Though I would also say this about despair: it is a sin only so long as one can bear the circumstances that precipitate it. Once a person can no longer bear those circumstances, and abandons themself to the whims or caprices of a reality they no longer feel invested in (or cared for or needed by, or equal to meeting), it is no longer despair, but something else, something I would find difficult to characterize or understand, and which perhaps is beyond characterization or understanding, as it would belong to the privacy of each person in their relationship to God.
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Meaning, grief possesses within it the blueprint of one’s own release from it, whereas despair possesses no such blueprint.
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Though to move beyond our grief, or to know that our grieving can be indicative of the strength of our conscience, which recognizes the gulf that exists between what God would will for his creation, and what we (not always, but very often) do to disfigure that creation, and to abandon that will, is as necessary as the grief itself.
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Better that we grieve for it, when to do so is natural, as grieving does not extinguish hope with the same finality that despair does, which is why despair is a sin (and grief is absolutely not a sin).
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No age will benefit from our despairing of it, though very often, because of it, we are brought to the brink of despair, and might in fact yield to that condition.
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Though really I don’t know what this age needs, or any age. Most likely each age gets what it deserves, which is to say it gets what it has earned, the consequences of its deeds and misdeeds. Which is not the same as what it needs, but which reveals, I think, if nothing else, that one can talk about an age needing something.
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And though by ‘prophet’ I do not mean madman or madwoman, I do mean a person whose rhetoric and utterances and conduct, while coherent, and inspired by the Holy Spirit, are fiery enough, and symbolic enough, to make them seem ‘mad’ to society, and even to those who, with comparative sanity, may have left society, to exist at its fringes.
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By prophecy I do not mean prediction, or divination, or anything suggestive of an oracle. I do not even mean, really, a concern for the future as much as a concern for how the present is making an abomination of the future.
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Though what would also be useful, in that case, is a willingness to listen to prophecy.
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This age could use a reemergence of that class of persons known as prophets.
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Which Jesus heard, and did respond to.
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As evidenced by the plea made by the father of the possessed boy, to Jesus, in the Gospel of Mark: “I believe; help my unbelief!”
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Which isn’t to say that there is no rational component to Christian spirituality, or no work involved, for there is, but only that all spirituality begins in humility, wherein an awareness of the profundity of one’s own lack meets a willingness to rely on God to find us in the context of that lack. And in which lack God already will be.
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Because to want to pray is to begin to pray. And to want to have faith is to begin to have faith.
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And yet I can recognize, as true, that one is better off stating what one believes, with regard to a principle, and humanity’s relation to the divine, than not stating it at all. Even if one falls short of the belief that one is talking about, when trying to engender it in one’s own life.
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Fasting is important too, so long as it does not become disconnected from a spirit of prayer. But if I do not feel qualified to talk at length about prayer (which I don’t), then I feel even less qualified to talk about fasting.
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This mustiness, I should add, is not an actual mustiness, but is only the aggregate of associations that gather in our imagination, and remain there, reinforced by the messages of a society that has made an idol of its own rationalism.
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That the most efficacious way to achieve this awareness is through prayer is not exactly a secret, but it is, I think, the kind of secret that hides in plain sight, accruing to itself, through the ages, an aura of mustiness that would obscure the freshness and vitality at its source.
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Which doesn’t mean we need to go around thinking about the devil all the time, but only that we ought to be aware of the vulnerabilities, in ourselves as well as in others, that he seeks to exploit, and that we ought to tend to those vulnerabilities when we can.
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My point being that to not have this knowledge of him, or to forsake it, and to relegate it to the realm of superstition, as if it amounted to a distraction from all the business that is appropriate to the sophistication of adulthood, is to hamstring one’s self spiritually, to put it mildly.