The Spiritual and the Worldly

In my last post I described leftism as the ape of spirituality. By this I meant that it is a degenerate, corrupted imitation of spirituality which seems to many people in the absence of any real spiritual understanding to be a moral thing. But it is actually profoundly immoral because it grounds itself in a denial of the very source of true morality which is God. You may say that some people on the left believe in God but they don't really, not the living God and Father of Creation. They believe in humanity first and foremost, that is their idol, and in fact I wonder if they actually even believe in humanity or just believe in believing in it.

The ideas behind what we call the left seemed to many people to come about for a good reason. There was injustice. There was cruelty. There were great classes of human beings who were treated badly. The attempt to address the problems was often well-motivated, even if motives were mixed with resentment and envy. However, the answers put forward were either completely bad or had enough bad in them to do harm, especially as time progressed and the seeds within them blossomed. That is because they were all founded on the fact of this world and that it is justified in itself instead of being simply a training ground for the next. Which should be obvious as everything here ends in death, the one inevitability of earthly life

Why has the left become so powerful? So powerful that it is now the air we breathe whatever our supposed political persuasion. It is because once religion in general and Christianity in particular have been destroyed people have no understanding of what is the good. They locate it in this world and see it as tending to the well-being and defeating the harm of individuals as they are in this world. Human beings wish to be good or, at least, be thought to be good. Leftism says, "I am good, I care". But what do you care about? Earthly things only. Traditional thought doesn't say that. It says, "Worship God and when you do that everything else falls into place". Its principle is that when first things are put first, secondary things proceed as they should but when secondary things are given primary consideration which is what the left does then not only will first things be lost but so eventually will the secondary things which replaced them because these cannot live unless sustained from above. Nothing has any reality except what it borrows from God. When this is not understood, we live in illusion and living in illusion sooner or later always leads to disaster.

It's the same on an individual level as a global one. You are a soul, a mind and a body. If you live as though the mind or the body were the primary thing, you will die. I don't mean physically. I mean spiritually which is the true death. If you live as though the soul were the primary thing, which is the case, then mind and body will be healthy or as healthy as they can be given your individual destiny which may require a certain amount of hardship and suffering. But your moral and spiritual state will be healthy and that is the foundation of everything else.

However, I do have a word of warning for people who think of themselves as religious. For many, their religion is really only a worldly thing, a formal thing. It is not based on the spiritual reality of God and the soul but on a materialised imitation of that. This is easy to tell when the spiritual and the worldly come into conflict. Which bows to which? Which has more meaning and reality to you, the hidden truths of God or those based on human interaction in the material world?

Another question is this. What is more important to you? The outer form of your religion or its inner truth? Its social and communitarian aspect or the unseen vital creative life rooted in transcendence? If you are not careful, religion can easily be co-opted by the world but you need to keep your religious instincts pure and you also need to engage the imagination as well as have faith or else the thing you direct your faith to will be a bland thing, unable to transform you spiritually which is what the religious path is really all about. It is the unimaginative who are most likely to have their religion corrupted by this world because they have not vivified it with the waters of life and done what is required to light from within what is often just a system of beliefs, essentially religious secularism such as is practised by many of the churches today.

God is a consuming fire, as Hebrews 12:29 has it. This fire destroys all that is not divine, and if ideas, sentiments and priorities that are not founded on the absoluteness of the divine exist within you then the God you worship is just a figment of your own imagination using that word in a different sense to that in which it is used above. (The difference being between imagination as creative inner vision and as mere image maker). Do you worship the living God or just your idea about him? Now is the time when that is being put to the test. The current sorting out of the sheep and the goats is not just a crude division between those who are religious and those who are not. It is subtler than that. It is between those who wish to live by eternal truths and those who, even if religious, are of the world. And here is a fact for consideration. If you do not reject the world, particularly at this time when it is more severed from its spiritual source than ever before, you are of the world.