What do I have a GIVENNESS NOW to?
The only human emotions that we can attribute to God.
“God delights.
God is always rejoicing and doing so with a single and simple delight.
In fact, it is appropriate to say that love and joy are the only human emotions that we can attribute literally to God.” Thomas Aquinas
…so much more than Turkish delight.
I have a GIVENNESS NOW to the only human emotions that we can attribute to God.
What do I have a GIVENNESS NOW to?
Never a skinny love.
Come on skinny love just last the year
Pour a little salt we were never here
My, my, my, my, my, my, my, my
Staring at the sink of blood and crushed veneer
I tell my love to wreck it all
Cut out all the ropes and let me fall
My, my, my, my, my, my, my, my
Right in the moment this order’s tall
I told you to be patient
I told you to be fine
I told you to be balanced
I told you to be kind
In the morning I’ll be with you
But it will be a different “kind”
I’ll be holding all the tickets
And you’ll be owning all the fines
Come on skinny love what happened here
Suckle on the hope in lite brassiere
My, my, my, my, my, my, my, my
Sullen load is full; so slow on the split
I told you to be patient
I told you to be fine
I told you to be balanced
I told you to be kind
Now all your love is wasted?
Then who the hell was I?
Now I’m breaking at the britches
And at the end of all your lines
Who will love you?
Who will fight?
Who will fall far behind? (Lyrics by Justin Vernon, performed by Bon Iver)
…cut the ropes and let me fall, whenever there’s a “thinness” to it all.
I have a GIVENNESS NOW to never a skinny love.
What do I have a GIVENNESS NOW to?
The boy who prefers joy.
“What do they choose, these souls who go back (I have yet seen no others)? And how can they choose it?”
‘Milton was right,’ said my teacher. ’The choice of every lost soul can be expressed in the words “Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven.”
There is always something they prefer to joy - that is, to reality.
Ye see it easily enough in a spoiled child that would sooner miss its play and its supper than say it was sorry and be friends.
Ye call it “the Sulks.”
But in adult life it has a hundred fine names - Achilles’ wrath and Coriolanus’ grandeur, revenge and injured merit and self-respect and tragic greatness and proper pride.
‘Then is no one lost through the undignified vices, Sir? Through mere sensuality?’
‘Some are, no doubt. The sensualist, I’ll allow ye, begins by pursuing a real pleasure, though a small one.
His sin is the less.
But the time comes on when, though the pleasure becomes less and less and the craving fiercer and fiercer, and though he knows that joy can never come that way, yet he prefers to joy the mere fondling of unappeasable lust and would not have it taken from him.
He’d fight to the death to keep it.
He’d like well to be able to scratch; but even when he can scratch no more he’d rather itch than not.’” C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce
What do I have a GIVENNESS NOW to?
Not to pout when put out.
“But, however you approach it, the great thing is to bring him into the state in which the denial of any one indulgence - it matters not which, champagne or tea, sole colbert or cigarettes - ‘puts him out’, for then his charity, justice, and obedience are all at your mercy.” C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
What do I have a GIVENNESS NOW to?
Not knowing the only restaurant with the best steak in town.
“Now your patient is his mother’s son.
While working your hardest, quite rightly, on other fronts, you must not neglect a little quiet infiltration in respect of gluttony.
Being a male, he is not so likely to be caught by the ‘All I want’ camouflage.
Males are best turned into gluttony with the help of their vanity.
They ought to be made to think themselves very knowing about food, to pique themselves on having found the only restaurant in the town where steaks are really ‘properly cooked.
What begins as vanity can then be gradually turned into habit.” C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
…the calamity of vanity.
I have a GIVENNESS NOW to not knowing the only restaurant with the best steak in town.
What do I have a GIVENNESS NOW to?
Extract the exact.
“The real value of the quiet, unobtrusive work which Glubose has been doing for years on this old woman can be gauged by the way in which her belly now dominates her whole life.
The woman is in what may be called the ‘All-I-want’ state of mind.
All she wants is a cup of tea properly made, or an egg properly boiled, or a slice of bread properly toasted.
But she never finds any servant or any friend who can do these simple things ‘properly’ - because her ‘properly’ conceals an insatiable demand for the exact, and almost impossible, palatal pleasures which she imagines she remembers from the past; a past described by her ‘as the days when you could get good servants’ but known to us as the days when her senses were more easily pleased and she had pleasures of other kinds which made her less dependent on those of the table.
