2023-06-13 Journal Entry

🍃 Season: 🌷 Spring 🔆 Weekday: Tuesday 🗓 Date: June 13, 2023 📅 Week: Jun 12 – Jun 18, 2023

I’m writing this from a fancy new iPad, so let’s see how that goes. The keyboard is definitely way smaller, but I also like this little extra bit of portability and getting away from a regular laptop.

I’m mostly just quite tired. I feel like I have just been wanting to sleep lately. It’s not even 7 and I feel like it’s bed time. This happened the last few days, especially where I think I was just physically exhausted. My Oura ring was telling me I wasn’t getting fully restored, and after a few days of this, I was zonked, I just couldn’t think for the life of me. I’m very ready for vacation. But I also think my brain is still lagging a day behind — I have done less than nothing this past week at work. I honestly feel okay about that, and I’ll continue to be a bit out of the loop for the next few weeks, but I really don’t want to totally drop the ball there.

Anyways, enough about work. A while back, one of the challenges of the Heroic people was to think of someone whom you’d consider a Hero, and after reading The Weight of Glory, C.S. Lewis is starting to become a contender for that role. Eloquent, wise, and absolutely joyful, he’s someone who I read and go I want to be like that. I don’t normally say that about people, but I’m beginning to think that having some of those role models in place might be really helpful for me. I need to read more of his work to really digest it all, but I highlighted probably half of that essay.

There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilisations—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendours. This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously—no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption. And our charity must be a real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner—no mere tolerance, or indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment. Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbour is the holiest object presented to your senses. If he is your Christian neighbour, he is holy in almost the same way, for in him also Christ vere latitat—the glorifier and the glorified, Glory Himself, is truly hidden.

I love this — I love the glory in the everyday, I love that joy comes from seriousness, I love embracing love itself. There’s so many wise truths in this essay, not the least of which is learning that we are beautiful, and learning exactly what that beauty means.

And this brings me to the other sense of glory—glory as brightness, splendour, luminosity. We are to shine as the sun, we are to be given the Morning Star. I think I begin to see what it means. In one way, of course, God has given us the Morning Star already: you can go and enjoy the gift on many fine mornings if you get up early enough. What more, you may ask, do we want? Ah, but we want so much more—something the books on aesthetics take little notice of. But the poets and the mythologies know all about it. We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words—to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.

There’s this lovely description of beauty and glory in this essay that is one of the biggest takeaways for me. We shun glory and shun the beauty of ourselves as creations because we’re ashamed, because we’ve taught ourselves that those are prideful. But if we’re creations of the divine, creations of something perfect, what’s to be ashamed of? Right here, when God sees us, we are beautiful.

This journal is just quoting C.S. Lewis, and that’s exactly as it should be. May you be united with the beauty you see. Much love.