It is not hard to understand how the previous entry (Pt 1) seems rather severe. Almost a harsh expos`e. Our need to feel (of ourselves, or to ourselves) useful. And to think one (even, or particularly, as myself) who merely recognizes it has in some way escaped it, or has become immune to its gravitational pull and source; ie the self, would be the greatest folly for me to pose as such. Your folly would be to imagine that a fair exposition (if one has even been made) is interpreted to mean such a one has achieved any mastery.
If I am able to state this clearly enough so that even the wise might understand: No one gets good at bearing the cross.
We perceive things. Even (as believers) things that seem hidden to view by some (sometimes other believers and certainly what are known as unbelievers) and yet, and almost immediately, enter into what is the most common endeavor of all men seeking understanding.
We attempt to deconstruct to its elements; reverse engineer to the most fundamental place of our ability grasp and identify such fundamentals, and then, having it all broken down before us to each discernible piece, reassemble according to the pattern discovered in such reverse engineering and say “now I got it”…I have also made in whole what was once mystery to me. Now, it is no longer mystery. I can do this now, too. How common. How natural. How deceptive.
And since deception would seem, at least in some part, in the purview of the one calling himself believer; we might pay attention as to where it is identified and/or claimed to be. Let’s take a silly example. (Though I am persuaded if one thinks about this he will see how far it extends to almost all matters)
A man sees what he has never seen before, even such a thing he couldn’t believe possible previously. But now, he sees it. He knows now, not only of its possibility, but reality. He watches the Wright brother’s first flight. “How can this be? This thing that now is?” being clearly presented before his eyes.
Let’s say he steals into their hangar by night and either takes the contraption all apart and/or makes the most detailed and meticulous drawings of it…in every detail of angles of attachments, lengths of cables, size of bolts and screws, materials used, shape of wings, control surfaces, propeller, and power source. (You get the idea)
He duplicates perfectly. Now he flies. He may even think himself a flyer just like them. Do you see his deception? Does he…yet? It might not take long. But then again, it might…before he encounters matters of head winds, tail winds, cross winds, matters of which he was completely ignorant (not even thinking in terms of lift or the Bernoulli principle). Things the Wright brothers long experimented with, or in some far greater measure understood, accounted for…not to mention the most fundamental matter of all, the imagination and persuasion such was possible to achieve. Some things (actually many things) are not seen or “left out” due to their invisibility to a mere copier.
Even the very assumptions and presumptions of a copier may be the most invisible to himself, of all. Until. Until he discovers the relationships of climb, and power (thrust), and drag and stall. (After all, all he wanted to do was fly, not have a thing cost him his life!)
I would think I only make myself tedious were I to attempt to make any explanations and correlations of how much more this applies to matters of the faith. Even a faith we are told (do we yet know?) which “worketh by love”.
I would also think stating the obvious to the perceptive/discerning were also not necessary (and far too numerous to recount) of crashings and burnings. How that I have not died…gracefully. How that the “parts” I liked always ended in a part I didn’t like, even a right consequence and due assignment to any taking of the name Jesus Christ into my mouth.
Some of you, God knows, maybe many or all of you already know this. This would again be a great help…to me! to knowing the safety of my own uselessness above all. I am far safer finding myself an object lesson as a copier than being allowed to continue in some presumption I have “come up with anything”.
This searching out of “a” part I didn’t like by my inclusion of it in experience (I rarely endeavor to understand why I like what I like…I just “do”) has even helped me with that part in parenthesis. All has been help to me. All has been help for me. And all made even all the more particularly and exquisitely personal in pain when I have proceeded as though I am a helper. There is all too obviously something made perfectly fitting to me personally for that place of presumption. The piercing is simply too perfectly accurate.
Now, please do not misunderstand. I am not saying there isn’t or shouldn’t be pain. Not as though I would deny the Lord’s sufferings on our behalf, God forbid! Or have some notion He was made immune to pain by some trick of mind or spiritual cleverness…again, God forbid! To the contrary, and hoping to not put too fine a point to the matter, pain and suffering are not quite the same. Suffering has more to do with processing the experience of pain…even as a woman being sawn in half has a different experience of matters than a woman giving birth…though great pain is experienced in both. And both may feel such greatness of it to the convincing of their own death in such excess.
No.
What I am saying is this. I came to perceive a great gulf, a great divide…even insurmountable to me lest I be given some light sorely lacking between the man who said “God, yes” while I discovered only the man screaming “God, no!” in whatever pain he knew. I had to know how this is reconciled. This man, and that man. Something, or better, someone was plaguing me, paining me, with discontent in my darkness. Would God…pain a man so? And…if so…to what end? Why would “that man” ever submit and still maintain such mercy (Father forgive them…) for this man whose only issuing forth in pain was complaint? What “is” working…invisible to the man?
Could it be that one man really knew nothing of suffering? Man, but he’d need a lot of help. Even all of it.
(Pt 3 to follow)
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