I may need to clean something up a bit from last year and post it publicly.
I struggled with suicidal fantasy and depression after my little brother drowned. Something I think is a lie is the notion that everyone and everything goes back quickly to normal. We love to believe that we are little islands. I know you said this is sinusoidal and we should wait for the complete wave.
Everyone has a story, and by the charity of God I am here today.
To say that I'm a little behind on SS notifs would be a chagrin-saturated understatement. I find posting things, anon though I am, to be very helpful in discharging the past. Everything doesn't get better, but discharge is better than the formation of spiritual cysts.
Everyone does indeed have a story. The people about us are far greater pieces of literature--God's literature--than we often presume.
You are right. Maybe the greatest sign of our society's stupidity is its failure to see grief. I don't even say understand but merely to see. Things don't 'go back to normal' except perhaps for superficial natures, for those who were never touched by deep love for the one lost. And they shouldn't. It would be inappropriate for a creature destined for eternity to let mere time change the contents of his being, to make him forget love and loss. I wrote this not that long ago as part of a thing on Jesus words 'Blessed are those who mourn for they shall be comforted' about how my dad has lived with the loss of his mom. I think that maybe they will mean something to you.
'What seems less blessed than sorrow? To mourn is to be so overcome with sorrow that you can’t hide it, that it interferes with your life so that you can’t function anymore. It is not merely to suffer grief but to be made weak by your suffering. First, note that Christ doesn’t distinguish between causes of mourning, between whether you mourn rationally for a thing that is worth mourning over or whether you mourn foolishly. His comfort is not confined to those who mourn in some way appropriately or those who mourn immoderately but is extended to all mourners.
The brokenness, the fallenness of our world gives many and constant causes for grief. I think especially of my daddy, Papa Andy. He lost his mother 13 years ago and he has never ‘gotten over it’. He has never been the same. The last gift that she gave him was a truck, and since it broke he has been unable to fix it or to let go of it, so it sits in his yard a monument to loss. He sinks deeper into depression and paranoia and into the dream world that is our gift and our curse. And our culture treats that as a failure but it seems, in some ways, admirable to me. It is appropriate for one destined for eternity to not let the truth of your life be washed away by the mere passing of time, to not stop grieving simply because x amount of time has passed but to hold on to the loved one and not to paper over the wound of loss.
Our society’s only response to mourning, what we would call major clinical depression, is to try and fix your broke brain with drugs or with talk therapy or to do whatever it takes to get you out of the mourning and ‘back to normal’, ‘back to work’, back to the rat race cause we are counting on you and don’t have time for you to stop and be a broken person. I think that everyone who has had a protracted sadness has had some ‘friend’ who came along and tried to fix us, and I don’t need to tell you how much the friend helped. To a mourner all help offered is just Job’s friends.
But the Good News is that there is a genuine comfort coming. Christ’s answer to grief is so complete, so good that those who receive it say, ‘I am glad that I suffered because the comfort is better than the grief was bad.’ Because we suffer we obtain the compassion of Christ, which makes suffering actually preferable. Our weakness, our loss, our failure, and our sin though horrible in themselves are the weaknesses in which His strength is made perfect. The prophets say, ‘It is better to go to the House of Mourning than the House of Joy.’ and if the House of Mourning is where the Great Physician is then they are surely right.' from https://comfortwithtruth.substack.com/p/the-beatitudes-and-whats-up-with
Very nice. I admire this very much. I do think that I disagree with you a bit about the Knight of Faith though. S.K. is very clear that Faith doesn't sacrifice or lose anything even Isaac, though it is prepared to. The 'double movement' of Faith happens instantly such that Isaac should be seen, in the spirituality of Abraham, to be sacrificed and instantly raised or as it happened in the real world sacrificed in intention but not in fact.
It is the necessity of obedience with the whole heart, soul, mind, and strength that makes this impossible. It is in the wonderful Upbuilding Discourse on 'Seek first' that he makes it clear that 'Seek first' means seek always with the whole of your being. This is why the Knight of Faith is 'the only prodigy' because he devotes his entire being to fulfilling the law, as the Infinite Resignation(Renounciation would be a better translation, not that I know Danish but based on what he is trying to communicate) attempts to do, but while devoting his whole being to lawkeeping(in the Lutheran sense) there is something else within him which believes that Isaac will be returned to him. That 'something else' is the mystery of Grace, the gift of the Holy Spirit as you and I and S.K. certainly know but Johannes de Silentio did not.(having not even a whole person to try the experiment with much less a whole person plus more)
Thank you for this. I read it when you posted, but somehow, illness et al. lead to one thing and another, and I never responded. I am now catching up.
It's funny you point out the flaws in my commentary: you are exactly right! I later wrote more to this friend, amending and altering my reasoning slightly, after rereading and discovering I had flatly forgotten to say or specify certain things. I wrote the Tetralogue in a very brief period of time, rather ill; it is riddled with errors, small and large. Thank you for pointing out a large error to my comments section (small though it is).
I absolutely adore the Discourse you reference. You are exactly right about Resignation/Renunciation, too, in my reckoning. I like Resignation in some contexts, particularly depression etc., because a Holy/Set-Apart Resignation acts as antithesis to [Suicidal] Resignation, but Renunciation has a cleaner religious shade.
The day to day pleasures--mundane pleasures, from the Latin "mundus" for "world"--are healthful to an unspeakable extent. The enormity of their beauty is rarely grasped. We write things off as "mundane," but life in the world is necessarily "worldly" at times.
If laughter and joy are remedies for despair; we might do well to remember that the heart of comedy is the unexpected, and it's hard to ever be surprised if one never interacts with the world. After all, is not the only constant in the world--change? Or, the unexpected?
I may need to clean something up a bit from last year and post it publicly.
