"Immortal Horrors or Everlasting Splendors"

"It is curious—curious that physical courage should be so common in the world, and moral courage so rare." (Mark Twain)

I am slowly learning that genuine courage is generally not the stand-up-and-take-notice sort of thing that you find on the screen at the cinema or in the squalor of the battlefield; most of the time, it's simply learning the rather tame and unremarkable art of daily stripping yourself of your own swollen, insolent self-will. How many men, I wonder, throughout human history, could conquer civilizations -- but not their own bosom sins?

And how many of us must count ourselves in that number?

As time goes by, I'm beginning to recognize that within my story, the divine Pen is the narrator, but I am both protagonist and antagonist rolled into one. Tricky business, that.

And if I've come to know myself at all over the fourteen-and-half months that have elapsed since my house of cards collapsed, I know that I'm never content with mediocrity, that for me, the chaotic neutral, the passionate drama queen, it's either supreme sanctity or the sordid depths of sin. There is no via media. There is no turning back. The salvation or damnation of my immortal soul is utterly dependent on a million insignificant yet eternally significant choices I make each and every day. A being of infinite worth hangs in the balance.

The way is clear before me, but do I dare? How can I possibly aspire, with all my angst, with all my past errors, with all the powerful potential for wickedness that I know lurks just behind the deceptive brightness of my big brown eyes -- to be a saint?

But more importantly -- how can I afford to not be?

Late have I loved Thee, O Beauty ever ancient, ever new, late have I loved Thee.