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Chapter
1
SERENITY NOT SERENDIPITY
CALLED TO BE SAINTS, NOT
RECONSTRUCTED TO BE ROBOTS
A happy feeling, a felicitous
occurrence, a sense of incursive well-being, this is not the paramount thing in
life.
It is not some rest from logic,
some glorious spontaneity, colloquy with and collocation of events which is crucial.
Happy as many may be to consider happy living, in part and at times, swallowing
you up in undeserved pleasantness, this variable is not the issue. It is the
meaning, necessities, graces and cast of life itself which matters. A weaving in
the air may please the pilot immensely, and lead to further joys; but he can
still crash in the next minute, which is unfortunate, not desirable and also
unprogrammed ... by the pilot.
Serendipity, that fortuitous riot of interesting novelty, the
lurch from discipline to delight, from rugged discoveries by instilling strength
into a slowly yielding field, to the grant of happiness without being focussed
on it, the embrace not from beyond but from the internalities of living: to some
this is an event of relief. How wonderful! It is close to worlds of thought
compacting by spiritual means and the like, in type.
However, this kind of experience
considered as a field for life, it is
more a relief in thought and a flush of hope, than a focus for fidelity, a scope for living and a
basis for grace.
Walpole is noted for using the term,
just as a Persian fairy tale has serendip in it, the concept of reaching what is not researched,
but yet happily comes anyway, a developing pleasure or attainment, as it were, free of charge.
The appeal can resemble that of a dream, translucent to thought, suddenly loses
its wings and becoming, rather stunningly, reality, actuality, there!
Serendipitous, the term can even be applied to nice people in high office who by
the sheer splendour of their personalities stumble on events that forward their
inmost desires without actually being dug for! It becomes a fairy tale
philosophy, joined to a relief crusade, and a high expectation dream.
As for the factual basis, it is of
course true that as one works in a disciplined way for ONE thing, a delightful
OTHER thing can 'arise' without one's realising the source. This becomes the
measured tread of the optimist, who finding more, skips. It is also no less sure
that matters of genius may suddenly find, as it were gifted from beyond one's
ken, solutions or delights, pleasures or realisations unsought, but received with
becoming delight.
It is however not for no reason that
this is so. When one in a disciplined way, seeks within what God has created,
one thing may readily lead to another because God has placed them in logical,
geographical, semantic, legal, physical or artistic proximity in the grand
conceptions behind His creation of all things. It is for this reason, that of a
divine Creator machining what needs it, giving matrix where applicable, codes
that portend, as in human DNA, and provisions that amend, as in editorial DNA
specifications, while adding spirit that superintends and mind that
investigates, that man may so notably find what is a source of unexpected
happiness, attainment, discovery.
It is the same with physical laws:
they are formulable only because there is a sufficient cause. That is cause ? it
is that the
conceptual basis of the said laws HAS BEEN formulated already, and HENCE and
hence alone, is formulable by man, who is after all, only discovering what is
there. It COULD not be there if it were not put there by the collation of
conception and creation which places the former by the latter so that it
consistently relates within the sphere, domain or cosmos of conception. In
creation, these things are
trapped in physical things, inside chemical, biochemical, codal and modal
matters, enabling the combination of order and result, relevant means supplied by orders,
and in timely fashion,
likewise to enable fruition.
It is no less so in mental realms as basic. The
structure of the brain, which is a massive compilation of billions of cells with
billions more of connections with each other, and provision (it is now realised
increasingly), not only for initial conjunction of dendrites, dependent on the
call and use of a given area of skill by the very young, but for latter
development when the brain REMAINS active: this too is an arena prepared, which
may then be investigated. It is very much like Columbus, Drake and Magellan, who
investigated what was already there, and used much skill and endurance to FIND
it and then to report it, without actually creating any new lands!
