"spirituality"タグの名言
The operative word in these lines from D.H. Lawrence, who wasn’t a conventionally religious person, is “soul.” It’s a word that has become almost embarrassing for many contemporary people unless it is completely stripped of its religious meaning. Perhaps that’s just what it needs sometimes: to be stripped of its “religious” meaning, in the sense that faith itself sometimes needs to be stripped of its social and historical encrustations and returned to its first, churchless incarnation in the human heart. That’s what the twentieth century was, a kind of windstorm-scouring of all we thought was knowledge, and truth, and ours - until it became too strong for us, or we too weak for it, and “the self replaced the soul as the first of survival” (Fanny Howe). Anxiety comes from the self as ultimate concern, from the fact that the self cannot bear this ultimate concern: it buckles and wavers under the strain, and eventually, inevitability, it breaks.
Silence leads to acceptance, which leads to liberation. All of our conditioning is then suspended; so, too, are morals, manners, even simple courtesy. Dogmas, rules, commandments, churches, political parties, opinions, doctrines, ideologies, and gurus fall away. All that remains is reality. All that remains is truth. How free we suddenly feel!
I lay in bed, either trying to fall asleep or having just woken up, and I contemplate the direction my life is going. Sadly, I haven’t the faintest idea what direction that is. Because, to me, I’m standing still; no steam in my engine propelling me down the rails of Life Railroad. Now, I’m not bothered by it every waking minute of every day; however, it is something that hits me from time to time. It’s an attack by the enemy, made to draw my attention away from God. Let me tell you, it’s a darn fine attack, too. Not that it works, but boy does it take a lot to keep my mind focused on the Lord.
