I am a bit frustrated by some simple things that are much harder than they should be. I have come to strongly believe that often our nature works against us. I think this is what folk like Augustine meant by the "fall." I think that our basic selfishness and impulses toward survival, so important when we are young, even babies, or when we were more animalistic, (or when we are threatened and vulnerable, injured or broken, when our circumstances approximate the darkest moments of our past), becomes a real debilitation as we try and become better people, families, communities, societies. It is this battle within us that is the foundation of most of our difficulties--maybe all of them--when we consider that those who hurt us likely suffer from the same debilitations.
The hardest part is facing this about ourselves first, admitting the truth to ourselves about ourselves. This is difficult work, this examined life is excruciating and rewarding: certa
inly the least done.
Our nature, if there is such a thing, is surely shaped by our personal experience and more, the patterns or tendencies built by a billion choices most of which we did not make but have been bequeathed to us as a inheritance in our blood.
This is why it does no good to blame at all and why it is, at the same time, absolutely vital and life-giving to take responsibility for the small choices we make that build the larger choices: the art that is our lives. Our destiny, which is not fixed by our inheritance, by our mistakes, but is open, that is, designed by our hope. We are what we hope! And when we lose hope we are doomed to the trajectory of our nature, we are bound by the inertia of our past and only death awaits us. But when we hope, believe and act in alignment with these hopes we are born, again. The "again" signifies the great irony of hope that it only exists as a response to the power of death, which is only fear. The "again" signifies resilience, resurrection.
Hope requires untold amounts of courage. It is not an accident. It is our only salvation from the fall. It is the ability to fly. It is the only real freedom there is for a soul, a psyche. And as difficult as it is to believe, it IS a gift. It is already there in the darkness, it is born in us, somehow, at the very moment that it or death is the only choice. only there. It is LIFE! This too is our nature, somehow to both fall and to hope.
Toby Sanders - Facebook - December 1, 2012
