The unforgiveable sin

The only unforgivable sin is the sin that we refuse to confess and forsake. We commit unforgivable sin when we hold to a sin so long and so tenaciously that we can no longer confess it as sin and turn from it. The blasphemy against the Holy Spirit (Matthew 1:31f) is the resistance of his convicting work to the point where He withdraws, leaving the sinner in helpless hardness of heart.

http://www.recovery.gov/

Don’t forget to go to this website to check on your “stimulus” bill at work. But also do not forget that this is the way government sees it. You just might see the spending in a different light. Find a web site of your choosing that will mirror this government site and give another perspective.

Today’s Quote 2/24/09

Grace substitutes a full, childlike, and delighted acceptance of our Need, a joy in total dependence. We become “jolly beggars.” – C. S. Lewis

Naivete about the nature of spiritual energy

Words from The Holy Longing, Ronald Rolheiser

All energy is imperialistic, especially erotic and creative energy. Energy is not friendly, it wants all of us, it can beat us up like the playground bully. Karl Jung once said this explicitly, but premodern cultures lived their whole lives in the face of that truth. They treated energy with a holy reverence. They had their reasons.

The first of these was a religious one. The Bible tells us that “God is a jealous God!” More is contained in that statement than we spontaneously imagine. Energy is not just difficult to access, it just as difficult to contain once it enters. Many is the obsessed lover, possessed artist, or unbalanced religious fanatic who gives testimony to that. It is hard to be on fire with love, creativity, or religiosity, but it is just as hard to contain that fire once it hits.

Former cultures, whatever their faults, understood the imperialistic nature of energy, especially of spiritual, erotic energy. For the most part, they feared energy, particularly sexual and religious energy. That fear expressed itself in all the various buffers they put up to protect themselves against its brute force. Energy, they felt, needed some mediation, like high-voltage power liens need transformers to cut down the voltage. Hence, they had a lot of taboos, fear, timidities, rituals, and prohibitions, especially sexual and religious ones. As well, it was generally advised and often forbidden to ask certain questions. Too much free thinking was considered dangerous, certain books were put on an index and pronounced condemned, and Galileo was forbidden to look through a telescope. The very desire of the human mind to think and to ask questions was feared.

We can judge all of this harshly, but not all of it was unhealthy. The premodern understood, however, flawed that understanding, not just what the Bible means when it says that we have a jealous God, but also what it means when it says: “No one can see God and live!” What this meant for them is that energy, espeically creative energy which contains the sexual, must have some mediation, some filters, and some taboos surrounding it or it will destroy us. On its own, it is too raw, too demanding, too powerful. We need help not just in accessing it, but equally as much in containing it…

Today, whatever our sophistication, we are naive about the nature of energy. Unlike Jung, we consider it friendly, as something we need not fear and as something we can manage all on our own, without the help of a God or of external force, religious or secular, that would in any way censor or restrict an absolute freedom to let energy flow through us. Obedience and genuflection are not very popular. We want to manage energy all on our own.

Partly this is a good and necessary step in human maturation and partly it is its opposite. The rejection of any external censor of our actions can be a sign of growing up and it can also be a sign of infantile grandiosity, the child in the high chair, demanding tha the world revolve around him or her. In either case, we pay a price for demanding to manage all on our own, mostly in our incapacity to find that fine line between depression and inflation. What this meanss is that , all on our own, outside of the classicial social and ecclesial taboos, we invariably fluctuate between being out of touch with the deep source of energy, depression, and not being able to properly contain it, inflation. We are rarely on an even keel, always either too low or too high, feeling dead inside or unable to act or sleep properly because we are too hyper and restless. Mostly, though, in this struggle, it is depression, feeling dead inside, that is the big problem.