Re-reawakening

I am slowly living back through so many things but on a different level. Like a giant spiral of translucent life in which I am passing back through things I've already experienced, but now colored by the new place in time and space. Rejection of things I had rejected. Embracing of things I had embraced. Having reactions to things and remembering having the same reactions before. Understanding what I had felt then on a younger shallower level and seeing again on an older more experienced level why I had gone that way. It's almost like reliving my life as a wiser person...yet turning out to be the exact same person. I see how I got here and I am choosing to do it again.

It's a reaffirmation really of who I am and who I am made to be. It's good. And I am choosing good. I have had enough of the fake and less than...again. I am gravitating toward the real and more...again. It looks from the outside so much like going the other way. But there is peace here. I can't quite put my finger on it yet, but I'm following that peace.

I have a friend that I often argue with...not angry fighting, but just engaged debate. This debate has helped me. Like iron sharpening iron, it is a grating and clanging process, but it leaves a finer edge. He says some things that I do not agree with and that I wouldn't say, but I understand what he means. It's all about perspective. One has to be in another's place to see from that perspective. I always did understand what he means on a certain level, though I constantly take exception with it for good reason. But in this place right now, I can feel affinity for his statements so much more than just assenting to it logically. I guess I'm saying that I feel it right now. I'm following what feels good and right.

I'm moving away from what hurts. I've tried to find the way to a place of peace again for a long time and all I keep finding is injury. I'm going to think on the pure, holy, worthy things. But that won't take me where most think it will. It didn't before. I don't deny my darkness. It is part of me and will be me, but I am accepting it and moving toward a place where the darkness is acceptable as part of the whole. I will never be at peace in the places that I was not made for. I learned this early on and had somehow flopped back out of the water where I have floundered and flopped trying to walk on fins and trying to breathe air through gills. And then upon strangling and tripping I began flopping about looking for the water again. I think I have found a trickle. Maybe a puddle, but there seems to be flow and life there and I'm looking for deeper water. I'm diving in, going deep, hearing that fluid rush. Get me in the water!

Get me out of the Keep (mixing metaphors, I know). I need to find that dewy wild place beyond the wall where I can crash down among the lilies and find the one waiting for me there. When I catch that scent, hear those pipes, I'm gone man! Watch how fast I cut it all away.

Metanoia: Simple

Metanoia is the Greek term that is often translated as repentance. It means to change one's mind. In behavior science, metanoia is the crux of change. Especially in deep personal change, metanoia occurs at the bottom of a long decline, after which a personal reformation begins the climb back up based on the new psychological foundation.

I recently had a metanoia experience. I had felt it coming as I slid down, down, down in the confusion over suffering and faith. I think it has a more personal meaning for me than my posts may have reflected because, simply, I suffer. I don't pretend to be special at all in this. It's just that I am the person I know best and it is therefore keenest to me. I am no stranger to sufferings that cannot be released with any amount of prayer or behavior change or what have you. I don't go into the details here because it is very personal, but I'm sure many who read this can relate in your own way even without the details.

I couldn't get past how the medeival mystics talk SO much about suffering as a virtue that many of them inflicted things on themselves! I don't want these sufferings, but since I can't be rid of them, there must be some good in them...am I supposed to relish them like these writers did? I can't!

But then modern people, good, respected modern people, say that God doesn't work like that. He desires healing and peace. This is true too! So I'm missing something! This was driving me crazy and I was so bound in it that I became aware of it and started consciously trying to come up the slick wet slope...hence the joy post.

Then today, I crossed the watershed...or rather God opened the solution for me: Simple.

Oneness. The worlds build so much on top of what is real and important, even the Christian worlds, that sometimes I get lost in it. The simple truth is Jesus. I don't even remember how I came to it, but I found an anonymous article today that reminded me of it. Jesus is our model. More than that, the firstfruits. He is what we are becoming. He didn't strive. He didn't complicate. He simply loved. ALL other additions to this are artifice...artificial...built on top of the truth. I recognize that like most personal revelations, this falls far too flat in writing. The simplicity confounds.

My intellect is a gossamer sham. Our systems, medeival or modern are too. Jesus said that to be saved we must simply come. I have come. Grace abounds. I understand it more now. Pieces of the clockwork puzzle of my life have again fallen into place and the gears have rotated one more tic. In my mind, I can jostle this simple truth and see just how many silver strands of reality vibrate throughout the whole ecology of the universe. It is a nexxus moment. A metanoia.

Suffering

Suffering is a difficult concept. We all know that it does not feel good to suffer. Bad things are part of life, but who wants them? Various traditions deal with it in different ways. In my tradition, it is taught that since God is in total control and is totally good, suffering of those who love God is a matter of growth. In this light it can even be a blessing to suffer. The martyrs and ascetics positively gloried in it. I can understand this, but I must qualify that it is only so in the context of those who love God. How deeply this holds true, I can't say. While in my naivety I once thought that ultimate suffering was good and that I could handle it, I have long since left the plain of the hard-minded. There is definitely a suffering that is just evil. Suffering that I would not wish on anyone, no matter what. Rape and beating of children are easy examples. But there are many other sufferings that we would not wish on people.

So I find myself in a tension...strung between two wires. The one understanding that God can allow suffering to purify and to draw us to his love. The other hating the suffering caused by evil and wanting to alleviate it at all costs.

But I guess it is in that tension that there is the most truth. To suffer in peace and understand that God will work His good in spite of and through it while seeking to lighten the load and resolve suffering and injustice. How we talk about it should depend on the understanding of who we are talking to. I see this in Jesus' life and words. Tender to the hurting, angry toward those who inflict it, and humbly submissive toward God who led Him through it.