Frustration–the people around you just won’t reach for greatness. They are stiff-necked. They persist in their follies and will not repent.
I am increasingly unhappy with all the talk of how God loves everybody. He does love everybody, let’s be clear about that. But we make it sound like he’s some sort of do-gooder who loves the undifferentiated human mass.
The reality is that He loves each particular–you–in a particular way. He loves you the way only you can be loved, to the maximum extent and beyond that you specifically can be loved. You should not come to God’s love via syllogism–“God loves mankind. I am a man. Therefore….” Too many of us are trying to lawyer God–“you have to love me because its a rule!”
It should be the other way around. You should come to understand and know his love for others by swimming in the current of his love for you. Or you should come to know his love for you by learning from people you know the depths and emotion of his love for them. Out with abstractions.
The glory of an infinite God is the vast particularity he brings to each particular.
I was grumbling in my heart that I haven’t dreamed for months. Now I have three. Here’s one:
We are standing near the edge of the world watching a naked man. We are probably all naked too, dunno, but we are, like him, all very innocent. This land is Eden or something like it. The man is standing at the edge. It is a high and grassy where we are, then there is the edge which is a cliff. Far, far below you can just barely make out through the haze and the clouds that there might be some other land below.
The man is Adam, our first father, but also somehow all of us. He is mankind. Call him Adam They as the scriptures sometimes do.
He is trying to see if there is a way down. There is nothing here but the grass and the trees and the cliff.
But there is no way down.
Finally he just plunges. He just jumps.
You want some recognition. A little bit. Something. Some kind of validation. Other people rock the classroom, the sports field, have interesting hobbies, have money or looks, or just have a certain je ne sais quois. You just plod along. When you try those things, you don’t actually humiliate yourself, not too badly–but people shrug and look elsewhere. “Oh, I didn’t realize you were on the team also. That’s nice. Congratulations to you too.”
“He’s OK.”
“She’s all right.”
Can anything good come out of Nazareth?
You stick out. You don’t want to. You try to fit in. But something happened to mark you and now, no matter what you do, people notice and talk about you. Even when things are going well, you feel them watching, judging, waiting.
You cannot feel your lungs ever, except now. They are tight, painful, itching. They burn. You fight each breath.
Gone. Missing. Absent. Never in this life to hear that voice.
A man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.
No one knows you or cares about you. maybe they would help you if you begged–but they would help you as strangers, or with their teeth gritted.
We hid as it were our faces from him
It’s a part of your body you don’t normally notice. Now you do. It’s not acute but it just nags at you. You can’t take anything for granted.
You want… friendship, love, to be one of the guys, an opportunity to prove yourself. And you don’t get it. No. Not with us, they say.
Maybe its you, you don’t know.
He was despised and rejected of men.
There you are, moving along like you have so many times before… ouch! Dang dang dang! You’ve stubbed your toe.
Which actually tells us a lot about the mortal condition.
Kings shall see that which they have not considered
One moment you thought everything was fine, you were among friends, then something happens and your face burns and they are all laughing at you. It feels awful.
Even years later, you can feel your gut clench when you think of it.
If it happens enough, or you worry about it enough, it becomes a permanent injury. You are always about to cringe. You have a permanent psychic injury.
Perhaps, eventually, it will lead you to either Pride or the peace of Humility. But either way, it hurts.
He was despised and rejected of men.
You are bored, you are flat and restless and irritated and dull.
I spur to action, to mischief, or sometimes to nothing.
That acid taste of despising yourself. Perhaps in some distant day you will look back and see it as a spur to repentance and growth. But for now it is just a bitter fire of feeling sick at who you are.
When the bells justle in the tower
The hollow night amid,
Then on my tongue the taste is sour
Of all I ever did.
Why callest thou me good? there is none good but one, that is, God.
It’s annoying. If it goes on, almost maddening. Sometimes it is a warning or a precursor of worse pain to come–stop now while you can!–sometimes it is a sign of healing–sometimes its just an itch. Part of the mortal experience.