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Day 87

Updated: Apr 6, 2022

Morality is taking personal responsibility for the wrongness of all things.


This seems impossible.


This requires caring, and we think we are not strong enough to care about everything. What is miraculous is that we are, and we will be shown a path of where our actions may carve the most good (to do anything is to not do everything, so you need not worry about doing too much- you will care about everything and do only what you can).


That's why some who are moral postulate God, and God helps. A higher power is just that- a power which may strengthen our own, whether or not we understand it. By leaning on this power, we never worry, but work, and work better than we have ever worked before.


I say "we," but I suppose I mean "I."


For now I am content in saying that I am not sure what kind of being God may be (or if God is actually being-itself), but that by believing and worshipping an embodiment of all good things, my life begins to conform after this image.


Thomas Merton wrote that, “Our idea of God tells us more about ourselves than about Him."


Maybe it would be better to say that our idea of God tells us more about our future selves than it does about God. And that if we don't actively worship a god, then a god will be given to us among the gods of culture. These gods aren't only the famous ones: sex, drugs, money, fame. They are also things like "authenticity," "self-love," and "radical freedom." In other words, they nourish one side of ourselves, making us shallow, lop-sided and sick. Only a God which transcends even our very selves can be big enough to unify the self, and steady enough to be a consistent form of peace (and not an easy peace either- the peace which requires painful sacrifice in every stage of life). This is the Old Testament obsession with idols, the insistence that anything lower than the highest God would not be big enough to embrace the cavernous self.


And what cavernous selves we are! Our lives pant outside their cages, as Hafiz writes, "sniffing for light," on the hunt for a bigger peace.


-Sondra

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