For the past few years my friend David Wayne (aka, Jollyblogger) has been a winsome model of the pastor-blogger. I’ve learned a lot from him and assumed I’d be reading his work for decades. But then last Christmas he discovered—at the age of forty-five—that he has stage four colon cancer. Since then his posts have become less frequent, though more poignant. His most recent entry is a prime example of how he’s learning to appreciate every day (and teaching me to do the same):
I once heard it said, and this may come from Chesterton, that all of the problems in the world are caused by man’s inability to sit still in a room. In other words, we are restless, always trying to make things happen—it is as if we treat it as our moral obligation to be perpetually dissatisfied. Of course we spiritually spruce up our language and call it “striving for excellence,” or “pursuing a more passionate spiritual walk,” or “being relevant,” but I’ve come to believe all of that is a smokescreen for the fact that we have acquiesced to the spirit of the age, ergo, the newer and more flashy is always better.
The greatest blessing of the Noahic Covenant is God’s promise to not destroy the world with a flood, but the second and only slightly less well known is God’s promise of a regularly ordered world—Genesis 8:22
“As long as the earth endures,
seedtime and harvest,
cold and heat,
summer and winter,
day and night
will never cease.”In other words, as long as life endures we will live in a world governed by regularity and sameness.
He includes this excellent quote from G.K. Chesterton:
A child kicks its legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough. . . It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again,” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again,” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike: it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.
“Grown ups are not strong enough to exult in monotony,” is a stinging rebuke. But acknowledging that truth can be a starting point for appreciating our world of regularity and sameness. So today that is my prayer: “Do it again, Lord, do it again.”
September 25th, 2009 | 9:31 am
A good reflection; thank you. I believe the line about “man’s inability to sit still in a room” comes from Pascal.
September 25th, 2009 | 10:58 am
From Merton’s Ascent to Truth:
The earthly desires men cherish are shadows. There is no true happiness in fulfilling them. Why, then, do we continue to pursue joys without substance? Because the pursuit itself has become our only substitute for joy. Unable to rest in anything we achieve, we determine to forget our discontent in a ceaseless quest for new satisfactions. In this pursuit, desire itself becomes our chief satisfaction. The goods that so disappoint us when they are in our grasp can still stimulate our interest when they elude us in the present or in the past.
Few men have so clearly outlined this subtle psychology of illusion as Blaise Pascal, who writes:
A man can pass his whole life without boredom, merely by gambling each day with a modest sum. Give him, each morning, the amount of money he might be able to win in a day, on condition that he must not gamble; you will make him miserable! You may say that what he seeks is the amusement of gambling, not the winnings. All right, let him play for nothing. There will be no excitement. He will be bored to death!
So it is not just amusement that he seeks. An amusement that is tame, without passion, only bores him. He wants to get worked up and to delude himself that he is going to be happy if he wins a sum that he would actually refuse if it were given him on the condition that he must not gamble. He needs to create an object for his passions, and to direct upon that object his desire, his anger and his fear—like children who scare themselves with their own painted faces.
September 25th, 2009 | 11:02 am
More Merton:
Man was made for the highest activity, which is, in fact, his rest. That activity, which is contemplation, is immanent and it transcends the level of sense and of discourse. Man’s guilty sense of his incapacity for this one deep activity which is the reason for his very existence, is precisely what drives him to seek oblivion in exterior motion and desire. Incapable of the divine activity which alone can satisfy his soul, fallen man flings himself upon exterior things, not so much for their own sake as for the sake of the agitation which keeps his spirit pleasantly numb. He has but to remain busy with trifles; his preoccupation will serve as a dope. It will not deaden the pain of thinking; but it will at least do something to blur his sense of who he is and of his utter insufficiency.
Pascal sums up his observations with the remark: “Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for our miseries and it is, itself, the greatest of our miseries.”
Why? Because it “diverts” us, turns us aside from the one thing that can help us to begin our ascent to truth. That one thing is the sense of our own emptiness, our poverty, our limitations, and of the inability of created things to satisfy our profound need for reality and for truth.
What is the conclusion of all of this? We imprison ourselves in falsity by our love for the feeble, flickering light of illusion and desire. We cannot find true happiness unless we deprive ourselves of the ersatz happiness of empty diversion. We must seek the light in the darkness.
September 25th, 2009 | 11:37 am
From Merton’s “Ascent to Truth”
The earthly desires men cherish are shadows. There is no true happiness in fulfilling them. Why, then, do we continue to pursue joys without substance? Because the pursuit itself has become our only substitute for joy. Unable to rest in anything we achieve, we determine to forget our discontent in a ceaseless quest for new satisfactions. In this pursuit, desire itself becomes our chief satisfaction. The goods that so disappoint us when they are in our grasp can still stimulate our interest when they elude us in the present or in the past.
Few men have so clearly outlined this subtle psychology of illusion as Blaise Pascal, who writes:
A man can pass his whole life without boredom, merely by gambling each day with a modest sum. Give him, each morning, the amount of money he might be able to win in a day, on condition that he must not gamble; you will make him miserable! You may say that what he seeks is the amusement of gambling, not the winnings. All right, let him play for nothing. There will be no excitement. He will be bored to death!
So it is not just amusement that he seeks. An amusement that is tame, without passion, only bores him. He wants to get worked up and to delude himself that he is going to be happy if he wins a sum that he would actually refuse if it were given him on the condition that he must not gamble. He needs to create an object for his passions, and to direct upon that object his desire, his anger and his fear—like children who scare themselves with their own painted faces.
September 25th, 2009 | 3:31 pm
The quote mentioned is indeed from Pascal’s Pensees:136 Diversions. “Sometimes, when I set to thinking about the various activies of men, the dangers and troubles which they face at Court, or in war, giving rise to so many quarrels and passions, daring and often wicked enterprises and so on, I have often said that the sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to say quietly in his room.”
September 27th, 2009 | 10:08 pm
[...] Carter at First Thoughts has some ideas about monotony. The movie Up! offered the same theme, in part, in modern cinematic experience, highlighting the [...]
September 27th, 2009 | 10:09 pm
[...] Carter at First Thoughts has some ideas about monotony. The movie Up! offered the same theme, in part, in modern cinematic experience, highlighting the [...]
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