Encouragement
Iucounu held up his hand. “The offense is far too serious for flippant disclaimers. I have stated my abhorrence for plunderers and thieves, and now I must visit upon you justice in its most unmitigated rigor – unless, of course, you can suggest an adequate requital.”
“Some such requital surely exists,” Cugel averred. “This cord however rasps upon my skin, so that I find cogitation impossible.”
“No matter, I have decided to apply the Charm of Forlorn Encystment, which constricts the subject in a pore some forty-five miles below the surface of the earth.”
- from The Dying Earth by Jack Vance
Cugel the Clever was a thief and a knave, a character conjured up by the magnificent imagination of science-fiction writer Jack Vance. In this instance Cugel had been bound by Iucounu the Laughing Magician, having been caught stealing from Iucounu’s manse. The penalty laid on him would be the Charm of Forlorn Encystment, from which you can gather the nature of in the above dialogue. Imprisonment in a pore forty-five miles below the earth’s surface would indeed be a forlorn encystment.
Don’t simply read. Feel and taste this bitter word forlorn. It speaks of silent suffering without remedy; of despair and hopelessness. It is a word for our time, which if we really understood our hearts would be better soil for hope. And let us not distance ourselves in arrogance, envisioning starving infants and war torn cities. Yes, those are the obvious places where forlorn is the unchallenged landlord charging whatever spirit crushing rent he desires. But here in the West, in what we call civilization, forlorn often has a designer look and a ready explanation to scratch every itching ear. It has friends in high places who mute its effect with elaborate sophistries that never change its nature but redirect its force, ensuring only that its withering strength is ignored through illusion until it overwhelms. Its victims are then forgotten with an appropriate shaking of the head and relegated to outer darkness to become cold cases awaiting artificial resurrection through more intricately developed deceptions such as you’ll find in the DSM (psychiatry’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) and the common man’s implicit DSM – political correctness. These things and much more make us far more pathetic than Third world countries and inhabitants of terrorized and bombed out cities who at least have some excuse. But we, in the midst of plenty, on the tail end of history recorded on film and page, enjoying comforts unmatched, are a snapshot of the forlorn man of the tombs.
And when he was come out of the ship, immediately there met him out of the tombs a man with an unclean spirit, Who had his dwelling among the tombs; and no man could bind him, no, not with chains:
Because that he had been often bound with fetters and chains, and the chains had been plucked asunder by him, and the fetters broken in pieces: neither could any man tame him. And always, night and day, he was in the mountains, and in the tombs, crying, and cutting himself with stones. – Mark 5:2-5
There are young people these days who cut themselves. They call themselves, appropriately, cutters, thus showing they still retain some simple honesty that would no doubt be mutilated in the hands of therapists who avoid forlorn reality and send their patients away with joyless smiles painted on with medication’s dead brush. Cutting is the cry of forlorn spirits but only one cry in a mass wailing out of our many avant-garde tombs. I don’t have to be able to see through walls to know that in ghettos, mansions, workplaces, nightclubs, hotels and, yes, churches all across this country the forlorn cry out in deafening silence. They walk around in forlorn encystment in broad daylight, inwardly imploded upon themselves like stars that become black holes. And like a black hole light that comes to them is swallowed up by the forlorn heaviness of their gravity. They dwell in the tombs, which is anyplace they are since they carry desolation with them, cutting themselves on the jagged edges of the innate knowledge that the tempter’s original message that they shall be as gods (Gen.3:5) was the most costly scam ever run, but, like being electrocuted, they can’t seem to let go of the instrument of death.
Unlike the man in the tombs those entrapped in forlorn encystment today don’t break their chains. No way! Maybe you didn’t know this but they’ve developed some perverse (another word for our time) sophistication since their forefather racked up chill time in cold biblical tombs. With sophistication comes fashion sense. Chains are part of the image now. Forget the chopper riders who wore a few chains on black leather jackets. That was a fad. Fads come and go. Nobody goes into forlorn encystment without a strong sense of self-righteousness. Above all else self-righteousness calls attention to itself.
