Grace and Thermodynamics in the Human Soul

To receive the light of God within oneself: a miracle of extremes. Within each human being is the capacity to receive God's light, this itself provides the supernatural energy to sustain uncorrupted love for God. This is no different than chlorophyll.

That opening within the human spirit, the very porous membrane to receive light, is infinitely small (and, in some cases, calcified into stone). For that opening to remain as such requires enormous effort, an extraordinary strain on the finite human condition. The finite can only, for a short time, make room for the infinite. This is why receiving God's light is short-lived and comes at great cost.

Through this, the unifying aspect of man is our finite energy.

The people reduced to things (such as the beaten child, the veteran with PTSD, the alcoholic) have inherently less energy than most. In the human realm, this manifests in differences in social achievement, like the ability to ascend upwards in class. In the spiritual realm, this manifests in immense difficulty to receive God's light, for there is hardly enough energy to survive, let alone receive love. To struggle upwards in both realms, despite their affliction, is a miracle that often comes at great cost. This is why most suffer deeply and never recover, and why the few who persist are rare.

This is the constitution of grace.

Effort and the ability to expend energy is a fickle thing. We liken our material pursuits to God's love, which is to say we raise our pursuits (like job promotions, large homes, specific family dynamics) as an end rather than a mean. We arrive at the end after years of labor only to find ourselves not having stepped forward at all. If God's love is the light which provides a higher energy to the soul, this is a lower mimicry of God's love. This sense of love provides us with the energy and reason to live, but it does not provide us a life.

The aperture to receive light is, without God's love, the same as a vacuum. The attempt to fill it with the imitation of God's love exists many planes below his statement of love: "Let there be light." Only he can create something from nothing. We should empty ourselves into nothing so he can create something from us.

In a sense, this explains why there exists a trope of the exhaustion of men. Given their finite energy, their job, family, duties, and other obligations all feed upon his energy. True roots for the human soul violate the law of conservation of energy; they provide more than they consume. But most men organize their lives around material pursuits that follow thermodynamics, not grace. They spend energy without receiving light, until the aperture calcifies from disuse.

This is why true friends, and other good things, are so rare, and the quality of them can be distinguished as either that of thermodynamics or that of grace.

We exist in society under the constraints of human necessity: markets, jobs, imposed obligations and pressured duties. Many constraints are arbitrary in themselves, and this is why the gift of sight is a curse; those who seek truth and understanding suffer under contradictions against the discursive intelligence. Two choices given this: optimize for grace, or let the discursive intelligence shatter under its weight.

To choose the shattering under that weight, in the human realm, is the inner collapse of truth. At one moment a man suffers in distress at the falseness of his work; the next he is happily working the same job for a hefty paycheck. He exchanged essence for thermodynamics. The calcification of the aperture, or the reduction of socially respected man into thing. A happy thing, but a frozen thing.

The other path is precarious and scarcely rewarded, and it comes at great material cost. The miracle of American society is that the further one develops the capability to reduce men into thing the more he is rewarded with material comfort. This is the requirement of operating at scale. Optimizing the human life for grace, by reducing and cutting unnecessary things beholden to thermodynamics, often manifests in the lower end of that scale. The needs for flourishing, and thus the greater reception of God's love: food and drink, shelter and belonging, human love and a humble orientation. The optimization for grace is the willingness to walk closer to nothing, both internally and materially, within reason.

One must suspend thought to receive God's love. The imagination of man is the source of suffering, especially for the precarious: "This should be X, but it is really Y, so I am wronged." A better orientation: "This should be X, but this strays me further from God's love, so I will take appropriate action." It is the body and spirit which receives God's love, not the intellect. See: people collapsing to their knees and sobbing at church, inexplicably. Truth is a felt structure, not an abstraction. In the encounter with reality, surrender to feeling without abstraction, and appropriate action will follow.