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Sunday, July 11, 2010
Higher Realities: A Sunday Rumination
When my luck is running, I can literally feel it, like an air current that pushes me gently in the direction I ought to go, and around all traps and hazards. It's been that way this past week.
Part of any man's luck is a sense for opportunities ready to his hand: possibilities for growth or gain uniquely suited to his talents and predilections. It's definitely that way for me. Inversely, when my luck is "out to lunch," I often sense innumerable such possibilities, rich, promising, and so near as to be underfoot...five minutes after they've expired.
And then there's this: It isn't all "luck."
Luck is the residue of design. -- Branch Rickey
Fortune favors the well prepared. -- Louis Pasteur
The more you look, the more you see. -- Robert M. Pirsig
To hear, one must be silent. -- Ursula LeGuin
That had better be enough quotes for one Rumination; I've just about worn out my HTMLBlockQuote macro.
By now, Gentle Reader, you're aware that I write fiction as well as the interminable op-ed essays and treaclesome preachments that appear here at Eternity Road. As a fictioneer, I spent many years in the wilderness, selling the occasional story but getting little recognition and less recompense, and absolutely no interest from conventional publishers for my novels. Whatever you might have believed, writing good fiction is very hard work, much harder than any sort of non-fiction or exposition of opinion. It often taxes the psyche worse than a marathon would tax the body. For certain, it goes on a lot longer.
The effect of flogging oneself that way, only to be ignored for years on end, is a cumulative disheartenment that can drain a fictioneer of the passion required to tell his stories. If those stories strike him as imperative -- must-be-tolds that sprout from the moral bedrock of the universe -- it's an order of magnitude worse.
But after all, why does one write? "To buy groceries," as Robert A. Heinlein put it, or to be read? For material gain or for the illumination, via fiction, of great truths? There are an infinite number of positions between those poles, but very few writers, no matter how vigorously they protest their unalloyed materiality, are completely and consciously free of the desire to illuminate, to convey the great moral themes and the conception of justice they express. In contrast, some of us don't think of material gain at all.
I'm in that latter camp. All I've ever wanted is to be read. You might have noticed that I don't allow advertising here at Eternity Road, nor is there a "tip jar," nor any semblance of a "bleg." But it took quite a while for me to realize that if all I want is to be read, I shouldn't be pursuing conventional paper publication.
So, a few months ago, I put everything online, and for free. No barriers! The cover images in the right sidebar will lead you to all my worthwhile fiction. There's no cost for any of it, and so it will remain. The results of doing so have been most gratifying.
Even a Certified Galactic Intellect can take a while overcoming his preconceptions. It's easier, and flows faster, when one's luck is running.
As you can surely see, what I've called luck in the above has nothing to do with chance. Lottery winnings excepted, gains we typically call "lucky" are a consequence of attention to our surroundings plus heightened interior awareness. We look more, and so we see more; we keep silent better, and so we hear more. Along with that, being in a state of superior consciousness of what we want and what we can do about it, we move in better directions and to better effect. That strikes me as the furthest thing from luck.
The results are, of course, salubrious. (Yes, the reasoning is somewhat circular; if the results weren't salubrious, we'd hardly call it luck.) But when one's luck is really rolling, double-6s and hanging curve balls all the way, one who's watching closely and thinking hard can "connect the dots:" he can literally see the laws of the universe enforcing themselves as he skips along the great game board of life.
And if he's a Christian, he'll fall to his knees.
We do that, you know. Not always on a schedule, either. Mass on Sundays, sure. Prayer upon rising and at bedtime, yes, of course. Rosary in the car...well, maybe that's just my personal fetish. But along with all of that, we have these moments when, stunned by an insight into a higher reality, we surrender to overwhelming gratitude: to God, for the lawfulness of His Creation, and for His generosity in sending us His Son to explain how simple it is to obtain the best from this life and the next.
C. S. Lewis called it being "surprised by joy." Yet it compares to the transitory, mundane joys the way a supernova compares to a fluorescent light.
I can count the moments of such that I've personally experienced on the fingers of one hand, with a couple to spare. (Hey, if it were commonplace, do you think I'd be rhapsodizing about it?) I wrote about one some time ago. I had another just this morning, while musing over what I should tackle as my next fiction project. And the most striking aspect of this most recent one is that it depended massively on an aspect of my life that virtually no one would call positive or pleasant.
The laws of the universe don't always bring us kittens, roses, or fresh pineapple chunks. Yet even the unpleasant stuff is important and useful. God does not make junk; neither does He do junk.
About three weeks ago, I wrote:
The atheist, whether fliply or after long consideration, says, "There is no God," eschews all notions of permanence, and hurries to make all he can of his mortal life.The Christian, whether intuitively or after a lifetime of prayer and reflection, says, "There is only God," lives in unending hope, and gives thanks for His gift of time, however brief the allotment.
In pondering what I ought to write about today, I found myself caught fast by four of the words above: There is only God. Comprehending that depends, of course, upon the acceptance of the theistic premise. Yet even the hard core atheist can be induced to see that the universe is essentially a single event, separable into parts and sequences only by an effort of will. The step to those four little words is a very short one.
One of the cliches of Christian outreach goes like this:
Atheist: I don't believe in God.
Christian: That's okay. He believes in you.
Faintly absurd, no? I mean, how would you convince an atheist of the theistic premise with a statement like that? It doesn't qualify as an argument of any sort. But then, it's not meant to be one. It's a statement of faith.
Faith and its close cousin hope are what permit the Christian to remain cheerful even when times turn dark. We suffer, just as everyone else does. We endure disappointment, pain, and loss. But we can confront these things with good spirits because we believe that there is a Plan, that each of us has a part in it, and that by adherence to the Commandments we can see ourselves through any imaginable trial.
Many an atheist has wondered how we do it. That's the complete and unexpurgated version.
It doesn't even matter if we're wrong. We might be; an intelligent Christian will admit it. Faith always cohabits with doubt. But even if so, our gift of faith and our store of hope allow us a degree of serenity that would otherwise be available to us. You cannot hope for eternal life in the nearness of God without first believing in a higher reality that both shapes our universe and contains eternal life and God.
Acceptance of that higher reality provides the energy that pulses in one of the oldest of all Christian maxims:
May He bless and keep you all.
Comments
I think that one of the greatest literary treasures of the 20th Century was Clive Staples Lewis. The man possessed such a powerful rhetorical grace that I find it almost discouraging when I sit down to write, knowing that his ability dwarfs so completely anything I might ever choose to write.
With the exception of some decisions written by Oliver Wendell Holmes, no other author is so challenging to me. My wife is amused by the fact that I can often read, re-read, and re-read again a page of his work, trying to grok every erg of meaning from the words on the page, and often consulting a dictionary to make sure that I fully understood the choice of words. Yet for all that effort, I find that his writing affirms my faith in ways that I never could have imagined any author doing.
Posted by Blackiswhite, Imperial Consigliere on 07/11/2010 at 12:17 PMThank you and may He bless you too.
Posted by KG on 07/11/2010 at 02:11 PM
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