I apologise for any confusion that anyone may have encountered; the new e-mail address is ddcomfort@gmail.com. I haven't yet figured out how to make the links work (I'm not sure I ever did figure out how to make the links work).
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When I was very young, (I think about five) I saw a still younger child (unknown to me) being given an ice-cream cone; as the child reached out his small hands for the treat, he tipped the cone, and the ice cream fell off of it onto the ground, and he began to cry. At that, a pang shot through me; I can feel it to this day. It seemed it would have been better for the World never to have existed than for that one event to have occurred; of course, that was a posterior analysis, but that was the substance of the feeling at the time. It is a common enough event; I have since witnessed the very same thing many times without reaction, and had most probably seen it before, (my memories of those far-off times being rather hazy). In fact, unless I am very much mistaken, the very same thing had happened previously to me without provoking nearly as intense a reaction.
At this point, you are all probably looking at me as a complete lunatic, and I don't blame you. What was it that provoked such an intense reaction, making that simple event one of the formational forces in my life? I think it was the combination of the childish intensity of delighted anticipation of enjoyment, the abrupt taking away of the promised pleasure, and the broken-hearted wailing that resulted. For that child at that moment, that ice cream was his heaven, and suddenly, the door was slammed shut; more ice cream may be procured, and the child comforted, but still that bereaved wailing echoes down the corridors of time and space. Of course I know it is silly to place such importance on ice cream, but it is exactly the silliness and childishness of it that gives it such poignancy; I don't at all think that the reaction would have been nearly as strong had it been a reasoned and measured response to some great crisis. The disjuncture between the triviality of the incident and the intensity of the response gives it its pathetic quality, and it is one of the things that in adolescence had me shaking my fist at God, and saying, "You Tormentor! Stop it!!". It didn't mean anything in itself, but a tiny paradise was shattered, and my heart broke; I didn't so much care if a rational creature suffered the torments of Hell, but for a child to shed such tears made the Universe seem like a cruel joke.
The reason I introduce this post with this rather unimportant piece of autobiography is because I have come to suspect that similar reactions lie behind many of the core perceptions of modernity; as modern people, we worship Pain, that dark Taboo before which we make such extravagant obeisances, and perform endless sacrifice of infants and other helpless creatures, and really, is there that much of a difference between my reaction to the child's spoiled ice cream, and the reactions of many to such things as Hiroshima? A difference in scale, to be sure, but at its root, the common perception that pain is intolerable, and that we must remake the world, and if necessary human nature, in striving to rid the world of pain. I cannot concede to the Anonymous One that pain is the most important thing there is; he believes that he has upset everyone else's applecart just by quoting some grim statistics, but I keep my apples in an entirely different conveyance, thank you!
Later on, I began to see pain as a gift of God, warning us of wrongness and danger, and really, a great confirmation of the truth of the Christian Faith; only in the knowledge of fallenness and separation from God does pain make sense. Deep in our hearts, we sense the brokenness of the world, and our souls explore the fracture like someone endlessly running their tongue over the rough edges of a broken tooth. In any other system, pain is an absurdity; we don't know what to do with it. When my wife was seeing a counselor, I was speaking with her of the necessity of making some hard choices, and saying that though they would be painful, it might in the end be a good thing; she immediately snapped "Anyone who thinks of pain as good is a masochist". So much for "Christian" counseling! Not until I became Orthodox did I find a complete theology of Pain, and learn to experience pain as sanctifying, and cleansing; after a night spent in tears of repentance, the sun shines with extraordinary brightness through windows of the soul washed clean of years of accumulated grime. Indeed, it comes to mind that this is an important difference between ecstatic religion, the condition of seeking spiritual experiences and consolations, with the attending auto-erotic characteristics that Ochlophobe has so well outlined on his blog, and religion that seeks only repentance and self-mortification; the latter is clean, but the former is completely tied up in the passions of human eros.
Pain is not the soul of the Cosmos; at the heart of the Cosmos beats a heart of radiant Joy. In that light, all pain is seen to be illusory, as insubstantial as a morning mist which vanishes instantly at the rising of the Sun. To the modern mind, the fact that Pain exists is the center of the universe, and proves God to be either cruel or nonexistent, and misery blots out the sun. In every soul either Love triumphs over Pain, or Pain triumphs over Love; on this depends whether our life is heaven or hell.
