Step 5
#5- Access Deeper Consolation
What is Consolation?
I have borrowed the term from JRR Tolkien who suggests that it is one of the four essential features of lasting believable fairy tales. It is the happy ending. It is what needs to occur in any narrative so that the heros, the innocent can live happily ever after. All stories have tragedy– bad things happening to us– catastrophies. But into stories is injected by the good author a redemptive story– a ‘eucatastrophe’,
“the sudden joyous ‘turn’ (for there is no true end to any fairy-tale): this joy, which is one of the things which fairy-stories can produce supremely well…is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of the dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to teh joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of joy– Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.”
In other words, Tolkien speaks of a full and complete surprising, external dramatic unique remedy– now– to the tragedy. For we victims, that would include of course some remarkable, unimaginable restoration of what was taken from us — at least in some dynamic eqivalence. This is the consolation that your soul demands before real forgiveness can really happen in your life.
I do not know of any other way to really experience deep and real substantial consolation for the violations other than a path that takes the victim through the wild and unbelievable claims of the Old and New Testaments of the Bible. Some of these claims are consistent with some forms of Judaism, Islam and some Hinduistic faiths among others. But only Christianity dares to make a claim of real, experiential consolation available now to the seeking victim. By the way, when I speak of ‘Christianity’, I am not referring to the caricature of the faith embodied by many of the pinhead religious legalists and pundits around today. I don’t mean Ned Flanders. I am speaking of the faith embodied in the words and writings of the early followers of Jesus Christ as expressed in the New Testament.
These writings proclaim the availability or access to deep substantive consolation now to the seeker. These ‘next steps’ go beyond the realm of this blog and so are added as free downloadable links to talks that I gave at my church http://www.newlifefivepoints.org/pop_ups/how_to_forgive.html(New Life Church at Five Points). Please feel free to download them and take advantage of them as you choose. I, along with dozens of others, have personally experienced powerful and substantial consolation for many deep crimes. Let me know if they have helped you as well.