But all their works they do to be seen of men: they make broad their phylacteries, and enlarge the borders of their garments… Mat.23:5
See? The self-righteous have always had a fashion sense. Who do you think came up with hair shirts but people doing public penance? With the self-righteous the left hand always knows what the right hand is doing (Mat.6:3). That’s another symptom of this disease. Who thinks about their hands? That’s a part of your body you usually move on impulse. Thought and act are almost one. But with the self-righteous what used to be simple becomes complicated. That’s why Judas tried to make a big deal out of Mary pouring expensive ointment on Jesus’ feet (Jn.12:5). Nobody else tightened up over it except him because nobody else was as self-righteous as he was. When it comes down to it “self-righteousness” is just another way of saying self-centeredness raised a few degrees hotter. And whether you’re trapped in a pore forty-five miles beneath the earth or the even stronger one within called futility of mind (Eph.4:17) there is no greater self-hatred than to cook in futility’s grease within a forlorn encystment, generating a white hot resentment and rage. The French have a word for this special kind of resentment: Ressentiment.
res•sen•ti•ment (rə-säɴ'tē-mäɴ')
n. A generalized feeling of resentment and often hostility harbored by one individual or group against another, especially chronically and with no means of direct expression.
Note the words “chronically and with no other means of expression”. This is the attitude we nurse in this country from noxious seedling to poisonous tree. How? Please permit me a little story as explanation. Dwarves were much prized as servants and entertainers in ancient China and Rome. Eventually, the population of "natural" dwarves was exhausted, so techniques were developed to manufacture dwarves from normal children. In China, children were placed in a topless and bottomless vase. The vase was constructed to prevent the shoulders and legs of the growing child from emerging from it. Month after month, the children's bodies grew inside the vase, but with no room to grow up or down, they expanded outward to fill the space inside the vase. Eventually, the vase was cracked open and, voila! A dwarf is born.
We do the same thing but as usual we do it the way people abuse credit cards. The ease of using the card short circuits the caution we might use if actual dollars left our fingers so we don’t see the immediate results of spending money. As long as we don’t see the immediate results of stuffing people into the topless and bottomless vases of institutions and philosophies that treat human beings as if sensual and material concerns are all that matter (and we don’t even do that well because healthy spirituality alone makes for a healthy material outlook) then it should be no surprise that the dwarf population metastasizes. We like to wait until the negative results of our stupidity fill our prisons and dominate headlines. Then we enact, or we trust other manufactured dwarfs to enact, harsh rules that not only never solves the problem but makes life harder for those in the non-dwarf population.
All this because we set the stage for evil very early on. Because since human beings in reality have a spiritual capacity that is meant to control all other considerations (and it matters greatly how you interpret “spiritual”) when they are forced to live in the spiritual torture vases we stuff them in, the negative energy of what we ignore and abuse eventually expresses itself in a destructive madness. This is the logical result of legions of human spirits living “chronically and with no other means of expression” for the central part of who they are because from the beginning they are stuffed in a vase by packers with a full measure of religious faith in Dwarfism.
Pretty depressing stuff, is it not? Well, it’s supposed to be. We spend a lot of time trying to escape the effects of these truths because of the sheer magnitude of the problems. That’s understandable to a degree. Nobody wants to hear depressing things all the time. Hope deferred makes the heart sick…Pro.13:12. Yes, it does. But the rest of that verse says but when the desire comes, it is a tree of life. This can mean many desires but there is one desire we all share as created creatures. If we fight it we aid and abet the creation of dwarfs in forlorn encystment. If we acknowledge it we have hope in its fulfillment.
For the earnest expectation of the creature waits for the manifestation of the sons of God. For the creature was made subject to vanity, not willingly, but by reason of him who hath subjected the same in hope, Because the creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God. – Rom.8:19-21
While this refers to the final unveiling of the sons of God I believe it would be a mistake to relegate this to the future only, disfiguring the meaning the same way we’ve done with end times foolishness. When Christians act with a sincere and conscious desire to glorify Christ instead of churchy moralities and sub-cultural pathologies the sons of God are revealed to some degree then. This is the hope that can release dwarfs from their forlorn encystment. When they hear of other dwarfs released from captivity (Luk.4:18) the Holy Spirit applies this to their hearts and they begin to desire freedom. So as depressing as the whole scene is from our limited vision we have only one choice if we ever seriously intend to not only release the dwarfs from forlorn encystment but prevent their creation in the first place.
And he said to me, Son of man, can these bones live? And I answered, O Lord GOD, you know. Again he said to me, Prophesy upon these bones, and say to them, O ye dry bones, hear the word of the LORD. – Eze.37:3-4
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