What the Lord Hath Made Crooked (Part 3 of 10)

The following is a series of attached photos sent from Liza to the group. As usual, we publish typed excerpts of these illuminated texts along with the original photo. The best way is to read the text, of course, is to to experience it in its illuminated form.

10. (Continued) You yearn for brotherly, for sisterly love. You yearn to love others and you yearn to fulfill your earthly potential, seeing it for what it truly is: a gift from the heavens. To yearn for these things, no matter at the moment, signifies, to me, that your path remains illuminated through your unrelenting faith. Having seen the path so clearly at all, you suffer from anguish each time you realize your actions, thoughts, as well as the corrective actions and thoughts of humanity, have again lead you and all of us away from it. (note: revisit Ubuntuism in next letter--"I am because you are.") I think the foundation and frequency of your self-judgments reveal how deeply your faith has seeped into your essence. To exist as a Catholic is to follow the rules through your actions because that's what you're told to do. Generally, these existences are founded and dictated on guilt, fear, and obligation; their existence as Catholics preceded their essence as Catholics. To be Catholic in essence (correction: your faith hasn't "seeped into your essence," it is your essence) is to organize your very being not around these "rules," but through them through you. It is to feel your faith, not just act out your faith. It is to suffer with mind, body, soul, to feel the failure so deeply that it becomes a part of you. This is a tremendous blessing, you see, but it is and can only remain a fruitful blessing when balanced with the following understanding: habitual failing does not define us as permanent failures. We must love both ourselves and one another in our successes and most importantly we must love both ourselves and one another through our failures. We must be kind; we must be patient. Though it's of great importance that we're always aligned with our path or in the process of making our way back toward it, it's perhaps of even greater importance that we acknowledge the impracticality of never stumbling at from it all. This sounds like a lazy and self-interested approach to personifying our faith, yes, but once again I will ask you to exercise your patience with me as I sift through this rubble I've created in search of a treasure worth sharing.
11. We must strive for perfection with all of our body and all of our soul, but we must do this with the understanding that we will never reach perfection on this earth. What is life if not a journey toward perfection? Take the Sanskrit root for "to be" for instance. bhū́ → भू. Did you know it's the same as the root of "to grow" and "to dwell on Earth (not in Heaven)"? Did you know that's the meaning of this life? I can't stress enough how much this being human is a process, and a trying one at that. Each of us is no more than a work in progress, or as my boy Rumi says, a guest house. And, like that, I've found my next point or rather it's found me. Why I say your faith is "unrelenting." Why I say you've seen the face of God and now you must live in separation from it.
12. So these "failures" to be patient, loving, and kind are agents of personal (and collective) growth. They're in our lives to illuminate our routes back to our paths. To revisit Rumi once more, EACH OF THESE FAILURES HAS BEEN SENT AS A GUIDE FROM BEYOND! Entertain them all. I was by NO means referring to you as a conservative, Art. Nor was I referring to myself as a radical. I found the essays meaningful, and thought they related nicely to something or other at the time. Sorry for the miscommunication though it seems as though you ultimately benefited from it by replacing the presumed periods with open-ended question marks. In Neil Postman's Teaching as a Subversive Activity (Have you read/re-read it yet, Will?), he writes of how we all enter school as question marks and leave school as periods. I both love and despise this observation and it's through this love and through this hate that I welcome any moment that stirs us from the tranquil comfort of the period of thinking we have tried the answers. There's a danger in comfort→danja, danja, high voltage!