We of course intuitively know we ought to be contributing to
our family, friends, and community. The problem is we think (and are taught in
a wide variety of subtle and overt ways) that this is mostly at odds with our
own wants/needs/desires. So we believe our task is to suppress our own desires
and serve others. Trying to do this we often end up needing vices to help us
suppress our own desires and we often try to serve in subtlety manipulative
ways to get our own desires met without admitting we are doing that or that we
even have them to begin with.
Our desires are often somewhat at odds with contributing to our family, friends, and community, but our deepest desires are always about contributing to the communities we are a part of, whether that be a marriage, other family, friends, workplace, church or other group, or earth inhabitant. Spending the time and effort to get to know these deepest desires of ours and how to act upon them in ways that benefit our communities ends up being the only way to give without also subtly and/or covertly taking. As such, that is our responsibility.
We and our communities are heavily invested in trying to get our needs/desires met without admitting we have them though. Ourselves because admitting them makes us somewhat vulnerable and often feel very vulnerable, and our communities because it underlies most of our social fabric and hierarchy. As such, we may find great resistance to this path being the correct one and to implementing it if we decide to proceed on it.
Additionally, many of us have a few decades or more of practice and autopilot pointing in the wrong direction of demonizing, suppressing, and otherwise trying to avoid at least most of our desires, and this takes a while and concerted effort to alter. And even when doing everything right we are likely to fail as much as we succeed for a while in trying to live from our deepest desires in a way that benefits our communities, which added to our revulsion to being or feeling vulnerable and the resistance we might experience from others makes this path require the faith Jesus often mentioned as the thing that healed.
That faith is obscured by our refusal to accept our current internal and external reality, somehow thinking we know better how things ought to be and we will only join the present after we first make things different. I am not saying we need to accept and stay in a dangerous or harmful situation or a safe and meaningless one, but we need to first accept if that is where we are at to gain/find/be granted the faith to move out of it in a sustainable way.
We do have a responsibility to give of ourselves and serve, but if that does not come from the very foundation of our being as something that is an honor and mostly a pleasure to provide, it is inevitably taking us further away from that foundation and will have to eventually collapse to allow us to start from the only solid foundation there is. And to the extent we learn to give and serve from this source we will find the giving and serving actually expands rather than depletes that foundation/source. And that is some really good news.
As such, our responsibility is to abandon ourselves as much as we possibly can to discover, spend time with and act from this foundation found at our individual core and in the connections between ourselves and things beyond us.
Our desires are often somewhat at odds with contributing to our family, friends, and community, but our deepest desires are always about contributing to the communities we are a part of, whether that be a marriage, other family, friends, workplace, church or other group, or earth inhabitant. Spending the time and effort to get to know these deepest desires of ours and how to act upon them in ways that benefit our communities ends up being the only way to give without also subtly and/or covertly taking. As such, that is our responsibility.
We and our communities are heavily invested in trying to get our needs/desires met without admitting we have them though. Ourselves because admitting them makes us somewhat vulnerable and often feel very vulnerable, and our communities because it underlies most of our social fabric and hierarchy. As such, we may find great resistance to this path being the correct one and to implementing it if we decide to proceed on it.
Additionally, many of us have a few decades or more of practice and autopilot pointing in the wrong direction of demonizing, suppressing, and otherwise trying to avoid at least most of our desires, and this takes a while and concerted effort to alter. And even when doing everything right we are likely to fail as much as we succeed for a while in trying to live from our deepest desires in a way that benefits our communities, which added to our revulsion to being or feeling vulnerable and the resistance we might experience from others makes this path require the faith Jesus often mentioned as the thing that healed.
That faith is obscured by our refusal to accept our current internal and external reality, somehow thinking we know better how things ought to be and we will only join the present after we first make things different. I am not saying we need to accept and stay in a dangerous or harmful situation or a safe and meaningless one, but we need to first accept if that is where we are at to gain/find/be granted the faith to move out of it in a sustainable way.
We do have a responsibility to give of ourselves and serve, but if that does not come from the very foundation of our being as something that is an honor and mostly a pleasure to provide, it is inevitably taking us further away from that foundation and will have to eventually collapse to allow us to start from the only solid foundation there is. And to the extent we learn to give and serve from this source we will find the giving and serving actually expands rather than depletes that foundation/source. And that is some really good news.
As such, our responsibility is to abandon ourselves as much as we possibly can to discover, spend time with and act from this foundation found at our individual core and in the connections between ourselves and things beyond us.
I am not trying to persuade anyone that what I am
describing is the same thing as being baptized in the Holy Spirit, but I am saying I think it is. The Body of Christ
is creation from its inception through eternity, and being baptized by the Holy
Spirit is claiming our spot and destiny as a slightly unique, connected and
valuable part of that Body of Christ, and spending the time in communion with
It to have It teach us how to live from this whole and united perspective. And
the good news is that this whole and united perspective is both the external
reality (truth) because we are all inescapably connected and our deepest
internal reality.
All of our thoughts and feelings to the contrary are the pain of being hurt by the world and the fear of being hurt again, which are based upon reality, but being baptized by the Holy Spirit means accepting this real pain and fear to get to and live from the deeper reality of communion, which of course takes the faith Jesus talked about as the thing that heals. To the extent we actually do this the pain and fear are transformed into the very connection to the Body of Christ/Holy Spirit and go beyond bittersweet to peaceful and pleasurable union.
Now please do not get me wrong and think I am being negative towards people who have not found sufficient faith/Grace for this transformation. No one can decide to acquire it and be confident they will, and it is normally a combination of pursuing it and surrendering to not being able to acquire the faith by our own volition that helps us slowly build a foundation of it that mostly seems like successive failures, as we are without our knowledge building it. Basically, in this way we are surrendering a bit more to Grace with each struggle and seemingly failure. Then at some point, if we are really lucky, we realize this Grace/union is Reality and embrace our tiny little spot in It. At this point we realize intuitively that we have found what everyone has always been looking for and we did it as a result of our efforts. However, not from being successful in those efforts but rather from failing at what we thought we were trying to do. So in a real sense it occurred both as a result of our efforts and in spite of our efforts.
All of our thoughts and feelings to the contrary are the pain of being hurt by the world and the fear of being hurt again, which are based upon reality, but being baptized by the Holy Spirit means accepting this real pain and fear to get to and live from the deeper reality of communion, which of course takes the faith Jesus talked about as the thing that heals. To the extent we actually do this the pain and fear are transformed into the very connection to the Body of Christ/Holy Spirit and go beyond bittersweet to peaceful and pleasurable union.
Now please do not get me wrong and think I am being negative towards people who have not found sufficient faith/Grace for this transformation. No one can decide to acquire it and be confident they will, and it is normally a combination of pursuing it and surrendering to not being able to acquire the faith by our own volition that helps us slowly build a foundation of it that mostly seems like successive failures, as we are without our knowledge building it. Basically, in this way we are surrendering a bit more to Grace with each struggle and seemingly failure. Then at some point, if we are really lucky, we realize this Grace/union is Reality and embrace our tiny little spot in It. At this point we realize intuitively that we have found what everyone has always been looking for and we did it as a result of our efforts. However, not from being successful in those efforts but rather from failing at what we thought we were trying to do. So in a real sense it occurred both as a result of our efforts and in spite of our efforts.
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