Empirical data is a persuasive informer, which can
tempt us to believe it’s all there is. Yet, numerous difficulties arise here,
not least the aspect that so much of our lives are non-empirical. Consider
thoughts, emotions, imaginations, and a self-referential talking to ourselves. These
‘invisibles’ are a strong argument against the reductionistic tendencies of
empiricism and for a reality that includes the unseen.
A supposedly insurmountable antagonism towards self
– self-hate – read as a continual experience of fault and denial, undoes
dialogue and strikes at the heart of selfhood. That is, when trust and
suspicion cancel each other out, there will be little or no capacity to change
self-hate. What and who to trust and what and who to be suspicious of, if
suspended in this manner, result in a default adherence to the status quo. To
break the cycle of the same, it must be realized that trust and suspicion
orientations cannot rest solely on the self, and other informers have to be
taken into consideration. When an embrace of a dialogue with these reliable
informers takes place it can help to validate appropriate trust and suspicion,
and thereby expose self-hate as a lie, eventually replacing it with a finite,
yet genuine picture of a truer self to love and be loved, in the configuration
of oneself as another.
Catharsis, while an indispensable part of the broken
journey towards our destiny, is not an end in and of itself. Rather, deep release
is to lead to renewed conviction that in spite of the tragic circumstances that
have so horribly blown the world apart, God is eventually going to transform
everything.
It’s almost as if the “poetic moment” is a
suspension of time, in time.
