New Wineskins

There is a kind of despair that flatters itself. It dresses in cynicism. It names itself insight. It sings of hate and ruin as though this were strength. It repeats, again and again: I see through everything. And so it refuses to be touched by anything.

But hate is not strength. Despair is not wisdom. They are closures of the soul. They seal us off from the living stream. Meister Eckhart wrote: If your soul is full of anything, no new thing can enter there, not even God Himself.

Even Jesus said it: No one pours new wine into old wineskins. The old must be relinquished. Not patched, not argued with, but emptied out, that something wholly other might enter.

This is not mere optimism. It is not the shallow trade of despair for cheer. It is a deeper poverty: the relinquishing of every certainty, even our cherished griefs and hatreds, even our proud ideas of God. For the Mystery that is Life cannot be seized by the intellect. It must be received with empty hands.

The world is loud with voices cataloging its ruin. Songs of hate, poems of despair, endless refrains that the bad guys always win. But such voices are not new. They are the cracked vessels of an old age.

The harder courage is to empty oneself. To risk silence. To let the vessel be made new.

Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence is no nihilist’s shrug. It is a challenge: Would you choose this life again, as it is, forever? Not because it is good or fair, but because you have learned to love its terrible beauty.

Dostoevsky knew this. A man broken in body and fortune, imprisoned, addicted, near despair, yet he clung to Christ with fierce, trembling love. If anyone had cause to curse life, it was he, and yet he blessed it. His art burns with this vision: that beneath all wreckage, grace waits if the heart will open.

Hopkins sang it: The world is charged with the grandeur of God. Eliot learned it: All shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well. Stafford warned it: For it is important that awake people be awake… the darkness around us is deep.

The artists who endure do not deny the dark, but they refuse to worship it.

Against the cult of despair, this is the quiet revolution: not a new argument, but a new vessel. An emptied heart. A soul made spacious. A life ready for the new wine of the Spirit, which cannot be explained, only tasted.

Perhaps it is time to let the old wineskins go.