All spiritualities worthy of the name, stress the need to make a certain ascent, to grow beyond our immaturities, our laziness, our wounds, and the perennial hedonism and shallowness of our culture. The emphasis here is always to reach upward, beyond, towards the heavens, and towards all that is more noble, altruistic, compassionate, loving, admirable, and saintly. Much of classical Christian spirituality is a spirituality of the ascent, an invitation to something higher, an invitation to be true to what is deepest inside of us, namely, the Image and Likeness of God. Much of Jesus’ preaching invites us precisely to something higher. Confucius, one of the great moral teachers of all time, had a similar pedagogy, inviting people to look to beauty and goodness and to forever reach in that direction. In our own time, John Paul II used this very effectively in his appeal to young people, challenging them always to not settle for compromise or second-best, but to look always for something higher and more noble to give their lives to.
But the challenge to growth also needs a spirituality of descent, a vision and a set of disciplines that point us not just towards the rising sun, but also towards the setting sun. Continue reading
The journey of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi to Mahatma Gandhi was highly challenging. During the course of his life, Gandhi sought to resolve the constant plaguing of self-doubt helped him put his truths and beliefs through tough tests of realities that helped him see an issue from different dimensions and perspectives.The ‘take away’ factors from his life are many. And the more one reads him, the lessons from his life increase with the number of interpretations you can make from the text. Read between the lines, if you must, when you read Gandhi and the essence of his life (and ours, too) increases by manifold to the reader.
ONE TUSK 