Comes the morning

My night lasted for eight long months, but at last the morning has come and joy with it.  No, I did not win the lottery or buy a new car or acquire any other thing that modern society deems necessary for joy.  My grief is past, my tears are spent, and at last, I am a real person, not just an amorphous paper doll donning whatever disguise she deems necessary for another's satisfaction.  My whole world has changed, just not the physical aspects.  I have walked through the valley of sorrow and found at last the peak of joy, and I must say the view is certainly worth it.  I would not choose my former circumstances, nor do I wish to endure them again, but I think it has been worth it, this struggle, this pain, this heartache, for it has made me the person I now am.  Much as birth must be endured for new life, so too do the pains of sorrow and grief and trial give place to personal growth and a deeper sense of life and self, unless they are not weathered properly but rather are stillborn as bitterness and misery and resentment.

It is not your outward circumstances that dictate your level of joy and contentment, but rather who you are on the inside, that part of you that will live forever, either an 'immortal horror or everlasting splendor' as C.S. Lewis puts it.  Our culture abhors even the idea of a soul, though we relish the idea of physical immortality.  Everything is about what you have and what you look like and what you do, not who you are.  Even our politics have been reduced to physical attributes, with your personal worth based upon race, gender, or whatever, rather than as an image-bearer of God.  But how can there be such pain and heartache and sorrow in the world, not to mention true joy, if we are but a random collection of atoms, if there is no meaning or purpose or this is how it is supposed to be?

Cows are the contentest creatures I am aware of, certainly they can feel pain and fear and anxiety, but they don't know what sorrow is, yes they yearn for their weaned calves for a day or a week, but an abusive calfhood doesn't haunt them all their born days, assuming they can suffer such at the 'hands' of a fellow bovine, which they can't, for they have no notion of good or evil, of enduring beyond their allotted years, no thought beyond enough to eat and drink and to be physically comfortable.  That's the level to which many of my fellow citizens have descended, they wish merely to 'eat, drink, and be merry,' little caring for the higher things of the soul, ignoring the fact that they even have one, counting their 'friends' or 'likes' on social media far more dear and certainly more important.

But you have a soul, we all do, and if it has been grievously injured, it can heal, but the worst thing you can do is neglect it or pretend that it doesn't exist and thereby stifle your own growth into who you were meant to be.  It is not pleasant at times, it is not pretty, but there is nothing that will yield greater rewards.  Perhaps that is why I find modern literature so dull and insipid and dreary, it has no soul!  For if the writer does not believe men to be more than cattle, how can they inspire us to believe differently or even to care? And I fear our personalities have become as banal as our books, for the very same reason: soul rot.  Perhaps it is time to open the windows and dust out those forgotten rooms, you won't be disappointed.