FIVE THINGS THAT WILL KILL YOU…AND YOU WON’T EVEN SEE IT COMING

I have always been intrigued by the statement, “The wages of sin are death.” For some reason, I think about this topic whenever political or societal news comes online through my YouTube streaming. I offer you my thoughts about the topic of why society seems to be going to Hell in a handbasket and nobody can do anything to stop it. As always, all I can present is my opinion or commentary in the context of what I have learned about life that makes it worth living.

I need to share with you two techniques that I have used in my thought process.

1. DUALING CITIZENSHIPS — When I look out at life, I do so through the lenses of several types of aids, that help me to discern and therefore dissect reality into manageable chunks of logic that make sense to me. Dual citizenship is a concept that I use almost daily. I think it means that I am a citizen of two worlds, that of my physical and mental universe (the world as St. Paul terms it) but also I have a passport to the world of the spirit, comprising physical, mental, and spiritual universes. These two are different and in many ways competing. They are at war with each other over who will win the battle of the one center (my second technique that I will get to next). With the Baptism of water and the Spirit, I have been adopted by the Father as a son (daughter) and heir of the kingdom of heaven. Jesus told us that his kingdom was not of this world. For me, I live in the tension between the world of original sin (a la Genesis), and one of trying to move from my false self (the world) to my new self, which prepares me for the trip to be with Christ. For this topic of false ideas or values, I term those choices as being from the world and incapable of propelling or compelling me to the next level of my human evolution, to be a citizen of heaven now, and later on. God, and though God, Christ, gave me and all those who believe, the template to have spirituality makes sense. This leads to my next technique.
2. YOUR MOST IMPORTANT CHOICE IS WHAT YOU PUT AT YOUR CENTER AND HOW DILIGENTLY YOU STRUGGLE TO KEEP IT ON TOP. I think that each of us, be we atheists, paganists, Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, and Hindus, to name a few, has only one center to our life. It is the one principle upon which all others depend. It is the bull’s eye for the archer, the basket for the basketball player, and the one principle that, if you took it away, nothing else makes sense. What we place at our center is a free choice and all choices have consequences. Adam and Eve make their choice and the result is the mythic story of why we humans are in such deep do-do all the time. It is why there is imperfection and why chronic wars, strife, murders, and thefts happen. We not only have the free choice to choose anything we want as our center, but also must daily keep it there because the world keeps trying to depose our choice in favor of its own default. The default of each human is not goodness but human nature, wounded by the sin of Adam and Eve. Remember, sin, in this case, means that God told them what would make them more human and heirs of the Garden of Eden, but they chose the world versus what God said is true…and they had consequences. With Christ, the covenant relationship is reestablished once again (Romans 5), but those pesky effects of sin are now our default behaviors, emotions, and values. Because of our ability to be dual citizens, we have the opportunity to choose good (in this case, tell God once again that His way is THE WAY. To do that each us us must die to that false self, the world, even though it seems enticing and like cotton candy, in favor of the cross, and choosing what is right over what is easy. Christ came to TELL us and SHOW us what it right and fulfill the Old Testament relationship, to be a light of revelation to the Gentiles.
   

What these techniques mean for me is to give me the framework for all of this to make sense. In addition, I can continue to grow deeper (capacitas dei) each day in how the choice of my center does not make the struggle to be spiritual any easier, but that I have the power from God to give me knowledge, love, and service now and in the life to come.

My center is, and has been since 1963, “Have in your the mind of Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 2:5). I use this center daily to convert my false self to my new self. Each day is a new day; each day is a lifetime. All the blogs that go way back to 2017 are based on that one phrase: how about that for being deep. I tell people all I do is try to write down what I hear during my Lectio Divina. I realize I only get about 5% of it; at least it keeps my mind thriving on making those old wineskins new so I can hold the wisdom of the Holy Spirit. The older I get, the more I forget, but I forge ahead with my contemplative Lay Cistercian Way, which is unique to me.

