Fragment VII
In Praise of Good Will
Brothers and sisters strive to live for an ideal outside of themselves, and within each person, several impulses push life in different directions. Not to follow the Will to Possession, the Will to Knowledge, or the Will to Domination, but to follow the Will to Goodness and grow one’s soul with the fruits of fraternity and devotion.
If I do wrong to you, that wrong will come back to me threefold. Vice is chaos and chaos is suffering, and virtue is order and order is bliss. There is nothing greater than an opportunity to do good for another person, and the more in need the person, the greater it is to help. No living being on Earth has been given the right to judge another, because all living things share their wellbeing, and just as the hand must not judge the foot, the saint must not judge the sinner. The more wicked the individual, the greater the virtue must be to help him.
Love absolutely and without condition, and begin by loving God. Then mankind, and then all living things, and then the soil of this Earth and all of creation. Love is a hand that reaches out for embrace, and so it forms a relationship that cannot be seen and through which understanding flows in a constant stream. The one who loves grows closer to the Divine Mystery and loosens the tie to earthly circumstances. The one who loves is aware of other worlds and feels the Spirit’s touch.
Faith is letting go. Let the world flow through you and be the nothing that perceives everything. This is Divine Wisdom, and the only path to it is through surrender to the Divine Will. Pray, and remember not only your principles but how to live your principles. All will pass if you do not grasp it.
It is all the same as it all changes.
The Hymn to Divine Grace
All that is, Lord, has been, will be, can be – strings resonating in a single chord.
The Lord is my fate and the Lord is my mercy and the Lord is my skeleton key through the gates of rocky corridors lit with black torches flaming from the dead cypress tree branches that burn and scorch the unconscious hordes of living corpses who drag their numb limbs to the drum of Fear Doubt and Delusion’s whims.
You open doors to immortal rewards and whisper in my ear your tidings grim: Oh, weary pilgrim! They are lonely shores you walk toward in quest of the isles of gold, and soon you will have to swim.
But because I was very thirsty I cried out to the Lord: My death is nigh, my throat is dry! My bones are cold and my eyes are sore.
And then I heard a voice from Heaven say: We are born so that we may die, and the end comes before midday. Life ends in the morning, under a sky red like clay, when the sun is still dawning, and the hawk stalks its prey.
Now I stood beneath a tree and below a sword, crying for a few words more and grappling with a hunger that raged with spite like a caged boar, ‘till I saw a red apple glistening in the twilight.
I submit and I bit and the ground was then split, a schism of delight with the bite that undid the wisdom of your kingdom and the songs of the saints.
But then I heard faint melodies from a fountain in a chapel, with a phantom ocarina that did breathe and sing: the Spirit within is an aplomb spring.
For Days that my Soul is Heavy and Nights that my Eyes are Open
Lord, give me the strength to speak only to you, to choose my words and actions as if I have no judge other than you. Let my vision be clear so that I see all everything righteous without the blur of human conceit and greed. I see now that I have no wish other than to receive your love, and I pray that you keep me open to it. In the cold clarity of my solitude, I know that my true dream for this life is to live close to you, to not just be your servant but your son. Time rolls on unendingly. The stars glide around this finite existence in circles and I know my hour will end. No moment is much nearer than any other in eternity, and day by day Being dissolves into nothingness and nothingness forms into Being. When I stop fearing death, then I will know that I have released myself to you. When I die I will know, though I will have no mouth to speak it or mind to think it, that I am yours and that I have come from you: That is why in my human form I can be strong.
When the day is dreary and the night is bitter, when hope comes slowly and faith is out of reach, I know that love is divine. If I were alone in a cold universe with danger all around me, I would know that I always have love within me. I can always fill myself with enough good that evil cannot penetrate me deeply, and even if my sad fate is doomed, I can be a living light for others.
As I live in love, your smile becomes more radiant, and my faith is strengthened because I see the truth that can only be found in love, and the truth is that I know nothing, save that there is always light, and there is always a way to reach it. If others hold my hand, I can show them too.
Postscript
He felt like he had to do something drastic, and from the outside, it looks over-dramatic. I believe I understand some of his logic, or at least his beliefs about the universe and how he responds to them. He believes that there is a force of good in this universe, that it can work through anyone who has faith in it, and that if we do not find our own way to it, the potential for bad is equally as strong as the potential for good.
The first time I read through his journal, I was wobbling back and forth between being concerned for him and proud of him. I have mixed feelings toward him that are extreme in opposite directions. I have this strange feeling that my father is praying for me, like his words are echoing around the Earth and touching me. But I do not even know how I view him. I do not know if he is a good man or a selfish man or a delusional man. I only want him to pray for me if he is a good man. Maybe his love has grown so much that it is completely unconditional, and the condition of being his son or daughter does not affect anything. That feels twisted, though, and I hope it isn’t true.
I do not know if he has succeeded or failed, or if he is all right, or if I agree with the things he says. I do believe that he is not doing these things out of any selfish motive, but his purpose is selfless: to have faith in something that exists outside and beyond him. I think he still wants something more, though, and feels like he has come up short in some way. He wanted validation that he was on the right path toward the truth, but could not really get it, so he turned to love and faith. On that new path, he had no way of knowing whether he is really responding to a transcendent calling or if he is deluding himself based on his own impulses. But with this uncertainty comes humility.
In appreciating the possibility that you are deluding yourself, you lose your arrogance and face the choice of whether to embrace your own ignorance. He is no longer pursuing knowledge but trying to grow closer to the mystery, and he believes he has to take a risk to do that. The reward, I suppose, would be self-understanding.
But I have to stop thinking about him and begin to think about myself. You cannot change if you place all responsibility for your faults on another person. You have to take responsibility for all your vices. To live a truly good life, you have to take responsibility for the vices of all humanity. Personally, I do not know if I believe in God, but I believe that there is good in this universe that exists beyond us. That good is the transcendent power that I wish to praise and follow.
I am unsure whether our father purposely left his journal here, but some part of him must have wanted us to read it. Whatever we think of him, his journal is a gift, because now we can make our own way without repeating the sins of the father.
With love abundant, with love beyond words,
Iliana
