All naiveté isn't bad!

The second naiveté is an understanding reached on the far side of critical analysis and thinking.  Having come to recognize that things could theoretically be other than they are, we are brought to the perception that they are as we thought them to be, but on the far side of all our questioning, we know in a way that we did not know it before . . . It is surely part of what Christ meant when he insisted that we must be born again, becoming not again childish but, for the first time, childlike.  Eliot puts it nicely in Little Gidding:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

So it is with sacrifice, and so it is with beginning to understand the cross. - Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, Death on a Friday Afternoon


I thought I'd reached at this second naiveté years ago.  I'd explored the opposite of faith, and found a great emptiness there.  Then I was touched by God's love, experienced the movement of the Holy Spirit within my soul, and thought there was no going back. But that didn't keep me from failing so spectacularly, and so I suppose I've either been experiencing a "third naiveté" this year, or I needed January's mini-crisis of faith to truly find myself in Christ.

I'm discovering that it is an entirely different and joyful and intimidating thing to put away my self-judgment and start to really thrive in God's love.  There's a big difference between, "Oh, I'm such a worthless sack of excrement, isn't everyone - especially God and most certainly my wife - so great for loving me anyway!" and being able to truly rejoice in who I am in Christ. Perhaps now I can quit demonstrating to myself - albeit in far smaller ways - what a "bad person" I am.

The "intimidating" part is that I no longer have an excuse for shrinking away from becoming the man God dreams for me to be.