A MOSAIC PIECE OF MY LIFE: What I use to fill in the blanks.

I find it very disconcerting that, as I come to the end of my human existence, I only now discover some of the missing pieces that would have made all of this so simple had I had them in my wheelhouse forty years ago. But, because I only garnered a fleeting piece of the truth here and there, the final pieces seem to pop up unannounced in my 83rd year.

There are many blanks left for me to discover what it means to be fully human, what it means to love fiercely, and what truth stands the test of time. Today, I will deal with one of them: what it means to die to myself to open up the next level of my human evolution and achieve some resolution to the dissolution I feel at not knowing or loving at my most profound level. It is a process of discovery for me, one not found in textbooks or from the teachings of the Catholic Church, but one where I must fill in the banks. What I use to fill in these blanks comes from my life experiences as they are interpreted with The Christ Principle (including the teachings of the Catholic Church on how to know, love, and serve God in this world and be happy in the next life).

DUAL CITIZENSHIP

I use the two-citizenship model for this fill-in-the-blank. Remember, my assumption is that humans evolved reasoning to move deeper into my humanity and fulfill the evolutional role. More importantly, the freedom to choose and continue to choose (sustainability) what they think will help them attain their innermost yearnings.

My premise is that to move to this next level requires an act of individual choice that will lift us up to that next level of our evolution. The problem is that my nature, with its evolution from animality to rationality, does not know how to do this (reasoning) or the energy to achieve this next step without help from a source outside of us to “give us a boost up.” We have reason for a reason to discover what that outside source is. Still, we also have free will to allow us to tap into that energy that alone can lift up humanity to the next level, one required by nature but which nature alone is unable to attain.

This gap I call the Christ Principle, the source of that energy that enables me, the individual, to use power outside of myself to become fully human as nature intended. This “hiccup” in evolution means I must look for something outside myself with the energy to help me. Once I know what this energy is and how to use it, I must die to everything I know to be accurate, like abandoning what my reason and free will tell me is correct, to step out (existence) beyond what is nature to what becomes a super nature or spiritual dimension. The duality of living in the world with all its corruptions of mind and matter (not moral) is the citizenship of my base or the physical and mental universes, over which I don’t have control, to the next phase in my evolution, the primacy of freedom to choose. John 14 refers to the realm of the kingdom of the earth. I want to move from the kingdom of the earth to expand that to attain the kingdom of heaven. This action requires me to use my reasoning and freedom to choose what I reasoned in an authentic way to what nature requires.

This moves me from just existing in a physical and mental universe (the citizenship of the world) to embracing a new reality with new rules and measurements while retaining the fullness of what it means to be a human being at the deepest levels attainable in this life.

Dying to self means fulfilling the pathways from the beginning of all that is real. God’s fingerprints are on all physical matter and mental intelligence progression to move toward fulfilling the needs of a hungry heart to rest with what nature intended. All nature flows towards its destiny with the complexity of what I learned in my lifetime to make a free choice to move to that second citizenship, that of an adopted son or daughter, designed just for me (and you) from the beginning of time.

There are two types of dying to self. One is the complete abandonment of what I can know and choose about what is fundamental to a new set of assumptions that are actually at odds with my citizenship of the world. The second type of dying is the daily struggle I have to re-choose (conversio morae) my center to renew my commitment to be a sign of contradiction in the world. If I don’t use it, I lose it.

One way that I have chosen to do that is to be part of a gathering of believers called Lay Christians. http://www.cistercian.net. These lay people (not clergy) follow the teachings of St. Benedict as interpreted and practiced by the Cistercian Way. We meet once a month to strengthen our commitment to the process of dying to self each day. I call it the martyrdom of the ordinary because I must constantly challenge the meaning of what the world says is true, every day, to replace it with The Christ Principle, the constant source of strength and enlightenment to my reason and free will to choose what is right for me (not what is always easy).

To be continued…

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