8/21/24
Make of yourself the good tree. Jesus is the good tree.
Warning: Everything but what moves you to discipleship of Jesus is destructive of your health. jesianity.info/search/label/Jesus
Lightly edited transcript:
you and i every one of us every breath are defining what it means to be fully human.
that is not to say we are doing it well. it is not to say we are trying to do it. it is to say it is what we are doing inescapable. everyone including ourselves maybe most importantly ourselves we are defining for ourselves we are convincing ourselves in a way this is what it means to be human.
what i'm doing right now and no it's not a matter of cycling or not cycling how am i being in the world, what are my values that i'm living, and expressing right now.
and nobody realizes, nobody nobody realizes this. we are the collective definers of what it means to be alive in the world, an alive human being in the world. and nobody understands that's what we're doing. i certainly haven't.
maybe i'm beginning to grasp it. That a we are the watchmaker, in that sense.
if anyone understood it i think it's the man jesus who took responsibility for making of himself the definition of health or rather finding how to be that, the definition of optimal health.
the perpetual artist the consummate and complete important artist that is trying to work out for themselves and trying to work out for all of us what the truth of human health is. what does the human being by its dna nature dna given nature what does it find beautiful What does it find lovely? What does it find healthy?
Such a wonderful, divine, horrible, inescapable situation.
We can escape it through denial, but we cannot escape the fact of it.
Everything I do, let alone everything I say, is an argument for how we all should be.
Jesus seemed to understand that, and made an argument for how we all should be out of himself.
James cannot escape that everything he does and does not do is an argument to us all. For how to be. It's fine to have slaves, James says. James has slaves? This cell phone has cobalt. Cobalt is mined by brutal, cruel child labor in the Congo and elsewhere. It's fine to have slaves. James eats meat many days. Fish, beef. And is arguing thereby. That this is what is right for a human being to do. He consumes at levels that are tiny fractions of what he did earlier in his years. But at higher levels than 80% of the world. The world's population or at least 50% of the world's population or 4 billion as I understand it now.
And he is arguing that Jesus is the model and his argument is strong to the degree to which he is unwavering in his pursuit of complying with that model. And argument against. Every breath that he is not devoted to being that embodiment.
I suppose there's tremendous leverage in that. Our strongest argument is what we attempt what we devote ourselves to. degree of actual compliance is a much less powerful argument. The degree to which a gymnast devotes their life to being as great a gymnast as they can be is a stronger, more compelling argument than the degree to which they have attained it.
This is obviously a very new thought for James, although it has been nagging at him most or all of his years. Why this compulsion to understand what could be understood in psychology, his advanced degree studies? Because getting it right is a very strong argument.
It is to experience optimal health one's self. And who would argue that they feel physically better when they are physically sick?
We absolutely argue to ourselves without realizing it that to be less than fully healthy mentally and emotionally, psychologically is of no consequence. Most of the time, we try to convince ourselves of that. But upon reflection, those times when we are the most whole, the most complete psychologically, is when we feel the best.
Comments
Post a Comment