Emotion, "inpletion," and devotion: part 2
The power of devotion to transcend emotional disturbances and emotional exhaustion
In a previous post I shared an excerpt from my draft novel entitled A Gift for King Felix in which the protagonist, a young shepherdess named Ba, is flogged for bringing false accusations against others in her village. For the sake of the story, I had to inflict that pain upon her. (When I told my wife about this and other scenes in which Ba suffers, she sympathetically exclaimed, “Poor Ba!”).
Consequently, I had to inflict something of that pain upon myself as an author, as many authors must do with their own characters. And like I’ve said, such self-inflicted suffering takes its toll and is considered by many an unavoidable consequence of writing fiction. To make matters worse, we often try to offset one emotional extreme with an equal extreme on the other side of the emotional spectrum—to balance pain with pleasure, depression with excitement, and anxiety with bold confidence. Yet doing so is exactly what puts one at risk of emotional exhaustion due to the never-ending intensity.
The concept of inpletion, as introduced in part 1 of this series, offers a different approach: instead of swinging to the opposite emotional extreme, thus amplifying the overall energy, relax into a place of stillness. This is what I sought to do in the scene with Ba by giving her a vision of Christ that brings her to a deep peace. That’s also what I wrote in my account, A Matter of the Heart.
But in both stories there’s something more: a reaching upwards toward the divine not through emotion, but through devotion, which is possible only at that calm center of inpletion. As Psalm 46:10 puts, it, “Be still and know that I am God.”1
Devotion, in other words, is built upon a foundation of inpletion, making inpletion an essential aspect of the mystical realism that I’m looking for in fiction. Without that internal direction, much of what passes for “devotion” is merely emotionalism painted over with a veneer of what appears to be “spiritual” or “religious.”
A demonstration of the nature of devotion
As a means of demonstrating something of the nature of devotion in relation to emotion, let’s do a little craft project.
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