The late Father Conrad Louis, O.S.B., my moral theology instructor at St. Meinrad School of Theology back in 1963, was giving us insights into sin and the deceptive way it creeps into one’s thinking to seduce those who are righteous (or even not so much). He told us that we take sin for granted, even though we must continuously fight against becoming complacent by saying, “After all, it is only sin.” The statement I remember, and one that resonates with me as I ruminate on the topic of five themes that can kill you, is “You don’t break the commandments, they break you.” Of course, that thought went right over the top of my head, like so many others that I am now resurrecting to find out just how potent they actually were.

Here are some of my thoughts about placing something at your center that may eventually kill you.

Humans get bored easily when it comes to pushing back against perceived evils such as drink, drugs, and orgiastic sex (Erich Fromm’s list of unauthentic ways to love) https://ia800201.us.archive.org/30/items/TheArtOfLoving/43799393-The-Art-of-Loving-Erich-Fromm_text.pdf

• Humans tend to read for enjoyment rather than to increase their capacity to love
• Whatever you place as your one center is what I would call God.
• There can be good choices as your center or poor ones. There is no punishment for choosing the wrong center, but there are consequences.
• What your place at your center is constantly being challenged by the rivals to be “top cop, or “top soldier.”
• If you don’t work daily, you will lose your center and won’t even realize it.
• Like a false self, a false center means your chosen center will eventually kill your Faith, Hope, and Love.
• That is why I stress daily conversio morae and capacitas dei to be able to keep centered on Christ Jesus as The Christ Principle. An adopted son or daughter of the Father can never let their guard down or lose the awareness that the Devil and its minions are just waiting for them to falter. The Psalms give us the image of a sentinel waiting for the dawn, having guarded the city throughout the night and been vigilant. We are that sentinel each day.
• Only the energy of Christ, present through the Holy Spirit as we make our will sit down next to Jesus for a recharge, has the power of transformation from humanity to spirituality. Eucharist, the Real Presence of Christ, is our energy source, one that does not originate from anything human but overshadows us and allows us to participate according to our disposition (capacitas dei). The Holy Sacrament of Forgiveness is another energy source that makes all things new once again.
• False choices do not produce any energy to lift us up to claim our inheritance as the fullness of what it means to be human.
• In thinking about dualing citizenships, if we never get to the spiritual level, even though our natural life is good with great outcomes, we still fail to achieve our destiny as human being who belongs with God in heaven.
• False choices for our center will kill our spiritual life if we have chosen that one, but it can also keep us from moving forward in our evolution to be what nature intended from creation.
• All we have to do is nothing to keep from descending into the Hell of casuistry, rationalism, individualism, and thinking that we are god. How do you know you have done this? What is your center?
• If you break with God’s law, no matter what your motivation is to be sincere or what society says is the morality of the month, it breaks you due to the choice to go against Truth, Absolute Truth. It doesn’t matter what you think the truth is. What matters is what God tells us what truth is. With original sin and the cult of individual choice, each person is the template for what is true for them. This is internal truth (limited to our humanity) rather than the choice that we make when we say to the Father, “Thy will be done, on the earth as it is in the heavens.” It is my giving the most precious gift from God to humans, free will without punishment for choosing what is false, back to the Father in the Eucharist, In Lectio Divina, in Liturgy of the Hours, in contemplative prayer, as a sign of our love.
• Sin is almost always seen as something an individual does one time that is either mortal or venial and which you must confess to be forgiven by God. But might there be an even deeper meaning to the concept of sin as missing the whole point of your existence? If, as I always do, look at how all reality fits together, I think that the physical, mental, and spiritual universes are all one, yet linked together, and what happens in one permeates through all of them. In the case of a sinful approach to life, which is that first citizenship above, it means that if humanity as a species, trends toward that which will destroy it (the wages of sin is death), then eventually nature will correct itself, as in Sodom and Gomorrah.
• The implication of this is that sin is not an individual, one-time action against God’s laws, but that it is the absence of any standards except for personal gain or what’s in it for me. I say all of this to bring up the point that I observe our society going down the drain of morality and not even knowing what is going on. My research into how our species moves forward in its collective will, often like lemmings going over the cliffs, has to do with our evolution or devolution. It is my contention that society is becoming more and more fixated on what is easy rather than what is right. The fact that so many articles and YouTube segments now tout atheism as gaining in popularity in other countries, and even in the United States, means that great swabs of people do not hold what God has told us to do to move to the next level of our evolution, intelligent progression.
• There are three types of believers out there.
• Those who believe that there is a power beyond physical reality and that power has bent down to show humans how to rise to the next level of their evolution and one that fulls their destiny as sons and daughters of the Father. This belief comprises those who actually get what God has come to show us all the way to those for whom religion is like the Moose or Elks Clubs. It is harmless but a social club.
• Then there are those who think, and sincerely so, that there is no God nor ever was and that all there is, is human societies of ideologies trying to move forward toward something in the future.
• Last of all, there are those who live out their lives not believing in any god or some vague representation of their hope in the future, but not really caring if there is a god or not. I observe this is the greatest category of humans past and present, who are not atheist or agnostic nor Catholic or Christian, but just live as though there was only what life has to offer, then nothing.
• Just as there is movement of reality towards a point in the future (Omega) there is also complexity in the physical, mental, but also spiritual universes. I have come to the conclusion that when enough individuals abandon what God has as being natural and leading to movement forward, there is a massive correction that nature makes. Remember, God’s fingerprints are on each atom and molecule and each particle of matter and gas, so the natural trend is toward what is true about nature. When humans (not animals) go down the wrong path, be it the Church or Society, the Holy Spirit will allow our collective choices to spring back to what they should be, much like a seismic fault line snaps back. We call that by the name earthquake. I think our collective spirituality springs back like that automatically and we won’t see it coming. In my observations, humankind is rejecting more and more who we are or can become so there is a spring back in the offing. Sodom and Gomorrah was such an event, couched in the story of fire and brimstone. Does God cause this? No. Here we have the Genesis Principle again raising its head to give us an insight that our collective spiritual nature will react to evil and sin (going the wrong direction).
• As an individual, my center is a free choice without repercussions. If enough individuals choose what is bad for our nature as human beings, and that trend is irreversible, nature will protect the creation of matter and restore the way, the truth, leading to the life we were intended to discover, Omega. I think such a catastrophe is going to happen (don’t ask me when, because these are the musings of a broken-down, old Lay Cistercian, who speaks for no one but himself.)

