? This is the mentality. The noise comes from everywhere, it is inescapable. With such a wealth of information it’s any wonder there is boredom or apathy in the world, for surely one could never be bored when so many options are available. Yet, this is not the case. This is because every part of our lives is filled with empty nothingness, and this is what we cannot escape. All of that noise is meaninglessness. Everything has become so meaningful, so equally important that nothing is important and all has become meaningless. Is it any wonder why so many are depressed, why we have to medicate all our teenagers for their endless number of problems? The mid-life crisis have become a common staple especially in our present age. People are finding out all too late that their lives have been devoid of meaning for so long, and now they set out to correct their mistakes in attempt to re-live those moments they wasted in indecisiveness and disconsolation – yet, if only it wasn’t too late. Everything has turned grey.

So what is the role of the Christian in all of this? Where are we even to begin? I hesitate to find a safe-footing to make that first step; yet, this is the task. We are to be lights in a world of darkness, unstained by the world, to love your neighbor as yourself without distinction and even in their sin – and ‘blessed is he who is not offended by Me.’ Because this is your reward, isn’t it? You defiantly reject their materialism and noise for mild comfort and silence. Your non-conformity is received as offense. Christianity looks at the individual, you in particular and rejects the mass; for God only has interest in you. It is for you not them that Christ came to save you. You are not a Christian through the mass, you are a Christian through your own personal relation to God and through no one else. The best anyone else can do for your salvation is guide you, because the choice is yours alone – either to have faith or to be offended; either to love God or to hate Him (for there is no going in-between in these matters). With this choice, you are rejecting the many for the singular, for “one cannot serve two masters”, only the one who has created you. This singularity of choice, the world does not accept. This is not how the public thinks, for if this was how they thought, the public would not exist since the public is concerned with the many. Christianity demands authenticity from you: this is only achieved through God’s grace. To be authentic is to separate yourself from the rest of the world; to quit banging your head against the wall of the present age where everything is meaningless; to be yourself, your eternal self before God in total guilt-consciousness of one’s sin. Though everything may be ‘turning grey’ around you, you have the Father of Lights on your side who will not change due to any shadow or variation. This is the Christian’s hope in life. The Christian can and must live in the world because we are called to love our neighbor as ourselves and it is only through this love that we can be saved from the noise around us and be in that eternal peace and silence of being before God. Only in love, that is living as a Christian in the world (for as a Christian we shall love the neighbor as ourselves), are we free from the slavery of the world; only then are we our true selves and no longer the mask or the costume.