Best Friends

It is a grave mistake to believe that discipline is a good in and of itself. This is a concept that rationalizes what the person believes to be a means to an end, but which in fact uses discipline to one's own disadvantage. Objectives like this are always irrational or unreal or self-contradictory. They produce illusions of holiness whose objectives are to control God. Practising spiritual disciplines are never about exhorting controls or methodologies. Instead, genuine discipline calls into question the obtaining of goals themselves in the light of simple, direct reality and daily life. Much that passes for contemplation is nothing more than a narrow narcissism and self-love that is placed at a safe distance from from the holistic and immanent experience of God in the natural world. The challenge is to not barricade oneself in a cloistered subjectivity. You must learn to make silence and solitude and mystery and uncertainty your best friends.