The Abyss in my Eyes
There is something from David Bentley Hart's writings that capture my attention. I think it's his sincerity. He is erudite, sure, and it puts a lot of people off when he uses "big words" in his work, but I don't mind. Maybe it's my indifferent nature, but I think it is his sincerity in laying his views. He doesn't do false humility or explaining away things he doesn't understand. He stares it in the face and calls it out, no matter who he makes uncomfortable. And that's what I've been trying to learn: Sincerity.
The thing I need to stare down is, quite mysteriously, myself. Like I've said before, I don't like mirrors, I don't like what they show me. I don't take many pictures willingly, I don't know the person I see in my reflection, he is an abyss of mystery. His eyes have no end to the darkness they betray. I realize what I need is sincerity, to show myself to myself, to confront the truth, whatever this mysterious truth may turn out to be.
The nihilist in me disagrees, he is scared of the darkness, so he wants to hide, paradoxically, in darkness. Like I told a friend recently, statements like "You only have one life" have no meaning to me. If nothing matters but me, then nothing matters, and there is no difference whether I jump off the cliff now or sleep in death later. I told her that If there's anything I want from life, it is to die, to disappear.
But then, the only thing holding me back from giving in to the demon infested self centred maniac I call my alter ego is simply, faith. Faith in the resurrection the church proclaims, the resurrection I proclaim in my very refusal to give up. I do not stay in my fumbling faith because I read an argument, but because all those logical arguments for God, all the beauty of the world, everything, somehow seizes me in the face of the one they call resurrected. His face is beautiful, and terrifying, and it sees me through the eyes of every human being I see, even through me. Yes, the mystery of myself, of the abyss of my eyes, is the terrifying sight of the one who truly lives, and loves, for me:
…for Gregory no less than for Augustine, the turn inward proves to be, in a still more radical sense, a turn outward: I am an openness whose depth does not belong to me, but to the boundless light that creates me, and whose identity is then given me as other. And as the otherness of God is the soul’s true depth, she can possess no identity apart from the otherness of the neighbor; and both the soul’s otherness from God and the otherness of each soul from every other reflect the mystery of God’s act of “othering” himself within his infinite unity.
David Bentley Hart: The Hidden and the Manifest; The Mirror of the Infinite: Gregory of Nyssa and the Vestigia Trinitatis
This truth is why I hide, because I don't want to be seen. To be free is hard, so I run to bondage. I see hell's fires in the face of my saviour. But I know I misunderstand, I know hell is but my refusal to love the mirror, and love the others whom are my mirror. He won't let go, until I see, until I face Him, the severity of my salvation is such that my desires are not even mine, but His:
For what it is worth, however, I do in fact believe in hell, though only in the sense of a profound and imprisoning misery that we impose upon ourselves by rejecting the love that alone can set us free. I believe, in fact, that I have on occasion experienced that hell from within its walls, so to speak; I suspect that most of us, at least past a certain age, have done so. And it is a captivity from which we would be foolish to imagine we can free ourselves on our own. Practically all of us go through life as prisoners of our own egos, which are no more than the shadows cast by our souls, but which are nonetheless quite impossible for us to defeat without assistance and without grace. Hence, a secret that we all too often hide from ourselves is that we walk in hell every day. There is, though, another and greater secret too: We also walk in heaven, also every day. This too we can occasionally see, though usually only in rare moments of spiritual wakefulness or imaginative transport. Redemption, then, if there is such a thing, must consist ultimately in a conversion of the heart so complete that one comes to see heaven for what it is- and thus also comes to see, precisely where one formerly had perceived only the fires of hell, the transfiguring glory of infinite love. And "love never fails" (1 Corinthians 13:8).
David Bentley Hart: That All Shall be Saved
Therefore, I will stumble towards that goal of self reflection, towards the selflessness He calls me to be, towards the hell he walked into, and calls me to follow Him to. There I will find my salvation from this death that plagues my soul, there I will find Him.