Be Serious

A serious person thinks about life and death and grapples with what those might mean because the meaning of death is directly related to the meaning of life. If you say that death has no meaning, it’s just the end, curtains, goodbye, then you have washed your hands of spiritual responsibility. You have trivialised life because you have denied death, and, yes, you have denied it because you have reduced it to nothing and you can only do that by rejecting what it is to be human. For a human being is like an iceberg though with this important difference. It’s an upside down iceberg with the perceived part the lowest part and the hidden part, which nevertheless supports the whole, stretching up above and beyond what is seen and known. The boundary between the two can be melted occasionally in life but is only fully crossed at death.

Human beings come into this world because, unlike in the spiritual domain from whence we derive, we do not know God directly here. We have to find him. We have to choose him. Everything in nature obeys God’s laws automatically except man. We have a natural part which does obey as it must but a human being is also a person so there is necessity but there is also freedom. God has renounced his supreme power to give us some power and he has done so because of love in which there can be no compulsion.

There are fewer and fewer serious people these days, people really willing to think for themselves and look life squarely in the face. We are too distracted by phenomena and the shiny trinkets of modern technology to try to understand what a human being really is. Some people do seek a spiritual answer but the fact is not all forms of spirituality are equally valid. There are some forms that seek to reduce human beings purely to a kind of naked spirit, void of form and individuality. But this is a return to our origins without having learnt the lessons of creation and the material world, and if God had wanted this for us he would never have bothered sending us out into this world, separated from him in order to find him again and know him consciously for who and what he is. There is a higher form of spirituality which includes the spiritual and the individual and the fruits of this are love and creativity, something that pure spirit does not know. For the love that advocates of the pure spirit path talk of is not really this spiritual love at all. They have borrowed the concept from theistic religion while rejecting what makes it possible. Their love is impersonal but impersonal love is a contradiction in terms. God’s love is not impersonal and directed equally to everything. He loves more what opens itself more fully to his love and reflects it back.

As the world progresses further and further into what is effectively chaos it is critical that people become serious. Don’t accept what you are told by authority without submitting it to a thorough intuitive assessment. Even if everyone you know goes along with the agenda that is no reason for you to follow. Hold up everything you are told to the truth of Christ and see whether it stands or falls in that light. The time is coming when Christ will be the only serious thing left.