Pensees: The Journaling of Chimera

The Journaling of Chimera

Journaling is not always a problem for me. Writing my thoughts is not always difficult. But writing my thoughts in a code that will take two centuries to crack? Now that is a feat!

Charles Wesley did it. And the code is finally cracked! (HT: SI).

Why code?

Honest journal-keepers know that the hardest thing about journaling is utter truthfulness, unmitigated honesty. Someone has said that we usually journal what we want to be true about us. In that sense, our journaling is honest. Journaling often reveals what we long to be the full truth about us.

But it’s not the full truth. The full truth is either too painful, too ugly, too incriminating, too gossipy, or too shameful to write. I think those of us who journal know that we might be a bit more transparent if we wrote in code. If we had a code the chimera would journal more transparently.

What a chimera then is man! What a novelty, what a monster, what a chaos, what a contradiction, what a prodigy! Judge of all things, imbecile worm of the earth; depositary of truth, a sink of uncertainty and error; the pride and refuse of the universe! Who will unravel this tangle? ~ Pascal

But even then the code would not liberate the truth completely. Sinful men who have been made secure in Jesus Christ may ultimately be more honest than unregenerate men about the deepest realities of their heart, but even they cannot endure to expose everything and, more importantly, they are utterly unable to do it. The heart is too deceitful.

Nonetheless, the effort of self-exposure and self-examination by thoughtful journaling is worth it.

Here’s one guy who is hoping he gets to read whatever Charles Wesley thought was code-worthy. I think it will encourage me that the man who wrote so many of my favorite hymns was, well, also a man.