So instead of surrendering to the self-mastery that Truth requires, we chase shadows of Truth that may have some partiality to it while manipulating us further from it. At best we can find merit with the impulse towards something beyond oneself. David Walsh notes that,
As finite beings we must work within our pregiven limits or we will just fall prey to endless choices of incoherent self expression. “In every moment we remain free, although never utterly free of all direction.” The secular modern project ensures that is our right as autonomous human beings buffered from anything but our reasoning selves. We think we create our own meaning! And yet, the “illusion that we could from a superior vantage point critique all positions had proved a cruel self-deception.” And by thinking “we could see through all things we ended by no longer having anything to see.” We are free to respond to existence and the order that it is given, but we can't create existence. “Our freedom is a drama enacted between the poles of certainty and uncertainty.”
“The more we respond to the glimmerings that at first attract us faintly, the more they become beacons of light irradiating the path before us with unanticipated intensity.” We are never completely autonomous, as grace will always impel in ways we will never fully understand. We can always reject it in defiance and to assert our autonomous will, but ironically that only will restrict our true freedom even more so.
Change will happen, but for it to be true progress (or transformation for ourselves and our loved ones), it always must happen against the backdrop of some ultimate standard. Otherwise, it is just change, but to what ends? “When there is no divine judge to measure our actions, then all restraints we choose to impose are merely arbitrary: everything is permitted. ... What enables us to judge the gap between ideal and reality is that we continue to possess the reality of the ideal.” But we can't force this ideal as gods, as that will only reduce us to less than persons. We must see through our manipulation of truth, to be available for the Truth that was available in the beginning!
As Walsh says,
“each generation begins with the same faith in the goal for which it seeks and struggles to explain its inspiration to itself. The fact that none of the accounts becomes definitive does not signify failure. In each of them living contact is made with the source of the movement that underpins them. By straining toward the transcendence of reach we gain a greater sense of its reality.”We may not know what we need, but we know somehow we're not going to come by it through what we want. We may aim for the peak experiences of everyday life as the final goal, when those were only unveiled to get us beyond our material selves. Instead, we scatter about chasing states and erecting idols who can inhabit them for us. How many human relationships have been invested with such a burden too heavy to bear? How many ideologies have been fabricated by political leaders to create the illusion of paradise on Earth as a pursuit? Since we are restricted to our material selves, we can't do anything but to institute happiness through secular goods unto ourselves and others. Despite these utopian impulses, “we are not made to attain a paradise within time.” Moreover, if we remove human weakness, are we “also removing human beings as well?” The point to what draws us deeper to the horizon of the inexhaustible mystery of transcendence was never to put our finger on it in this world, but to point us toward the goal that is beyond all finite characterizations. “If we focus too insistently on the attainment of our final fulfillment in the here-and-now, then we will distort the meaning of all lesser goods.”
As finite beings we must work within our pregiven limits or we will just fall prey to endless choices of incoherent self expression. “In every moment we remain free, although never utterly free of all direction.” The secular modern project ensures that is our right as autonomous human beings buffered from anything but our reasoning selves. We think we create our own meaning! And yet, the “illusion that we could from a superior vantage point critique all positions had proved a cruel self-deception.” And by thinking “we could see through all things we ended by no longer having anything to see.” We are free to respond to existence and the order that it is given, but we can't create existence. “Our freedom is a drama enacted between the poles of certainty and uncertainty.”
“The more we respond to the glimmerings that at first attract us faintly, the more they become beacons of light irradiating the path before us with unanticipated intensity.” We are never completely autonomous, as grace will always impel in ways we will never fully understand. We can always reject it in defiance and to assert our autonomous will, but ironically that only will restrict our true freedom even more so.
Change will happen, but for it to be true progress (or transformation for ourselves and our loved ones), it always must happen against the backdrop of some ultimate standard. Otherwise, it is just change, but to what ends? “When there is no divine judge to measure our actions, then all restraints we choose to impose are merely arbitrary: everything is permitted. ... What enables us to judge the gap between ideal and reality is that we continue to possess the reality of the ideal.” But we can't force this ideal as gods, as that will only reduce us to less than persons. We must see through our manipulation of truth, to be available for the Truth that was available in the beginning!
As Walsh says,
“Not being gods, we can acknowledge God and receive from him the gift of participation in the divine life. Once freed from the impossible burden of providing our own meaning to ourselves, we can accept the surpassing divine outpouring of reality. By accepting the gift of transcendent life as our goal we have at the same time received the gift of meaning within this life.”* All quotes are from David Walsh's excellent book Guarded By Mystery. I can't recommend this book highly enough!
