Dirtbag Faith

Dirtbag -

• A person who is committed to a given (usually extreme) lifestyle to the point of abandoning employment and other societal norms in order to pursue that lifestyle.

• An individual who is not capable of respectfully participating in any common aspect of society.

The death of the old self means the death of the routine way in which people see and interact with the world. In this, self-seeking and a conventional social life are found to be nothing. This swap is by no means remaining the previous persona, except now found to be in possession of a legal certificate that entitles them to a special status or privilege or final reward. Instead, there is a genuine letting go of all things. Discipline under this rubric facilitates expanding one's capacity for the actual experience of God outside of what one can control themself. Deeply connected to the natural world, it is by no means materialistic in the sense of manipulating one's environment for one's own gain, but is simply an openness to God in the daily flux of what the natural world brings in and of itself. It does not exclude humans from this milieu, but it certainly does exclude the manipulations that human creativity imposes on the world by way of people's arrogant assumptions that what is naturally there is meant to serve human life and can be extracted willy-nilly and applied for human benefit. These two natures - what St. Paul denoted as the differences between the old man and the new man - could not be more opposed to one another.