We are today just like our original forms, hollow sounding clay. Our shapes may have more or less pleasing appearances, but upon interrogation, and we must be interrogated, the tapping of self-questioning returns from the surface only empty echoes of who and what we wish to truly be. We are a farce created by our own minds, we can be nothing more and always less.
The simplicity that connected us to our environments so intimately, giving us a mutual belonging, an anchoring, have been lost with knowledge and freedom. By having these twin aspirations, we have lost our ability to find peace and our ability to be satisfied. That fruit that began the fall was inevitable, and paradise is lost despite the knowledge we have uncovered. We cannot recover the breath we have breathed, our words are written across the universe and is spread out of reach. The footsteps in the sand behind us are being covered and distorted by the winds of time making them illusory and fantastical, more the effort of our current imaginings than inscriptions of truth and reality.
We are lost in the deserts of our selves, the familiarity of the landscape being both the comfort and the cause of our ‘unbelonging‘, our soothing disorientation, our growing awareness of our predicament only deepens the driving inexorable fall. The descent to depravity stands stark over us in the form of the shadows of our own angels. The more we know of paradise the slipperier our handhold on it. We try to fill our emptiness, to quell the distance of our gaze from the heavens (like a sky diver trying to claw himself back to the plane from which he has leapt, a poor attempt to recover that to which we never truly committed ourselves in the first place), towering ambitions crashing around our heads.
You cannot fill a void. Anything entering it becomes it and is thus negated. Besides we cannot find entry to our inner selves except through those organs designed only to examine the external. We haven’t the tools. We haven’t the map to our souls. We have only the love, the hope, and the fear that we will be redeemed through an earnest committed surrender to the awesome blankness of our lives drawn over us, insignificant against the Creator. We try to turn away because our eyes cannot comprehend what is before us, our minds cannot enslave its meaning, we are helpless so we deny it to save face in the knowledge that we have no reply. We refuse to acknowledge that our knowledge is the root of our evil and it is not the Hand of God that carves us to pieces.
We stand like giants in our own shadows of ignorance, knowledge without wisdom and both without action are as an unmoored rudderless ship thrown about in a storm on the sea. The only fall from which we can hope to recover, the only way to make full the emptiness of our forms is to cast ourselves down in submission to the Almighty Who has not left us without guidance, Who waits to reveal what we know about ourselves but about which we have been too afraid to confess. He will fill us with our successes and failures wrapped in His Mercy… or not. This is our only determination worth considering.
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