A Far, Far, Better Thing

Today was very hard. I saw my therapist, and it seems as though feelings I've held back about my father, the way I've felt around him and in response to things he has done, is flooding me; a new pain, yet an old pain. My life was so crazy for so many years...Estella, the girl after her, Robert and Keith, and above all my obsessions, shoving all other players from the stage of my mind. I believe this is called growth. It feels almost like madness. But I have been through worse, and I've been through this before as a child with no support whatsoever, and I survived. And I will survive this.

But I want more than just survival. I want closeness with my spouse, my son, as much inner peace and freedom from anxiety as I can find in this life. Clarity of purpose. The love of God. Is all this too much to ask?

I am not a Dickens fan per se. I've read a handful of the novels, Expectations, Bleak House, Hard Times, maybe another I don't recall, and now Tale of Two Cities. I almost didn't stay with the book. I don't think it really shines until Darnay goes back to France. But oh how it shines after. Do we get the realistic psychology of Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy or George Eliot? No. Dickens remains himself. But what he has done in this book, flooding it with the Christian hope, the last moment rescue from the grave, the price paid by another, the great words from John which have throbbed over the entire earth for two thousand years...'I am the resurrection and the life'...I wept so hard through the final pages, for myself, for the real victims of the Terrors, for everything in me the book touches. My own doubt and fears. The desires I hold in me which are the most sincere hopes of all humanity, at least all humanity touched by the words of Jesus, the fabric of the great Christian mythos: forgiveness, eternal life in loving communion, hope beyond all despair.

As I have said, my faith is taking a battering, probably as much a result of what I'm going through emotionally as anything I've read or thought. But I've thought it all: Romans prayed to the lares, Hindus pray to one god and myriad gods, Catholics pray to Mary, of course you pray to Jesus; because you want to feel like someone actuallly cares about you, that your life is not without meaning, that you will not die, that even if you die you will yet live. Who wouldn't want that?

And yet the Voice cries out across my despair, 'I am the resurrection and the life.' Did Jesus not believe that? I've read no critic who can convince me otherwise. And are all the miracles fabrications? Jeez. I can't even say how hard I've been thinking, perhaps obsessing, over those questions. I've walked the dark soul walk of the last two months without the support or hope of Christ, without relying on him, though I've said myself on this blog that's what Christianity is. I have prayed, but not often. I've analyzed everything to sickness instead.

Still, the beauty of Dickens' fable. I know he had a mistress for years, ended up divorced from the mother of his children, lived a less than perfect life. Was he even happy? I don't know enough to say if the gospel he preaches in Tale was one he believed. Or perhaps, sometimes he did. Living when he did, as rationalism and science dismembered the faith that had been.

And those things have changed Christianity, at least for me, for good. The earth is not six thousand years old, and the universe was not made in six days. The ot and the epistles of the nt, at least, are not word for word God's decree. I can't believe it when I read them, anymore than Plato could believe Homer and Hesiod were telling the truth about the greek pantheon. But the truth is in there. In some mysterious way. It's terrifying, sometimes, to imagine...maybe some of Jesus' sayings are incorrect, perhaps a miracle or two didn't really happen, some mistaken traditions arose...all this I admit as possibility, perhaps probability, though I have seen no evidence either way; and if I admit one miracle, the rest could be genuine.

But the central gospel message remains. It is consistent as far as I can tell. I have to meet the intellectual challenges I face as they arise, but because of my emotional history, my ocd...it's almost a bad thing for me to sort out my own apologetics, though I can't imagine not doing it. Less analysis, more of something else, dependence, reliance, communication, even trust. Yikes, trust. In the face of no empirical evidence in my own experience. On the strength of the message alone and a unique historical record. And admittedly, the strength of my own need.

But back to Dickens. What a finish. I knew almost nothing of the French Revolution before I started the book and I know only a little now, reading website history as I read the novel. The whole thing reminds me of the madness that exists in potential in any human culture, even if degree varies. Could my own culture, my own town or country, descend into such violent anarchy? Given the right circumstances, I think it could. All the more reason to constantly wean Americans away from violent solutions; we need to see how outrageous violence really is, how it should be a final, desparate fix. How easy is it, when I am inured to the death of Iraqi's on the battlefield of their own soil (yes, and the foreign fighters who have joined them, martyr fools all) to begin to imagine the death of an American who might be politically dangerous? Events in history like the Terrors, the Holocaust (and there have been many genocides) the rapes in Sudan, these are so difficult to understand. But they happen when a group or class is dehumanized, even out of revenge. Oh, group A, those guys have killed lots of us group B's; go ahead, rape their women and butcher their children. That happens. And the cycle continues.

But isn't is possible that the same way Americans have begun to see women as equals, certainly capable of voting at least, the same way our culture has been educated about things like date rape, a term, a concept, I never heard when young. Isn't it possible we could be taught that violence is never a good solution; war always involves innocent death and breeds lasting hatred? Couldn't we begin to look for other ways whenever possible?

Am I a true pacifist? Do I think Bin Laden, for example, or those responsible for the attacks in New York or Madrid should not draw a military response? I don't think that yet. I know intelligent people who feel the appropriate action would be to find and arrest and imprison those who supported those massacres using international law enforcement. Good idea. But I admit I also support what we were/are doing in Afghanistan looking for those guys using troops. Yet even there I know innocents have died. And good soldiers.

Embracing the true and complex nature of war is the first step in ordering it. Lie next to its true nature. Then breathe in the brotherhood of man. Think.

Otherwise, more Terrors await our retributive race. What made those men and women that different from us? Poverty and oppression? I guess. But there have been numerous slaughters in world history, involving greater numbers.

We can never allow the sick luxury of dehumanizing any group or race or religion. Of elevating any Republic over the lives of beings. It is astonishing to me (and a biblical higher critic, incidentally, would never believe it) that the French Revolution came after ours. At almost the same time, or just after, the Bill of Rights was ratified. Some have argued (and again, I'm a true novice) that the French people misunderstood what had happened in our country, what was happening, when they themsleves revolted. But while our states were agreeing that speech must be free in this country, the French were beheading people in mass hysteria, a marxist revolution before marx, the madness of lenin more than a century before.

Well, I am tired now, and I'm drifting. And I don't want to go back and edit this, so you get it as it is. The novel drove me on. And I get such mental peace, freedom from my suffering, when I write. It simpy feels good.

Finally, unlike the notes in the back of my penguin edition, I didn't really give the end away. If you can wade through the first two thirds or so, it's worth the effort to get to the end.

Peace and well wishes to all. It's one butt cold sierra night. Snow coming in tomorrow night.