"We are half-hearted creatures fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased." (C. S. Lewis,
The Weight of Glory)
As most of you already know, I have a real Thing for Lewis. I'd have married him, if it weren't for that whole dying-twenty-two-years-before-I-was-born deal, which did put somewhat of a damper on our relationship. In any event, I think he's one of the finer thinkers of the twentieth century and
the finest prose stylist of the last century (with all due respect to Chesterton, who runs a close second in my book). Ergo, Q.E.D, tonight I'm rereading bits of
The Weight of Glory for my haphazard-ADHD-dosage-of-nighttime-spiritual-reading, the latest Grandiose Plan for Self-Improvement (I apologize for the Random Capitalization -- who do I think I am, A. A. Milne?) which I'm currently attempting to implement. Still, realizing that man cannot live on Lewis alone, I've also been moonlighting reading Corrie ten Boom's
He Cares for You -- a Christmas present from Liz several years ago -- and Fulton Sheen's
Peace of Soul.
Sheen is really something else again. In
Peace of Soul, he's got a chapter on the psychology of conversion which is really riveting. In it, he articulates something which I've been trying to comprehend for the last several weeks -- that in the end, you can't wait for some random external emotional impetus to push you over the brink of conversion -- that when it comes to doing a 180-degree turn and getting your life back on track, the spiritual life more closely resembles the Nike slogan:
Just Do It. In fact, I'll let the man speak for himself: "True conversion has nothing to do with emotional 'uplift' or with a moral veneer of social action; it is a hard game, an arduous battle, a travail of soul from which emerges a new dedication of self. The Christ mind must become the soul of our thinking, the Christ vision the eyes of our seeing, the Christ truth be in our mouths for speaking, and the Christ love in our hearts for loving."
In light of this, I've been struggling to eradicate some of the Egregiously Bad Habits which have both subtly and not-so-subtly infiltrated my life, and replace them with Good Ones, in spite of having no emotionally-charged inclination to do so. My sanguine soul being especially prone to sins of the flesh (read: gluttony, avarice, and lust), I'm rapidly learning that avoiding temptation is rarely a powerful spiritual experience of cinematic widescreen-Technicolor quality, but typically an altogether rather humdrum, prosaic, unimpressive affair which involves gritting one's teeth and getting through it. Most temptations, I've discovered, can be cured or at least reduced remarkably by dropping and doing fifty stomach crunches. I mean, really, who has time for shopping, binge eating, or kissing boys with a throbbing ribcage? (I think St. Benedict might have been onto something with that whole hurling-oneself-naked-into-thorny-bushes deal, but I'm not quite that pious yet. Still, let's just say I've been working out
a lot.)
I've dusted off my Rosary the past few days, gradually working the Rosary and the Divine Mercy Chaplet back into my daily regime for the first time in years. Today I was meditating on the Finding of the Child Jesus in the Temple, and it suddenly struck me that there's a really vivid metaphor for the spiritual life going down there -- namely, that even in those moments when Christ seems the most absent, the most distant, in our lives, in those lonely moments when our Faith seems the most vapid and arid, He is really ever close at hand, about His Father's business. We too "find the Child Jesus in the temple" when we realize that He is never truly lost to us and that someday, we shall see the finger of God even in those times when we were utterly lacking in concrete spiritual consolation. This is all very abstract and rambly; I apologize.
Been watching a lot of horror movies of late. Struck me today that perhaps man's fascination with the genre ultimately proceeds from his innate longing for what the Inklings might have called the Numinous -- the mysterious, the transtemporal, the Unknown God. We all thirst for the supernatural; somewhere deep inside, we all have an inborn sense that we were created for something beyond this present world. And whatever complaints one might have about horror flicks (and there are many legitimate ones I will grant you), one can hardly argue with the fact that they are all brutally honest about one premise, and that's that there are genuinely forces of good and evil at work in the cosmos, battling for the souls of man. Which, if treated properly, can point to Truth just like any other genre of cinema.
My soapbox I think is drawing to a close for the night. My only parting words of wisdom are -- don't lose heart in the battle for self-improvement. You
will fall off the wagon more than a few times in the process, there will be moments when it all seems hopeless and you've screwed up yet again, but don't let that be a deterrent. Don't forget Mary Magdalene was a hooker, Paul persecuted Christians, and Peter denied the God of the Universe. We all have our shining moments of stupidity, but fortunately, we have a God who's so nondiscriminatory about His offer of salvation that he loved even screw-ups like them, so
we've got no excuse at all for accepting failure and mediocrity as our
status quo. "Why do we fall, sir?" one Dickens character rhetorically posits. "Why, so that we might better pick ourselves up."
Lest we forget.
"Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, though checkered with failure, than to take rank with those poor souls, who neither enjoy much or suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat." (Theodore Roosevelt)
