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!

Maybe She's Born With It

1. Once, while on a visit to a reservation with a crazy professor of philosophy, I was questioned by a man named Henry as to my interest in Native culture and resistance.

"Well, I've read a few books-" I said.

"Yeah, but those are just books." He said.

Since then I've done my best to do my reading outside.

He sand a loud song in his own tongue while his wife braided his hair. The tea-pot was boiling in preparation for an herbal concoction he had made for me that was to clear my sinuses. It had no name in the English language, but it did the job.

Earlier that morning, I unzipped the door to my tent to find the rotting skull of a dear hanging from the branch of a tree, silhouetted against the rising sun.

2. I am comfortable, the light from the sun not having found its way into the box office yet. It's "slow", so there isn't much to do. Accordingly, I pick up the already irrelevant 2007 movie guide and flip to (movies about) writers.

I check out dvds (movies) to people, walking back and forth mechanically, alphabetizing, shelving, talking and joking about movies. The transactions occur smoothly: titles, total, change, due back [Tuesday], sign on the space, thank you. There are stories all around me.

There are stories on the periphery of my mind, dancing in and out of the ring in a frustrated hokey-pokey, evolving to a game of dodge-ball, taking aim at the mechanical comfort of day-to-day activities.

3. All writing is practice until it's finished. Then the game is over. This literary actualization hinges on what it means to win it.

Are you brave enough to let it be an experiment? Or is calling it that a cop-out? What are you writing? Words. What are you writing about?

There was substance in there, somewhere. I was hoping to get to it.

I thought that by writing I'd get to it. This is the gamble part of the game. An outside, unknown factor we look for to give us the win.

4. The admission that I am a sinful person, or believe myself to be, is sure to sound odd to many people in the world. The idea of being sinful is not only misunderstood in our culture, but misrepresented. What it means to be sinful is an object of gross over-simplification, both on the part of both those who deny it and those who affirm it.

When I say that I am a sinful person I am saying two things: 1) that I , as a human, exist in a sinful state, or have a sinful nature. It is something innate and as part of me as my reasoning mind and my personality. 2) It also means that because of this nature I commit acts of a sinful nature - sometimes out of ignorance, sometimes very purposefully.