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  • 20. Friday Nights at 9:00 p.m.

    It’s “Gold Rush” time. 

    I’m not the biggest TV buff I know, but I do kinda dig Discovery Channel’s reality show, “Gold Rush.” Maybe I’m a glutton for punishment, but each week I watch the show hoping these guys hit the motherload somewhere deep in the bowels of Quartz Creek, Alaska.  Instead, I watch for an hour and discover that when it comes to gold mining, if it can break down, fall apart, or go wrong–it will.  The show could be called “A Series of Frustrating Events.”  So why do I like this?

    I’ll never be a gold miner.  I’ll never know what it is really like to rough it in the Alaskan wilderness.  I’ll never drive gargantuan dump trucks, dozers, or front end loaders.  But the show does give the impression that its showing us a little of what it might be like to mine gold.  It’s intoxicating.  It’s maddening.  It’s enough to make you thankful that no matter how bad of a day you’re having, you probably didn’t have as many things go wrong as these guys did in any one hour show.

    Yesterday I quoted from Rasselas. Might as well go for it again, since it seems relevant here.  Prince Rasselas is bored in the Happy Valley–bored because he has everything he wants. While it might seem like happiness is getting everything you want, the prince points out that he is unhappy precisely because he has nothing to struggle for, nothing to strive after, nothing to desire.  Rasselas says, “I fancy that I should be happy if I had something to pursue."

    I like this TV show because these guys are relentlessly pursuing gold. I’m not all that interested in relentlessly pursuing gold, myself.  But I do know that we all need something to pursue.  Every week I watch them endure disappointment after disappointment, and only occasionally a small triumph or a glimmer of hope.  And yet they press on.  They seem happy.  I think it’s because they have something to pursue.  I need something to pursue, too.

    So I keep on the lookout for little things that might awaken me from my contented slumber, and I pursue them.  A hundred free throws in a row.  Thirty unbroken pull-ups.  A doctorate.  A new humanities major. 350 blog entries in a year–one a day with a reasonable assumption that there will be a dozen or so days when I’m somewhere with no Internet connection. The entire Bible in 6 months.  That sort of thing.

    There is that inevitable let down once you’ve reached some goal.  If these guys strike it rich by the end of the mining season, the show won’t be quite the same for me any more.  I hope they do, but I also know that if they do, that’s the end of the show.  I’ll make a hundred free throws in a row again someday soon. Then what?  Do it again.  Hit 50 3 pointers in a row.  Who knows.  I just know I’m the kind of person who is happiest struggling and striving my way towards something.  Kind of like the guys on “Gold Rush,” I guess. Call it restlessness if you want, but it beats the boredom of happy valley.

    → 8:17 PM, Jan 20
  • 3. The False Self

    Life is a journey.
    All journeys quests.
    Every quest has the same purpose–that purpose is to deepen the self-knowledge of the quester.
    Self-knowledge is never merely additive; it is always transformative.

    Maybe?

    The Spirit intends to investigate our whole life history, layer by layer, throwing out the junk and preserving the values that wer appropriate to each stage of our human development . . . Eventually, the Spirit begins to dig into the bedrock of our earliest emotional life . . . Hence, as we progress toward the center where God is actually waiting for us, we are naturally going to feel that we are getting worse.  This warns us that the spiritual journey is not a success story or a career move.  It is rather a series of humiliations of the false self.  (Thomas Keating, Intimacy with God: An Introduction to Centering Prayer, 82-84).
    Which begs the question, of course.  If I actually feel good about my progress am I truly making progress?  Should progress actually feel like I'm getting worse? 

    I guess I buy this idea of upside down progress--of wisdom through suffering--in literature.  The alarm bells go off in my head whenever I read of things going "well" for Katniss Everdeen, because it is just about the time when things seem to be going well for her that the Capital sends some misery and devastation.  I want to believe that for her, these miseries are humiliations of the false self, and are in fact ultimately moving her toward the real purpose of her quest (self-knowledge), even if they may appear to take her further from her stated purpose.  What the Enemy doesn't seem to know, then, is that in their efforts to destroy her, they may actually be moving her "toward the center" where she finds her true self.

    What about me? Just this. In the midst of calamity it never feels like I'm making progress.  While I rather like literature that makes this point about life's journey being a series of humiliations to the false self rather than a success story, if I had my choice, I'd write my own story--and the stories of those I love most--some other way.



    → 8:58 AM, Jan 3
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