Destroying Binaries

When I say "my spiritual life", there are certainly two ways to read it. The first, I suppose, being an indicator that this blog is about a compartment of my life that I give the title "spiritual". This is entirely incorrect. Serious faith, or serious belief, must insist on a lack of disparity between one life with the other. The chief agency of sin is to separate, dispel, dissolve. The duality felt in life between the real and the potential is part of this. Therefore my life, it should be read, is spiritual. Everyone's is. St. John of the Ladder says in "The Ladder of Divine Ascent" that

"God is the life of all free beings. He is the salvation of all, of believers and unbelievers, of the just or the unjust, of the pious or the impious, of those freed from the passions or caught up in them, of monks or those living in the world, of the educated or the illiterate, of the healthy or the sick, of the young or the very old. He is like the outpouring of light, the glimpse of the sun, or the changes of the weather, which are the same for everyone without exception."

Therefore one of the first steps in the spiritual life is destroying the frail barriers we erect in order to understand the world and ourselves. The modern paradigm is one of compartmentalizing: we are comprised of many disparate systems: "emotional", "intellectual", "physical", "spiritual", "financial", etc. that all battle within us. Modern pop-psychology has to do with synchronizing them to the end of fulfilling their various needs, with disastrous ends. This compartmentalization of life is at once our attempt to understand it and the product of our inability to understand it with our fallen logic alone. Bringing the self to one, the aim of the spiritual life, is a matter of pulling these fractured spheres of our self into a harmony with God's will, putting an end to discord, through the harvesting of the virtues and the destruction of the passions.

Holy Father John of the Ladder, pray to God for us!

Everything is a Text

Associations are odd things.

Association is an odd thing. Avoiding it seems to be an act not unlike slipping between the raindrops in a downpour. Is this really how we establish what we know, or think we know?

When you look at me you look at what I'm wearing, my hair, my glasses, my skin color, my gate, etc. All of these thing help you to form an embryonic opinion of me. What follows, if we interact, is either a series of predictable outputs or a litany of surprises, depending on the accuracy of your initial assessment.

When you come to my blog, you look at the colors, the words, the quotes, the links, the titles, my spelling, the topics, the length of posts. A similar assessment is made concerning your opinion (maybe opinion isn't the right word) of me and/or my blog - either my blog, myself via the blog, or the blog's message, or me personally via the blogs message, and whether or not said message is related with skill or not.

That being said, by this point, you've probably stopped reading and clicked "back" on your browser, though not before at least some of this had taken place.

Perhaps I haven't satisfied you. Perhaps the requisite photo and caption weren't present. An obsession with these associations can lead to the habit of either attempting to fulfill all of these expectations or circumventing them altogether, neither of which being completely possible.

If I place a cross, or an icon of the crucifixion on my blog, you know exactly what I am, what my blog is about, what "I am about". So I'm reticent to do it. What if I told you that I believed the crucifixion was the profound center of the earth, of reality, of time, the cosmos? Or that I believed that "the greatest and most perfect thing a human being can ever desire to achieve is to come near to God and dwell in union with Him"?

What does that do? To us?

Words are a strange thing. I spend my time writing them, and I believe that they spring from this mysterious center of the cosmos, but I hardly ever turn to this thing as a subject of my writing. But everything is a text.