Life is not an error
Under a twilight, let's talk about ...
A few weeks ago, a friend reminded me of a most painful incident.
Once upon a time, I lent him a book.
And he returned it …. all dog-eared and torn up!
Even the cover was creased!!!!
We had a good chuckle over it now. But I liked his explanation—that he just didn’t know that a person should return a book in its same condition. That people marked their pages by turning corners. That he just didn’t know he was doing anything wrong—until my reaction!
Often, ignorance is the root cause of misunderstanding. It’s humbling to learn that we must truly learn everything.
All that is in my mind as I read My Bright Abyss by Christian Wiman. A friend lent it to me. I always appreciate when someone you don’t expect just up and lends you a something. It’s an interesting interaction that speaks volumes as to what this person is paying attention to about you!
Anyway
I’m only 10 pages into this book, and I want to HIGHLIGHT everything. But I won’t because I have good book-borrowing manners.
So instead I’ll share some lines with you:
“Seven years ago I wrote a short essay […] It was about despair: losing the ability to write, falling in love, receiving a diagnosis of an incurable cancer, having my heart ripped apart by what, slowly, and in spite of all my modern secular instincts, I learned to call God. It was my entire existence crammed into eight pages.”
In truth, though, what I crave at this point in my life is to speak more clearly what it is that I believe. It is not that I am tired of poetic truth, or that I feel it to be somehow weaker or less true than reason. The opposite is the case. Inspiration is to thought what grace is to faith: intrusive, transcendent, transformative. […] To experience grace is one thing; to integrate it into your life is quite another. What I crave now is that integration, some speech that is true to the transcendent nature of grace yet adequate to the hard reality in which daily faith operates. I crave, I suppose, the poetry and prose of knowing.
If you return to the faith of your childhood after long wandering, people whose orientations are entirely secular will tend to dismiss or at least depreciate the action as having psychological motivations. […] In fact, there is no way to “return to the faith of your childhood,” not really, not unless you’ve just woken from a decades-long and absolutely literal coma. Faith is not some half-remembered country into which you come like a long-exiled king. […] No. Life is not an error, even when it is. That is to say, whatever faith you emerge with at the end of your life is going to be not simply affected by that life but intimately dependent upon it, for faith in God is, in the deepest sense, faith in life—which means that even the staunchest life of faith is a life of great change.
It follows that if you believe what you believed at fifteen, then you have not lived—or have denied the reality of your life.
I could go on and on.
Also a fun thing
If you’ve never heard of the Irish sitcom Father Ted, then you are welcome!
And lastly … I mean really!
Another great language bonbon from Ángeles Mastretta:
Hay veces que uno despierta con la memoria nítida del último sueño. Una de esas mañanas, cuando abrí los ojos a la luz de mi cuarto en penumbras, me costó reconocer que no estaba yo bajo un crepúsculo, cerca de unos barcos, joven como un pez azul marino, nadando sobre la arena blanca.
My translation:
There are times that one wakes up from the final dream with a sharp memory. On those mornings, when I open my eyes to the light of my room’s shadows, it costs me to recognize that I’m not under a twilight, near some boats and young like a blue ocean fish swimming over the white sand.
