Call to An Account
"We should every night call ourselves to an account: what infirmity have I mastered today? what passions opposed? what temptation resisted? what virtue acquired? Our vices will abate of themselves if they be brought every day to the shrift.*"
Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4 BC - AD 65)
*to the shrift = a brief time for confession
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Dear Alex,
I have been thinking of your last post here. Somewhere along your words bugged me.
Was I bothered by your first use of expletives I have ever read in or between your lines? Or did your tone suggest manufactured clarity or ham-fisted falling on knees for prayer? Which of your words did not settle well with me?
But it was something unsaid in your last post that has knocked me off my pedestal, made me fall from my knees, turned my face to face my strangleholds at ground level of self-deception: you did not use nice words. No sugar-coating of private Self in intimate conversation with the public. No gold-plating, varnishing or polishing of hypocrisy in Self bent to yap, gossip, inflate and curse rather than pray.
We meet a stranger we seek to make less strange (your line), and in doing so, we are estranged from the strangers we have made of ourselves and one another. This is how divisive and lonely our technocratic empire has grown since the original fall from knees in Eden. We need not go far into the night to be cuffed by addictions and denials. Much have been unspoken offscreen to sharpen our focus on what speaks most truly about us on screen.
So I will ask with Seneca tonight the prevailing questions unchanged: what infirmity have I mastered today? what passion, temptation, virtue, vice? What does it mean to fall from our knees and face our beasts? Teach us to pray.
No wonder your words choked me!
Yours, Kate
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Dear Kate,
I realized I haven't allowed a proper settling of stomach from your indigestion of my expletive before the abrupt and facile conclusion to offer a cure: prayer. Maybe that was the point. Maybe I was in a hurry to get lunch. Maybe I found anything more at that moment unspeakable.
Mountains of book have been written about prayer to help us surmount the "interior castle," mansions of our being, to get closer to...God? (Not enough or nearly effective to censor life's many expletives.)
A Godless person can't settle down: no sitting still, no standing aware, no lying peaceable. Life is one big seeing blind and hearing deaf, moving on and following up, getting along and bringing across and all sorts of absolutely necessary maneuvers to distract our Self from her need for being and becoming.
Is this the sort of "ham-fistedness" you are talking about, I making grand statement about godless people and with the obvious assumption of how one is so and the glorious suggestion that I ain't one of them?
I shall call myself to an account.
Yours, Alex
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