Chapter 3: What conclusions may be drawn from the fact that God is Father of men.
If a man could only take to heart this judgement, as he ought, that we are all, before anything else, children of God and that God is the Father of gods and men, I think that he will never harbor a mean or ignoble thought about himself.
A part of me would like to say that God has regularly gotten me into trouble, but that is quite wrong. Rather, I have regularly gotten myself into trouble, and God has seemed the most convenient excuse.
There is something quite perverse about a tendency to turn the absolute into something relative, and the relative into something absolute. The Divine becomes a crutch for all my preferences, and before too long I am trying to crown myself as the supreme ruler.
I wasted too many years being angry with people for not seeing God in quite the same way that I did, an unmistakable sign that I was applying finite standards to an infinite reality. Once we start talking about “my” God as distinct from “your” God, we are no longer talking about God at all, but only about ourselves. There can never be human limits to what is, by definition, without limit.
As soon as God exists when things are going my way, and He then suddenly doesn’t exist when I have hit an obstacle, there is a major problem in my thinking. I have reversed the order of Nature, confusing causes and effects, the measure with the things measured.
I would once have taken this passage by Epictetus from the standpoint of a zealot, insisting that the man upstairs had my back. It took me some time to think of it differently, that my own life would be transformed completely once I no longer thought of anything as ultimately being “mine” at all.
So am I to think that “religious” people will necessarily be good people? Hardly, as I must first define my terms more clearly. There is a world of difference between having a lust for God and a love for God, between demanding everything and accepting everything. The defining moment will come when I decide if I am myself the whole or rather a part within the whole.
I can’t help but notice how many proponents of a “modern” Stoicism will latch onto the passages that stress self-reliance, while completely overlooking the passages that demand piety. I know that this is precisely what I have also done, looking at a “me” without the greater context of an “All”, of an individual mind separated from the Universal Mind.
The authority I have, for this moment, over myself is, in turn, gifted to me by Providence. I will only understand myself, and therefore do right for myself, when I come to terms with this necessary fact.
If a man could only take to heart this judgement, as he ought, that we are all, before anything else, children of God and that God is the Father of gods and men, I think that he will never harbor a mean or ignoble thought about himself.
A part of me would like to say that God has regularly gotten me into trouble, but that is quite wrong. Rather, I have regularly gotten myself into trouble, and God has seemed the most convenient excuse.
There is something quite perverse about a tendency to turn the absolute into something relative, and the relative into something absolute. The Divine becomes a crutch for all my preferences, and before too long I am trying to crown myself as the supreme ruler.
I wasted too many years being angry with people for not seeing God in quite the same way that I did, an unmistakable sign that I was applying finite standards to an infinite reality. Once we start talking about “my” God as distinct from “your” God, we are no longer talking about God at all, but only about ourselves. There can never be human limits to what is, by definition, without limit.
As soon as God exists when things are going my way, and He then suddenly doesn’t exist when I have hit an obstacle, there is a major problem in my thinking. I have reversed the order of Nature, confusing causes and effects, the measure with the things measured.
I would once have taken this passage by Epictetus from the standpoint of a zealot, insisting that the man upstairs had my back. It took me some time to think of it differently, that my own life would be transformed completely once I no longer thought of anything as ultimately being “mine” at all.
So am I to think that “religious” people will necessarily be good people? Hardly, as I must first define my terms more clearly. There is a world of difference between having a lust for God and a love for God, between demanding everything and accepting everything. The defining moment will come when I decide if I am myself the whole or rather a part within the whole.
I can’t help but notice how many proponents of a “modern” Stoicism will latch onto the passages that stress self-reliance, while completely overlooking the passages that demand piety. I know that this is precisely what I have also done, looking at a “me” without the greater context of an “All”, of an individual mind separated from the Universal Mind.
The authority I have, for this moment, over myself is, in turn, gifted to me by Providence. I will only understand myself, and therefore do right for myself, when I come to terms with this necessary fact.
Written in 9/2000
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