Punitive Church; Resentful Handmaids

When the church is punitive, resentment will be its handmaid.

It is never the case that someone is preventing you from living freely; we always willingly give ourselves over into social slavery.

The world is full of people who flaunt their social status and who believe that they have the mandate to subject others to their own self-invented, moral authority.

The solution is not simply a matter of becoming your own master; it is a matter of not being a false self among other false selves.

The problem is this: you have relinquished your true self to dependence upon a system or an organization or a society or leaders or individuals who give you an identity. You have bought into it. They invent an identity, justify it, market it, and you buy it. But it is their invention. And people’s invented identities are always those which are easiest for them to be, even though they will be disguised as grandiose and universal; there is never any real discipline involved, or any real understanding of what is real for that matter. It is all a fabrication. People never ask you about your self, let alone who we all are when we are stripped down to nothing and standing before God. And punishment is always close at hand for those who are not quite in step with their programs. These range from corporeal to banishment to shaming.

If you want to stop being resentful of all of this, then you only have to renounce the shadow self - the false self - that subscribes to this enthralled confusion. Stop lauding and flattering the tyrant to whom you remain subject. If it is a nation, then stop cooperating with the nationalists, or leave. If it is a corporation, then find a new way to make a living. If it is a friend, then walk away. If it is a denomination, then find a new way to worship. If it is a spouse, walk out. Radical action is needed. The bulk of counsellors to whom people will send you in the midst of what they perceive to be your 'crisis' are of no avail. To get into their positions of authority they are themselves slaves to the system.

Servility is a bitch.

No one else is preventing you from living freely. No one is stopping you from directly experiencing God. No one is putting any blockages in your way to simple, contemplative living except yourself. But it is best to both have a real sense of the challenges that people faced in the past who tried to do this (read your Bible and the lives of the saints), as well as to know what it is that you want personally/psychologically out of the contemplative life. Be reassured that this gravitating away from a socially constructed self is not unnatural, unhealthy, heretical, or antisocial.

Remember: God did not invite Israel to leave the slavery of Egypt behind, God commanded them to do so.