Tuesday, January 25, 2005

Conduct: the space behind the glass

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If conduct is our truest way of worship, why does this leave me so scared? What is going on?

(Aside from my own evaluation that my own conduct is consisently appalling and fake -- it would turn God's stomach if God were the giant body that most people visualize.)

((And gets worse when I try to repair it.))

(((So that "faith not works" becomes this hasty bandage that I apply to my own ghoulishness.)))

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The fear. Is it that I don't know what conduct is? In other words, don't know what to do? Moment by moment the question recurs: what right now? what step will do the least damage?

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There is a barrier like glass (metaphor of Francis P Sullivan SJ). Something gets through -- but touch does not. Can't touch. Light goes through, also something else. The gap is not empty but feels like a sprouting vacuum.

This is the point where omnipotent God has stopped -- willingly. God knows why. Out of love perhaps? giving the creature the freedom to move of its own volition? An infinitesimal space, too small to measure or of course see: the creature's separation from God. That infinitesimal space is conduct. I don't know what to do with it. Use it? How? Widen it? Make it smaller if I can? Give it up? Give it away?

Talk about it like an idiot?

What to do with this gift? Will God eventually take it back? Is my existence inside it? What to *do* with it???

One listens for an answer -- but that too, the listening, occurs within this infinitesimal space.

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