Joseph Kreydt

Tag: essay

  • Loneliness and Presence

    This loneliness, in a world awake, is unnecessary affliction. I run circles around this fearfully imagined lonely future — “it will end like this,” “that is a sign about that,” “she will abandon me,” “he will betray me,” “I will starve.”

    And I wonder why I’m lonely.

    It’s because all that’s real, all that exists, all that is in communion, exists in the present, and all the while I’m seeking it in the past or the future.

    Grace, ever remind me to take three slow breaths, sense and notice the world in the moment, feel the gentle scratch of pencil on paper, and reach out to a friend.

  • Poor in Spirit, Rich in Presence

    To live without recognition, without thought, of the past or the future is to be “poor in spirt” because the present is un-ownable, always being lost. Our only riches exist in some future anticipation or some past memory.

    The more fully we live in the present, the more we are blessed. So don’t be afraid to let go of your worries or regrets.

    You’re afraid because you fear poverty, but poverty is where you will find grace.

    To always live like this seems impossible. But to pray like this, and to pray often, is possible, good, meaningful, healthy.

  • Certainty Only Comes After You Take the Leap of Faith

    What is it that you really want in life?
    Focus on that.
    Focus requires sacrifice,
    De-focusing from everything else.
    Focus requires faith,
    Trusting that focus matters
    And that grace will be there
    When you need it.

    Let go of the outcome,
    And at the same time,
    Stay committed to the path.

    Certainty only comes
    After you take the leap of faith,
    Not before.

  • WTF Does “Give It Up to God” Mean?

    First, you must understand attachment and detachment. Desire itself and the thing that is desired are two different things. Detachment is to experience the desire — and all the feelings and thoughts that come with it — separately from the desired thing; to feel desire but not attach it to some outcome.

    Once desire is detached from any object, a strange emptiness is felt. Simone Weil calls this “the void.” Others call it a “God-sized hole.”

    Experiencing the void does not make God come to us, but it opens the door and invites him. With wisdom beyond ours, he decides whether to enter or speak.

    Simply, to give it up to God is to feel the desire but not reason or think about the thing that is desired. In that empty space, wait for God.

    This is difficult to do, even for just a couple minutes. Try. Let it be prayer. You might experience a great deal of peace in letting go of yourself.

    And what of the physical feelings — the trembling hands, the pounding heart, the cramped gut — how do you give those to God? Love in spite of them. It’s not easy, but it is the way.

  • Consent to Reality

    Try listening to every sound while you’re cooking dinner or taking a shower. Don’t add any meaning, labels, or thoughts to the sounds. Just hear them as they are, letting them pass through you. If you do this perfectly, you’ll have a direct experience of reality. Simple yet profoundly difficult. And you might find a great deal of joy in it.

    “People do not realize just how much they are putting at risk when they don’t accept what life presents them with, the questions and tasks that life sets them. When they resolve to spare themselves the pain and suffering, they owe to their nature. In so doing, they refuse to pay life’s dues and for this very reason, life then often leads them astray. If we don’t accept our own destiny, a different kind of suffering takes its place: a neurosis develops, and I believe that that life which we have to live is not as bad as a neurosis. If I have to suffer, then let it be from my reality. A neurosis is a much greater curse! In general, a neurosis is a replacement for an evasion, an unconscious desire to cheat life, to avoid something. One cannot do more than live what one really is. And we are all made up of opposites and conflicting tendencies. After much reflection, I have come to the conclusion that it is better to live what one really is and accept the difficulties that arise as a result—because avoidance is much worse.”

    Carl Jung, from Reflections on the Life and Dreams of C.G. Jung by Aniela Jaffé.

    I think many people misunderstand this advice from Jung. They take it to mean “I should work hard and achieve my goals and kiss the beautiful girl and do what I am driven to do, or I’ll get a neurosis.” But what he’s actually talking about is far less comfortable, far more grounded.

    The problem with viewing Jung’s advice as “live in such a way that you won’t have regrets” or “just be yourself” is that no human on Earth knows how to do that. In fact, following Jung’s advice in that way is a great way to end up with regrets because regrets rarely come from doing something wrong in our past. They come from assuming we actually could have done things better in the past without the knowledge we have gained in the present by doing them badly.

    Instead, Jung was speaking against this very thing. By trying to avoid an inevitable future in which you have regrets (inevitable because you don’t have perfect knowledge of outcomes, or how to achieve them, or what you actually want to achieve), you develop a neurosis that you have to deal with because you didn’t simply sit with the uncomfortable reality that you are a human being who can’t live a perfect life.

