It is good for a man that he bear the yoke in his youth. Let him sit alone in silence when it is laid on him – Lamentations 3:27-28Be still, and know that I am God – Psalm 46:10For fifteen days I strove to prove that there could not be any functions like those I have since called Fuchsian functions. I was then very ignorant; every day I seated myself at my work table, stayed an hour or two, tried a great number of combinations and reached no results. One evening, contrary to my custom, I drank black coffee and could not sleep. Ideas rose in crowds; I felt them collide until pairs interlocked, so to speak., making a stable combination. By the next morning I had established the existence of a class of Fuchsian functions, those which came from the hypergeometric series; I had only to write out the results, which took but a few hours. – Henri Poincaré
It doesn’t matter what we strive to do, striving is
necessary – if only to prove that striving alone is insufficient. Discipline, bearing the yoke, if we carry it
through to the end, will lead us to a summit of silence.
Paul calls the Law a guardian, a nanny, a pedagogue – something formal
and pedantic to help us get started in the right way.
So it is with all the burdens we carry in life – with life
in this world itself. Our journey here,
all of it, long or short, is mostly boot camp.
Some of us will advance a little beyond and be more of a help than a
hindrance to our fellow travelers, and we will all know our joys as well as our
sorrows along the way.
At times, really,
the weariness seems too much.
For those times, God has given us the gift of silence. The space between, the stillness that holds
the rhythm. Rest.
7 comments:
Fittingly, that sort of rest in music is called tacet.
At times, really, the weariness seems too much.
Yes, I know that feeling.
I learn something new everyday.
"It is good for a man that he bear the yoke in his youth."
I was scribbling something in the notebook the other day. Something about it being a blessing to face an existential crisis when one is young and strong rather than in your last days. It really is a blessing if you can kick its ass relatively quickly. My son is going through it a second time. Likely to make the message sink in good and permanent. I think he's surfacing. But how can he hear me when I tell him he will be a better psychologist for his patients because of this. He will truly know them. He can hear me a little. It will come with time. Everyday is a little better.
My father, on the other hand, lost 3 loved-ones these past six months. I think he's making headway, but he looks so tired. And its a such a strange world when you were born in 1933 and lived so long a certain way.
I'm glad to hear about your son.
I was reading MOTT yesterday and thinking that I have stopped believing -- practically not theoretically -- in the miraculous or "sacred magic". That's not quite right -- I've stopped being so dependent on it -- that sounds better. In any case, this struck me as strange because I experienced so much of it in the past. Challenges and struggles make reality so much more immediate. The thing to guard against in age isn't weakness so much as excessive caution -- which leads to weakness.
Bearing the yoke when young makes us stronger and more confident. Youth really lets us push the boundaries because there's more time and strength to recover and rebound.
Funny, this thing we call a miracle has been on my mind lately too. What do we mean when we say it. I'm starting to forget. Or something like...maybe there were the great miracles so that we might see the grace or spirit common within all of them, which is the point of them. I mean, would us gorillas have noticed "Hey, did you see what happened to that guy?!" if we weren't knocked over the head with a column of fire first?
I mean, what really is the difference between someone hearing the voice of God, then doing something about it and silent, personal injection of Grace changing a person permanently.
Good point -- sometimes miracles write big what we see in the fine print every day. The miracle is the billboard and megaphone, but it's the same spirit, the same working that we hear constantly in whispers.
"sometimes miracles write big what we see in the fine print every day."
Oh! I like THAT!
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