Brief Thoughts on What Matters

"It does not depend, therefore, on man's desire or effort, but on God's mercy." (Romans 9:16)

I have a lot of trouble wrapping my head around the idea of mercy, and worse, the truth that I depend on it, really. Mercy conflicts with my sense of agency and responsibility. Don't I have to do it myself? do it right?

But the answer is, simply: No. All I have to do is believe ("This is the work of God, to believe in the one he sent"), and God's mercy takes care of the rest. Believing is work, yes, and real belief does translate into action. But the thing everything else hinges on, balances on, turns on, dangles from: depends on: is mercy.

Mercy is the sun and the soil and the water, and I am the plant, just growing.

Yesterday it was 50 degrees. And now:

Snow everywhere, turning the world black and white. The ground sparkles like sugar, scattered diamonds, splinters of glass. The black paths slice through the white, and we glide along them, watching the water crystals fly on the night air.

Time Travel

In The Time Machine, H.G. Wells' Time Traveler character claims that when we recall a moment vividly, we travel back to that time (in "spirit", perhaps). My quarrel, though, is that, in remembering, I don't actually revisit the moment itself, or even my own experience of that moment, but rather my retrospective interpretation of my experience. A year or a month later, looking back, I always simplify and classify my experience and emotions. Nuances are difficult to remember. Ambivalence, ambiguity, half-hearted and unsuccessful attempts to make things go a different way: these don't stick in my memory. They fade out, too delicate to be caught and held, like the photographed rainbow that vanishes into the pale sky on paper.

But when I read my journal, I see the things that ran through my mind as I was still processing, still reeling from whatever happened, still sorting out whether it was good or bad. My journal is a record of events before hindsight imposed a paradigm on them. It's still my interpretation, yes, but it's the interpretation from that very day, a day that I can't re-live but that I can re-imagine. It's a snapshot that retains all its colors, even if it's only one view of the scene.

When I want to travel back, I still try to go in the vehicle of memory, and I see through the haze of my judgment. But when I open my journal and it falls to an earlier page, I fall, too. I fall into a record of my mind, into a moment I had left behind. I find it not as I recalled it, but as it was, with more shading and texture than I could sketch it with now. Fortunately, it's easy to climb back out. Turning pages, I come to a blank one: and I record this moment, too.