    Sitting with the uncomfortable reality; that is really the key here. A bit of wisdom from Simone Weil can help us understand what reality is and why accepting it is so hard.

    In her reflections on gravity (she is referring to a mental/spiritual gravity, not Newton’s gravity) and relationships, Weil suggests that our natural drives try to even scores. If my friend is late, I am bound by the law of gravity to seek retribution — maybe I make him apologize, maybe I keep score to use against him later, maybe I treat him with coldness. Weil calls this necessity. It is necessary for me to seek retribution. Necessity is beautiful, according to Weil. It’s the only reason we should do anything. It’s perfect obedience to the laws God wove into the universe.

    But when it comes to relationships, necessity must be disrupted because humans are free, conscious beings; children of God.

    The disruption of necessity is exactly what Christ was talking about when he said, “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, offer no resistance to one who is evil.” (Matthew 5:38-39) The law of gravity drives us to seek an eye for an eye. Grace — the beautiful gift of divinity breathed into every human heart — is the ether that enables us to turn the other cheek.

    Grace gives us freedom from our drives. It also makes us unique among all creatures on Earth. We are dust — Earthly things, natural drives, gravity. But we aren’t mere dust. We are dust given form and the breath of God — Heavenly things, freedom from our natural drives, grace.

    My friend was late. That is reality, the unadorned truth. When Jung says, “if I have to suffer, then let it be from my reality,” that’s what he’s talking about.

    The law of gravity, according to Weil, drives me to seek retribution for the injustice of this reality. I am driven to even the score with my friend. For any number of reasons — maybe shame, maybe social stigma — I might find this drive unacceptable, so I ignore reality. I pretend my friend wasn’t late. I adorn the reality with deceptions. And the seed of a neurosis is planted.

    But it goes deeper than that. Our culture seems to think our drives are who we are, and Jung’s writing is too often interpreted in that light.

    When Jung says “one cannot do more than live what one really is,” he doesn’t mean you should follow your drives. He means you should experience your drives. To do that is to be human. But humans aren’t just animals that must obey the law of gravity. We are conscious. We are more than just our drives. We have the unique ability to act against them. We can, with grace, and only with grace, turn the other cheek.

    When my friend is late, I don’t have to ignore that he was late, and I don’t have to seek retribution or lower my opinion of him to even the score. And I don’t have to think of a million reasons why it hurt me, why he doesn’t care about me, why he’s evil, why I shouldn’t be friends with him anymore. That cascade of accusations is called splitting — seeing another person as entirely good or entirely evil. It is a known and well-documented psychological neurosis that comes, as Jung points out, from a refusal to accept reality.

    Instead of splitting, I can accept my friend’s tardiness, not out of weakness or conflict-avoidance, but out of a deep consent to reality. My friend was late. I consent to that reality. I don’t need to explain to myself why what he did was disrespectful or hurtful or immature.

    I desperately want to pile all of this other thought on top of the simple reality. Why? To avoid the pain of the reality. Carl Jung is saying that that is the refusal to pay life’s dues, that is how a neurosis develops. And it is better to suffer by consenting to reality than to suffer by piling a bunch of rumination on top of it.

    If you can spare yourself a neurosis, it is very likely that you’ll also spare yourself regret because regret comes from the same thing: avoiding reality. We don’t spare ourselves from regret by doing everything or making the perfect decisions. We spare ourselves from regret by accepting the uncomfortable reality that we are limited creatures who cannot do everything, who cannot make perfect decisions.

    How do we accept that reality? It’s not always easy. In fact, it may be impossible for us. But perhaps something beyond us can help. As Simone Weil wrote, in Gravity & Grace, “In order to have the strength to contemplate affliction when we are afflicted we need supernatural bread.”

    By grace, allow the pain. It will do its work and then leave you. And you might even find that it has left you with some hard-earned wisdom.

  • Expect Miracles

    An intuition: I worried terribly about the forthcoming affliction of a beloved. I worried and worried as I walked. When the thought, “have faith that God will work miracles,” realized in my mind, a small, yellow butterfly crossed in front of me and fluttered by to my left. I, then, looked to my right and saw another. At no other point on my hour-long walk did I see another butterfly.

    We must always trust that, in God’s time, our longings will be met, our worries released. Miracles happen.

    No matter how certain our worries feel, even when reason confirms their truth, we must have faith. Miracles happen.

