Good Friday

To know what is true and to do what is good. If I could boil it all down I think it comes down to this. But to walk this path is not easy. The world deceives and we too deceive ourselves. St. Thomas Moore (I think) once said something like this: the animals serve God with the raw beauty of instinct; the angels serve God with the pure clarity of intellect; but we humans, we must serve Him through the thick tangle of our minds.

And how easy it is to get stuck, to get caught up in crap that really doesn't matter. The clothes I wear, the car I drive, what people think about me, weather or not the life I'm living is "normal." It's all the worries of the ego. And we are not free. We are not free from ourselves or from the societal structures that enmesh us, that put us into debt to keep us working and achieving, that numb us from the realities that exisit outside the narrow confines of our own worlds, that always leave us lusting for more, more, more. The Babylon system is the vampire. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. And this whole system propagates itself on the presumtion that we remain inert, apathetic, and driven by our own base appitites.

Maybe this is why we call this day Good Friday, because through Christ's death we celebrate our own death: to ego, to sinfulness, to self-centered living, on both the personal and societal levels. But as with all things in this temporal realm, this dying is a process ; it is not yet complete. Still, through faith we know that Resurrection awaits.