Gifts and holiness
I haven't written much of anything lately. Recent events prompt me to regret this. I've spent so much emotional energy on wanting something else that I've ignored the gift God has given me right now, which is my creativity. Trying to pick it up again the other night I felt all the old feelings of pain and inadequacy, those demons that have always plagued the process of writing. But I must turn to it now, must be creative because it is God's gift to me, because he wants me to use it, it is his desire for me right now; instead of telling him it isn't good enough, it isn't what I want right now I should thank him for that gift and indulge it, use it, enjoy it, take pleasure in it. Stop being so impatient for other gifts which in truth I'm not ready for. That is my comfort right now; instead of looking at an emptiness I want to look at the gift I have, be fulfilled by it instead.
Interestingly, Father's homily today was on being holy where we are, as we are. I'm not really sure how to apply that, how to be holy as I am. Holiness is generally construed in terms of the meditative life, a life I'm not called to. What is holiness, anyway? I've never really thought about it beyond the simple definition of holiness as being set apart for service to God. So how do I serve God in my station in life? I'm not really satisfied by saying that I can serve God through creativity; that doesn't really suffice for me. There must be something else, something, well, less self-serving. Oh, here's a thought~I could pray about it. That should have been my first reaction, I guess.
Labels: creativity, holiness
Finding God's will for your life
About a month ago I got St Francis de Sales'
Finding God's Will for Your Life. Read it all at once, hoping, I think, for some bolt of lightning. After time has passed I've begun to understand it, I think.
I am where God wants me to be right now, experiencing what God wants me to experience and doing what he wants me to do. I've been thinking I needed something in my life that seemed, to me, to be the only thing worth having. The fact is that right now~I am in the position to finally make use of the gifts he gave me, and I've come perilously close to throwing those gifts away again, just as I once did. Having that thing in my life would probably have done that. Right now he wants me to make use of them. Right now he doesn't want that thing in my life, but that doesn't mean he won't give it to me later, when I'm at the point to have it. Or he could not have it in his plan for me at all, and if so~there will be other blessings to be had. It won't leave my life any less fulfilling unless I make it so.
So I guess that means I've accepted that God does have a plan for me, something that was once so heretical to believe that I still feel a little weird saying it. I've accepted that I haven't flown under his radar, that he hasn't been neglectful of me. All will be well. That's not to say I don't feel a sense of terror at the prospect of life without that desiderata, but . . .I need to just focus on what he wants me to do right now, and stop considering the lack of that which I wanted as a failure in my life. It's only a failure if I let it be so, I guess.
Labels: this and that
"Atheism is harmless"
Someone came through my line today wearing a shirt that made me so mad I fumed about it for an hour afterwards. It read Atheism is harmless. Religion is bigoted, murderous. . . . and other adjectives I couldn't make out. First off, the statement is not even true. It states a prejudice, which makes the wearer bigoted, which makes the wearer a hypocrite. Factually, wars commenced in the name of atheistic statist ideologies have killed more than one hundred million people--vastly more than wars of religion--and still kill and imprison thousands of people deemed "dangerous" for "thought crimes" or for being unwanted (the unborn) or retarded or otherwise unfit. Factually, all of the world's major religions--Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, and Judaism--preach love and peace. (It is, of course, a safe bet that the maker of the shirt wasn't thinking of Buddhism when s/he wrote the slogan, but of Christianity.)
Atheism is not harmless because atheists are human beings just as Christians are human beings, and factually, human beings kill. As long as there are human beings living and breathing and believing something, there will be crimes committed in the name of that something. It is not therefore just factually wrong but a gross misapprehension of human nature, and what's even more infuriating is that the maker and the wearer alike probably believe themselves enlightened. And lately that sort of thing has really been bothering me, that tendency to smugly assess one's rejection of theology as evidence of one's superior intellect. Frankly, unbelief, as opposed to disbelief (which is at least evidence of one's desire to believe), flies in the face of a sane assessment of reality.
Labels: atheism