I struggled with suicidal fantasy and depression after my little brother drowned. Something I think is a lie is the notion that everyone and everything goes back quickly to normal. We love to believe that we are little islands. I know you said this is sinusoidal and we should wait for the complete wave.
Everyone has a story, and by the charity of God I am here today.
To say that I'm a little behind on SS notifs would be a chagrin-saturated understatement. I find posting things, anon though I am, to be very helpful in discharging the past. Everything doesn't get better, but discharge is better than the formation of spiritual cysts.
Everyone does indeed have a story. The people about us are far greater pieces of literature--God's literature--than we often presume.
You are right. Maybe the greatest sign of our society's stupidity is its failure to see grief. I don't even say understand but merely to see. Things don't 'go back to normal' except perhaps for superficial natures, for those who were never touched by deep love for the one lost. And they shouldn't. It would be inappropriate for a creature destined for eternity to let mere time change the contents of his being, to make him forget love and loss. I wrote this not that long ago as part of a thing on Jesus words 'Blessed are those who mourn for they shall be comforted' about how my dad has lived with the loss of his mom. I think that maybe they will mean something to you.
'What seems less blessed than sorrow? To mourn is to be so overcome with sorrow that you can’t hide it, that it interferes with your life so that you can’t function anymore. It is not merely to suffer grief but to be made weak by your suffering. First, note that Christ doesn’t distinguish between causes of mourning, between whether you mourn rationally for a thing that is worth mourning over or whether you mourn foolishly. His comfort is not confined to those who mourn in some way appropriately or those who mourn immoderately but is extended to all mourners.
The brokenness, the fallenness of our world gives many and constant causes for grief. I think especially of my daddy, Papa Andy. He lost his mother 13 years ago and he has never ‘gotten over it’. He has never been the same. The last gift that she gave him was a truck, and since it broke he has been unable to fix it or to let go of it, so it sits in his yard a monument to loss. He sinks deeper into depression and paranoia and into the dream world that is our gift and our curse. And our culture treats that as a failure but it seems, in some ways, admirable to me. It is appropriate for one destined for eternity to not let the truth of your life be washed away by the mere passing of time, to not stop grieving simply because x amount of time has passed but to hold on to the loved one and not to paper over the wound of loss.
Our society’s only response to mourning, what we would call major clinical depression, is to try and fix your broke brain with drugs or with talk therapy or to do whatever it takes to get you out of the mourning and ‘back to normal’, ‘back to work’, back to the rat race cause we are counting on you and don’t have time for you to stop and be a broken person. I think that everyone who has had a protracted sadness has had some ‘friend’ who came along and tried to fix us, and I don’t need to tell you how much the friend helped. To a mourner all help offered is just Job’s friends.
But the Good News is that there is a genuine comfort coming. Christ’s answer to grief is so complete, so good that those who receive it say, ‘I am glad that I suffered because the comfort is better than the grief was bad.’ Because we suffer we obtain the compassion of Christ, which makes suffering actually preferable. Our weakness, our loss, our failure, and our sin though horrible in themselves are the weaknesses in which His strength is made perfect. The prophets say, ‘It is better to go to the House of Mourning than the House of Joy.’ and if the House of Mourning is where the Great Physician is then they are surely right.' from https://comfortwithtruth.substack.com/p/the-beatitudes-and-whats-up-with
This is really wonderful. Thank you for taking the time to write it, and so care-fully at that. There is indeed genuine comfort coming. Praise God.
Very nice. I admire this very much. I do think that I disagree with you a bit about the Knight of Faith though. S.K. is very clear that Faith doesn't sacrifice or lose anything even Isaac, though it is prepared to. The 'double movement' of Faith happens instantly such that Isaac should be seen, in the spirituality of Abraham, to be sacrificed and instantly raised or as it happened in the real world sacrificed in intention but not in fact.
It is the necessity of obedience with the whole heart, soul, mind, and strength that makes this impossible. It is in the wonderful Upbuilding Discourse on 'Seek first' that he makes it clear that 'Seek first' means seek always with the whole of your being. This is why the Knight of Faith is 'the only prodigy' because he devotes his entire being to fulfilling the law, as the Infinite Resignation(Renounciation would be a better translation, not that I know Danish but based on what he is trying to communicate) attempts to do, but while devoting his whole being to lawkeeping(in the Lutheran sense) there is something else within him which believes that Isaac will be returned to him. That 'something else' is the mystery of Grace, the gift of the Holy Spirit as you and I and S.K. certainly know but Johannes de Silentio did not.(having not even a whole person to try the experiment with much less a whole person plus more)
Thank you for this. I read it when you posted, but somehow, illness et al. lead to one thing and another, and I never responded. I am now catching up.
It's funny you point out the flaws in my commentary: you are exactly right! I later wrote more to this friend, amending and altering my reasoning slightly, after rereading and discovering I had flatly forgotten to say or specify certain things. I wrote the Tetralogue in a very brief period of time, rather ill; it is riddled with errors, small and large. Thank you for pointing out a large error to my comments section (small though it is).
I absolutely adore the Discourse you reference. You are exactly right about Resignation/Renunciation, too, in my reckoning. I like Resignation in some contexts, particularly depression etc., because a Holy/Set-Apart Resignation acts as antithesis to [Suicidal] Resignation, but Renunciation has a cleaner religious shade.
Thank you, again, for your note.
The day to day pleasures--mundane pleasures, from the Latin "mundus" for "world"--are healthful to an unspeakable extent. The enormity of their beauty is rarely grasped. We write things off as "mundane," but life in the world is necessarily "worldly" at times.
If laughter and joy are remedies for despair; we might do well to remember that the heart of comedy is the unexpected, and it's hard to ever be surprised if one never interacts with the world. After all, is not the only constant in the world--change? Or, the unexpected?