2/2:
How do I learn to be a better person and forgive myself for my flaws?
The events of the last week scare me and I want to make things better. I
feel like the real place to start is myself and that dark part of me
that resembles the other darkness.
First part: I don’t know that it was a conscious decision to go down that road. It just seemed to me, at the time, to be the way the story needed to go. (I didn’t know at the time that the concept of the redemption of the Fallen One was in fact for a while one part of a heresy called
apokatastasis, apparently propounded by Origen and others, suggesting that all the universe would eventually be reconciled to God when physicality was finally wound down.) (Since then there’s been all kinds of argument over the various types and degrees of the heresy, and whether it was even really a heresy at all. I’m not going to get any further into the issue here, as once you start digging around in it, it’s potentially as much of a time-sink as TV Tropes.)
Though this makes me laugh a little –
As literary critic Maximilian Josef Rudwin illustrates in his book The
Devil in Legend and Literature: “[The Devil] has had apologists even
among the saints, particularly among the saints of the weaker sex. [OMG, rumbled. Though not as regards sainthood, God wot. –DD] St.
Theresa desired that men should not speak ill of the Devil, and pitied
him for not being able to love. St. Thomas Aquinas could hardly be
happy, it is said, from thinking of the doom of the Devil and went so
far in his pity for the prisoner of the pit as to spend a night in
prayer for the pardon and restoration of the dethroned archangel. ‘O
God,’ he prayed, ‘have mercy upon Thy servant the Devil’” (Rudwin 284).
So if both Theresa and Aquinas have been down that road, I’m a bit less concerned about my position. (Not that the Vatican is ever going to concern itself with my case for any reason whatsoever.) 🙂 …But as I say, at the story end, it just kinda happened.
Now as for the art of forgiving oneself: I am possibly not the best one to ask for advice on this, as once I realize I’ve screwed something up (or begin to suspect I have) I can often be pretty bad about the get-past-beating-yourself-up-and-work-out-what-to-do part.
However. Those dark places, being where they are – right to hand – have their uses. The important thing about them is not to go unconscious about them, as if you do their chances of quietly infecting your actions (or just as bad, predisposing you toward inaction) greatly increase. And those who write about this particular type of struggle (C.S. Lewis, among others) are at pains to point out that it’s not those who flee evil who’re much good at combating it. It’s the ones who acknowledge its presence in their own makeup and who grapple with it daily, who learn the ins and outs of the daily fight, who truly come to understand it well enough to learn its moves and figure out how ti fight it effectively. And without such understanding, there’s no hope of ever winning such a fight in the long, indeed very long, term. You have to engage with the Dark Side (to borrow the Star Wars angle of view) where you find it in yourself, and work to learn its dangers and its weaknesses. The better you understand it, the less power it has to run you.
And as you do come to understand it, that understanding becomes a weapon in your hand. The perception of evil, in terms of the kind that hides down at the bottom of whichever of your behaviors make you most suspicious that it’s there, can act as a sort of “canary in the coal mine” for when you run into them in the outside world. It can start leading you to understanding, not just of what’s going on in your own head, but (sometimes) to others’. And that way lie solutions, eventually, even when the problems are insanely tangled (like the ones facing the US at the moment).
Over the last week, this whole issue has been much with me. The sudden ugly increase in open, gloating cruelty and rage in some quarters has triggered some of my own dark angry places pretty powerfully at times, and the realization of how loudly the canary is singing at the moment is a more or less constant warning for me that response in kind, though it might feel really good, would be completely useless. Nor is the fear any particular use, now or later. I’ve spent a lot of time, hour by hour and day by day, slapping both those sets of responses down until the anger is way better informed and much less contaminated. Then it’ll be useful for powering whatever actions are necessary once a course of action is chosen. But not right now. Right now most of my work has been to hold still and listen to what’s going on, and be as useful as possible to other people while I choose to see what I personally can do to make a difference.
…This is more a rumination at the moment than anything else, and I don’t know how much assistance I can be to you. Like everyone else I’m feeling my way through a worldview that has abruptly become very weird and uncertain, and keeps shifting all the time. “These are the times that try men’s souls,” Tom Paine said about a period that felt just as uncertain and dangerous to the people living in it. And he meant “try” not in its softer modern definition – of being kind of put through the wringer – but in the older sense that metal is “tried” by being melted down for necessary analysis before being cast in some new form.
I think the safest thing to say is: Don’t be too hard on yourself for perceived weaknesses. Especially right now, as all perceptions are likely to be a bit wobbly in the face of such a huge disconnect/disruption. But also: sometimes being and doing better can be achieved with less introspection and more extrospection: by turning attention more toward being better for other people. It’s surprising how often the inside is positively affected by what the outside is doing. Find something useful to be for someone else, and be busy about it.
Hope this helps. 🙂
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