It gets tough
and scary from hence, for so should an experiential initiation be…
The word ‘Go, sell all that you have’ (Mt 19: 21),
shall soon happen to us all. We shall have to, willingly or unwillingly, let go
and let God. Everything perishes, why deny that, or why not willingly confront this
reality? We live within the confines of change and decay. Nothing we bring to
this world, nothing we shall take away from it (1Tim 6:7) It is all vanity of vanities! (Eccl
1:2).
Christ’s admonition
for us to leave houses, brothers, sisters, father, mother, wife, children, or
fields for His sake (Mt 19:29) is a benevolent one, because entropy is the ultimate nature
of everything. Sooner or later all dependency shall go, and only Christ, who is capable of reversing entropy through the cross on Calvary, who shall remain.
It is good spiritual
practice to learn to strip oneself from all things. The money we labour for, the children we groom, the spouse we cherish, the prestige and position we strive after, even the body we protect and adore, all these shall decay, and we ourselves
shall be gone. We cannot be spiritual by clinging unto these. Apart from its peak, every hierarchy
of Maslow shall collapse. Ego, money, family, security all shall be stripped.
What is
tougher to bear in this journey is not so much the stripping, as the fact that
these ordeals often happen through human agents who slander, judge, condemn,
malign and betray us. The closer those people are, the tougher it is for us to
bear!
The path of
liberation is that of detachment, that is the stuff Lent is made of. Detachment
is tough, but it makes us wise. Without detachment, we cannot be wise, and without
wisdom, we shall remain a slave of the System, and there is more toil being a
slave of the System than accepting to be stripped.
Let us ask our
Blessed Mother, the Virgin Mary, the Star of the Sea, to help us in stripping
our numerous garments. She knows how to carefully
and lovingly strip us of our attachments so that this is not overtly hurting.
Our Lady
(Notre Dame) of Paris, Pray for us.
No comments:
Post a Comment