THE ONE CENTER THAT LEADS TO MY FULFILLMENT AS A HUMAN BEING

I have discovered only one center that is outside of myself (divine nature) that gives me the power I need to lift up to the next level of my evolution, as I can assimilate it (contemplative prayer and Lay Cistercian practices). This power doesn’t destroy me but allows me to fulfill my destiny as an adopted son (daughter) of the Father. I have selected this phrase from Philippians 2:5, “Have in you the mind of Christ Jesus,” which is my 100% center and which I have held since 1962. Each day, I measure myself against this center. Each day, I try to be what it proposes, only to find out that it is to be grasped at but never mastered. I am okay with that.

FIVE SINFUL CENTERS THAT DO NOT LEAD US TO BEING FULLY HUMAN

There are at least the top five centers that, if I place them as 100% of my self, become false selves and have consequences of dissonance that I am not even conscious of when I do them.

1. PRIDE — The king of Cardinal Sins, Pride at my center makes me incresingly take the press releases that I am god seriously.
2. MONEY– Money is the root of all evil. Putting money alone as the sole reason you exist will kill your other spiritual values.
3. LUST– Lust for the sake of lust (Erich Fromm calls this the orgiastic state of sex) kills those around it like chemical weed killers.
4. ADULATION — Wanting to be worshipped as a human or as a god is murder.
5. RELIGION– Religion is never a good center because our human nature means others must follow what I say or go to hell. Be careful of this one.

If you noticed that these false centers lead to chaos and dysfunction of the human condition, you are correct. Think about this from a profound basis.

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