The Road
The spiritual life is a difficult thing, considering how bad we are at understanding ourselves. I am certainly not saying we fail to understand because of some great, unsearchable depth – rather, I mean that we are too foolish to even probe our shallowness. We rarely consider what we ought to be doing, opting for the easiest option without thinking twice. Even when we try, we rarely know the right thing to do, so thick is the mist of our own self-deception. And even when the right thing is clear to us, much of the time we still fail to do it out of weakness.
As such, the spiritual life requires two indispensable guides. To combat the fickleness of the heart, man needs reason. To combat the weakness of the will, man needs discipline. Without these, man is a rudderless boat, doomed to the moral code of his own sympathies and antipathies. Yet, as man advances in right reason and action, these guides can start to hinder him. For example: it is good to know things. Yet, our knowledge of the divine is always imperfect, as we naturally imprint our own limitations upon it. Or, it is good to have discipline. But labor and asceticism were made for man – man was not made for them. Rationalism and discipline may be indispensable, but they are only means to an end.
What is more perfect than to know the divine is to love the divine. It presupposes some knowledge, of course, but surpasses it. Further, what is more perfect than asceticism is to love each other. This presupposes some discipline, of course, but surpasses it. And this leads us to the most important guide, whose teaching never becomes a hindrance: Jesus Christ. The holy man is not a philosopher nor a sociologist, but a living image of Christ, who loves selflessly and unconditionally. The spiritual life is walking the road to divinity, keeping within the sterile, cautious guardrails set by rationalism and discipline, but allowing ourselves to be drawn by the God-man into something mysterious, intimate, and immeasurable.
This section explains the basic facets of the spiritual life. It is not as long as the other sections of the website, as the spiritual life is ultimately something you master by living, not by studying.
The ideas discussed here are: the Gospel story, sin, prayer and virtue, and predestination. You can find these pages via the hyperlinks or by navigating through the menu.