Moreover, the nature of mind, which
is a brain-user in the case of man, has its own criteria and characterisable
functions and correlative usages of many phases. There is the logical, the
analysing, the constructive, the creativity in the thought world, the facility
for testing in terms of conceptual, or physical, or investigatory coherence, all
usable separately or in various degrees of conjunction with a liberty from which
computers are entirely free. Here too the unexpected can turn up, say in the
development of logical theory, so that an aspect can lead to the correlative of
a new continent, say in the realm of logical validity, where WHAT IS ALREADY
THERE can be investigated. In thought, it is now found, or partially found, only
to be discovered more completely later, and found to be applicable in the
supreme discipline of conceptual events.
If such things were not there, mind
and spirit would not be related to the
physical, the mental and the creative conceptual worlds as they are; for the
thought about it does not create, but discover the cohesion, the
consequentiality and the systematics which toil can exhibit, and experiment
verify. To be sure, that delicious creativity, by which man can innovate
heuristically, be rejected, try again, be accepted, invent specious worlds
inoperable or speculative ones not to be found, it has a licence the actual
world does not possess. That is very simply because man has been MADE creative,
like his Author. Thus he can defile, defy and depart from all disciplined
reality, into thought and dream worlds, a thing which can be most instructive in
imagination, and most destructive when applied as with Hitler and Stalin, as a
distortive dynamic in the real world, where sufferings attests its brutality to
facts, and explosion its vain thrust.
In things mental, inapplicable
dreams may stimulate or slay.
Further again, there is the arena of
spirit, where options may be weighed, principles assumed, discovered or arrested
by fact, merely call to imagination and will. In some cases, by this mode,
distortion already present may be amended; but often the dream is as distortive
as the original error, and merely enhances a dream-world scenario which ends in
something less than dream for the drowsy, rather more like failure for the
frowsy. Reality does not end life; imagination and spirit has a vast realm; but
it implies a vast discipline, not in flights, but in applications and
confirmations, verifications and reality check.
Thus, here once more there is scope
for error (as when the Great South Land was thought to include Antarctica); even
for wilful error, as when Inquisitors in Romanism for centuries tortured, stole
from and crushed many*1 who had very often
shown what was indisputably biblical truth (cf. SMR
pp.1032-1088H,
911ff.). There can likewise be errors of confusion, as when a person
willingly accepts authority (as did some of Saddam Hussein's 'converts'), and
then is 'forced' to participate in watching torture, in order to 'harden'.
However the finding of the
unexpected, the desirable, and this the more if the desired at least
INCLUDES the truth,
as in serendipity as often defined, this has its basis in work, that of
the Creator who made it so in order that it might be used in just such a way.
Thus comes its entire wonder in the reality
which man investigates and which God has presented, duly ordered and organised
and correlated so that the same may be FOUND. It is the good will and the good
pleasure of the good God who made all, including the liberty to sin and dream
amiss, which allows such things to be found, not haphazardly, but beyond the
express purpose of investigating man. It is thus that such happiness can come:
the nuggets are there because formed, not because absent.
Thus, contrary to all chance,
which merely operates outside purpose, in a given ordered realm, when one does not know
it thoroughly, and hence unexpectedly, one may find this or that great and fine
thing in life and thought and understanding and experience, like the Spring
breeze. However, like the Spring, which enables the breeze, and the atmosphere
which is a base for it, and the sensory capacities of man's skin which enables a
certain kind of perception, not to mention the rotation of the globe, which
balances gravity so nicely, and the energy sources which facilitate action,
whether in cells in countries: this is no actual accident. Incident, rather, it
is available because of preliminary work done, the work of creation.
When one
writes WELL, a story, in a novel, then happy realities may chime as one creates
BECAUSE the thing was so well conceived that such addenda fall out, not of the
skies, but with surprise from the edifice of thought and action, as a bonus for
apt creation. Again, the intuitive thought may grasp as one writes, an unthought
of possibility; but this is not to say that the realm did not have thought,
rather than further recesses of opportunity lay in what was real enough to show
them, not as distortions, or contortions, but developments.
