2.24.22

I.

One of the most important accomplishments of Christ’s cross, that which He still accomplishes through the effective power of His Spirit, is to liberate man from the delimiting tyranny of not only Reason but also the tyranny of the body and its senses; liberation which in every case frees man from the rooted immovability of the body’s animalistic, basic demands which, in its attempts to extend its dominion over the totality of “what-is” and “might be”, entrains and thereafter forces a man to associate the destiny of his entire personhood upon certain bodily phenomena and only bodily phenomena, for instance, his sexuality or sexual preference for either woman, man or boy.

Grounded in the concretized soil of such false identity, soil which does not appear to such deluded souls as concretized and fixed but, insofar as the urges of the body are so primal, powerful, and persist in a kind of vicious, self-reinforcing cycle which is never enduringly satisfied with anything it receives but only will perpetually demand “more” of whatever it “thought” it wanted, that thought which is, of course, not one’s own but those which are informed by the aforementioned entrainment which, again, is, at best, entrained by the culture of one’s enveloping social consensus and, at worst, is as utterly groundless and aimless as the debauched “will to power” that gave it breath.

In Christ, via the power of His Spirit, is a man liberated from his mere animalistic association with only his body and its irrational urges and is thereafter cleansed of all its indecencies so as to enable one to commune with God in the clearest conscience that might be possible; clarity that can only come about when one no longer ties the whole of his identity to the trajectory of the things of “this world” which, as stated elsewhere, is not so much destined for outright destruction but a never-ending return to what it once was and the eons-long glacial movement back to where it is today.

II.

At some point in the distant future, Reason – in its current unredeemed and tyrannical manifestation – will “witness” the destruction of each one of the stars in its night sky, and for what?

III.

Surely the most difficult theoretical obstacle that the modern thinker must overcome so as to witness the sunrise of a completely different phenomenological horizon than that which has been forced by the “evolution” of his consciousness since his birth is the so-called “theory” of “evolution”. Because the very nature of the machinations of Reason structure themselves and thus perceive the entirety of the phenomenological world in a similar way and form to evolution according to that which it is – which is teleological – all that might be expressed and communicated to man from nature will appear in a teleological, or “goal-oriented” form. In all things, Reason posits a beginning, middle, and end. It cannot posit in any other way.

However, as endlessly stated, Reason’s machinations, insofar as they are embedded in the bodily experience of finite man, have not the power to transcend “what they are”, thus whatever goal a certain teleology might point to will, in the eyes of Reason, never be more than it appears; “mere appearance” which every sage from every epoch has correctly identified is, at best, a deception, if not a deliberate lie; a lie that obfuscates – by the very fact of the undeniability of its material presence in the world of thoughts and things – the actual truth of its goal which is necessarily kept from Reason insofar as neither Reason, nor language, nor the senses can perceive – let alone apprehend – anything that does not resemble what such things “are”.

The Theory of Evolution is “simply” the most salient demonstration of the externalization of Reason’s teleological machinations. “Evolution” is Reason’s teleology, though one without specific meaning or purpose whatsoever beyond what itself appears to be, which, of course, is not what it transcendently is, for transcend it cannot.

IV.

Reason is teleological but, deprived of the transcendent meaning for which it sleeplessly seeks yet cannot access in and of its own power, its teleological trajectory will always be an “interpretation” of man, an “aesthetic interpretation” of man, an “artistic creation” of man. Faith, however, is outside the limitations of time and thus cannot be teleological in a form that requires a beginning-middle-end.

How then could it be said that in Faith is found the meaning of man’s teleology if it is not also teleological and thus comprehendible by the Reasonable faculties of man?

V.

Existential meaning and purpose can only be attributed or otherwise bestowed upon that which necessarily exists “outside” and “independent” to the story that is being told — by, say, the writer, or perhaps an astute reader or fastidious scholar.

Stories do not create their own meaning, neither the story itself nor the characters. Stories require their meaning and purpose to be vested into them from that which is “outside”, “apart”, and “other”; from an “other” who is yet not so radically and fundamentally different from or foreign to the story and its characters, but one who can communicate with and be communicated to, at least in some way, shape, or form.

Perhaps the most remarkable consequence of consciousness is that man – insofar that he is himself a word, a teleology of words, and by it, a story, “the handiwork (or poem) of God”, is that man’s story at a definitive place and time became aware of itself, aware that it was a story with a beginning, middle, and end, not merely the story of an individual life but that of the race of man and the cosmos and earth in which he lives; this story which, as all human stories, though aware of itself, can do little with that awareness other than to perpetrate more of itself, lacking as all stories surely do the sacralizing power to transcend itself; that transcendence which can only come from that which and “who” is “wholly other”, one who is “God” so to speak, “God the Transcendent”.

VI.

For if man is and supplies the teleology, God supplies the meaning. If man the Reason, God the Faith. If man the word, God the Wordsmith. If man the poem, God the poet.

Unlike my own poetry as well as the vast majority of my prose, all of which is finite, I have no idea whatsoever what I am doing besides the love of simply doing it. Further:

VI.

Man sees that which he is.