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When I was very young, (I think about five) I saw a still younger child (unknown to me) being given an ice-cream cone; as the child reached out his small hands for the treat, he tipped the cone, and the ice cream fell off of it onto the ground, and he began to cry. At that, a pang shot through me; I can feel it to this day. It seemed it would have been better for the World never to have existed than for that one event to have occurred; of course, that was a posterior analysis, but that was the substance of the feeling at the time. It is a common enough event; I have since witnessed the very same thing many times without reaction, and had most probably seen it before, (my memories of those far-off times being rather hazy). In fact, unless I am very much mistaken, the very same thing had happened previously to me without provoking nearly as intense a reaction.
At this point, you are all probably looking at me as a complete lunatic, and I don't blame you. What was it that provoked such an intense reaction, making that simple event one of the formational forces in my life? I think it was the combination of the childish intensity of delighted anticipation of enjoyment, the abrupt taking away of the promised pleasure, and the broken-hearted wailing that resulted. For that child at that moment, that ice cream was his heaven, and suddenly, the door was slammed shut; more ice cream may be procured, and the child comforted, but still that bereaved wailing echoes down the corridors of time and space. Of course I know it is silly to place such importance on ice cream, but it is exactly the silliness and childishness of it that gives it such poignancy; I don't at all think that the reaction would have been nearly as strong had it been a reasoned and measured response to some great crisis. The disjuncture between the triviality of the incident and the intensity of the response gives it its pathetic quality, and it is one of the things that in adolescence had me shaking my fist at God, and saying, "You Tormentor! Stop it!!". It didn't mean anything in itself, but a tiny paradise was shattered, and my heart broke; I didn't so much care if a rational creature suffered the torments of Hell, but for a child to shed such tears made the Universe seem like a cruel joke.
The reason I introduce this post with this rather unimportant piece of autobiography is because I have come to suspect that similar reactions lie behind many of the core perceptions of modernity; as modern people, we worship Pain, that dark Taboo before which we make such extravagant obeisances, and perform endless sacrifice of infants and other helpless creatures, and really, is there that much of a difference between my reaction to the child's spoiled ice cream, and the reactions of many to such things as Hiroshima? A difference in scale, to be sure, but at its root, the common perception that pain is intolerable, and that we must remake the world, and if necessary human nature, in striving to rid the world of pain. I cannot concede to the Anonymous One that pain is the most important thing there is; he believes that he has upset everyone else's applecart just by quoting some grim statistics, but I keep my apples in an entirely different conveyance, thank you!
Later on, I began to see pain as a gift of God, warning us of wrongness and danger, and really, a great confirmation of the truth of the Christian Faith; only in the knowledge of fallenness and separation from God does pain make sense. Deep in our hearts, we sense the brokenness of the world, and our souls explore the fracture like someone endlessly running their tongue over the rough edges of a broken tooth. In any other system, pain is an absurdity; we don't know what to do with it. When my wife was seeing a counselor, I was speaking with her of the necessity of making some hard choices, and saying that though they would be painful, it might in the end be a good thing; she immediately snapped "Anyone who thinks of pain as good is a masochist". So much for "Christian" counseling! Not until I became Orthodox did I find a complete theology of Pain, and learn to experience pain as sanctifying, and cleansing; after a night spent in tears of repentance, the sun shines with extraordinary brightness through windows of the soul washed clean of years of accumulated grime. Indeed, it comes to mind that this is an important difference between ecstatic religion, the condition of seeking spiritual experiences and consolations, with the attending auto-erotic characteristics that Ochlophobe has so well outlined on his blog, and religion that seeks only repentance and self-mortification; the latter is clean, but the former is completely tied up in the passions of human eros.
Pain is not the soul of the Cosmos; at the heart of the Cosmos beats a heart of radiant Joy. In that light, all pain is seen to be illusory, as insubstantial as a morning mist which vanishes instantly at the rising of the Sun. To the modern mind, the fact that Pain exists is the center of the universe, and proves God to be either cruel or nonexistent, and misery blots out the sun. In every soul either Love triumphs over Pain, or Pain triumphs over Love; on this depends whether our life is heaven or hell.
1 comment:
Maxim,
Finally, I overcame all the obstacles and updated my blog, including this post in which I name this blog.
http://molonlabe70.blogspot.com/2008/01/adding-of-new-blogs.html
Many years to you, Maxim.
Sophocles
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