The Gradual Road To Hell

 I don’t know why I’m ever surprised when people intentionally or unintentionally blow it. We are human, after all. Even a world-famous evangelist can turn out to be a sexual predator. 

I’m less concerned with that right now than I am with human nature. The heart is deceitful above all things; who can know it? The weeping prophet, Jeremiah, said that while he watched his country spiral into self-destruction. 

Jesus said you will know people by their actions. Some people are really good at hiding the rotten ones. No one is perfectly good. 

Let’s time travel and talk to C.S Lewis about human nature. I’ll be quoting from Mere Christianity and The Screwtape Letters.

Vance: Mr. Lewis, tell me about Christian morality.

C.S Lewis: “People often think of Christian morality as a kind of bargain in which God says, ‘If you keep a lot of rules, I’ll reward you, and if you don’t, I’ll do the other thing.’ I do not think that is the best way of looking at it. I would much rather say that every time you make a choice, you are turning a central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before. 

And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life, you are slowly turning this central thing either into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature.”

V: Any hope for us?

C.S: “Each has done something to himself which, unless he repents, will make it harder for him to keep out of the rage the next time he is tempted and will make the rage worse when he does fall into it. Each of them, if he seriously turns to God, can have that twist in the central man straightened out again: each is, in the long run, doomed if he will not.

When a man is getting better, he understands more and more clearly the evil still left in him. When a man is getting worse, he understands his own badness less and less.”

Good and evil both increase at compound interest. That is why the little decisions you and I make every day are of such infinite importance. The smallest good act today is to capture a strategic point from which, a few months later, you may be able to go on to victories you never dreamed of. An apparently trivial indulgence in lust or anger today is the loss of a ridge or railway line or bridgehead from which the enemy may launch an attack otherwise impossible.”

V: Even the little decisions?

C.S: “Indeed, the safest road to Hell is the gradual one-the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”

Even the slightest compromise opens you up to negotiations—a boundary that is unenforced, and as such, not a boundary. 

It is fitting, I would say, to pray this dangerous prayer that King David did:

“Search me, God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts.

See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.”

Reflections On Meaning

 There’s a “downside” to writing book reviews. It makes me want to reread them. So I read How (Not) To Be Secular again and reflected on how we make our own meaning and how flat the world is. 

Not flat like a flat Earth. I mean, spiritually. There is only one level, and we’re just going through the motions of religious and spiritual rites. Yet, the rise of new-age spiritualism and paganism indicates a hunger for it. 

As do our entertainment choices, like horror, sci-fi, and my personal favorite, superheroes. We long for something more, or greater, and in our postmodern world, we think we can declare it, and it will happen. 

We have a couple of views that we’re not even aware of about ourselves, according to the author. The first is the buffered self—finding and/or crafting our own identity. The second is the porous self, where your meaning comes from the outside, and you’re affected by the world. 

The latter is more common in cultures based on family or tribe, like 1st Century Judaism, where your surname came from your dad. The Apostle Peter was Peter bar Jonah. Or like Superman’s Kryptonian name is Kal-El, his name and his family name. 

Looking at it for myself, I’m from America, the clan of Gatlin/Gatland in England, a blue-collar family, centered in the South. 

Now a child of Yahweh on a mission for a kingdom that I wasn’t born into. That’s the reality of it.

The buffered self is like a shield against reality, according to the author. I’m well-acquainted with it. You are too. What/who did you emulate as a kid?

What character traits did you keep from them?

I copied and made my own versions of Spider-Man, Wolverine, Batman, Superman, Green Lantern, Captain America, and the western heroes from William W. Johnstone’s books. At any point in school, I was trying to act like a fictional character. 

If you personally know me, you’ve probably seen me sporting a superhero shirt at one point or another. 

Ronin, the name I took for myself years ago, had a whole mythology and code crafted around him like armor until life broke it.

I tried to rebuild it, and the book I wrote five years ago was a product of it: Discovering You. That didn’t work out too well. 

Maybe we should think of ourselves as a filtered self. We don’t self-certify or deny reality. Instead, we take from family history, emulate good character, etc., to navigate the world.

I was going to write about spiritual topography in light of this, but it’s already long. That will just have to be a different post.

Winging It!

I was at the doctor the other day for my wife's health insurance screening. While she was in the back, I sat in the waiting room reading. Until a kid-toddlers-walked by.

I would look up and then go back to reading. This one child caught my attention though. She was probably barely over her mom's knee in height. She was staring in rapt attention up at her mom, her little head almost all the way back.

I'm thinking I can't remember ever being that small, despite the photographic evidence. The next thought is I don't feel like I ever grew up either. I was just given more responsibility until it snuck on me.

In fact, I feel just as uncertain now as I did then...

New "Toy" To Play With

Introspectors gonna introspect.

That describes me perfectly. I've taken almost every self-assessment I come across. I know my personality type, how people see me, my enneagram numbers, my weight and measurements over the years. I understand where StrengthFinder puts me.

Even my ancestry and how we migrated to the US centuries ago.

I'm the world's leading expert on me...and I still don't know much.

Have you heard of "quantifying yourself"? It's also known as lifeblogging. Wikipedia says this about it.

Quantified self, also known as lifelogging, is a specific movement by Gary Wolf and Kevin Kelly from Wired magazine, which began in 2007 and tries to incorporate technology into data acquisition on aspects of a person's daily life. People collect data in terms of food consumed, quality of surrounding air, mood, skin conductance as a proxy for arousal, pulse oximetry for blood oxygen level, and performance, whether mental or physical. Wolf has described quantified self as "self-knowledge through self-tracking with technology."

If you track any health markers, even just wearing a FitBit, you're 'lifeblogging.'

I stumbled across an app called Welltory that consolidates all the information to give you health measurements along with tracking HRV (Heart Rate Variability). The goal is to measure stress and energy so you can work to balance out and perform at optimal levels. They say 'energy management instead of time management.'

I'm really good at time management. Not that great at energy management. Most of the time I'm one

project away from burnout again.

So I'm giving it a shot to avoid flaming out again.