At the end of the day it takes an act of the will to behave with integrity. This may be old fasioned and a little less common than it once was but it is true nonetheless. Thanks for the reninder.

I think the problem of our age boils down to two words: relationship and rule.

I’d like to invite you, dear reader, to go re-read the Genesis account of the creation of humanity and the fall.

In these accounts we see the dawn of spirituality and religion; spirituality because God is personal and we are personal…. spirituality is thus any “interpersonal relationship”…. and religion, because any interpersonal relationship will have its own rhythm, routine and…rules. Think about our own social conventions – no one forces us by law and yet every year we all buy flowers and cards for our Moms’ for Mother’s day. It’s an unwritten convention that supports our relationship with our moms…. “religion” is no different – it either builds up our relationship with the Divine and each other or we lose the forest for the trees and disintegrate in all our relationships.

The danger is de-personalization and de-contextualization: to stop treating God as a person and stop treating other human beings as persons…..and to willfully turn our backs on the ‘context’ that interpersonal relations imply.

Take Eve….she knew God. She knew God had expectations, ‘rules’. But then she developed a new relationship with a new and strange creature. The talked with each other. A dialogue was set up. At first she bore witness to her relationship with God and the rules: they were allowed to eat of ALL the trees in the garden (including the tree of life!) but not the one in the middle….. and then she listened when told by this creature to doubt God….to turn from her relationship and rule with Him and instead just focus on the fruit itself and what good it might bring her not in light of God or all the garden or all her duties but just de-contextualized, one on one.

So she ate and Adam ate (which means he was a mute witness to all this drama) and then their eyes were opened – they remembered “the context” and their prior relationship and the rules all such relationships imply and they hid.

Genesis is a poetic description of the same phenomenon of temptation and sin that we all experience if we care to ever analyse ourselves and our motives and emotions from A to Z…

There is always a period of distraction….we wander away from our conscious allegiance and relationship with God or others….we get distracted by things – harmless but distracting things…. thus the cloud of witnesses, God, angels, saints, loved ones, etc. vanish in the fog and we’re left with ourselves, the world, the flesh and the devil…..

And then – according to our own vices and proclivities, we stray into a new dialogue, a new ‘relationship’ with a single thing that is held up to us – in an occasion of sin – to consider as a good thing for us… and the knife edge of decision is upon us: absent witnesses, absent the conscious presence of God, other people, other values….just us and the desired ‘good’…. what will we choose?

Because if God were present then no creature could be preferable to him. If he hides or we turn from Him then it’s not so easy. It’s a real testing of loyalty, faith, confidence, hope that in delaying our gratification we will reap better goods…. that if we forego the instant pleasure by letting the seed in hand ‘die in the furrow’ it will sprout up 100 fold tomorrow….

So the trick is to remain in God’s presence – either directly or with his friends, the angels and saints – so as to remain in his love…. remain contextualized and in that relationship and so become ever more identified with these good and beautiful persons that we’re less and less tempted to abandon them for trifles or temptations.

We need to cultivate occasions of grace! To “pray always including with psalms and hymns”…. to gather in community of likeminded saints who can encourage us, support us on the journey….

Because the answer to the question “who are you?” always implies relationships. Our “who-ness” necessarily involves with whom we are related and in relation with…. Our names themselves connect us with other people do they not? And our self-understanding, self-worth, self-concept – all involves allegiances and loyalties to other people do they not?

So by cultivating and remaining “in relationship” and in context with God and his Kingdom we become more known and more identified with the King…. who will thus not one day say those awful words ‘away from me, you evil-doers for I do not know you”…

Merely going through some motions (rules) without a relationship with the rule-maker is not enough. Heaven is not a de-personal place, it’s a state of being in love with God (and all his other friends).

Conclusion…. life is always inter-personal…. and conscious life always involves some form of relationship, some form of spirituality -which always leads to religion as rules, routine and rhythm, providing a context for our choices and actions and decisions….and these sovereign actions of our free volition either build up our identification with these others or dissolves these ties…. thus we are always becoming either more like God or less like God….becoming more identified with Being Himself or less and less ‘real’….either more alive or less.

Sometimes “what’s expected” can get so incredibly out of control, it isn’t funny. I spent six years in the military, where I learned, as “everybody knows” – at least they did, once – that a uniform is proper attire for ANY occasion, from casual to full formal. Yet my family objected when I wore my uniform to my father’s funeral. (They always objected whenever they saw me in uniform, and I never did figure out why – they’re not liberals or anti-military; in fact, my father was bitterly disappointed because of his own 4F rating – for those too young to remember the draft, 4F meant you didn’t meet the physical and health standards to join the military. He dearly wanted a career in the Air Force, and his health denied that to him. It was for him I wore that uniform to his funeral, and it was for him that I refused to bow down and wear something black instead. That was thiry years ago. To this day, the remainder of my family isn’t talking to me.
I could go into a long list of why I think they didn’t like me to wear my uniform, but that’s a whole ‘nother ball of wax.

Thank you for this article. I have been noticing lately that many people don’t keep their promises when they’ve agreed to do something, and it has made me loosen up on how I behave. (Why not, no one else keeps their word?) Your article has pulled me back to my standards; can’t thank you enough.