31/08/2016

H,

The thing to do with the self is to give it to God. This has been said and said over again but the truth has to be singular and consistent. Things repeated often have the tendency to be annoyingly true.

In this case, it is the details that add shape to the whole machine. How do we give ourselves to God? I think they are three levels to it.

The first is on the outside, where we accept monotheism and the promise of a benevolent being. We can be great admirers of this idea and believe that it has some emotional punch. We can wonder at the miracle of nature or the nature of all miracles. Yet we are still on the outside and our day to day living is much the same as before we came to this epiphany about a certain creator.

The second level is on the inside lane, where we have a great need to solve a spiritual and/or material problem (a spiritual problem often has a material manifestation). We are no longer observers but characters in the play about a miracle. We receive this great help and it forms the shape of our future life. We become miracles and miracle junkies, always looking for the next “wave” of the spirit and the next thing God will do. This does not mean prosperity only. This could even have themes like Holiness, Celibacy, Social Activism or ideas about the Purpose and Plan of God for the Church and the individuals within it. The main focus is however on the “product” of drawing nearer to source that the bounties of dwelling in the source itself. There is a difference. The former is always about doing and the latter is always about being.

The third level begins in discipleship. When Christ called the twelve He called them out the normal routine of living so that they might live in the glory. This is not an exclusive club. It is the start of the conspiracy of grace to touch every human heart and mind and body throughout all time. The new holy of holies is in the human soul because we are now the temples of God. Every man and woman is called to choose the deeper life of living on a prayer and that prayer is: to be ever in His presence. Pray without ceasing means stay connected all day. Give up your wealth and follow me means nothing material should rule over the pursuit of a spiritual life. We are waking up to who we will forever be.

Like God.

30/08/2016

H,

                

It always begins with the internal inventory. We are fighting and pressing up against our worst selves all the time. The more we let that version of ourselves thrive, the more it takes a foothold it should not have over everything we do.

This is the main battle in the celestial war of ages. We are not here to turn the tide on other lives and interrupt or instruct others on how they ought to live. We are here to discover how weak we truly are and how helpless we must become in the face of grace and living in the light.

We are “poorly made” by sin and desire to be “wonderfully re-made” by love.

This turns our understanding on its head. There is a part of us that comes alive when we first turn to God, not in the humble way of truth but in the prideful way of trying to lead others. It is like we have been looking for answers along with a sense of personal greatness. This side of us will not thrive long on the narrow path. It will fill its empty places with pretence and vainglory before long. It will convince itself that it has nothing to grow into and will seek to make excuses for any sort of mishap as the falling down of a great soul and not merely the humanity of a saved soul that is in repair and in process.

This inventory of our own soul is the counterpoint to the large argument of self against change. This inner look is not to make the self-more prominent or to build a pity party for all our wrong doing. It is to make it clear to our own heart that this is the light and we sit in the dark. The light is overcoming our dark. We are walking back from the moment of our salvation. We are gaining back long held enemy territory. We should let the grace of God do its work.

29/08/2016

H,

There is a celestial war just beyond our range of vision. It is not a Greek tragedy or Homer’s other epic. It does not rage just beyond the clouds above but deep inside the human soul. It is a fight for the very survival of the human spirit.

Some will argue that humanism is enough. They will say that religion brings evil and personal guilt and we should instead be guided by our most rational thoughts and our deepest hopes of collegiate happiness. There are many points here but none of them solve the problem of man or woman. Inside us, as we grow older and more self-aware, and if we grant ourselves the benefit of standing in any sort of real light, we can see the cracks and damages and problems of the human soul. We can be our own test case for how optimism and a general idea of doing good does not go far enough to solve the problem of being human. In various ways we have come up against the very wide limits of our own good intentions. We know we struggle to live up to the things we say. We know we give up to nihilism and cynicism and call it being realistic. Or we take a big bit out of some other sort of belief-relief and find safety in various placebos for the soul.

The battle rages on. In places where the rule of law and laws of ‘civilization’ have thrived the human soul is curbed and seems to rise above murder and mayhem to pay taxes, go to work and school while pursuing a sort of material happiness. This is materially better than in places still ravaged by an ancestry of hurt and exploitation. These other places suffer from the uncurbed excesses of those who hold power but are painfully human. So, they hurt others. The former is manifestly and materially preferable to the latter. Yet both speak to our material state and remove the eternal nature of the human soul from contemplation.

This is the real manifestation of the ages old struggle for the human soul in modern times. We are not expected to believe in ghosts or spirits anymore. We are to base our whole life on the things that end in fifty to seventy years on this blue planet, if we are lucky. The real battle is for the human soul to reach beyond “the surly bonds of earth and touch the face of God.”