O my God!
You have given me a word, the word is arrogance, the barrier to what it is really all about for us humans, why we are here, why our ancestors were expelled from the garden. Our goal is humility..and has been our goal and will continue to be until the end of time: building humility - the only ticket to heaven.
As I see it today: We were in the garden with You. We were tempted by arrogance and we bailed on who we really are: creatures, not You. We were duped into thinking we could be Creator too. An impossible task for a creature.
You intervened out of love for us because You really wanted our company, but could not be one with us without..humility, our living knowledge of who we are..You sent us to Ground Zero..to start over.
We are all in some kind of recovery..recovery from pride and arrogance. The Greeks called it hubris. We are hummus, of the earth, or the dirt, in a good way. We have no call to hubris. It is our lie, our downfall.
Pride is the major stumbling block to the spiritual life or oddly enough, to the human life. We are spiritual beings learning to be human, and through being humans. There was no better way or our loving Creator would have thought of it. We are stuck in the muck of wonderful flesh, dying flesh. We have only this one chance to get back in the garden.
With our limited spirtuality, we cannot do it because only God is wholly or perfectly Spirit and only the completely spiritual (another word for perfect/mature love) can survive Paradise. Entering Paradise is not entering a place, but entering a Person, or a Family, FatherSonSpirit.
The ticket, just the ticket, is a loss of arrogance, a humility, a knowing the truth about who we really are: creatures made for maturing love. Without this love need met in ourselves and others, we cannot even start the trek. With that ticket of humility, however it comes into each ones life, however stringent the course, however long it takes, we can have hope of entering the path of peace, or rather, the Persons of Peace.
Getting us this ticket cost Christ his human life, just as it costs us ours. It is unthinkable really, even as much as we meditate on the Cross, to come close to knowing what that kind of humility and full acceptance of His mission was like.
Humility is not natural to us, because we inherited the lie (original sin) Compared to His Cross, our cost at times seem small, such as holding back a sarcastic comment when we know we are right. However we are each given a cost, a mission, a cross that fits us. The trick is to accept it, however ordinary or challenging. I recall a story about a woman who was so angry that she had to die through cancer because it was more within her vision of herself to die like a real Christian, by saintly martyrdom.
Humility is not natural to us, because we inherited the lie (original sin) Compared to His Cross, our cost at times seem small, such as holding back a sarcastic comment when we know we are right. However we are each given a cost, a mission, a cross that fits us. The trick is to accept it, however ordinary or challenging. I recall a story about a woman who was so angry that she had to die through cancer because it was more within her vision of herself to die like a real Christian, by saintly martyrdom.
I have trouble at every turn accepting my mission. I pretend often, or allow myself to be deluded about what it so obviously is. Often I don't want to even consider accepting it. I want to distract myself constantly, with food, with the internet, with research, thinking, figuring it out, shopping, you know. Even prayer at times, is a distraction or a way to control the circumstances that make me uncomfortably stuck..and human.
Being human is being in a humbled state. We are being humbled from thinking we are God, that we know all, or at least can find out. After all, we have Google now. Until recently, many of us could seem to buy it all, knowledge, pleasure, ownership..full control. These were and always will be props unholding the lie, and eclipsing the cross - for a time. We are here to be humbly loved and to humbly love. This truth, will set us free. He suffered humiliation for that, to set us free from the pride of life, that liar.
