Simple, true and very helpful. The difference between people being: what is yearned for?
Someone can appear successful, professional, settled, affluent, high-status, etc, and yet be yearning for something bad. It is this yearning which counts, though others can't see it!
On the other hand if we are yearning for something divine then knowing this is so is useful because it calibrates our expectations for this life. Embracing the sensation of it is immediately helpful in maintaining sanity.
@RT - "Someone can appear successful, professional, settled, affluent, high-status, etc, and yet be yearning for something bad."
Quite true - as I can vouchsafe from experience. Indeed we all do this, to some extent. The crucial question is whether we recognize that the yearned-for bad is bad, and repent it.
24 May 2022 at 14:00
It is, I suppose, a vital aspect of Romantic Christianity that it aims to heal the mind of modern Man; as wellas to provide the truth of reality. But such 'healing' (although vital and deeply desired) cannot be permanent - because this mortal life is a time for learning, directed at immortal resurrected life; and we are neither made nor intended to attain a state of permanent rest and satisfaction. Rather, we are supposed to continue learning for as long as we are alive. Yearning is the mortal-human condition. Nonetheless it is a fact that modern Man carries a terrible wound of alienation from which he craves healing - because this wound causes the characteristic and deadly sickness that so distorts modern thinking; rendering thought conceptually-incoherent, and dissolving motivation.So, it is right for us to seek healing; but we must ask what is the goal of this healing?Does healing - as it should - extend beyond here-and-now happiness combined with a materialistic optimism about the future: amounting to a (delusory) conviction that "my life will get better". Or is the healing we seek to extend and include healing the deepest and most distorting trauma of modern Man? Modern Man suffers alienation, disorientation, demotivation and conceptual incoherence because of the denial of God, rejection of belief in creation, exclusion of life beyond biological death... and other related spiritual deficits. This deficit is the wound, the hole, at the very centre of the mind of modern Man; the absence of which causes intractable spiritual despair, and indeed biological sickness unto death... Such that he covertly/ deniably seeks his own death, the extinction of his people and the annihilation of his culture. But the wound we carry cannot - therefore will not - be healed by absorbing what previously occupied the hole. The world cannot heal us: the world lacks what is needed. We cannot restore the mind to what it was before. The hole must to be filled, therefore, by God, creation (and purpose), meaning and the reality of relationship. And this we need to discover and know for ourselves: from our-selves. The mind's deficit formed and grew because of serial denials of The Known; denials of what we each once knew naturally, spontaneously, by the gifts of God. We began by knowing! But by serial subversion, destruction, inversion etc... we made ourselves ignorant. We broke our ties with God, men and the world of nature.We broke the spring of our faith, hence hope. Each Man's deficit is - however - distinctive in terms of its extent, shape, and degrees of absence; and the order of urgency by which we crave healing. This is another reason why there can be no standardized and prefabricated 'plug-in' healing patch. The healing of this mental deficit therefore requires active, conscious choices from each of us. We must become not just our own Christian theologian (deriving our sustaining living faith from direct engagement with the spirit); but also a physician of the incarnated immortal soul. We need to be our own conceptual artist and spiritual craftsman. Only thus may we be sufficiently healed.
"Healing the mind of modern Man"
2 Comments -
>Yearning is the mortal-human condition.
Simple, true and very helpful. The difference between people being: what is yearned for?
Someone can appear successful, professional, settled, affluent, high-status, etc, and yet be yearning for something bad. It is this yearning which counts, though others can't see it!
On the other hand if we are yearning for something divine then knowing this is so is useful because it calibrates our expectations for this life. Embracing the sensation of it is immediately helpful in maintaining sanity.
24 May 2022 at 13:40
@RT - "Someone can appear successful, professional, settled, affluent, high-status, etc, and yet be yearning for something bad."
Quite true - as I can vouchsafe from experience. Indeed we all do this, to some extent. The crucial question is whether we recognize that the yearned-for bad is bad, and repent it.
24 May 2022 at 14:00