Everyone needs a Reason and a Way.
There is One Reason, and He has given us a Way. I am the light and the life of the world. Life. The Reason to work, to endure, to try and succeed. He opened to our imaginations a veritable cornucopia of rewards. He told us the Plan, the Reward, and how we were going to get there. He is the Way. Light. We follow where he leads, and where he leads is to life. We cannot blaze our own path, we cannot make it alone. But with him all things are possible.
He is the Light and the Life.
He is life. Life mirrors him, copies his perfection in minute replicas all over the universe. C. S. Lewis said that, "miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see." Seasons change; spring eradicates winter. Dawn burns away night. A birth and death of all things, in a simple and perfect design, His design.
Art imitates life, just as life imitates its creator. The archetypes of the hero, the protector, the king, all point to him. We knew in LOTR that Gandalf couldn't really be dead, because he died for his friends, and we all know how the story progresses from there. Same with Aslan. Believe me, dad, you don't have to read the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe to know the story. You've heard it every day of your life. And I don't mean since you were born. Even Ayn Rand, vociferous atheist, wrote her greatest novel about a perfect man who redeems those who have been abused by evil -eventually suffering phyiscal torture. He saves them from their own follies after they worked for those who enslaved them by sanctioning the evil that destroys them. Oh, Ayn, I shake my head at your determined denial of truth.
But I get off topic.
Where I mean to go with this is here: We search so desperately-albeit unconsciously- for anything in this life that will remind us of The Life. Is it surprising, therefore, that when we fall in love, the emotion mirrors the Greatest Love? We seek a Reason and a Way.
We want to be inspired. All of us earnestly seek someone who will give us a reason to rise above whatever in our life is bringing us down, ourselves most importantly. Not someone to say to us, you're okay as you are, but someone to say, I know that you have it in you to be amazing. For that person, you want to be amazing. You are willing to work to possess her (him, in my case, but its much more romantic the other way). She is worth every effort, every pain, to hold for one moment that glowing white fruit of perfection. She is the Reason. So gearing ourselves up for the enormous challenge, we suddenly find that she is also the Way. How being our best possible selves is suddenly so easy and freeing...why it's all a tribute to her. The inspiration that gives us the desire also unconsciously gives us the ability. That is the romantic love that all artists, philosophers, housewives and schoolboys aspire to. You've heard the song. You know which one I mean.
Isn't it amazing! The very act of falling in love is a testimony of our belief in a greater good. To love someone with one's whole soul is a sacred gift to the Father and the Son, an acceptance of their gift.
The reason I thought of this is not because of the conversation I had with Ted tonight, though my sentiments mirror his in many respects. I came upon this idea while watching a drama on TNT. Wanted. Now, ask me, how did a television show about police guys who hunt down wanted criminals make you think about the sanctity of romantic love? Because the criminal had Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. I wish I could relate the entire show to you. It inspired me. But the relevant part has been related in full. The mad bomber was a PTSD victim of Desert Storm. It made me think of Dad.
Sometimes I think my dad is so weak, unable to do the simplest things for himself, unable to be a grownup in many ways. I feel burdened, thinking that it is my duty to take care of him. And yet, he has never starved, nor frozen to death. He is perfectly able to take care of himself. So why do I feel that he is not alive? My father is not happy. He chooses to live in the past, in the years he was surrounded by war, death, hatred and pain, rather than to live in the present. Why would anyone choose such a life? Why does he not let himself be happy? It's a simple choice. One that I've tried to make for him, so many times. But I cannot make my father happy. I do not think that even he has that ability anymore. But he used to.
PTSD is a catchword in our family, among we children anyway. A hiss and a byword. Like the phrase, "so damned depressed", it has ceased to mean anything important or real. I forget sometimes that people who have it are legitimately sick, and I use the word sick in its worst connotation. These bastards are sick! And, yeah, sometimes Dad veers that way, but for the most part, even he doesn't think of his mental unhealth as relevant. Dad is skitzophrenic. My dad is insane. And yet, it's not a big deal to us. Why? Because he has always been insane, since before we were born, but it never got in the way before. It was always there, unnamed, but he never let it bother him. My dad, my weak dad, never let his wife of twenty-seven years know that he saw his dead friends from Vietnam. How did he find that strength? Because of her.
I learned the meaning of the word romance from watching my father. Because of him, I can never marry a man who does not treat me like a princess. My mother once lectured him for the money he spent buying her flowers, as flowers die. So, whenever my father got the urge to splurge on a bouquet, he instead bought a single silk rose. In her bathroom, my mother had an immortal collection of ILOVEYOUs and JUSTBECAUSEs arrayed in all colors imaginable. Incidentally, I learned the meaning of disappointed from my mother.
In my mom, my dad found all the inspiration he could ever want for life. His wild past that we joke about with him did not influence our lives negatively, because the man we met was gentle-even when he yelled- protective and living a life within the lines. I'm not counting the Pepsi he drank behind mom's back. She was his Reason for fighting all the demons and dark things that lived in his mind. And she was his Way to do it. Heaven knows they did not have a perfect marriage even at the best of times. They probably ought never to have been married, but I may not ever meet a man who still means it for All Eternity when Time has turned her back on him.
Maybe that is why my dad could not believe in God anymore, and why the Son became fiction in his mind. Dad could not believe in Reason and Way. He had lost love. My parents' marriage really hit the rocks at the same time they left the church. The cause and effect is one eternal return. But I do know that my dad's mental weaknesses caught up to him when he gave up on her. That is why he chooses to live in the war; because to live in a life that doesn't have her is traumatic.
I wish I could do something more than observe it.
For my sanity, I must end on a note of inspiration. Perhaps I may speculate on my future prospects of romantic love. I may bear testimony of the Great Love. Girlishly, I may hope to be the Reason and Way for someone some day. But all of a sudden, I am afraid of messing up those sentiments and paths. So I will end, with a Tiny Tim thought for all: May you find love in your lives that make you a better person every day. May you find a Reason and Way, and the Light and the Life.
God bless us every one. (<--must use very bad cockney accent)
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