Category: Speaking to the Soul

I have on my office door these words from an accomplished Indian yogi: “Before speaking, consider whether it is an improvement upon silence.” The man who wrote them once went nineteen years without speaking, setting a standard I can’t hope to meet. Yet his words remind me that when we do speak, we must speak truth.

For much of my life I’ve lived contentedly by a few simple rules: don’t track mud in the house, take care of your own, help others, do as little harm as you can, change your oil every three thousand miles. But maybe enlightenment is simpler than we think.

Wild animals don’t have to accept themselves. They can simply be. As thinking animals, we must work to create some space for our wild natures, to give them room to roam. Whether keeping our awareness on the breath as we meditate, on our bodies’ rhythm as we run, on our sensations as we sink our hands in bread dough, our practice

The example of Jesus, and the experience of mud season, remind me of a harsher truth: to be reborn, we first must die. The way to Jerusalem lies through mud. Dying, like mud, can take many forms, but every death, in the sense I mean, is a letting go. We let go of ambition, of pride, of ego.

I am not suggesting that anyone learn more about world religions in order to subvert them. Sacred truth is a very deep well into which human beings have been lowering leaky buckets for millennia. The more we learn about what other traditions have fetched up, the more we learn about our own.

That which we more strictly call piety, or the love of God, and which is an essential part of a right temper, some may perhaps imagine no way connected with benevolence: yet surely they must be connected, if there be indeed in being an object infinitely good.

God gives Himself mainly along two channels: through the soul’s daily life and circumstances and through its prayer. In both that soul must always be ready for Him; wide open to receive Him, and willing to accept and absorb without fastidiousness that which is given, however distasteful and unsuitable it may seem.

A perfect illustration of Basil’s methodology is the analogy he draws between the life cycle of the caterpillar-butterfly and Paul’s teaching on the resurrection body. For most Greeks, the idea of a resurrected body made little sense philosophically, religiously, or physically. How, many wondered, could a body that had decayed be raised from the dead?

Two final points need to be made to counter a sentimental understanding of poverty to which people sometimes appeal. First, poverty is not sanctity. It goes along with all moods. Depravity and viciousness are found among all; so too gentleness and prayerfulness.