Mr. Ramacharaka is pleased to bring you this post. He believes it will hurt your little brain, despite the fact it was only written by eric maldonado, Transcriber of "The Onyx Spark Job".
Redemption
“In the end, it’s not the years in your life that count, but the life in your years.” - Abraham Lincoln.
There you have it, profound, simple and who am I to argue with Lincoln? Especially when I agree. Amidst many things done well, Lincoln could write, with a seeming simplicity, casually pitching profound difficulties directly into the reader's conscience... like this one:
"Does it not go down as thin as homeopathic soup, that was made by boiling the shadow of a pigeon that had starved to death?"
Kind of funny... till taken in context of the Lincoln-Douglas Debates where Lincoln is making Douglas and the crowd take it between the eyes as he argues the case against slavery.
Yep, Lincoln was a profound writer of rarest simplicity, the type of simplicity that would, a few decades earlier, compel Goethe to write the following words into the mouth of Faust:
"Simple, yes, but this simple is hard."
But enough of quotes, we've arrived at a faustian dilemma.
The more years we live, the less life we find in our years.
Remember childhood? For better or worse, life was full, the days long. The interminable length of school years, endless summers. Miserable or joyful, childhood was a time brimming with life... then what?
Something happens, time starts to fly, next thing you know, you can't remember what kind of sandwich you had for lunch, or was that dinner? But back to the dilemma...
What do you think it is that thins the life from your years? For to live long enough is to feel the encounter of lack in your life. And how is one to set their will to resolve this dilemma?
The dilemma is sin. And the only solution is to grapple with redemption. Now, do not get cowardly on me and fly away like the shadow of a starved pigeon just because I brought up sin, redemption, raised the specter of God before your conscience.
It's a common mistake, confusing sin with guilt, fleeing and denying God. Get over it! Sin and guilt, though related, are separate.
What is guilt but shame brought to the surface? For it is nothing more, nor less. And how are we to deal with shame?
The only thing to be ashamed of is your ignorance. So for God's sake, put your shame aside and let's talk about sin.
I'm sorry, was that too simple? Take this article from the top again before we proceed to sin. You back? Got it? Good.
Because sin is similarly simple... Brought down to cause and effect, sin is the stealing of love to the effect of despair.
What are the Ten Commandments but a concise list of acts to avoid that Thou Shalt Not Steal Love? For to break with any of the Commandments is to steal love from God, yourself and the victim. And how can one deny the effect stolen love has in polluting our souls with despair.
The burdening despair of guilt, whether or not one is aware of the buried shame, or of the crushing despair that wracks the souls of all victims from whom love has been stolen. In this way, sin, as despair, accumulates throughout the years, clinging to our souls, the same way heavy metals accumulate and cling to our flesh, until one day you look in the trash and ask yourself:
"What's that empty tin of cat food doing in there? Do I have a cat? That sandwich tasted funny... why am I purring?"
So that's what our dilemma is. Sin is despair. Accumulating as a seemingly insoluble spiritual toxin for our souls. And that's how it comes to pass that the more we live, the less life we seem to find in our years. Now, was that too simple?
Then I challenge you: read Kierkegaard's "The Sickness Unto Death" and tell me, if you survive, if sin being despair is the kind of simple that is not hard. Go ahead... I dare you!
I triple dog dare you.
Enough of this bravado. To diagnose a dilemma is, after all, a swaggering effort. But to prescribe a cure? That is where you separate the men and women from the boys and girls. And confronted with the diagnosis of life draining despair, the only prescription worthy of a man or a woman is: Redemption.
I know, you've heard it before, likely from a pulpit or on your television, from someone laying on the shame, just so they could gesture a hand to God, and declare, "Sinner! Do not despair! Redemption is at hand!" It's most likely this person had magnificent hair...
Hair style aside, and despite their asking you for money, getting themselves publicly humiliated in an exposed sex scandal or embezzling funds, their righteous declaration itself is damn correct and indeed, surprisingly concise.
But what is redemption? For as a prescription, opposing sin, it must be the opposite of sin. And how are we to recognize the way we are to put our will to the task of cleansing the toxicity of despair accumulated in our souls, the result of our very own, individually experienced, lives and destinies?
Well, since I've already brought Soren Kierkegaard into it...
In the aforementioned book, "The Sickness Unto Death", Soren Kierkegaard forcibly and successfully contends that faith is the opposite of sin, and thereby the only viable antidote to despair, (being the "sickness unto death" of the title). You really have to read this book...
That being said, all it takes is a simple leap of faith and a bit of good will to see that just as despair is the effect of sin caused by love being stolen, so is redemption that effect of faith caused by putting back into the world the good taken from it.
Excuse me? You have a problem with faith? Think you lost it? Feel you never had it? Grew up? Replaced faith with Will? I do understand... But that's not the faith I'm talking about.
What you are doing is confusing your faith in the face of ignorance, insentience... inertia. For faith is not to be found in the self righteous rhetoric of the televangelist whose hair is more perfect than a 1980's U.S. Senator and whose suit is so exquisite it would make a mob boss blush; nor is faith to be recognized in cliches of condescending comfort pitifully mumbled to us by representatives of the church in the face of our dire trial. And how is faith to grow in the barren soil of materialistic science with its supposed insight that in the final analysis boils down to nothing more than seeing itself in the surfaces of things?
That's all a bunch of life draining hooey. Not faith.
What I'm talking about is a life restoring faith. That image of life in the imagination, that living light of inspiration, that remembered intuition of actually being... an individual.
For you are an individual. You are an observer that observes itself. And how can you lose that, not be that, outgrow that?
It is only under the effect of despair that you have become confused and come to believe that as the observer observing itself you are alone. The sin of love stolen has caused you to forget that which observes as you observe yourself, that you are not alone... that God observes you observe yourself.
Have I frightened you? Good. In the Bible they call this: The Fear of God. But there's nothing to be afraid of. This is the gateway to redemption! What I mean... it's simplicity itself!
For knowing you are an observer observing itself and sensing that the effects of sin have confused you into believing you are so alone then realizing you are indeed being observed by the Almighty, it becomes apparent that love being stolen has sucked the life out of you. And how does one counteract this and cross the threshold of salvation and achieve redemption?
By simply putting back into the world good taken from it.
I did not say forgive and forget and smile and be all cheery.
Sure, you must forgive. You must let go of the resentment that acts like a toxic spiritual glue, binding despair to your soul. You have to make way for redemption to cleanse your soul and restore your life. But you can never forget.
You can never forget that love is being unscrupulously stolen, that sin is being selfindulgently committed by yourself and others... that everyone twists in despair.
You can never forget, lest you forget your responsibility and moral obligation to address, correct and balance this evil in yourself and in the world... and that God is watching you.
Remember, the point is to simply put good back into the world not necessarily to right wrongs, especially in some misguided attempt to right a wrong you or another have committed, which when all is said and done, proves to be nothing other than an effort to unburden yourself of your own shameful guilt at the expense of inflicting unnecessary despair upon someone else.
Such efforts only serve to discredit true righteousness and demoralize yourself from the life-giving path of redemption because they violate the cardinal commandment of redemption itself which states: Thou shalt not steal love, nor inflict despair, to put good back into the world. And that cardinal commandment is, by the way, what's known as a moral compass.
So forgive absolutely but never forget what you are forgiving for, and how the very act of putting good back into the world is in itself an act of faith that is indeed, your redemption.
There you have it, and I bid you Godspeed with profound apologies to our 15th President of the United States by saying:
“In the end, it is not the despair in your life that counts, but the good you have put back into the world.” - eric maldonado.
