Impetuous
2026-08-03
God does not want your zeal.
Well, at least He doesn't want mine, anyway. No, a broken spirit and a contrite heart are just about enough, I suppose. This last weekend was nice, and I finally actually feel over my depressive episode. Glory to God, they've become much milder and easier to deal with. It still sucks to go through it—to deal with the machinations of delusion that my sinful heart so ever loves to create for myself—but I don't work past it anymore. If you never see how bad it can be, you'll never see how good it can get. Not to say that things are necessarily that good right now, but in this current moment, I feel a relative sense of stillness. That's fine with me; and when that next storm comes, I'll do my best to fashion myself for the next wave of repairs. C'est la tempête, you know?
Faith isn't as hard to wrestle with, but the works are much harder. Logically, one might suppose that more faith would translate to more works, but to me that's a load of shit. Even aside from that one about the mustard seed, I find that God doesn't really care about what you want. Many think that's a fair enough excuse not to pray, and that's a sad thing. What? You'll come to God when good things happen, but the second things start trending southbound, you're out of dodge? What selfish heathens we are, aren't we? I cross my bed at night and ask God to keep me from dreaming, but last night I had another one. It was another traveling dream, one of several dozen I can remember. I was waiting at an airport with my family. We were trying to take a flight to leave some island we had traveled to because a big storm was coming, but the whole dream revolved around me wandering around the airport, frantically trying to find the plane my family had boarded. I remember finding a plane, but it was a small one—it only had a cabin of about six seats or so. The pilot tried telling me to get on, but I couldn't. I woke up after that.
Even though I've gotten to a point where I have completely submitted myself to my Lord's will, I still have to deal with my unfortunately human tendencies: my limited perspective, my pride, my gluttony, my despondency. "God, why have you made me such a mentally ill cretin who can't just be fucking normal?" I say to myself in those dark times. I guess He's just happy enough to have me come to Him with my grievances, saving everyone else from the trouble. Well, except for the fact that I write them out for a public audience. Whoops. Sorry, I can't help being an artiste d'exception. Forgive me for using a French expression twice in a single entry; I'll spare you a third. You know, if Dosto were here in the Big Twenty Six, I bet he'd have a blog like this. In his time, he had to put his philosophical musings in the form of these elaborate stories with certain characters who were so clearly his microphone. It comes from a long tradition, but we like our autofiction in the Big Twenty Six, so I just have to work with the clay I've been given. I recently read through The Grand Inquisitor, and it makes me wonder about the salvation of great artists.
I think of the big dawgs, you know: DaVinci, Michelangelo, Schubert, Beethoven. I'm especially thinking about Schubert—I mean, the guy who wrote Ave Maria has got to be in Paradise, right? But then I think about Ye again, that troubled soul. Sure, he made Jesus is King, but he also suffers from The Great Curse like me. Did Schubert have to deal with those problems too? I can't say for sure, but expressing beauty is such a wretched thing. I wish I could be even a tenth of that, even a single iota of that—that one precious drop to be sipped on by the entire cosmos. But alas, all I have are some sigils transmitted over wires. It'll have to do, but I can't let my pride lead to delusion. Not again. Never again.
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