Is Gives Way to Ought
How can we know everything will be all right?
This is a child’s question I have refused to outgrow. As I’ve written before, I struggle greatly with anxiety about not only the future, but the certain assurance of my faith, and exactly what the hoped-for eternity actually will be like. A large measure of this feels tied to ways I might be unwilling to change, the so-called nonfungibility of aesthetics – the idea I struggle to write off that, if people can refuse repentance because they love what is wrong, then there must be some uniqueness to the wrong, the love of which is not present in the perfected soul – and that frightens me, both because of the prospect of having seemingly alien preferences, the idea of any particularity being lost, and probably as a sort of defensive excuse to explain my reluctance to grow. I fixate on this anxiety about the Christian eschaton more than others, because its concerns still obtain in any sort of theology I find convincing, and because it feels more selfish and less defensible than any other objection one could have, so I need to make it visible. Whether this is more out of a fear of misleading people into jumping too quickly to reassure me, or out of a desire to extract some stronger form of encouragement that will allow me to feel safer with less change, I am not sure.
Thankfully as I get older I begin to be grateful for the ways in which I am changing, even those areas I feared to grow in in the past. I cannot myself resolve the seeming contradictions in my faith. On the one hand, the insistence that everything has to be all right in order for the promise news to be Good, which immediately splits into the question of how can everything seem all right to me and also be all right from God’s perspective, given my warped lens. I want not only to have and eat cake, but also to have the experience of not eating it; to not miss any possible permutation of experience, and yet to only live one meaningful life; to taste every substance, and yet not taste the foul or poisonous. When people are cruel and hurtful, I want them stopped and brought to justice; but I also fear the idea that anyone would be punished, and I often feel that no one should suffer, and everyone should by rights be able to have an assurance of safety. And even my righteous indignation is a contradiction, because I am dimly cognizant of my own wrongdoings in the same vein.
I ramble. I apologize for the vague confusion. In plain terms, I put my hope in Christ, but still worry in doubt that some sanctifying sacrifice will be required to emerge from even the Christian universalist George MacDonald’s purifying fire and fully enjoy God. I keep looking for the catch. I don’t think I can firmly resolve all of this here, now; all I can do is live in spite of the doubt, traveling in the way of trust even when it is absent. But I do think there is a way out, in the symbols of this holy season. In the inescapable death on the Cross and the seemingly impossible emptying of the tomb, things which seem contradictory find reconciliation; the circle is squared, what Is collapses into what Ought to be, as we round the corner into eternity.
