Suffering's Gravity and Faith

The marvel of suffering, that is to say a suffering analogous to gravity by which the body, mind, and soul find their wings clipped in union, is its ability to place the entire being into a state of total attention to reality.

Too often is the concept of grace and the love of God seen only in states of joy, beauty, and warmth. In such cases, very well it is the case that the believer instead finds himself in a state of devotion precisely due to his interior condition, or the contingent love of God. If we imagine the love of God, which is to say the love of the totality of everything and everyone in his universe, to be modeled as the exemplar through Christ, then the highest point of devotion in the human realm would be to approximate that love. This impersonal love and this contingent love are mutually exclusive.

The highest love capable in the human realm, as directed towards God, is to love him even when the union of being is clipped and fallen to the material realm. We must imagine the love of God, approximated by humans, to be analogous to a infinitely-grounded bird.

In the cases of the supposed devout who primarily love God in periods of ascent, they could not be further from God. They gaze upwards, across the infinite void of encroaching death, wishing to be something, which is to say worthy of God's love. And in such conditions they might focus their mind towards the purity of their thoughts, the purity of their flesh, a moral accounting under the realm of Christianity and God's supposed commands. They do not realize that as they focus on each step upwards, with an intensity reserved only for the thirst of a redeemed spirit, is actually their ascent away from God.

In moments of suffering, the miser could not feel further from God. Indeed he understands his steps halted, and he understands that the path towards the only being capable of total love is precluded because of his fundamental being. Such suffering is a crushing force, something that reminds him of his wretched and base being insofar that he believes his condition to be the locked gate between him and God. How could something so fundamentally broken be worthy of divine love? How could a clipped bird ever imagine an ascent upwards?

This condition is that of some state of being less than human. The collapsed union of the body, mind, and soul, was described, and especially of the mind, as the state of a beast according to the Stoics. The man laying in his bed on a Sunday night, the depressed mind which scrapes his skull, bathing in the agony of realized infinite distance from God, is nothing more than a beast. In this state, his most primal and base inclinations supercede that of his inclinations towards building a metaphysical bridge that place him above material reality. This collapse of his bridge colonizes his mind and reduces him to only his necessary substrate.

An inverted kenosis.

To ascend from gravity with clipped wings approaches a miracle; indeed such a case is a miracle. Epictetus is an example of such a miracle. We must not confuse ourselves with the exertion of will as this miracle's constitution. Will, as implied, is the control of a man's both real and imaginary assets directed towards a single point, or the fuel thrown into the furnace of ekagrata. The surplus of such assets is a privilege of fortunate humans, and this fortune mostly begets additional fortune. A cheap imitation of transforming water into wine, devoid of merit for the water was already wine. Such fortune only exists in the realm of humans.

The tattered only possess the asset of their totalizing suffering, and only in submission to this suffering can they discover there never was any destination to ascend towards.

We imagine ourselves to be more than we are. The human calculus away from our fallen state, often in social collections through material ranking, is similar to idolatry. Similar in the sense that the love of God's creation becomes subordinate to the adoration for wealth, purity, and the soaring human spirit. These adorations may only be described as defiant anesthetics against death's approach. All that can happen in the world will necessarily manifest. Of all that is necessary exists only one necessity that constitutes God's creation itself: death. In the beginning was God and God alone, which is to say in the beginning was love and love alone. The movement from being into nonbeing is the movement of finite and personal love into infinite and impersonal love. We are subordinate to infinite love.

To realize his standing of a beast, to succumb to his withering and bleeding soul, and to understand this as his fundamental reality, is the love of God's creation to its greatest degree. In such a state of necessary attention he faces two options. Firstly, he can reject this reality and elevate his mind into the delusion of humanity. This is the common and default act of an organism, the strive to preserve the natural stalk. Finally, he can submit to this reality and reduce his mind into the acceptance of his eventual death as something higher than humanity. The latter is the bursting of biological necessity, only possible from a flash of inexplicable grace.

The exemplar emptied himself of his divinity. God emptied himself of presence in the genesis of this world. The fracture and explosion of a container from its unbearable contents.

To see suffering as an instantiation of love, to not need a theodicy to love God's creation: the explosion of divine light in a likened vessel.