B"H
You Never Know Where A Lesson Is Going To Come From
In the course of member fishing (for the now defunct "Spiritual Giftedness" Yahoo list) I got to a list devoted to spiritual
concerns. One of the members is a BDSM prostitute. There she
was pictured on her profile in all her finery. Her favorite quote
is: "What doesn't break you makes you stronger" (which I later learned is a quote from Frederich Neitczche, although I don't recall reading that quote in his works that I read). The words jumped off the page. How true that is!
We spend so long trying to get stronger. The exercise is futile, of
course. Is there a trick in the book that God's agents who are sent
to break us eventually don't know? Is there anything they are too
squeamish to do to us in order to break us, if need be. Of course
not. Is there anyone they have not eventually broken into utter
surrender to God? Nope.
Herein lies one of the paradoxes of life: If we surrender to God before we
have made ourselves stronger the surrender is shallow. In order for
the surrender to be of great significance we would have had to harden
and strenghthened ourselves to a tremendous exist. This is usually
accomplished by committing some kinds of acts of what we call sin -
either against ourselves or others, usually both. Therefore sin
serves holiness in that it makes the surrender all the greater. That
is the reason why our Rabbis teach us that the one who returns to God
is far greater than the one who is wholly righteous. This troubles
me though. Is that to say that one should intentionally sin so that
s/he may get to higher levels of return to God? I dunno.
The reason for circumcision, the Sun Dance and other religious
ceremonies is starting to come clear to me. Those ceremonies make the
participants strong too - by causing themselves, and others, pain.
They are undertaken *for* God, not for the sake of enjoying dubious
pleasures.
Seems to me there must be a better way. Any way which keeps us caught
in a duality a 'this *or* that' can't be quite right.
What is the road that leads to higher levels of God consciousness
that does not involve either sinning or not?
Perhaps one of the reasons for the creation of a conglomerate of
Souls dedicated to God in this world is so that God can reveal the
one Golden Path, which is the resolution of the two.
Doreen Ellen Bell-Dotan, Tzfat
