This sonnet is a good partner for my St. Valentine's Day poem. Since one of my fans in student government liked it, maybe you will too.

Sonnet CIX- Promise

A promise is a promise, saying goes,
And blessings come to us if we can keep.
The problem is, I try to fall to sleep,
I lie there, neck is craned, return to those
Expurged devotions, mouth responses, give
My unasked love to her before I think.
A drain where all of my emotions sink
My conscience, partial, porous, iron sieve
Can better beat me on the head than stop
Those thoughts; pacific, precious. Mind is whole:
The reason, passion, spirit of my soul
Are not in quarrel, ready all to drop
This armistice. But God had overheard,
And gave me rest without a broken word.

Grace really has its moments, even in the most remote souls. What grace is and how it operates in the lives of normal individuals has always been foggy to me. On the one hand, the Christian can view almost every circumstance beyond their control as endowed with grace. The contrary of empiricism, the paradigm was well explicated in a passage from Pierre de Calan's Cosmas or the Love of God, the inaugural reading of the SGA Book Club [planned months and months in advance, the first meeting will occur next Wednesday; so long anticipated, it is being heralded like the Second Coming of Christ]. The narrator says,

Perhaps you would want to call chance what I am calling grace. But for a Christian- remember the dying words Bernanos attributes to his country priest- everything is grace, chance included. (pg. 44)

While there is surely provincial sentiment and a bit of church lady piety in this, it has become difficult not to view this law-governed world in such a way. Leibniz came to believe that the best of gods could only create the best of worlds; while this is false in the literal sense, in a poetic sense, this world has many particular excellences that will not be in Heaven (though they are of a lower order than those in Heaven), and insofar as this is a world wherein fallen men live finite lives, I can imagine no better. There is beauty in all things. Whether something is experienced as good or bad in our lives, there is always a sort of beauty or purposefulness in the given thing. Hence, love and tragedy are equally artful, and even the most unfortunate individual can always find beauty or meaning in their life. Because life on earth and the material world is cyclical, every evil or misfortune, wilderness or decaying empire, bears some future benefit in its womb. Nothing in itself is truly evil, because evil is merely a deficiency; having no objective existence, and being unessential to actions or events so designated by adjective, even those realities we would rather turn away from retain the essential beauty of the created. For instance, I am presently reading Nick Flynn's Another BS Night in Suck City for a class; while there has been scarce a cheerful happening in the book, it has been a moving and well worthwhile read nonetheless.

But all of that is somewhat obvious, and more a matter of subjective perception than objective reality. As "Sonnet CIX" illustrates, grace is essential to faith, hope, and charity, the theological virtues, which are not a part of human nature, but only given us by the grace of God. Without His help, we cannot escape the slavery of our feelings and emotions; reason even will not deliver us from despair and anger, nor will it make us love our neighbor. Only with recourse to the gift of God, verily, are we truly free.