True Development (Part 2 of 2)

(Found here)

“This, then, is the principle of the Christian life: it is positive rather than negative; it aims at something very much higher than keeping from definite acts of sin; it looks upon all laws of constraint as useless unless they tend to direct the currents of life toward their true end. It does not look upon such laws as ends in themselves, nor does it consider that by the mere submitting to the letter of such laws the soul has fulfilled their purpose.

No; habits of honesty, habits of prayer are mere bondage unless they are helping somehow the production of a free, honest, and prayerful nature. The only object in bandaging and twisting a man’s crooked leg is that someday it may get a straightness into it that will make it keep its true shape when it is set free from bandages. If that day is never coming, bandaging is mere wanton cruelty. Better take the bandages off and let it be crooked, if it is getting no inner straightness and will be crooked as soon as they are removed.

So all these commandments and prohibitions that God lays before us: they are mere cruelty; they merely torture and worry humanity; they come to nothing unless within them some free law of inner rectitude is growing. One looks across God’s great moral hospital, sees crooked souls tied up in constraint, and wonders — as one might who looked through a surgeon’s ward — behind how many of those bandages an inner life is gathering that someday will ask no binding up and need nothing but its own liberty to be its law.

It is a strange question. Suppose tomorrow all the laws of constraint should be repealed together; all social penalties, all public restrictions, lifted off together; nothing left but the last legislation of character. What would become of us? Just as soon as our bandages were off, our unshaped lives would fall into their shapelessness!

There are thus two regions in which we may live: in the lowlands, where we ever stand in danger of the penalty of violating the law, in which we are ever conscious of the presence of the law standing over us with its drawn sword in stern warning, in which we are trying not to do wrong; and on the higher plains that breathe with blessings.

Those who live on the higher planes aim at something higher than escape from the curse of breaking the law. They strive after positive holiness. They keep far out of the reach of the curse, within the region of the Beatitudes. They stand no longer tampering with evil, looking at the forbidden fruit and parleying with the tempter, arguing as to the terms of the command laid down by God, whether it was a distinct prohibition forbidding them to eat or not. They keep well out of the reach of the forbidden tree, filling their lives so full of all that blesses that soon they have forgotten that such a tree exists.”

~Basil Maturin (from Spiritual Guidelines for Souls Seeking God)