Meanwhile, the daily disappointments produces daily ill temper: cooks give notice and friendships are cooled.
If ever the Enemy introduces into her mind a faint suspicion that she is too interested in food, Glubose counters it by suggesting to her that she doesn’t mind what she eats herself but ‘does like to have things nice for her boy.’
In fact, of course, her greed has been one of the chief sources of his domestic discomfort for many years.” C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
“I will not eat green eggs and ham, I will not eat them, Sam, I am!”
…what may be called the ‘All-I-want’ state of mind.
I have a GIVENNESS NOW to extract the exact.
What do I have a GIVENNESS NOW to?
Fast from the gluttony of delicacy.
“The contemptuous way in which you spoke of gluttony as a means of catching souls, in your last letter, only shows your ignorance.
One of the great achievements of the last hundred years has been to deaden the human conscience on that subject, so that by now you will hardly find a sermon preached or a conscious troubled about it in the whole length and breadth of Europe.
This has largely been effected by concentrating all our efforts on gluttony of delicacy, not gluttony of excess.
Your patient’s mother; as I learn from the dossier and you might have learned from Glubose, is a good example.
She would be astonished - one day, I hope, will be - to learn that her whole life is enslaved to this kind of sensuality, which is quite concealed from her by the fact that the quantities involved are small.
But what do quantities matter, provided we can use a human belly and palate to produce querulousness, impatience, uncharitableness, and self-concern?
Glubose has this old woman well in hand.
She is a positive terror to hostess and servants.
She is always turning from what has been offered to her to say with a demure little sigh and a smile, ‘Oh please, please…all I want is a cup of teas, weak but not too weak, and the teeniest weeniest bit of really crisp toast.’
You see?
Because what she wants is smaller and less costly than what has been set before her, she never recognizes as gluttony her determination to get what she wants, however troublesome it may be to others.
At the very moment of indulging her appetite she believes that she is practicing temperance.
In a crowded restaurant she gives a little scream at the plate which some overworked waitress has set before her and says, ‘Oh that’s far, far too much! Take it away and bring me about a quarter of it.’
If challenged, she would say she was doing this to avoid waste; in reality she does it because the particular shade of delicacy to which we have enslaved her is offended by the sight of more food than she happens to want.”
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
…how far we fall from all we consider to be “small.”
I have a GIVENNESS NOW to fast from the gluttony of delicacy.
What do I have a GIVENNESS NOW to?
Saturday night fever.
“…here sick in bed, burning up with fever.
He touched her hand and the fever was gone.” Matthew 8:15
…can I ever proclaim “I’m a Believer” without “Saturday Night Fever?”
I have a GIVENNESS NOW to saturday night fever.
What do I have a GIVENNESS NOW to?
Not to fear beauty.
“A woodpecker with a cry as sharp as a dagger terrifies the lesser birds, while he is himself benevolent and harmless.
The beautiful kingfisher in dazzling flight rattles like a bird of ill omen.
So we fear beauty.” Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander
…will I behold what I cannot hold?
I have a GIVENNESS NOW not to fear beauty.
What do I have a GIVENNESS NOW to?
An incurable wound.
“In order to arrive at the second half of life, one has to realize there is an incurable wound at the heart of everything.
Much of the conflict from the age of twenty-five to sixty-five is just trying to figure this out and then to truly accept it.
A Swiss theologian, Hans Urs Von Balthasar (1905-1988), said toward the end of his life: “All great thought springs from a conflict between two eventual insights: 1) The wound which we find at the heart of everything is finally incurable. 2) Yet we are necessarily and still driven to try.” (Think about that for an hour or so!)
Our largely unsuccessful efforts of the first half of life are themselves the training ground for all virtue and growth in holiness.
This “wound at the heart of life” shows itself in many ways, but your holding and “suffering” of this tragic wound, your persistent but failed attempts to heal it, your final surrender to it, will ironically make you into a wise and holy person.
It will make you patient, loving, hopeful, expansive, faithful, and compassionate — which is precisely the second half of life wisdom.”
Richard Rohr, Loving the Two Halves of Life: The Further Journey
…removing the band-aid.
