The Road to Emmaus

Life is a spiritual journey. Yes, I am on this journey. I search for God. I search for the Divine. At some time I feel the closeness of God. I feel it as close as I feel my own limbs and blood and heart. At other times, I feel distant and estranged from God. Too often I am deeply disturbed by what religious people say and do to each other and other, non religious people, the hateful and sometimes even violent actions taking in the name of God. And yet I wonder, why do so many people use religion and God for such destructive ends? I see the violence in the Middle East, the irrational and vengeful responses of mobs to a stupid, homemade film in this country. Why do people get so bent out of shape over such matters? Who knows. Why are Muslims and Christians so often the most violent religions in the world? We see the violence of fundamentalist Islam today; and yet we have only to look back at our own history to see the violence committed by fundamentalist Christians against others, Christians and non-Christians alike. “Love thy neighbor” is one the great commandments. And too few Christians seem to follow it. It seems so strange to me.

All I know is that I need a spiritual life. As I have mentioned many times here, when I have that life, my life is better. Prayer is a powerful source of strength for me in this world. I don’t seek God because I need a justification for hatred and violence. I seek God as a refuge from precisely those things, from the evil and hatred and suffering of the world. Yes, there is that thing called suffering, the biggest stumbling block of all when it comes to God. When we see images of the skeletal, starving survivors of Nazi concentration camps, the first question we ask it, where was God in all that suffering? How can these things happen, if there is a God. When I hear a news story of an entire family killed in a house fire on Christmas Eve, I ask myself, where was God during all this? Why suffering?

It is a question I have no answer for, except to say that the world is full of suffering, and for whatever reason, that is part of our lot, and always will be until the end of time.

This is why I find beauty such a comfort in a world too often filled with pain, anger, evil, violence, destruction and suffering. At least with beauty there is an immediate goodness, a pleasure to be enjoyed, whether in nature, art or human life in general. There is the beauty of the world, the mountains, the oceans, the streams and rivers and forests, there is the beauty of love and friendship and kindness, there is the beauty of sex and eroticism. All these things reflect the goodness of God, the bright illumination of the Divine, in a world too often filled with darkness.

I find a particular joy in feminine beauty. I am not sure why this is such a deep source of pleasure for me, the simple sight of a pretty girl, but it is. And so I enjoy posting such photos here.

Feminine beauty, how lovely it is.

The journey goes on. Life goes on. There has and is and always will be much violence and darkness in our world. All I can do in the midst of it is try to bring some goodness to others, in one way or another. Overcome evil with good, as St. Paul says. Amen.

Me, in a more contemplative mode.

How lovely it is, to feel the peace of prayer. There is great delight in sexual pleasure; but prayer offers a different kind of pleasure. It offers a different kind of sustenance. For many months my prayer life had withered, dried up like a river bed suffering through a summer drought, but now, after having experienced the emptiness of a spiritual drought, I find the return to prayer most satisfying. I find, after neglecting prayer for too long, I long for it. It is like quaffing the cool, fresh water of a mountain stream that flows after a hearty winter and abundant spring rains. The soul, my soul, needs this sustenance. Sexual pleasure has its delights and it place, but spiritual pleasure is something that is beyond even that. The joys of prayer nourish the soul, feed us with the food of God, and help us maintain ourselves in difficult times. There is a certain beauty to prayer. I enjoy, even crave, the beauty of the feminine form, to be sure, but I also delight in and crave the beauty of a deep prayer life. For all the faults I have found with religion and especially Christianity over the years, especially recently, creating a certain crisis of faith for me, one thing is certain and good: Christianity has always been and continues to be a promoter of the goodness of prayer. Catholicism in particular has a rich history of prayer, contemplation, mysticism.

As I have mentioned, for the past six months or so I have been struggling with my faith. It is not that I doubt the existence of God or Christ, but rather, the institutional forms of Christianity as practiced today are troubling to me. I know in time I will work these things out. But recently I have become more aware of something, more appreciative of something that I was not as appreciative of before, namely, the fact that Christianity has always promoted a certain kind of goodness in the world. Recently I have been studying some aspects of the Second World War (which I plan on writing about later), and one thing that always strikes me when studying that time period is the complete horrors unleashed by that event, as well as by the competing ideologies of Nazism and Communism. It is hard for us today to even comprehend the total and brutal destruction that occurred during that period, the vast loss of life, the barbarism that both Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia unleashed. The Nazis were worse, and started the whole damn thing, but the Soviets were not much better. Hitler and Stalin were both monsters.

Studying such historical catastrophes makes me realize how important it is to have some sort guiding moral principle in the world, something based on an eternal laws or truths, rather than on man made precepts. Christianity, for its imperfect adherents, is still greatest bulwark against the horrors and brutalities that still lurk deep within the human spirit, and which often manifest themselves in concrete, historical ways, such as through warfare. And for me as the individual, the path to peace, the path to doing something good in the world, begins with the simply practice of prayer.