Temptation(s)…
Lately, I have been required, in order to maintain sanity, to simply write to myself. To dissociate myself from my circumstances and be a third party observer if you will. While I wholly recommend a confidant or friend for this process, I have found insights in stepping back and learning to get out of my emotion, therefore weakening the power of emotion until it has a much diminished role. I despise “feelings” at times. I have found them to be insidious, blinding, way too influential, and thieves of reason. In listening to a message on youtube, I was jarred by how the temptations of Jesus so mirrors what we experience. The speaker framed the theme of the desert experience as: Jesus was asked to meet a legitimate God given need in an illegitimate way. I fear for myself, that I am so vulnerable to the crafty deception that so easily can ensnare me. I feel the need as legitimate, but seem to rely on my wisdom for the fulfillment of the need. After we’re through reading the verse in Jeremiah 29 about his plans (11) roll on down to v.13 where God says “you will find me when you seek me with all your heart.” “All”, really. I’m not sure I have ever sought “all” of anything. Maybe when I was sixteen and stricken by a particular female. But lately, my devotions are as scattered as my thoughts. Imagine that. We must prioritize our devotions, and reclaim the meaning in them. Why were they devotions in the first place? I cannot let, as does the addict, the impulse meet my legitimate need rather than going and listening to the only source that can meet the true, root cause of what I feel. All the time guarding against the insidious themes of many feelings. Trust in God or emotions. To quote The Fray: “Sometimes the right thing is the hardest thing to do.”
Excellent entry, Chad. I love that you are a deep thinker who isn’t afraid of “stepping back” to gain a wider perspective, and that from another point of view you seek to see beneath the surface into something deeper, and beyond the self for something bigger than you and more universal.
I submit, however, a couple of quotes as counterpoints to your feelings about feelings, as the latter being “way too influential” and “thieves of reason.”
“Reason is the natural order of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.”
–C. S. Lewis
“It is the heart which perceives God and not the reason.“
–Blaise Pascal, Pensees
It seems to me that we exist along a precarious fault line between continental plates as antithetical forces. One of these is the fault line between the plates of reason and passion, which ever-shift and grind against each other. We are the space in between them. The action of the plates is a steady and certain action, and intractable, and it is this action which makes us, shapes us. It is the action of both plates which equally smashes us from both sides with blunt force and not merely one plate, though it sometimes is the case that only one of them at a time shifts and grinds while the other remains stationary. But the stationary one is no less powerful a smashing part of this seismic sandwich.
And so our existence is defined by the action of these antithetical forces: we are affected because we are smaller and less powerful than the giant forces which abut us. At the same time, we are the *why* of the antithetical forces – without the space in between, that line upon which the shift and grind, they wouldn’t exist! They’d be one, not two parts. In this sense, we too affect, and are just as powerful and significant.
This trinity of forces is the perfect circle of life. Everything is becoming. The dialectics of this yin and that yang produce their result, a Third component — new life, if you will. The resulting product is that toward which the synthesis of the positive and negative charge; indeed, it is also that which propels the charges along. Charge, as energy that causes movement and as the motivation that energizes. The question is the answer. Point / Counterpoint. Movement is life. The perfect circle is the One.