All it takes is an intentional opening of your eyes. You can see, if you so wish, right through the lies of our time. Make a choice to spark once more your awareness and you’ll quickly notice the cloud of purposelessness and confusion that hovers around us all. It’s a fog that makes everything shady and undefined, from the roads we walk through to the thoughts that occupy our mind. It confuses us and leads us forward, towards nowhere.
Soon enough we find ourselves inside a great void, where nothing matters and nothing exists. A life numbed by this great cloud, a life of no direction or purpose, getting by without thinking, without ever noticing that we’ve lost sight of the light. We’re given just enough distractions to cloud our awareness, and we’re pumped full of lies so that we forget there’s even such thing as a purposeful life.
And so we remain inside the void, walking in circles, blind in the pitch black darkness but thinking ourselves aware and enlightened. We look down, further into the void, sunk into a screen, watching our feet go round in circles, hypnotized by the repetitive pointlessness of it all.
Your awareness is never dead but merely sleeping, and it can only be awakened miraculously, by an instant of introspection, by a second of courage and by deciding to finally look up, towards the stars, to see that there’s more than the void you’ve grown to know and love. It’s not of your own doing, but somehow, you’ve been awakened for a moment, and now the spell that kept you numb has been broken forever. You now see what’s right in front of you, and most importantly, you now see that there’s something else outside of the void.
Hope quickly turns to desperation as you try to climb out of the darkness only to realize that the abyss has a mind of its own, and it pulls you back every time you try to move. A voice calls from the depths and promises once again the comfort of slumber and the peace of ignorance, tempting you to just accept that there’s no point in trying and that life within the void isn’t really “that bad”.
Maybe you’ve tried, really tried. Maybe you’ve exhausted yourself in short bursts of effort, anxiously reaching out. Maybe you’ve tried this and that, but your efforts have been so fruitless that you’ve just accepted life inside the void. Maybe when you were young and rebellious you truly refused to accept the promises of the void, but now you’re old and tired and all you want is peace, even if it’s the kind of false peace that surrenders your soul to the darkness.
And maybe after years of accepting the void, you’ve once again been awakened by a force larger than your own, that once again sows within you the seeds of discomfort and makes the once pleasurable darkness feel unbearable.
Once again, you’ve been gifted the strength to look up, and observe in the starry sky all that you could be on the outside. You decide to try again, you decide to trust the fire that’s been lit within you that tells you something better waits for you outside the void.
This time, you start clawing your way out slowly, but relentlessly, by taking small steps. There’s a newfound determination within you and you are committed to finding out what is it that exists outside the darkness. Every step you take further enlightens you, every step you take sharpens your awareness, lifts the fog from your mind and allows you to see the darkness around you, which is darker than you could’ve ever imagined.
Before long, the initial excitement and the miraculous push you were given wear off, and you’re once again doubting if it’s worth the hassle, and if it’s not better to slide back down and let the darkness embrace you. Again you hear the void calling out to you, telling you there’s nothing out there, promising you the comforts of a clouded intellect, the peace of a life in which no questions are ever asked.
The feelings of courage and excitement that were lit inside of you by the grace of what you know now to be God have disappeared. You can no longer rely on emotion to keep walking upwards, and you nearly surrender to despair as you realize you are not even close to the surface. You cry out to the heavens, asking for those feelings to be lit again, demanding God to once again motivate you, to carry you upwards, and make the choice to keep walking an easy one. You whine, cry, and make empty threats. You tell Him you’ll sink back into the darkness unless He gives you what you want. You ask Him why, you get angry at Him, not understanding why He woke you up just to leave you alone midway through the climb.
Only after you’ve exhausted all your tears, after all your threats have proven themselves useless, you start to realize there’s no outside force to lift you up or drag you down. All you have is your own choices, and you can decide to keep walking upwards or to swiftly slide down into the depths. But as you look down at the place that once looked comfortable you see, for the first time, and thanks to the perspective your new outpost gives you, that it’s not a warm, empty hole as you once thought, but a pit of snakes and demons, all reaching out to grab you.
The light that shines down from heaven allows you to see, for the first time ever, the fire that rages inside the void, and you see all the souls that lie there sleeping, all of those who’ve accepted life inside the darkness and have willingly let themselves be numbed to the point that they don’t even feel the fire burning them.
This terrible vision scares you, and even though you still can’t hear the voice of God as you did when He awoke you, you trust that there could be nothing worse outside than what you see inside the pit. It’s no longer emotion that drives you forward, but a firm commitment, and a constantly renewed decision to find out what the light outside looks like. It’s easy to trust God when He’s working miracles in your life, when you feel His presence within you, but the true challenge of the faithful is trusting Him in the desert, in the middle of the climb out of the abyss, not because you see Him working but because you decide to believe He does.
You can only find the way out of the void through faith. But not the sentimental, weak and lukewarm faith that depends on your feelings, because that kind of faith is fleeting and unreliable. It gets old quickly. It vanishes. And if you rely on it and only walk upwards when you’re “feeling faithful”, you’ll think —after that feeling has passed— that you knew God and you’ll think He wasn’t good enough for you.
Nothing but a complete surrendering to His will and a lifelong commitment to the pursuit of sanctity will be enough to guarantee that you defeat the pull of the void.
God’s grace is what sparks the fire within you, but it’s up to you to steward it, care for it, keep it lit and help it grow. And it’s only this fire what will fuel you forward, even when you can’t feel God’s presence, even when you slip and fall back into the abyss.
Only thus will you emerge, tired, broken and forever changed, from the pitch black darkness that was your home, to see that the outside world is even more beautiful that you could’ve imagined, and that God was always there waiting for you, urging you upwards. You’re now out of the void, out of the desert, and see that God is everywhere you look, in the colors of the trees, in the birdsongs that you get to truly hear for the first time. But you also see that the world outside isn’t a flat place where you can rest, but another climb. You see that the entire world is tilted and there’s no chance of standing still.
There’s only the climb towards the Light or the acceptance of the void.
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