Dear People Whom God Loves,
When we speak of the spiritual journey to which we are all called, we can find it confusing. Perhaps that is because of the word “spiritual.” We are accustomed to think in terms of dualism. That is, we tend to think in terms of either/or, black or white, good or bad. Human life is not like that. It is helpful to think in terms of both and.
There is a story that I will change a little to make it more “Catholic.” A priest was talking to a class of children about religion. He asked: “If all of the good people were colored red and all of the bad people were colored green, what color would you be?” A little girl thought and thought. She raised her hand and said, “I would be streaky.”
It would help us on our spiritual (human) journey if we would be honest with ourselves and acknowledge that we are all streaky and—at the same time—that being streaky is okay. God wants us to be human, and to be human is to be streaky.
That is why our spiritual (I will use this term because it is our ordinary language) journey is always a struggle and why the journey never ends. In fact, the struggle is the journey. We never arrive. There is no place to go. . . at least not in this life. That is why thinking that there is a goal interferes with our journey. It puts before us the option of thinking that we have arrived (and so we fall into the sin of pride) or that we haven’t arrived (and so fall into despair.) This means, of course, that we are called to struggle with our pride or our despair. There is no way out of the struggle. We will never have any peace until we accept this. This acceptance is also a struggle.
This is hard for us because it is so different from our customary way of thinking.
More next time.
Smile, God Loves You,
Father Clay
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