gone home

It's like the despair isn't allowed in anymore. It's as if a greater law has taken up residence inside me and despair can't get through the gate.

Screwtape's words stay with me: the general rule which we have now pretty well established among them is that in all experiences which can make them happy or better only the physical facts are 'real' while the spiritual elements are 'subjective'; in all experiences which can discourage or corrupt them the spiritual elements are the main reality and to ignore them is to be an escapist... your patient, properly handled, will have no difficulty in regarding his emotion at the sight of human entrails as a revelation of Reality and his emotion at the sight of happy children or fair weather as mere sentiment. 

I am grateful to CS Lewis and this book, because right now I am confused and completely taken aback at this new law in my soul. I sway toward believing that this is some kind of temporary happiness, as if reality will soon calm my emotions, restore me to the general sadness that is simply true. What CS Lewis says through the confession of Screwtape is that the good I am perceiving to be mere sentiment is actually the main reality.

It's like despair isn't allowed in anymore. I'm dumbfounded. I'm every ridiculous word you can think of.

I've dwelt in shame and I've cried in the place before breaking and I've watched the boy I love break, we've broken together. Vulnerability is refusing love's illusion. Honesty is accepting a wrecked world, a worn soul; is accepting nothing short of suffering and loss of the entire life you dream about. Relationship is when your own dying means his dying, too. Relationship is confessing your crosses to each other, and then instead of walking away, you carry them together. They are covered in the blood of Calvary. You twist in pain until you break him with your shameful deaths and you commit to dying together, every day.

I don't know where the despair has gone. It doesn't live here anymore.

Yesterday I prayed.
I asked for that Hope that was born on that bloodied cross.
I asked for that to be born in us.

I know what it is to miss him, now, and it's not because I'm lonely anymore. Because I'm not lonely anymore. I sat down to eat my breakfast and I didn't say grace, because God was all around me, because he was eating with me.

I'd be a fool to think anything else.