On Shiny Things

One can look around for little more than a moment and discover that humankind is looking for the good, and it is a quality of those good things that they radiate forth goodness. We are looking for those precious items or virtues that themselves shine in beauty, of which at the very mention of their name we can recognize the glory that they flaunt. You could call these goods friendship, success, romance, parenthood, all of which are some form of love. That is humanity, nothing else but a quest for love which man is made for. This quest has been repeated again and again throughout history in new and fresh adventures, some men have failed to find the shiny thing while some have succeeded at the noble task. What we find every single time in every single instance is that those few heroes who can attain this virtue themselves radiate the very same goodness. They become bright themselves, and the light that they caught is amplified by their very existence. It is not great speeches that inspire loyalty and fertilize peace, it is the grandness of a man's soul, and the bright contents of his heart that allow him to be truly bright himself.

This great bright thing does not make other things more dark, on the contrary, it reveals the other things more perfectly and makes them brighter. When a man possesses this good in one form or another, the other goods that he has are not diminished nor altered, but they are seen with a brighter clarity and are more able to be adored. If one were to lose a best friend, the whole of the man's world would be startled to find itself a bit darker and wonder where all the light has gone, because a great and shining love was (or at least seemed to be) taken from him, even if before it was taken from him everything seemed just business as usual. What a soul needs to struggle for, what a soul needs to honestly try his hardest to find is what makes life brighter. When something good and wholly beautiful enters our lives, what we might not realize is that everything becomes a little bit brighter. In contrary to the stars which seem to become dim whenever the moon flaunts her light in a particularly selfish way, good things in our lives selflessly offer to make all the other things brighter. Love is not jealous, nor proud. Instead, love becomes like a torch, a bright sky of fire that hangs over all the other things in our lives and makes them shine.

But where does this light come from? From what sun do these beautiful rays emit? It is not within themselves that they find the sources of their light, it is from one source and one source only. It comes from what is true and objective, it comes from God, the Eternal Wellspring of Light. Without this source? There is only darkness. Romance, friendship, parenthood, all straw without God. Without God love and romance have their origin in humanity, and therefore they are just chemicals. They hardly rise to any nobility greater than hunger. When we are given and freely accept, however, the Agape provided by the sacrifice of Christ and the nature of the Trinity the love that we have becomes real. It transcends physical boundaries, it transcends reason itself, it becomes a reality beyond our comprehension that shines brighter than anything else we can possess- but not brighter than God. That is why we should all put God first. When we live for Christ alone, Christ does not make our romances or our friendships darker. He seems to make them burn with overwhelming light. He makes everything brighter, not only brighter, but more real than we could have imagined. When we allow the Agape of Christ to come first in our lives, we look back to see that the light provided by this Divine Love makes everything seem more incredibly beautiful. Without the light of God we see how dreadfully dull everything is, but when the blinding illumination of Christ floods over creation what is revealed is the poetry of the crevices that were hidden in shadow, the sweetness of the details that the eye could not see. To live for anything else? Madness.

And that is why there is always hope. 

It is an unfortunate tendency of our human condition which causes us to be negative, and this tendency is the prejudice of being old. Children will never hesitate to celebrate the arrival of a new toy with a vigor that, if we are living the best life, we never have to lose. Like Peter Pan, we never have to grow up. The things that the child may be scolded for, however, are when he loses the toy or when he spills his milk. When he loses that small good, the mourning resembles that of Old Testament figures who cover themselves in sackcloth and ash and cry for days over the loss of some loved one. The true man who has come to truly love mourns over the loss of good, but he does not forget the Eternal Light that Christ provides. I have silly doubts. Sometimes I look out onto the grass and see the beautiful green, and I think to myself, "what if it is blue. What if my eyes are defective." Sometimes I look at a mirror and I honestly believe for a fraction of a second that my reflection is an entirely different person living in a whole new world imagined by Lewis Carroll. I never doubt, however, that God will work all things good for those who love him, and it is in this fact that I find my greatest hopes, not only my greatest hopes, but my only hopes. It is in this fact, that to love God is the source of all brightness, that all men should cling to desperately and ferociously.

And this reveals an extremely important part of the spiritual life. To live a bright life that is abundant in goodness and love, it does not rely on our own merits. It revolves and is contingent on the love of God. Therefore it is not from our own origins that the abundant life is reached, but it is through Christ that we achieve it. The spiritual life, then, does not have its origin in man loving God, it is in man opening himself up to the gift of God's love so that we may have love, a love that makes everything else shimmer. It is only by the love of God that we can love God. Seek not, then, to love God so as to be worthy of the Sacraments or to love God to be worthy of praying. Come in prayer, depend on the Sacraments, open yourself to the very gift of God Himself, and you will find that soon you will love God and others more perfectly, and you will wake to find all the love in your life a different shade of reality that you never could have expected.

 Peace,
- The Boy Pilgrim

A Hastily Written Message

"Shes smaht, funny, beautiful, but what if we go out again and I found out she ain't that smaht, what if I find out she is boring? Nawh, this girl, this girl is perfect right now. I don't wanna ruin that."
"Maybe you're perfect right now and you don't wanna ruin that."

In the movie Good Will Hunting, Will goes out on a date. The girl is smart, funny, and seems to see life the same way that Will does. The date goes really well, and he goes back to his counselor and tell him all about how smitten he is with this seemingly perfect girl. But then he says something odd. He isn't going to call her again, because he thinks she might end up being boring or stupid. The problem isn't with the girl though, and everybody knows it. The problem is with Will.

