Order and chaos – two conflicting concepts that seem to go against each other. However, they coexist in our everyday reality and often intertwine, deeply shaping our lives.
Let’s start with a question: what is order? It is the territory explored. It is the tribe, the religion, the national flag, the safe place in front of the warm fireplace where children play on the rug; it is the exchange rate, it is the calendar, the clock, it is the place where our expectations are fulfilled, it is predictability and control. Order is Tolkien’s Hobbit’s Shire of Hobbits. Over-manifested, order can reside in tyranny, in soulless military marches.
We move on to the other sphere: what is chaos? It is unexplored territory. It is the stranger, the monster under the bed, someone’s hidden rage or a child’s illness. It is the place where our expectations are betrayed, where disappointment and fear of the unknown emerge. Chaos is the land of Mordor, where the hobbit Frodo has an impossible mission to accomplish to remove evil. Chaos is also that formless potential from which God created order in the making of the world, the same potential that dwells within us and can take shape if it is well shaped.
Chaos is often associated with suffering and order with peace. However, things need to be nuanced, which is why there is a color transition from black and white: to those ever-present shades of gray.
In a world that promotes exaggerated positivity, self-forgetfulness, and surrender to passions and euphoria, we forget what a savage teacher suffering itself can be. Why should we avoid it when it has been present in our lives from the beginning? We need only look back at our genesis to come to the following conclusion: we are born out of expulsion into a hostile world.
At the origin of the human species, we find our first parents, the very first humans, Adam and Eve, who were placed by God in the Garden of Eden. There was Paradise. It was a place where order reigned in all its splendor and perfection. We humans were living in perfect harmony with God and nature, being the most important product of creation, made in the image and likeness of the Creator. All was good and beautiful until the serpent, Satan, tempted the woman to eat the forbidden fruit. And then, after she fell prey to the serpent’s suggestion, she too tempted the man to eat from the fruit.
Their Order was undermined by the infiltration of the serpent – chaos – and then totally crumbled when they tasted the forbidden fruit. Once this act had been drawn up, the two instantly knew right from wrong, seeing their emptiness, which they had not noticed before, and thus realized their flaws, their vulnerability. They feared and hid themselves from God. Having discovered it, they denied their guilt, even though they now knew only too well the evil they had done. But they did not escape. On the contrary, they were damned: the man will have to work hard to earn his bread, which now no longer falls from the trees, and the woman will bear her children in pain. Moreover, they were banished from Eden as fallen men, a status that would become deeply ingrained in our identity.
With the fall, man inherits a dual nature. On the one hand, we have the disposition towards the absolute, given us by the image of the Creator, and we are capable of extraordinary, innovative, and beneficial things for mankind, sometimes even in the face of adversity. On the other hand, no other being on this earth, apart from man, has been capable of such laborious works of extermination as, for example, that produced by the Nazis through the Holocaust.
Self-hatred and hatred of humanity have to be balanced with gratitude for tradition, gratitude for one’s homeland, and amazement at what normal people can do every day, says Jordan Peterson. To live in balance we must follow the Path between order and chaos. The Way may also be what Christ said in John 14:16: “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life.” For only in Jesus Christ do we find that absolute receptivity to truth. He was the only man in whom the will acted in complete unity with the divine order, even in the midst of what seemed chaos and lack of control to our fallen man. The way may be taking responsibility for one’s own life, in the sense of realizing that we cannot change the past, but we can influence the course of our lives from now on by taking care of ourselves, by accompanying ourselves with people with whom we can grow in wisdom and productivity, by being true to ourselves and to those around us. The path means taking on the burden of existence.
So, the utopian proposals put forward by personal development books, such as isolating yourself on an island with a cocktail in one hand and a stack of money in the other, do not work. Life has both suffering and joy. Staying in balance means facing the sea of chaos and the monster under the bed; seeing the dragon growing daily right in front of our eyes; exploring nature and talking to people who have different opinions to our own, but also enjoying life’s little pleasures; knowing how to delay gratification, telling the truth, practicing patience and listening and not getting stuck on the air; comparing ourselves with our version of the past, not with someone else in the present, putting our own house in order before judging the world, accepting individual responsibility for our existence and not blaming others for our own mistakes.
What if, from now on, we were to take our decisions into our own hands, giving up being passive victims to daily addictions and illusions, starting by identifying our mistakes and fighting to correct them? How about drawing lessons from life’s inevitable suffering in order to grow and to continue our quest towards the absolute?
The price of greatness is responsibility – Winston Churchill.