  • Worries and Graces

    You see, these worries are the me of the present — without the graces God can give me in the future — believing I will fail.

    Of course the me of the present will fail at the future task. He lacks the strength God provides, only in the moment, to handle whatever happens — which, by the way, will probably be very different than what I expect.

  • Man’s Only Riches

    Regret and worry are side effects of our richness

    Regret and worry, these are two of the greatest plagues of our time, and they only exist because we have this incredible ability to imaginatively inhabit a past or a future.

    Regret is a bringing of the past into the present moment. Worry is a bringing of the future into the present moment. As far as we know, no other creature on Earth has the ability to perform such sorcery; at least not to the degree that we do.

    Imagination enables us to survive with less energy expenditure

    Mosquitos have a million babies because they can’t stop before crossing the road and imagine that, if they don’t look both ways, a bus might run them over. If they didn’t have a million babies, the species wouldn’t survive.

    Humans don’t need to have a million babies because we can stop before crossing the road and imagine a future scenario in which a bus might run us over. In a sense, we’re able to produce a million lives — what richness! — with our imaginations so that we don’t need to produce a million lives in reality for our species to survive.

    It’s an incredible gift, really, to be able to imagine. Yet, I am continually amazed by the number of problems that can be attributed to this gift, this ability to inhabit imaginary moments outside of the present reality.

    Inhabiting only the present moment makes us poor

    Most creatures inhabit only the present moment, especially on a conscious level. Humans, though, can imagine past moments and future moments. This makes it impossibly difficult for us to inhabit only the present moment.

    When we do not fully inhabit the present, we are bathing in a wealth of time, an abundance of past and future.

    The present, though, is always passing, along with all that we have in it, and so it’s a place where little, if any, wealth exists. For this reason, one who inhabits only the present is, in some sense, poor in spirit.

    “Blessed are the poor in spirit.”

    Imagination, memory, and speculation are gifts of God’s love

    The richness of past and future has been given to us, as a gift, from God. It’s a way for us to choose something other than his love and his grace.

    Why is such a thing a gift? Because unconditional love, true love, cannot be forced upon someone. It’s not love if it’s not freely given and freely accepted. There must be a freedom, held by the receiver, to deny the love. Otherwise, it’s not love. Love is never forced.

    Our ability to inhabit an imaginary past or future is one way we can deny God’s love by escaping to a place where his love does not exist.

    Of course, this denial makes us miserable because all that is good is part of God. By denying him, we are denying ourselves the source of all goodness.

    Yet we are fallen. We suffer from original sin. We are rich in our ability to inhabit a broad span of time through imagination, and it’s nearly impossible for us to give up that richness. Maybe it is impossible.

    Possible or not, this ability to inhabit a past or future moment in the present is wealth on a fundamental level.

    “The miser whose treasure has been taken from him. It is some of the frozen past which he has lost. Past and future, man’s only riches.”

    Simone Weil, Gravity & Grace

    Dopamine is a fundamental currency for which humans work

    The dopaminergic system is what, at a neurological level, drives us. The dopaminergic system is all about anticipating some future reward based on past experiences.

    Neuroscientists call dopamine a “universal currency.”

    “Dopamine is a universal currency in all mammals, especially humans, for moving us towards goals. How much dopamine is in our system at any one time compared to how much dopamine was in our system a few minutes ago and how much we remember enjoying a particular experience of the past dictates your so-called quality of life and your desire to pursue things.”

    Dr Andrew Huberman, Found My Fitness Episode 91

    A particular experience of the past drives us to pursue or not pursue something. Pursuit is an anticipation, a seeking of some future thing.

    Coffee made me feel good in the past. I am driven to pursue more coffee. Most of coffee’s perceived value exists only because we remember how it made us feel in the past and can imagine feeling that way again in the future.

    Your caregiver broke your heart in the past. Now, you will be driven to avoidance or possessiveness due to the past injuries. Much of a relationship’s perceived value (or lack thereof) exists only because we remember how a relational pattern made us feel in the past and can imagine feeling that way again in the future.

    The past can cause us very real pain in the present. At the same time, we often give it more power than it deserves.

    We often turn this richness into a curse

    Even though it causes us pain to do so, we often fixate on painful memories. Why? Because doing so can save our lives, can prevent present and future recurrences.

    It’s very useful to be able to imagine that if I step in front of a bus then the bus will hit me.

