I Am My Greatest Enemy

The world feels broken,

like everything good is slipping between our fingers,

fires rage,

storms tear across the land,

and laughter has faded away.

…

Praying for a spark of change,

I believe that even from these ruins,

we can arise and rebuild,

finding beauty admist the ashes.

I love humans, but I dislike this world. I love God, but I hate organized religion. I love the human condition, but I hate the distance between souls in society.

I can write thousands of words with sophisticated rhetoric to create a logically airtight reasoning for the above, and I can convince myself that any thought of mine is true. I understand this explicitly, and that is why I focus on kenosis as sight.

Regardless of how I arrive to a conclusion, with or without our natural red-tinted lens, this premise still holds true: it is I who struggle against everything, and that everything is indifferent. It is precisely who I am that places me at conflict with the world. Am I supposed to change myself to mesh better with that indifferent everything?

I love God, but a man cannot love God. I can only love everything that composes him, and one such thing is truth. I love truth. I love truth to the extent that I am willing to burn and suffer for it at great personal cost.

I feel like everything I happen to be is at conflict with the world due to truth. At times I wonder if I care too much. I told my friend who has suffered at a low-paying, high-stress customer service job that the federal Pell Grant covers some trade school programs and that some programs last only a year. He already lives with parents; this would be his chance to live a materially secure life. And, just 30 seconds letter, he says "that's cool" and talks to me about a video game. This made me feel… bothered.

But that is precisely my problem. I project myself onto the world and its inhabitants. Why do I have implicit expectations about how they receive my message? Is not telling them enough in itself? I have an ego and its expectations, when truth exists beyond ego. Kenosis in this context would be for my statement to be an offering, not a call for action.

My core problem: I expect truth to lead to action, both for myself and others.

What is truth if not acted upon?

There is the highest realm of truth, which is to say all that is true as necessitated by God. This is why studying physics, math, and science are clean acts of striving towards truth, or the ultimate reality of everything. This is safe and clean.

Then there is the human realm of truth, which is to say all that is argued about what something is, how to live a good life, and other things. This is the realm I operate within, and to speak of what is actually true in a moral and relational sense is only possible within the frame of our own ego. Because this realm is messy, shaky, and difficult to create something that extends beyond the personal frame, systems of philosophy and theology emphasize specific virtues that, when combined, point towards truth: courage, justice, wisdom, temperance, neighbor-love, patience, etc. We approach truth in the human realm indirectly.

Truth as necessity versus truth as orientation.

Moral, or human, truth: ego-bound. To investigate the root cause, we must identify the boundaries within systems; the boundary between two or more humans is the disparate interiority of each man.

Within the interior human life exists an implicit contrast imposed by nature. We do not expect to be harmed unduly, nor do we expect our life to be overridden by others (the stripping of agency is the stripping of humanity), nor do we expect the ones we care for to betray us. This contract is universal until eroded by trauma and other manifestations of force.

To expect truth to cross that boundary once given violates that contract; to impose truth into another person is an act of force, an act of violence.

Human truth is universal, reception is radically unequal.

I must forgive myself and always ask myself, "Is what I'm doing, or what I hope to achieve, violating the soul's contract?"

Κύριε ἐλέησον.