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Allow me to quote a quote of a quote:

“He was a frail, sickly child, afraid of many things. So he stayed inside his house a lot and read books, mainly adventure stories. One day he was reading a novel by the English author Frederick Marryat. In his autobiography, Roosevelt records what happened:

‘In this passage the captain of some small British man-of-war is explaining to the hero how to acquire the quality of fearlessness. He says that at the outset almost every man is frightened when he goes into action, but that the course to follow is for the man to keep such a grip on himself that he can act just as if he was not frightened. After this is kept up long enough, it changes from pretense to reality, and the man does in very fact become fearless by sheer dint of practicing fearlessness when he does not feel it.’”

In context (The Art of War for Writers, to be precise), author J.S. Bell is talking about feigning fearlessness in the face of the daunting tasks of living a writing life, to act as if you are one until you become one. Author Steven Pressfield would call this manning your station, day-in, day-out, so that the Muse will find you hard at work and reward you as such.

And while this is helpful and true and beneficial advice, I read more into it.

The warring parts of my soul (some might even say the Jacob hovering above my right shoulder and the Lockeness Smoke Monster hovering over my left) answer the conundrum of feigning fearlessness differently.

Smokey answers: Your bad habits? The things you despise about yourself? The things you always want to change but you never seem to be able to shake them? You’ve been feigning godliness for a long time. Your pretense is not your reality. I know what’s real. You should just give up.

Jacob answers: I know what’s real. I can see behind the facade of your charades. I know your heart, your will. You have, actually, been feigning godliness for a long time, but that makes you just like all the others. And to see that you still try, despite the short hand you’ve been dealt? That you keep pressing on and pressing in and pressing forward impresses me. Don’t forget that. But don’t let it go to your head either.

And I answer: I used to be afraid, and because I was afraid I became numb. When the world changed and I was shocked back into feeling reality, I barely held on. I almost lost my grip, but I kept feigning fearlessness, and now that fearlessness… it’s almost real.

I first became aware of author Steven Pressfield because of his kick-you-in-the-face book on writing, The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles. It’s concise, stellar, and brutal. If you crave creative fulfillment, you need this book.

I was consequently delightfully surprised to learn that he wrote The Legend of Bagger Vance: A Novel of Golf and the Game of Life. And while I think I saw the movie, I can’t remember if I finished it. I picked up Legend about a month ago from a local used bookstore. I read it this past weekend. I’ve read a few other books on the “mystic” qualities of golf and life, but they all pale in comparison to what Pressfield did in Bagger. And while I plan to watch the movie again, I’m pretty sure the screen adaptation doesn’t live up to where the book took me. To wit, this passage, especially pointed for the smitten, frustrated golfer:

“The search for the Authentic Swing is a parallel to the search for the Self. We as golfers pursue that elusive essence our entire lives. What hooks us about the game is that it gives us glimpses. Glimpses of our Authentic Swing, like a mystic being granted a vision of the face of God. All we need is to experience it once – one mid-iron screaming like a bullet toward the flag, one driver flushed down the middle – and we’re enslaved forever. We feel with absolute certainty that if we could only swing like that all the time, we would be our best selves, our true selves, our Authentic Selves. That’s why we lionize men like Hagen and Jones and treat them like gods. They are gods in that sense, the sense that they have found their Authentic Selves, at least within the realm of golf.”

…as copied from a footnote in Brian McLaren‘s newest book, A New Kind of Christianity. The quote isn’t indicative of the book as a whole, thus it’s inclusion in the footnotes, but it resonated with me, and I thought it appropriate to post:

“Bernard of Clairvaux understood what it means to be a friend to oneself. He spoke of four stages in the spiritual life, beginning with learning to love oneself for one’s own sake. This is the infant, nursing at his mother’s breast, ecstatic in the warmth of being held and filled, but unaware of anyone outside his own skin.

Then comes loving God for one’s own sake. This is the child who learns to appreciate his mother, maybe to draw her a picture or gather her a bouquet of flowers, overflowing with love mixed with gratitude for all she dos for him.

Then comes loving God for God’s own sake. This is the adolescent or young adult who begins to see his mother for who she is, not just for what she does for him, and his love grows even deeper.

One wonders how any love could go deeper than this, but Bernard sees yet another dimension to the journey of life: loving oneself for God’s sake. This is the young man who has made a mess of his life and feels knocked down and beaten up, but then thinks of how much his mother loves him, and her love inspires him to not give up, but to get up and give life another go.”

Doc Jensen (@ewdocjensen) writes crazy, intriguing recaps for the epic television series LOST. If you’re a fan, you should read these after each episode, especially during this final season. He’s well-read, and makes connections to just about anything and everything you can imagine. I especially appreciated this quote of a quote from his recent recap of the episode Recon:

“Perhaps Charlotte Staples Lewis’ literary namesake, CS Lewis, sums up Ford’s Sideways arc the best. From The Great Divorce:

‘I do not think that all those who choose wrong roads perish; but their rescue consists of being put back on the right road. A sum can be put right: but only by going back till you find the error and working it afresh from that point, never by simply going on. Evil can be undone, but it cannot ‘develop’ into good. Time does not heal it. The spell must be unwound, bit-by-bit, with ‘backwards mutters of dissevering power’ — or else not. It is still ‘either-or.’ If we insist on keeping Hell (or even Earth), we shall not see Heaven: if we accept Heaven we shall not be able to retain the smallest and most intimate souvenirs of Hell.”’

After reading this post many months back, and being familiar with Mike Mason from another of his books, and being in a phase of life where I’m asking big questions, I started to read a chapter or two per night of Mason’s The Gospel According to Job: An Honest Look at Pain and Doubt from the Life of One Who Lost Everything, his personal commentary on the entirety of this ancient and often confusing book. Chapters are just two pages, but they’re worth traveling through slowly, allowing time for digestion. Last night’s reading is worthy of sharing here, now (in which I’ve emphasized a few parts that spoke to me):

What Job realized, in his own way, is that there is no progress in the spiritual life except through the cross. Naturally we are forever trying to avoid the cross, either fleeing from it or else searching for some way around it. But with the cross there is no way around and no going back. We must go through. In fact, every step we take forward as believers must be through the cross. There is simply no other way of advancing. That is why we must learn never to leave the cross, never to take our eyes off it. Daily we must pick up our cross and die to ourselves in order that the power of Christ might rest upon us. For the truth is that we do not die all at once but little by little, and every time a little part of us is nailed to the cross and dies, immediately the grace of the Lord Jesus flows into that dead part and renews it. This is how we live by grace. The power of grace is activated through the cross.

Too many Christians are looking for graceless, fix-it solutions to their problems, and to the problems of others as well. We forget that one of the great mysteries of the gospel is that God did not fix us when He saved us. By grace He simply saved us, warts and all.

- Mike Mason, The Gospel According to Job, pg. 174