    But we take on this richness in excessive or disordered ways. We fixate on worst case scenarios and rob ourselves of not only the fullness of joy available in the present, but also of any joy we might have had by imagining what could go right, by expecting miracles instead of disasters.

    “Always trust. Trust more and more, even to the point of expecting a miracle. Don’t stop halfway or you will set limits to my love. Always count on me, never on yourself.”

    Gabrielle Bossis, quoted in Fear is Useless by Conrad Baars

    Sometimes subconscious regrets and fears drive us

    Focusing on the present, or at least the best of the past and future, doesn’t always help. Sometimes our subconscious minds, or maybe our bodies, hold onto regrets or worries without our awareness.

    These are like daemons that leech onto the richness that is our memory and our imagination. They are the excesses and disorders that inhabit only the backgrounds of our minds, existing only as unnamed, unidentified dark feelings in the present.

    The infant who was left crying in her crib all night, un-soothed by her mother; she doesn’t remember those terrible nights, but many years later, she feels the same terror when her husband doesn’t answer her phone call.

    Daemons — subconscious auto-pilot programming — can use our wealth of memory and imagination against us even when we’re not consciously thinking about the past or the future.

    We are able to exercise freedom over our daemons

    While the answer to worry and regret — which are conscious thoughts — is a shift in focus toward the present moment, good memories of the past, and hope for the future; the answer to daemons is a shift in focus toward Christ.

    When it comes to daemons, we have a couple unique strengths. We have self-awareness, which allows us to see our behavioral patterns, and we have the freedom to behave in ways contrary to those patterns.

    As we become aware of our instinctive patterns, we must use our freedom to break the harmful ones, and to guide our actions toward love.

    Still, we will fail. But the more we fail, the more we ache, the more we recognize our own shortcomings, the more we are open to receiving grace. And grace, received through faith and focus on Christ, is the true salvation.

    Many blessings come when we make ourselves poor in spirit

    Many problems plague us due to our richness of past and future, of memory and imagination. To experience more joy in the present moment, much of our strength must be spent making ourselves poor in those things.

    We will rarely, if ever, be able to live completely, nakedly in the present. But the more we try, the more we practice, the more open we will be to experiencing the fullness of joy in the present moment.

    Still, there will be times when we cannot merely inhabit the present. To apologize when we’ve done something wrong, we must acknowledge the past. To prevent the same failure from happening repeatedly, we must anticipate it. But when it’s not absolutely necessary to remember a wrong or anticipate a failure, it is best for us to focus on the good memories, not the bad ones, and to hope for and expect miracles, not disasters.

    That, in many ways, is a work of faith. Being present requires faith — faith that things can be different than they were in the past, faith that grace will be given in whatever measure necessary for us to navigate whatever comes. Faith is essential.

    Practical advice to develop presence, joy, and hope

    Here’s some practical advice. As an act of faith, spend a few minutes each day embodying yourself in the present moment. Go for a walk outside. Using all of your senses, remind yourself of what you notice, what it reminds you of, and what you wonder about it.

    Just a few minutes of this each day will strengthen your ability to experience the present more often and more deeply. It will help you take off your fancy garments of past and future.

    And when you can’t embody the present — you’re only human after all — remember something good, or imagine a future where everything works out in your favor, where grace favors you and joy is yours.

  • The Pain Is Your Living

    A handwritten poem written in a notebook, expressing themes of individuality, resilience, and the importance of staying true to oneself.
    The world wants you
    To be a tool for its use.
    Refuse.
    Hold your brokenness high.
    Your bleeding wounds, lift up.
    The pain, don’t trade it for anything.
    It is your living.
    Do not fit in,
    Especially when it costs you money,
    Especially, especially, especially
    When it costs you you.
    Give up every happiness
    To stay wild.
    Give up everything
    To love the one who sets you free.

  • What Simone Weil Means by “Renunciation of God”

    A beloved being who disappoints me. I wrote to him. It is impossible that he should not reply by saying what I have said to myself in his name.

    Men owe us what we imagine they will give us. We must forgive them this debt.

    To accept the fact that they are other than the creatures of our imagination is to imitate the renunciation of God.

    I also am other than what I imagine myself to be. To know this is forgiveness.

    Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

    On page 79 (later on in Gravity and Grace, by Simone Weil), she explains the “renunciation of God.” She doesn’t mean a person renouncing God.

    She means this. God creates us so that he is not everything. He renounces being everything.

    So, to accept that someone is more than what we imagine them to be, to accept that they are subject, not object, is to renounce being everything — I am not the center of the universe.