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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).

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

 

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