Notes and Comments from The New Man
Chapter 1, The War Within Us, p. 3-15
I can do all things through Christ which strengthens me.” Philippians 4:11-13
Agonia
Great pain or suffering?
“Existence itself becomes an absurd question; to find an answer to such a question is to be irrevocably lost.”
Dark terror of the Agonia.
“Are we strong enough to go on and on with this absurd battle of entity and nonentity in our own insist self?”
Delusion!
“Hope is the gift.”
Gifts to live by!
Love, Joy, Hope, Peace.
The offering!
Paradoxical claim
“Christ was resurrected, man can conquer death, and will be resurrected to enjoy eternal life in transfigured bodies.”
The doctrine of first Christians.
“Without it, our Christianity would only be a moral system w/o much spiritual consistency.”
Simply an apostolate for western culture and economic “progress” and not a true preaching of the Gospel.
“A man who merely breathes, eats, sleeps, and works without purpose and ideas of his own is not really a man.”
“If a man to live, he has to become wholly and entirely alive. He has to be all life, in his body, his senses, his mind, and his will.”
“Free decisions made in the light of his own thinking. Moreover, these decisions must tend to his intellectual, moral, and spiritual growth. They must expand and extend his power to life others and to dedicate himself to their good: for it is in this that he finds his own fulfillment.”
It would appear that we truly have lost our way, therefore, the arrival of our Messiah. We have lost, or never had, the ability to think for ourselves outside the cultural norms. Something or someone is constructing our identity. It comes from our parents and then from the dynamics of siblings and extended family. If your family belongs to a religious congregation, you have their theology to impart “self” onto you. This then creates your false self, not in the image of your creator.
March of True Life
“March of true life in man is therefore not turbulence but control, not effervescence but lucidity, and direction, not possession but the sobriety that sublimates all possessions and elevates to the clear inebriation of mysticism.”
“Man then can only fully be said to be alive when he becomes plainly conscious of the real meaning of his own existence when he experiences something of the fulness of intelligence and spiritually that is actualized within himself.”
“His very self, his very reality, is all contradiction: a contradiction mercifully obscured by confusion.”
“The real meaning of his existence would then be precisely that it has no meaning.”
“To find the full meaning of our existence, we must find not the meaning that we expect but the meaning that is revealed to us by God. the meaning that comes to us out of the transcendent darkness of His mystery and our own. We do not know God, and we do not know ourselves.”
True meaning has to be revealed…it has to be “given.”
“We must learn that life is a light that rises when God summons it out of darkness” for this, there is no fixed time.”
When God “summoned” a prophet or messenger or Moses or Abraham, He revealed himself to them each time. They were not looking for him, yet they were aware of God's handiwork around them, his history with their people. He summoned them “out of darkness.”
Fully Alive!
“Man is fully alive only when he experiences, at least to some extent, that he is really, spontaneously dedicating himself, in all truth, to the real purpose of his own personal existence.”
“The glory of God is man fully alive”~St. Irenaeus
“In other words, man is alive not only when he exists, not only when he exists and acts, not only when he exists and acts as a man, but above all when he is conscious of the reality and inviolability of his own freedom and aware at the sane mind of his capacity to consecrate that freedom entirely to the purpose for which it was given him.”
“Man finds himself and is happy when he can be aware that his freedom is spontaneous and vigorously functioning to orientate his whole being toward the purpose which it craves, in its deepest spiritual center, to achieve. This purpose is life in the fullest sense of the word, not mere individual, self-centered, egotistical life which is doomed to end in death, but a life that transcends individual limitations and needs and subsists outside the individual self in the Absolute, in Christ, in God.”
“Man is truly alive when he is aware of himself as the master of his destiny to life or death, aware of the fact that his ultimate fulfillment to destruction depends on his own free choice, and aware of his ability to decide for himself, This is the beginning of true life, true self.”
When we, as a society, can begin to deal with the abuse of children, sacrificing our children to the gods, we will see a transformation of the culture in ways unimaginable. We will begin to see the emergence of abundant creative personalities. The family will thrive with excitement and promise as fathers rise up and mothers propagate children with a purpose for their lives not known in many lifetimes. Children will be alive with joy and love not seen on this planet before.
Yet, as we speak, what is the reality?
“Fallen man in whom life and death are fighting for mastery is no longer full master of himself: he has no power left except to cry out for help in the void.”
McGilchrist speaks to the control of the Emissary, taking the place of the Master in controlling how we process information in our neurology, leaving out the Master. Man has lost the ability to understand the real world, the authentic self God intended for us individually. Thus we live in a postmodern culture that has also left us wanting for life and purpose that we can barely understand.
“Man's real power lies hidden in the agony which makes him cry out to God: and there he is at the same time helpless and omnipotent. He is utterly helpless, yet he can “do all things in the Indivisible who strengthens him.”~Merton
“Not that I speak in respect of want: for I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content. I know both how to be abased, and I know how to abound: everywhere and in all things am instructed both to be full and to be hungry, both to abound and to suffer need. I can do all things through Christ which strengthens me.” Philippians 4:11-13
(All quotes from A New Man unless noted.)
