Life As Performance Art 59

I am dedicating this blogpost today, especially to my parish priest, and to all my Gentle Readers with a tender conscience. I am thinking today of a point that came up in yesterday's sermon, about the whole exercise of self-examination that we often do at the end of the day, of how we often feel that we have fallen short of our best and highest selves, and of how we have fallen short of God's highest hopes and expectations of ourselves. I am also writing about this because I also have a conscience that can at times easily turn ruthless and punishing tyrant, torturer and executioner on me, all in one, if I am not careful. It is wonderful that we have a conscience, to begin with. This helps us maintain our lives with a functioning moral compass and a living ethical sense. If we can get through the day this way, without succumbing to the self-hater, then we will have done okay. But the self-hater, that crown prosecutor that we carry in our heads, can at times turn vicious and vindictive and we have to watch for this. First of all, we never do get it right. We never have and we never will. We have to live with this. This doesn't let us off the hook for trying. We have to keep trying, to keep making the effort. This is how we learn, it is how we grow. I am thinking of the legend of Lucifer, of his great fall and how he became Satan, the enemy of our souls and the foe of all that is good and God. It is alleged that Lucifer began his career as the highest of God's angels, the bright morning star, the most beautiful and powerful of the angelic forces. But he wanted to be God himself, and his envy of the Most high resulted in a great revolt that led to the downfall of Lucifer and those angels that aligned themselves with him, and how they were all cast down by the hand of God. Lucifer could not be God, that was simply never going to happen. He could only be his creation. Lucifer could not be God, but only his reflection. All his beauty, glory and splendour was but reflected light, much as the moon owes its gentle and meeker glow to the light of the sun that it reflects. This is the way it is with all of us. It seems to me that we all are lacking in our natures that one essential characteristic that makes God uniquely God. That characteristic is called love. We can only get love from God and this is what maintains us in relation to God and to one another, this interdependency of love. Lucifer lost, or somehow lacked that perspective. He was unable to see or honour the love, the very love that made him and maintained him and was the source and fount of his beauty and divine splendour, and when we want to be completely self sufficient, as he did, we are essentially rejecting love. So, this is my counsel, to my priest, to myself, and to my other friends, for when our conscience torments us, for when we have fallen short, for when we weren't able or were simply unwilling to live up to the high standard of love. We are almost made to fail, first of all, and this sad fact of our imperfect humanity will be staring us in the face every single day of our existence on this sad and sorry earth. That we don't get it right is really for us a reassurance that we are incomplete in ourselves and frail and imperfect beings. But it is also our willingness to see this imperfection, to look it in the face, to smile and laugh at it, and by extension, laugh at ourselves, that helps us move forward. Keep our standards high, yes, because otherwise we are not going to grow. Then to learn to laugh at our failures and keep moving on, for this is also going to make us grow. Lucifer did not have a sense of humour. And Satan is not able to laugh at himself, nor forgive himself for what he is not, and never can be. But this is something, that we, as humans, can do, and so we can make our lives and our world at least a little bit more beautiful in trying.