Digressions Captured in One Sitting

That beauty is America’s biggest commodity...devouring instead of participating. Pursuing adventure and experience, manipulating every occasion for self-realization and pleasure. The fact that human experience is accessed through five inches of silicon and wire and glass screen. That you can watch anything from a cat video to a nice 10-hour long repeat shot of a crackling fire to produce comfort or at least the illusion of it….that human beings don’t need another app but something to ground them in reality. That authority and limitations are necessary for the flourishing of individuals and communities and in no way imply their ruin. That God is probably actually real but is not experienced through a blind fundamental certainty or a scientific model of probability but through a relationship that gets down to the original meaning of the word faith which is a kind of deep, marital trust. That a man as different from me as a Muslim with a history of secret homosexual affairs is just as much to be considered my neighbor as the white straight American male drinking coffee and brightly communicating his well versed Baptist humor to my immediate right. That the truth is sweeter in its seemingly irreconcilable paradoxes than in its controlled formulas. That my deepest despair and pain cannot be willed out of through personal strength but only loved into, and through love from a source that is not at all from my Gnostic inner light. That my imaginings and fantasies of perfect union and intimacy with a woman are in all actuality a severe case of homesickness for divine union. That only friendship can heal a broken heart. That God, if He exists, is closer to you than the air you breathe and closer than the covers you put over your soul just to try to hide what apparently we’ve decided is vulnerable to the most sickening shame imaginable. That I am not a morally good person, at least not outside the jurisdictions of grace, which isn’t really worth mentioning because grace has infinite jurisdiction and carries the authority to dictate whether or not I am a morally good person, and that, wow, it’s too good to believe that this insurmountable verdict was put in the slot and successfully reviewed and accepted in Heaven’s courts some 2,018 years ago give or take because of a monk’s bad history dating skills. That the point was never moral goodness but the giving and receiving of communal love within the context of the aforementioned faith, or the trust two parties gladly and graciously exchange in a covenantal marriage. That there’s a profound difference between vacation and recreation if you just deconstruct a bit of the semantics: vacate and re-create. That you are not without definition as a human being or even ill-defined as one if you’re not experiencing marital bliss by the time you’re 25 years of age. That the most brilliant theologian of the New Testament actually attested to some nice benefits of single life, especially in regards to spiritual formation and direction. That the worst sin in the world is no surface level sin in particular but the absurd assumption that a person is without or above sin. That this might end up being the unpardonable sin since its so malevolent to the invasions of grace. That my worst mistakes I’ve ever made were made because I assumed I would never make them. That this may be why God must almost always insist on using suffering as our most likely means of growth because the place we find Him is not on the heights of our moral ether but on the rock bottom floor of our unalterable depravity. That it is a step of exceptional strength to admit to someone you know has the power to hurt you that you are weak. That real strength is not what it looks like on the cover of our political campaigns or through our Instagram filters. That Dostoevsky was correct when he said that the collective guilt and sin of the world is settled like an impossible weight on individual souls. That yes, this scarily means that we civilized middle-classers are not exempt from the most horrific atrocities imaginable. That grace is the pardoning whisper in a universe of clamor. That beautiful moments are destined to perish the second you become conscious that they are beautiful--this is a strange phenomenon but beauty is designed to elude self-consciousness. That throwing something meant only to be held is an egregious sin. That eating something meant only to be looked at is our modern method of loving, and this shows our confusion. That love is the disposition to act for the joy and good of another person and it measured by freedom and faith in God, and that lust is conversely measured by the intensity of passion, usually sexual and of an appetite dedicated to self-upholstery. That I just can’t keep track of how many times I’ve gotten love confused with lust when they are in fact the fundamental opposing forces of the universe. That virtue which tends more to support the moral posture of its user instead of the tangible objects to which virtue is supposed to tend is not a virtue at all but the most elusive and dangerous of vices. That this was the blindness of the Pharisees. That in closing I am in the highest of mountains when I realize that I’m in the lowest of gutters. That this change in elevation first comes from a change in vision. And that this vision is bestowed upon, not achieved. And furthermore that this vision lets us see first and foremost how loved we are even when we deem it all so unloveable. That this is the will of God to man.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=foR_TLvzXqI&list=RDfoR_TLvzXqI&t=286