Such then one may find in
serendipity, and not find for nothing.
Serenity is different. Here there is
a PEACE OF PURITY, resulting from PURGING, which has a rational and logical
relationship to grounds for purging (as when taking a laxative), need for it (as
in overeating), and deliverance through it back to purity. While small peace may come
and go with this and that serendipity or sense satisfaction, mind-smile or
spirit-content as one lives with things as they are; yet there is something
different in kind. This is a peace which passes all
understanding, and it comes from a ground. It passes (empirically) all
understanding in the profundity and depth of it, in this, that there is SOUND
REASON for it, VAST DEPTH to it, since God Himself is infinite, IMAGINATIVE SPLENDOUR in it, since God is gracious, and UTTER SECURITY in it, since God has
in fact, empirically, acted to pay the price of turning one thing into another.
Which thing ? There are many phases.
He can turn pollution into purity, worry into understanding, error into
discipline, weakness into strength, trouble into trial and trial into enhanced
character (Romans 5), debt to sin (as in financial corruption, so in mental and spiritual
disruption and folly) into pardon through grace (Romans 5,8, Ephesians 2).
Payment ? That, it is as His uniquely valid and verified word*2
shows, made through the incarnation of His eternal word, His taking flesh,
His showing the power, peace and love of God in the form of man and His
cursed death on the cross: and this last not only to illustrate what sin looks like, even when
borne by the innocent and the pure. It also shows what man IS like, when he so treats the
Almighty in His excursion of empathy that surpassed itself in incarnation, and
sympathy which so transfixed itself on the Cross.
This may have a feel of serendipity
to the uninformed; but in fact, it is the infinite depths of serenity in Christ,
the ocean of it in which one simply swims, glorying in its transcendent wonders
and illimitable resources, which IMPARTS this sense, because these things are
THERE, this work is DONE already by the Almighty, sealing His heart, will and
practicality all in one great episode and event.
As to this, it is greater than
anything which nothing has
ever occurred in the universe, nor ever will or could. Why is this so ? It is
because of what it displays unique and illimitably munificent and magnificent
kind. Here is on display the Infinite love in the
infinite God, who at infinite cost has provided illimitable peace to limited man,
and this
utterly freely (that is what happens when the other party PAYS, Romans 3:23ff.,
Ephesians 2:1-12), so that what he was made to be, he now becomes. That bounty,
it is despite utter
failure, merely sharpened by the pride which cannot, because it will not, see
it. Since it will not see it, when this is the case, then it CANNOT find that peace, being
self-excluded (Matthew 13:15ff.). Eyes have lids, whether physical, mental,
moral or spiritual, and closing them is final (unless in divine mercy one is
moved to open them again!).
Peace that passes all understanding
? It is serenity on a spiritual basis
in the Almighty God
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who sent His only begotten Son to die for the difference,
cover the cost
and pardon man without excluding justice, but rather bearing it
Himself
(as foretold in Hosea 13:14 and told in Matthew 20:28, Galatians 3);
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who raised His flesh to remove the
concept from poetry and philosophy to practicality;
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who sent His Spirit to operate where
POWER is needed
(it is needed in things physical, chemical, geological, logical, psychic, moral,
spiritual,
mental - things do not just happen, but have channels of opportunity or
compulsion,
depending on the type in view).
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This is a glorious thing, because
God IS glorious. The one thing follows from the other. It does not just 'arise',
magically. It has a basis, adequate, delightful, diligent and deft. Praise God
that this is so.
NOTES
*1
See Ancient Words, Modern
Deeds Ch. 14, for example.
*2
See for example:
Light Dwells with the Lord's Christ
Who Answers
Riddles,
and Where He Is, Darkness Departs
The 6 Volume Set on
PREDESTINATION AND FREEWILL