Delusional

The exclusiveness with which people organize themselves short-circuits all personal sincerity. Trying to force people into certain behaviours, no matter how urgent or necessary, always produces a cloistered ghetto of pious fantasy. All politicking is always self-interested; disguised spear thrusts at power. Climate activists, labour unions, and who gets to say Mass at the altar...it is all the same. Don't tell me how to run my life! The one exception - the way out - is the absolute death of self, which is much more easily written/spoken about than done. But what do you expect in a world that believes in words and not in actions. In fact, un-worded actions that are instinctive and humble and unscripted and deeply self-sacrificing and meek and immediately responsive to the immediate needs of those immediately in front of your face, this is unheard of and untrusted anywhere in the west today. It is this other micro-management, we are taught, that is the only reality. The old wag rings true, insanity is defined by doing the same things but expecting a different outcome. In reality the vows that people - and they are rife - take need to be revamped. In the church the exclusiveness (and ensuing protectionism) of religious vows that are purported to break open the life of faith need to be made available to the masses, and not remained hermetically sealed. As Christ spoke to Martha, there is one thing necessary, and her sister Mary had found it. That one thing is full, wrapped openness tot he presence of God. Marthas have killed the church even as they have killed all social interaction from the start of human record keeping. Reform movements throughout the two thousand year history of the church have repeatedly returned to this central kernel of reality: direct interaction with God is possible for all who go there...but only for those who go there. And it is in that light that we see light and only in that light. That is the invitation-with-revelation that comes when you sell everything you have, give the proceeds to the poor, fully deny yourself, and simply wait for God to show up. But who wants to do that today? Well, certainly not those who think that they can come up with a better plan either for themselves or for the world, that's for sure. Peter Maurin said it best, that living this way makes it easier for people to be good. But as with Christ, who wants to listen to a crazed man who would give everything away while sleeping on park benches in his only suit of rumpled clothes? Most would rather accuse him of insincerity and a demented form of egotism, rather than to examine their own motives, which in all truth just might be something which they are genuinely incapable of doing, and for which they need the pity of those whom they indeed crucify even today.