Potential. Potential is a scary thing. We are all looking for it, the potential job, the potential home, the potential spouse. But once you have found something or somebody who has an incredible amount of potential, what do you do with that? The only possible thing to do with it is to follow it, and to follow it we must change. We don't like to change much, do we? Why the hell not? When faced with what could be beautiful and holy and good and  true, why is there part of our hearts that says no?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WC2BAjEnmJw

The truth is, we are all a little bit broken. Whether we can still feel it or the wounds lie just under the surface, we all hurt. If you get bit, you carry that bite mark with you. That is probably why it is so easy to fall in love when you are young, because there is no scar tissue there. And the more we live, the more suffering we go through, our hearts can't help but carry that with us, and we can't help but feel a bit of trepidation in making decisions that could potentially revolutionize the way we live our lives.

But it is better to love whether you win or lose or die.

Ultimately love overcomes trepidation. Ultimately joy triumphs over sorrow. Ultimately grace which encourages tramples over the enemy who defeats. If we let it, that is. Joy shows through our human fears that it is so worth it to chase potential. You never know what could happen.

In the movie, you don't know what happens to Will and the girl. All you know is that he went for it. I like to imagine Will and Skyler getting married and having many babies, but maybe it didn't work out. If that is the unfortunate case, Will grew because of it, and he probably found himself another sweetheart over on the West Coast.

Eventually you just have to accept that life comes with exceedingly few guarantees. To live is not to live safely, it is to take leaps over chasms, all to chase a chance at beauty.

Peace,
The Boy Pilgrim

Something Silly

"Isn't it funny how we all know that finding love and getting married will inevitably end in death and heartbreak, yet we want it more than anything else in the entire world?" said a friend of mine tonight with a smile. We were talking about the silliness of people. People are dreadfully silly, and that is what makes them so fun. That is why I could of walked around New York City for hours, looking at all the silly people walking about (looking quite silly with all their bags), that is why I can watch movies about silly people who fall in love in silly ways, that is why I can spend hours with all my silly friends talking about silly things. These sillinesses (Damn the red line that tells me that silliness can't be plural) we pass off to be general insanity, general quirkiness. They are not of much consequence.

And then there is a silliness that is terrifyingly large, so important as to change the destiny of gods and demons. It is a madness that is somehow sane, a disordered flow of logic that for some reason seems to be ordered. To the naked eye, the silliness of love, not just love, but Love, and (H)ope and (F)aith are mad. "You believe in something you can't see? You have hope in something not guaranteed? You would die so another may live?" These are the questions that a computer might put forth, or even more terrifying, someone who has grown old. But to the child who fights dragons in his sleep it is just second nature.

Which, when you think about it, is rather silly.

That is the truth of it though, just look around you. It is within our nature to trust the unseen and step out blindly into the dark. Those who don't, well they suffer a fate worse than death. They grow old. Maybe that is why Peter Pan said of death, "To die would be an awfully big adventure", not because he was brave, but because he was silly. He was human. He lived, and he lived abundantly.

Paradoxically, to be silly is not silly at all. It is childish, but the more I live the more I realize that to be a child is to be fulfilled. To be a child is to be sane.

I leave you with this, oh one or two valued readers. Never stop being silly. Whether being silly is waving your arms like a jellyfish or getting down on your knees and praying to God, those who truly understand life are the silliest of us all.

Peace,
The Boy Pilgrim

A Fairy Tale Easter

If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans. 

G.K. Chesterton has said that one of his favorite sensations was the moment when you are in a tunnel and you burst out of the darkness into the sunshine. That is what Easter feels like. We can be happy again. At the beginning of Lent, I prayed that God truly make me penitent, I prayed that God truly make me grow, I asked God to change things. Everything changed in the past two months for me. I look back at the life I lived and everything seems touched, changed, altered. The more I live, the more I think that it is for the better. And that is a beautiful thing. Before I entered the tunnel of Lent, things seemed very bright. But now, exiting the tunnel, things seem just a bit brighter.

I'm excited to live. I'm excited to plunge into the depths of my life, to explore, to laugh, to eat and to drink and to be merry, I am excited to cry and gnash my teeth, excited to look up at God and ask Him "Why?" It is all life. It is all an intrical part of the human experience.

If reading Fairy Tales has taught me anything, it is that life is extraordinary. Fairy Tales aren't really an escape for me, they are a reminder. When I open up Peter Pan and read about Wendy giving Peter a "kiss" (in the form of a thimble) I don't do it to escape the drudgery of modern romance, I read it because it reminds me of the innocent, playful wonder that romance carries with it. When I flip through Alice in Wonderland, it isn't to escape the unfortunate order of the universe, it is to remind me that this world can be silly, strange, outrageous, and, dare I say, hilariously and wondrously fun. The point is that the fairy tales are not so much fairy tales after all. We live in the greatest fairy tale ever told, where (to the slightly romantic eye) knights fight dragons and wizards sling spells and heroes and angels and gods (beware, demons too) walk among us. Every moment of our lives is a chapter in a dramatic and fanciful tale that would amaze and astound readers if it were told.

Even the sorrow. Even the pain. Who can say that Medea's rage is not poetic and mystifying? Or, for a more modern example, who can watch Hathaway's heart shattering performance in Les Mis and not be enchanted? The sorrows and the sadness of life can be just as exciting, just as noble as the joys. You only need to see it with a slightly romantic eye.

Peace
- The Boy Pilgrim