Never Alone

I don’t feel the least bit lonely.

Inner turmoil is the native human element. Want to end all tension? Die. Meanwhile, if you live, then a gnawing sense of longing for something or other is our native element here on the Fallen Plane of existence.

What becomes noteworthy is when your sense of longing shifts away from things that are painful. Unless you are stumbling across this blog for the first time today, you probably sense that I’ve recently gained a new level of serenity. I’ve always been a loner, but carried the delusion that I wasn’t supposed to be.

Indeed, I can recall a desperate hunger for a soul mate who could not have possibly existed. That burning sense of emptiness led me into all sorts of folly. If nothing else, I kept surrendering certain essential elements of myself to be a part of someone else’s fantasies and got really badly hurt that way. The most significant scars are related to attempts at denying those essentials, pretending they weren’t that important.

It would be hard to characterize things in any detail, much less offer an outright description of them. Maybe you understand and maybe you don’t. The point is, I’m content to let myself just be without justifying it to anyone. I passed through different levels, filling up different kinds of holes in my soul, and in different ways, and finally realizing they were all imaginary. It’s not as if I knew no peace, but once I came to terms with one thing, there was always one more thing left nagging and gnawing at me. Often, that still throbbing discomfort was simply not in range of my perception, though it still affected me. I still kept trying things that were not going to work for reasons I could not have explained.

So I don’t pretend to have finally arrived, since I’m cynical enough about my own self to suspect I’ll find more out there in the future somewhere. Right now, though, a very large collection of issues have been put to rest all at once. I’m telling you only because I suspect this part of my story is not unique. Let’s just say that for the first time since I can remember, the pain in my soul is manageable. I am far less confused about things than ever before. Whether that signals having found something or simply having slipped off into insanity is frankly impertinent.

I’m here to tell you there is no magic bullet. I simply kept pursuing Christ. The twists and turns on the journey had nothing to do with Him but with how deeply lost I was. Try not to think of this as a matter of distance, but of a series of barriers that were unique to me. Each required a different way of getting past. It comes down to persistence, not any other factor you can name or imagine. In other words: I have no doubt you can have it, too, but you can’t copy my collection of solutions.

While I despise the phony self-help industry, the honest truth is that the only answer to your sorrows is already inside of you. You can either find that inner path to God or you can keep struggling. I can offer some broad generalities that seem to help everyone I’ve talked to, but I haven’t talked to everyone, just several thousand people — out of several billions on this planet. So you can read my books and they might help you, but I can think of other books that are probably more practical for the broad sample of humanity out there in the world. If you are a Westerner, I would highly recommend, for example, Scott Peck’s The Road Less Traveled. No other book does a better job of attacking the most common false assumptions. While I suppose it’s a bit longer than it has to be, Dr. Peck did a masterful job of explaining things in terms that puts the solution in reach. He was a psychiatrist who knew how to talk to us ordinary people.

That’s different from, say, Thomas Szasz, whose writing is more important for how it tears down a broad institutional lie. Important, but I didn’t find his writing that useful for my personal needs compared to Peck’s explanations of how to climb out of the pit. You need both the theoretical explanations as well as the individual diagnostics. And neither of them openly attack Western Civilization the way I do, but both of them open to door for it.

In the long run, my own specialty is attacking bad religion along with bad philosophy because they are too tightly intertwined. I often have to explain that Western epistemology is how religion went bad. Yet, there is no crusade on this blog. I’m content to let millions follow their chosen path because of that holy cynicism that reminds me I just might not have the right answer for others. That in itself is an anti-Western concept. Despite all our mythology about the Great Man and the individual, it’s very subtly about keeping individuals within a certain range of acceptable options. The old joke is that both communism and capitalism (and the attendant political theories) emphasize individual freedom, but a different set of freedoms in exchange for a different set of restrictions. Even the anarchist libertarians reject my fundamental philosophical approach as dangerous to the rest of the world.

But even if I did have the power to destroy things I see as morally harmful, I wouldn’t. I’m utterly certain it wouldn’t make enough difference because it’s just externalities. The ultimate answer is inside of each person; there is no answer otherwise. If it’s not a conscious choice at this point in human history, then it can’t be solution to anything that matters. There’s that sense in which we cannot go back to Edenic innocence. We really do need that Flaming Sword and we need to see what it carves and burns away. Wiping the memory means rewriting the personality from scratch. Where’s the redemption in that? If redemption doesn’t leave a trail of awareness behind it, it’s not redemption. This is what Scripture itself says, though you’d have to read between the lines to get that.

There is a certain sense in which there is no way to compare with others. If I tell you I’m praying that God make me His #1 obedient and trustworthy servant on this earth, I don’t mean that in the sense of competing with anyone else. It’s just a metaphor. It means I’m determined to reach into that rarefied sphere of holiness that can’t be shared with anyone else. It means I’d love to blog about how it looks on the ground as I carry that commitment out into the world of fallen humanity at large so you can have some hope that you’ll find your way to something similar but uniquely yours. How else could I do that without engaging in activities other believers would avoid? If you are answering your own call, you can’t pursue mine.

My faith drives me to pray for God to put me into a certain context where I have to maintain a full awareness of His power when there is not another single human with whom I can fellowship. If I have an unfulfilled hunger of that sort, I’m vulnerable to temptations that would too easily destroy my aim to glorify Him. I must be able to stand alone in that sense. My faith has to overpower the context itself, so that no combination of human evils can put up any useful resistance. In other words, I have to be ready to assault the gates of Hell with a water pistol — a metaphor you surely have heard before.

It’s not a question of what victory will look like, but that I go in His name. It would be nice to encounter other believers along the way with some measure of sympathy for the task, but I can’t count on that. If you know anything about operations in hostile environments, you realize that every alliance is also a vulnerability. In some cases, you really must be able to stand alone in human terms. I suspect that’s the kind of job in front of me.

As I understand things generally, this virtual parish here remains pretty safe. The only thing anyone can do to afflict it is to limit who can read it, perhaps block me from posting, all the way up to removing it from all access. We’ll let God worry about that. Meanwhile, pray with me if you feel so moved, and then you can share in celebrating how it works out. It’s one of the few longings I still have. I look forward to doing that as a sort of icing on the cake, not essential for my sense of peace with God. I have to be ready to share at His behest.

Meanwhile, as long as I’m breathing, I’m not alone on this earth because Creation itself is my best friend.