“What makes you, you?” That’s the question I come across tonight, in the eve of the New Year’s Eve. Considering the passing year have been passionately instilling wisdom in us, I find the above question relevant. I vividly remember at the start of 2020, “This is our year,” we all said. To have it taken away from our sights must be in a way shaping us to be the way we are today, tonight, in the eve of the New Year’s Eve. The more I think about the posed question, the more it makes me wonder. Is it the accumulation of our fulfilled wants and needs, that made us who we are? Or is it our heart’s desire we gave up along the way, the ones we learn. It is either we win or we learn, right?
Or, if we’re able to be completely frank to ourselves, this could be the year we suffer the most. The way economy slows down, striking number of failing businesses, companies laid off their employees, so on and so forth. Again, putting asides the positives 2020 has brought in, don’t we all just want to scream and shout and swear and cuss? Alright, you done?
This year, due to the pandemic and the WFH scheme imposed, I got myself more time to read things I never thought myself reading, like Philosophy, for instance. With the help of Crash Course Philosophy on YouTube, I enrolled myself into lectures and features, and even took up further reading of the references. One of the things that captivated my mind was the Philosophy of God. It wasn’t the argument of existence that bothered me, it’s the problem of Evil. To put it simply, the arguments revolved mostly on why God allow evil to exist if God is truly good (Omni-God)? My wandering mind didn’t just stop there, I started looking up on references and more counterarguments, then I found out about theodicies.
What is a theodicy? It’s an attempt to show that the existence of Evil doesn’t rule out the existence of God. One of the most important theodicies in history must be Aquinas’, he proposed that all goodness in the world must exist perfectly in God, and that, existing perfectly, God must be perfectly good. He concluded that there is no Evil in God. Now, the more I read the more I dug my own hole in misery. The question that blew me is this, “If God knows what’s best, why would you want to change His mind?” Here I was thinking about prayers. Why should we bother ourselves to pray, when God already knows the past, present, and the future?
Eleonore Stump is a Professor of Philosophy at Saint Louis University specialized in the school of Thomism; the school of thought arose as a legacy to Thomas Aquinas. In one of her books, Prof. Stump describes the meaning of suffering. There are two major causes of suffering, one is being kept from flourishing, and the other is losing one heart’s desire. For right now, let’s just focus on the second cause, the losing of heart’s desire. Without being too referential, I try to define the desires as hopes, wants, and aspirations. In what way, losing the desires of our heart be our problem when God already know what’s best? Doesn’t God answer prayers?
The most common way out of the problem is to give up our wants altogether. Try not wanting things. And at first, I was allured to think that way, because that’s the way it is in other religion. Anatta, along with Dukkha and Anicca, makes up the three marks of existence in Buddhism. The concept of non-self and not desiring things to avoid pain, suffering, and anguish. Again, it’s consistent with the mind-blowing question. Let God decide what’s best, who are we to change His mind? For months I battled myself on that thought. It will save us from trouble, by letting God making decisions, letting Him decide for us, and for some time I thought that’s the only way to align my will to His.
Just last week, I was faced to another mind-boggling question from my reading, “Is having no-self enabling us to align my will to His, or am I just saving myself from heartbreak when I find out that His will is the one that be done?” Phew. The question itself brought me down to my knees, even without knowing the answer. In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus said to take up our cross daily and deny ourselves. Then, how do we do that when we have no-self at all? Whose cross we take up? When I thought by having no-self is the way, the Word itself hit me up. Then I set myself on further exploration on the concept of heart’s desire.
If it helps visually, let’s try to see a desire as an interweaving of craves and aspirations forming a web. Some are peripheral desires, and some are life-changing central to each one of us. When the peripheries are ignored, we still hold on true to the essential ones. What if, the ones we hold dearly are the ones taken away? Will the web still hold? I think that’s the case of how losing the heart’s desire can do to afflict us. Then, what if we relieve ourselves from having desires, knowing that having our web crushed before us offers no help at all?
Theodicies offer some explanation on the fulfillment of desires. While Aquinas’ theodicy focuses on relativizing suffering to the small period of our earthly life to the hope for a redeeming benefit in the afterlife. For us Christians, believing in faith on what the afterlife has to offer redeems all earthly suffering. While it’s considered faithful to give up our earthly desires to make way for the redemption, there are some addition to it. It’s from Prof. Stump.
There are two ways, she proposed, on the fulfillment of heart’s desire. First, she proposed that desires are subjective, and we should construct a scale of their subjective values, and difference in subjective value will have impact on the fulfillment of desires. It’s based on the idea that if, the original form of desire is unfulfilled, it will be in an altered form. A reshaped form can be higher in subjective value than the original form. So, the grief over the loss of the original form of desire will be redeemed fully, by the satisfaction of the more valuable form. As much as it brings hope, that what our wants will eventually fulfilled, somehow in the form of ‘what we need’, there’s still giving up involved. Heartbreaks are still intact; no matter how tidy we wrap it up.
So, what’s the second part that doesn’t involve giving up? I want to know! In the second point, she begins with Augustinian view that there’s a connection between other desires of the heart and the innate deepest heart’s desire for God and shared union with God. If we can use this point to rephrase the first one, it will be like this, “So, the grief over the loss of the original form of desire will be redeemed fully, by having what we most deeply want (union with God) or the ability to wait in faith.” In this point, we shift our focus from wondering about the fulfillment of our heart’s desire to what we hold the most dearly, the ultimate desire. Now it seems a less more important to have attained desire, as long as we have the deepest heart’s desire close. When the shared union with God is the first and foremost, all the other heart’s desire will be considered as gifts. Heartbreaks escaped.
We have reached an understanding on whether we should have desires or not, and what kind of them we should have. Let’s wrap this up before it gets too spiraling off-track. I think that having desires is unavoidable, however hard we try to abstain ourselves from it. To have the wills of our own, we open ourselves to grief and frustration when there’s a mighty risk of dissatisfaction. But, to be vulnerable itself is a quality. Because, when we hold our heart’s desire while keeping our eyes on the innate deepest desire of the union with God, we open ourselves to vulnerability. Jesus opens himself to be vulnerable several times, He is God and is human as well. In Luke 22:42, when Jesus was praying on the mount of Olives, “Father, if You are willing, remove this cup from me; yet not My will, but Yours be done.” He wasn’t on the position of no-self, he asked to be redeemed, yet He opens Himself up to be vulnerable, still putting the Father’s will first.
Recognizing God’s will is not through apathy, but a constant readiness to always prefer God’s will when it’s not compatible with ours. The key isn’t in having no-self, but to have yourselves with the readiness to deny it every now and then. That’s how we take up our cross daily, by denying ourselves.
No comments:
Post a Comment