The Fat Lady is Every One of Us (Part 3 of 7)

The following is a series of attached photos sent from Liza to the group during her electronics-limited "dispersed camping expedition" through the Keweenaw Peninsula during the month of August 2015. We will publish short excerpts of these illuminated texts over the course of the next several days along with a corresponding portion of the original photo.

Sure, feeling like a demon of sorts at times isn't exactly the greatest joy of living. Nor, I suppose, is to sense a demon within you at all times. But what is the greatest joy of life if not the gift of clarity, the ability to see our own delusions and still seek a different path? Baudelaire calls this "the downward path which leads to salvation." St. Paul calls this "putting off the old man and putting on Christ." St. Augustine calls this, well, his autobiography. Francois Mauriac explains the discovery of this clarity with such attentiveness and specificity to make a man (okay, me while reading this passage from The Long Loneliness atop Mount Houghton yesterday) open up his tearducts and bleed unceasing tears.

"What glorious hope!" he writes, "There are all those who will discover that their neighbor is Jesus himself, although they belong to the mass of those who do not know Christ or who have forgotten Him. And nevertheless they will find themselves well loved. It is impossible for any one of those who has real charity in his heart not to serve Christ. Even some of those who think they hate Him have consecrated their lives to Him; for Jesus is disguised and masked in the midst of men, hidden among the poor, among the sick, among prisoners, among strangers. Many who serve him officially have never known who He is, and many who do not even know His name will hear on the last day the words that open to them the gates of joy. 'Those children were I, and I those working men. I wept on that hospital bed. I was that murderer in his cell whom you consoled."

What glorious hope, indeed, Mr. Mauriac. To remember this always (difficult, absolutely impossible, of course not) is one method of attack against those pesky inner demons that validates the righteousness of this daily battle and through this validation makes these monsters more manageable and more meaningful. To begin and end each day boundless with compassion and infectious with joy is to reconfigure our pain into pleasure; it is to propel us little by little toward those glorious "gates of joy."