Duty and Desire

This is no great epiphany, but maybe I can start with a long-held truism and get something going from there: Sometimes a person is motivated out of duty, sometimes out of desire. I love the latter and in fact only tolerate the former because on some higher plane where exists a better, noble me, I ultimately desire to do the things that duty forces upon me when desire for and at that moment has slunk away into the shadows of my soul (or wherever it is that desire goes when I am feeling like a treacherous, hot-headed, or mopey jerk).

So today, and in fact at this particular juncture in time, I am writing from duty--I write because I think I ought to write.

Now, here's something I'd like to know: Why didn't anyone ever tell me the power of the word "ought." I learned "no," "yes," and "I want it" pretty early on, as I recall, and I even began, long before my schooldays, to call down the enchanted wonders of the sky with those magical "pleases"--but why in the world didn't someone take me aside and tell me about the lunatic, the unsatiable madman, sitting inside my head drawing me painfully, meticulously toward some ever-fixed, ever-oh-so-slightly-obscured mark in the sky--Mr. Ought.

Now let me tell you what I believe about this particular "madman," as I have labeled him. He's a madman only in relation to that part of me that wants to track him down and smite him from ever corner of my mind. He is, in fact, the most sane of all my faculties. He only seems like a lunatic because my desire, at the moment when I am labeling him, is itself so far gone into madness. He's my anchor and my lifeline to the shore. My hatred for him exists in direct proportion to the enmity I hold for my very self--though I'm often blind to this fact.

So the question of origin arises--and that is probably the most important part, so let me say it right out: Where did this insanely sane little mind-guard come from? Why, God put him there. In fact, He didn't merely put that little bloke in my head and then leave me be--He continues to nurture and guide me day by day, slowly, subtly, transforming me from within.

But I haven't quite hit upon the heart of the matter just yet. That man is only the start--the initial spark within that tells me about my Creator and His will, His intentions, for me at any given point in time and any given moment of reflection. I am in fact a participant in something much more profound and considerably more important. You see, I am a player, a participant, and in fact a "victim" in the most hostile kind of takeover the world has ever seen (and there are millions of others going on, right this minute, somewhere right before your very eyes)--I am a man who has been slayed from within. It's not suicide or the kind of flippant self-destruction that has often been romanticized in the history of the world. It's not the free-fling into madness that comes from severing of the anchor, from the final gnash of the teeth upon one's own tattered lifeline. No, it's the laying down of arms, the humble, helpless, yet noble kneeling before something you recognize--finally, at wit's end--as greater, better, and lovelier than yourself, the conquering of the hate-bent rebel within. And this is not a surrender to the imprisonment of nothingness, a surrender to hopeless, a final dash of despair--it's a surrendering to service.
And so duty becomes not an alien parasite scrambling around somewhere in your mind, a fugitive from your own intense probing, but in fact the very cloak you wear. And the fire that consumes corrupt desire, idle thoughts, words without grace and meaning, works slowly within.
And always you're drawn not toward destruction, in hate of self and others, but toward hope, hope in which (you know, though you do not know how you know) duty and desire have finally been joined.