Orsday Programming December 4 2024

Sore Throat, Cold Feet, Pink Tongue, Blue Fingers

Late in November a cold front began to make me miserable. December came and I’ve spent every day sick; in bed my legs feel unbearably cold, and awake, and exposed, the weather has made me feel raw and thin.

I have not left my house, except for short walks to look at the church in its off-hours from a safe point far down the street near the Avante home, and for other walks to pass the goat farm (also by the Avante home) to smell the earthy manure and see the Beasts laying about idiotically and happily.

The church has not contacted me, nor has any-one else.

I have made no effort to connect to the church or the world greater, either.

My time has been spent in a bitter recoiling from faith and attempting to warm my thin legs by laying under blankets and flattening myself down comfortably.

I read Dostoevsky on my back. I try to ignore how my throat feels like it has been swelling shut with vomit. I read about Lise and the Elder Zosima and Alyosha, and think how cute it is that Lise sits crippled in her chair with her own thin cold legs arest paralytic upon her nice chair—a centerpiece, Lise’s mom would have it, to their visit with the Elder in hopes of healing—and though the legs aren’t healed, and the mom prattles about her own worries to the elder: Lise seems perfectly warm, as she talks to Alyosha and the two share a burning connection of human warmth.

My house, without persons or heating or insulation, becomes a cold shell for its sole bug to retreat within and fossilize against its walls.

And I still refuse to pray out of bitterness. However, this morning (sitting near as I can to the open blinds hoping the sunlight will warm my legs) I thought about the interaction between Elder Zosima and Lise’s mom.

Lise’s mom presents herself as victim to a spiritual poisoning where the world constantly tempts her away from making the necessary sacrifices to be truly scrupulous to Lord God: she speaks to Zosima about her desires to, sometimes, shed off everything accumulated during her life (including Lise) and retreat to a nunnery where she may embrace a romantic commitment to Lord God and bear a sacrifice much like Christ did as communion to a new marriage with the Lord God—but it is only ever a romantic fantasy. Elder Zosima, a kind man, assures her that she is a good person for even having these thoughts to want to be better, and to sacrifice more; more importantly, though: Zosima emphasizes that it is a true key datum that one must not lie, and especially not lie to oneself:

If you do not attain happiness, always remember that you are on a good path, and try not to leave it. Above all, avoid lies, all lies, especially the lie to yourself. Keep watch on your own lie and examine it every hour, every minute. And avoid contempt, both of others and of yourself: what seems bad to you in yourself is purified by the very fact that you have noticed it in yourself. And avoid fear, though fear is simply the consequence of every lie. Never be frightened at your own faintheartedness in attaining love, and meanwhile do not even be very frightened by your own bad acts. I am sorry that I cannot say anything more comforting, for active love is a harsh and fearful thing compared with love in dreams. Love in dreams thirsts for immediate action, quickly performed, and with everyone watching. Indeed, it will go as far as the giving even of one’s life, provided it does not take long but is soon over, as on stage, and everyone is looking on and praising. Whereas active love is labor and perseverance, and for some people, perhaps, a whole science. But I predict that even in that very moment when you see with horror that despite all your efforts, you not only have not come nearer your goal but seem to have gotten farther from it, at that very moment—I predict this to you—you will suddenly reach your goal and will clearly behold over you the wonder-working power of the Lord, who all the while has been loving you, and all the while has been mysteriously guiding you.

This datum is, as part of Zosima’s guidance, for adhering to an active love that will guide the woman to be convinced of faith within herself; an active love defined by a conscious and tireless effort to love ones neighbor; the more this active love of another succeeds, the more the existence of Lord God materializes within the heart, and clads the soul steadily in faith against doubt. Zosima warns, too, about the nature of want for this active love:

But if you spoke with me so sincerely just now in order to be praised, as I have praised you, for your truthfulness, then of course you will get nowhere with your efforts at active love; it will all remain merely a dream, and your whole life will flit by like a phantom. Then, naturally, you will forget about the future life, and in the end will somehow calm down by yourself.

If the effort is only made a fantasy and never exerted (with doubts and failings and mistakes included) then the effort of faith is only itself a fantasy and a lie.

Every chapter I read of Dostoevsky I come to ‘mine’ out something useful for what has poisoned me; in the past it had been other Christian authors or prophets or the aliens of Urantia, or Hubbard himself—but this winter I find myself a parallel to Dostoevsky’s Lise sitting thin-legged in a colder plane that will never intersect the warmer world of the true Lise; I am sat before a dead Zosima who does not smile at me and does not guide my mother sternly. I am accompanied by a mother who only appears rarely and mutters to dogs about schemes ‘the others’ are working against us. The church we stand together at has been abandoned and made sanctuary to cobwebs and dried insect shells. There is no Alyosha there to connect with, warmly, because at some point in life the words of a dead Zosima reached me and taught me disconnection—the warm little wire that bound me and my Alyosha together had already burst apart from the temperature difference between us.

In the absence I lean over where Zosima would be and am taught.

Here in my cold house, where I have abstained from prayer and think about the Sinister teachings of Communication and Conjecture, I wonder if this greater disconnection may be itself a cold crucible leading to a purer faith and my growing depression, alienation, the rewards my dead Zosima promised from disactive love.

—The ‘inversions’ seem silly, too, and why I wonder about Communication and Conjecture; an early sermon warned about seeking shadows that aligned only as perfect inversions of what ought be ‘Good’, and how these conveniences oft would become Conjecture that we (as vessels) justify our vices to ourselves.

The Contradiction of the faith expresses this convenience: Disconnection is something the faith values as finding Communication within—it is our Wilderness and where the heavenly Word can be found at its thinnest—and yet each Orsday we congregate together and Connect and share warmth. Without this contradiction, we can not spread our faith; without this contradiction, Communication can not build itself a church where our mission can flourish.

To segregate the hands from the Confused binding with which they’ve become; a skein tangled of fingers where the rotten mass of the Left Hand grow only more necrotic inside the knot while the Right Hand whispers to it its own health.

Curled up here inside this cold stone home I do not feel Communication from the floors or shadows or empty rooms. I do not feel Communication from the goats. I do not feel Communication from seeing the empty church down the block. I only feel a sadness as scraping as winter, and only a desire to be like my chilled breath as it was this morning taking the trash out: brief, and then invisible.

I’d like to end up a little happier.

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this article is part 9 of the [Asmodeus and Glassware] series found on the Concordance