A Monday of Encouragement

Hi peeps! I ran out of time to do a Saunter through Weekly Shonen Jump today, mostly because I was catching up on Ancient Magus Bride (two episodes behind) and Overlord (four-and-a-half episodes behind, I must have fallen asleep in the middle of one?!). The new jumpstart, Ziga, was kind of “meh” in any case: not as bad as Jujutsu Kaisen, but again trying to be the new Promised Neverland and not quite living up to its promise. Think “Godzilla vs. Superhumans”, with a dash of the gut-punch conspiracy of PN at the base (SPOILERS: complete with the sudden corpse of a cute young girl we just got emotionally attached to and her cute stuffed animal). Anyway, the rest of the magazine’s manga tended to fall into the same patterns I’ve noted previously: Black Clover is *finally* soaring to new heights, as we actually reach the primary conflict of the series (foreshadowed forever, but still better than I was expecting). Hunter x Hunter is as confusing to the non-initiate as ever. Promised Neverland pulls of yet another display of “I know that he knows that I know that he knows that I know…” wizardry that is its bread and butter. We Never Learn was marginally better than last week, so slightly above mediocre and passably entertaining. Dr. Stone *finally* gave us a glimpse inside the rival kingdom that Tsukasa has been building; Senku also reveals his “greatest weapon ever created by humans” (“Nukes?” asks one character, leaning on the fourth wall; “Cell phones!” Senku responds). Robot x Laserbeam was solid though not amazing, continuing to set up its next conflict between Robo and the Don. Noah’s Notes was fun again, and I hope it gets serialized because they’ve raised a ton of mysteries that I want to see answered stat!!! My Hero Academia pulled off a decent surprise plot twist (at least for me; some of you might have seen it coming) and I’m honestly not sure how it will get resolved.

So what does all this have to do with encouragement?

Nothing, really. Just kind of went off on a tangent. But today I wanted to go in a different direction anyway. You see, as I’ve gotten to know my fellow anibloggers through the miracle we call the Internet, I’ve had the honor of you sharing the ups and downs of your lives. And some of you have had it particularly difficult in the past week or two.

So I wanted to share a bit of what I hope is encouragement (which, after all, is pretty much the only thing I can do a lot of the time). I ran across this quote recently at the very moment that I was waiting in the doctor’s office on the day of my recent EKG. It’s from Mencius, one of my favorite philosophers:

When Heaven wishes to impose a great mission upon a man, it deems it proper at first to fill his heart with bitterness, to subject his nerves and his bones to weariness, to deliver his whole body to the torments of hunger, to reduce him and to exhaust him, frustrating and overthrowing all his undertakings. In this manner it gives strength to his heart, endows his will with endurance; it increases him in stature and gives him the power to carry out that of which he would have been incapable. [Mencius, Book VI, ii, 15]

That was exactly what I needed to hear at the moment. (Incidentally, this passage is quoted on page 17 of Ways of Confucius and of Christ, the autobiography of Chinese Catholic priest Pierre-Celestin Lou Tseng-Tsiang. Before becoming a priest the author was a high-ranking Chinese diplomat in the critical years between WWI and WWII. The book makes for a fascinating read if you ever want an inside perspective on key world events that isn’t taught in your average classroom: It’s not just anybody who can, as Tseng-Tsiang did, send a telegram directly to the emperor of all China telling him what to do, and have the emperor obey, even with a delay of six weeks. Doubly true because he told the emperor to abdicate.)

On the related theme of suffering, my fellow aniblogger, TWWK, just published a post today about Chise’s mother in The Ancient Magus’ Bride. It’s worth reading in its entirety, but I just want to quote a handful of selections:

And as Chika’s demise shows, in the place of grace may come a storm that does more than tear away the brokenness—as a lie shouting that there is a “point of no return,” it becomes a reality from which one believes there is no escape, where shame reigns, and where hope is hidden for good, and it obliterates all.

Drawing a parallel between Chika (Chise’s mother) and his own life, TWWK recounts his own struggles as a father, experiences to which I can entirely relate:

I could no longer hide behind some false bravado of my goodness… I also felt alone… I knew God’s grace, but finally, being at rock bottom, I could really know it.

The point is not that people do terrible things; it’s that we can be driven to the point where we lose our capacity to continue to do good. As I’ve mentioned previously, my family and I have gone through our own dark times in recent years. In the middle of this, I went out for drinks with a couple of buddies from work. One of them told how, in his own life difficulties, his family had told him, “Don’t worry, God will never give you more than you can bear.” But my friend found this shallow and unsatisfying. It didn’t ring true for him.

“I don’t believe that for a minute,” I told him. “Even if it’s in the Bible. I think God does give us things  we can’t bear. That’s how he makes us aware of our weakness—and his support for us, because we can’t make it through on our own strength.” For my friend, at least, that did ring true. I would also add that sometimes we don’t make it through.

Speaking of rings, when JRR Tolkien wrote the Lord of the Rings (ha! Get it?), he had Frodo struggle through land after land, and trial after trial, all to destroy the One Ring—only, at the critical moment, to refuse to fulfill his quest, and instead to seize the Ring for himself. (Someone once told me that on the sheets of paper Tolkien used to draft his story, the handwriting breaks off at this point, and there are tear-stains on the paper. I don’t know if it is true or not.) One of his readers wrote to him and opined that Frodo should have been hanged as a traitor, not welcomed as a hero. Tolkien’s response was that there comes a point when even the best of people reach a breaking point, and under the duress of that crisis do those evil things they would otherwise seek to avoid and oppose.

One of the brilliant insights that I’ve found in Christianity is simply this: We live in a broken world, but we we are psychologically constructed for living in a whole, unbroken world. And life is a struggle to wrap our minds and our hearts around this paradox. Every religion can, I believe, be defined and understood by how it attempts to answer the questions, “Why is there evil?” and “What should we do in the face of evil?” (Granted, some religions answer, “There is no evil, it’s just an illusion,” but that’s still answering the question.)

Whatever the reason for this, it can be overwhelming. It can lead one to the breaking point. If you find yourself struggling, reach out. If you feel depressed, please reach out to your doctor and spiritual mentor (if applicable). If you are feeling suicidal, please call 911 and ask for help. If you are fighting anxiety, Arthifis in our own aniblogging community has an entire series of blog posts on what you can do. Whatever you’re going through, you’re going through: It will end. Your job is to make sure you outlast it, and you should and must rely on others at times. All of us do.

Oh yeah—manga and anime can help sometimes, too. 🙂