ORLANDO – Life! Love! Literature!

Orlando heaved a sigh of relief, lit a cigarette, and puffed for a minute or two in silence. Then she called hesitatingly, as if the person she wanted might not be there, “Orlando?” For if there are (at a venture) seventy six different times all ticking in the mind a once, how many different people are there not – Heaven help us – all having lodgement at one time or another in the human spirit? Some say two thousand and fifty-two. So that it is the most unusual thing in the world for a person to call, directly they are alone, Orlando? (if that is one’s name) meaning by that, Come, come! I’m sick to death of this particular self. I want another. Hence, the astonishing changes we see in our friends. But it is not altogether plain sailing, either, for though one may say, as Orlando said (being out in the country and needing another self presumably) Orlando? still the Orlando she needs may not come; these selves of which we are built up, one on top of another, as plates are piled on a waiter’s hand, have attachments elsewhere, sympathies, little constitutions and rights of their own, call them what you will (and for many of these things there is no name) so that one will only come if it is raining, another in a room with green curtains, another when Mrs. Jones is not there, another if you can promise it a glass of wine – and so on; for everybody can multiply from his own experience their different terms which his different selves have made with him – and some are too wildly ridiculous to be mentioned in print at all. (from Orlando by Virginia Woolf)

This struck me. how many selves do we have? Can we think of our different selves as just different moods? When Im in a bad mood I think and behave different to when I am in a good mood. My mood can be determined simply by the presence or absence of “Mrs. Jones”, or by more complicated issues like what the heck Mrs. Jones just freakin said about me. Though a mood is something I can choose, I choose how I respond to freakin Mrs. Jones, maybe I choose to understand where she is coming from and so I don’t get angry, or maybe it is irrelevant what she says so again I am not angry. I can choose my emotions, my moods, my selves.

As a Christian it is easy to see two selves that war within me. As Paul puts it: I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. Romans 8:15. We war with our sinful self, even though Jesus says we no longer need to war because he died to end our enslavement to sin, we war all the same! frustration! I feel like Orlando, Im sick to death of this particular [sinful] self. I want another. But to merely call out come, come! I doubt will work. Or will it? Is it just faith, faith that yes Jesus did it all, that yes I no longer need live with this sinful self, faith to live like the hot holy self I am? Like the absence of Mrs. Jones, the colour of the wall or the glass of wine, faith is a term that draws out the hot holy self. Come, come! How can it be more practical than this when after all this holy self is not my doing, but gods? Or do I with this attitude to easily shrug responsibility for they way I live? I would say that it is in gods hands how holy I am (being saved etc), but in my hands how much I choose to live up to this, how much I let the new creation he has done in me come forth. Like my moods this faith is a choice. I choose to believe, it is written, on terms of faith come!