There are some weeks where I am hit more strongly by the realization of how broken our world is...this week was one of them. My eyes became a little moist in my child psychopathology class as we watched a video clip showing the extensive, long-term therapy this little girl went through because of the permanent scars of sexual abuse she received from her dad, a married couple must learn to cope with the difficulty of reactive attachment disorder present in all three of their adopted children, a young woman is shamed and guilted into thinking that she is a horrible person for not aborting her baby who was born with an extremely rare and very debilitating disease. On a more personal level, I am always more readily reminded of my brokenness when part of my body is not working well such as my sore foot this week that I must have sprained.
Sometimes I feel a little guilty for allowing myself to ruminate at length over my longing for heaven. I attended a psychological assessment conference the other day where the main topic at hand was anger disorders. The speaker attempted to argue that rumination is a cognitive process in anger. Rumination has been associated with depression while affective anger has been associated with impulsivity and the two -rumination and impulsivity -are usually thought of as opposites. I think too much "rumination" over anything isn't good and can easily lead to depression but rumination over natural longings is natural and healthy to some extent....or it is at least healthier to be on more of the rumination side of the spectrum when thinking about the other world we were created for than opting for a faster way of getting there by being more on the impulsivity side of things. But, seizing every moment and looking for joy in everything sounds a little more impulsive to me. Of course a joyful heart is a thankful heart and cultivating a heart of ceaseless thankfulness is not an impulsive undertaking. I guess there is a time to ruminate and a time to be impulsive....but perhaps rumination must come before the impulsivity or impulsivity flows out of rumination rather.
"In speaking of this desire for our own far-off country,...I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you -the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both...Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth's expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things -the beauty, the memory of our own past -are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited....Here, then, is the desire, still wandering and uncertain of its object and still largely unable to see that object in the direction where it really lies...Heaven is, by definition, outside our experience, but all intelligible descriptions must be of things within our experience. The scriptural picture of heaven is therefore just as symbolical as the picture which our desire, unaided, invents for itself..." -C.S. Lewis
