The Twenty-ninth Day of Lent

I actually feel like I’m making a little headway on my Lenten journey. By focusing on what distracts me from being in fuller communion with God by concentrating on the 24/7 nature of something that is everything I actually end up with brief moments of lucidity with regard to what and who I am. On a relative scale, however, I am still woefully preoccupied by those things that confuse and distort that relationship when they don’t actually deny it altogether. Being culturally immersed in a religion which limits God only to “goodness”—while attributing “evil” to a power other than God—makes it difficult to comprehend a monotheism which must by definition be inclusive of everything. The human process of evaluating, assessing, and most fundamentally judging is thrown askew when anything is included in the something that is everything. Think of the current “popular sin” of homosexuality, for instance, and what happens when the life force within the “sinner” is recognized to be the same as that in the “righteous”. First, the so-called righteous are immediately relieved of any obligation to make a judgment on anyone else because it is placed squarely back on themselves. I am finding that this principle generally applies to all forms of human judgment. While it is true that we are called to do whatever is necessary to improve our own relationship with God, it pretty well nixes taking the speck out of other eyes until we successfully remove the log from our own (don’t you just love how I work Jesus’ parables into these things?).