A Blog to the Lesser Good

THE holy Fathers say with one voice: The first thing to keep in mind is never in any respect to rely on yourself. The warfare that now lies before you is extraordinarily hard, and your own human powers are altogether insufficient to carry it on. If you rely on them you will immediately be felled to the ground and have no desire to continue the battle. Only God can give you the victory you wish.

This decision not to rely on self is for most people a severe obstacle at the very outset. It must be overcome, otherwise we have no prospect of going further. For how can a human being receive advice, instruction and help if he believes that he knows and can do everything and needs no directions? Through such a wall of self-satisfaction no gleam of light can penetrate. Woe unto them that are wise in their own eyes, and prudent in their own sight, cries the prophet Isaiah (5:21), and the apostle St. Paul utters the warning: Be not wise in your own conceits (Romans 12:16). The kingdom of heaven has been revealed unto babes, but remains hidden from the wise and prudent (Matthew 11:25).

We must empty ourselves, therefore, of the immoderately high faith we have in ourselves. Often it is so deeply rooted in us that we do not see how it rules over our heart. It is precisely our egoism, our self-centeredness and self-love that cause all our difficulties, our lack of freedom in suffering, our disappointments and our anguish of soul and body.

Take a look at yourself, therefore, and see how bound you are by your desire to humour yourself and only yourself. Your freedom is curbed by the restraining bonds of self-love, and thus you wander, a captive corpse, from morning till eve. "Now I will drink," "now I will get up," "now I will read the paper." Thus you are led from moment to moment in your halter of preoccupation with self, and kindled instantly to displeasure, impatience or anger if an obstacle intervenes.

If you look into the depths of your consciousness you meet the same sight. You recognize it readily by the unpleasant feeling you have when someone contradicts you. Thus we live in thralldom. But where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty (11 Corinthians 3:17).

How can any good come out of such an or biting around the ego? Has not our Lord bidden us to love our neighbour as ourselves, and to love God above all? But do we? Are not our thoughts instead always occupied with our own welfare?

No, be convinced that nothing good can come from yourself. And should, by chance, an unselfish thought arise in you, you may be sure that it does not come from you, but is scooped up from the wellspring of goodness and be stowed upon you: it is a gift from the Giver o life. Similarly the power to put the good thought into practice is not your own, but is given you by the Holy Trinity.

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"The only thing you can do alone is die (or go to hell)" is an old Russian proverb.

What a poor, maltreated, and abused word conspire is. We all have an idea of what conspire and conspiracy mean, and a cloud of meanace and suspicion hangs over it:

2.	to plot (something wrong, evil, or illegal).

It is a beautiful thing that language can provide us with more than one word that means the same thing, yet have differing connotations. But - oh! - why did conspire have to be cast as co-operate's evil twin? The etymology of the word promised so much for this young Latin word:

conspīrāre to act in harmony, conspire, equiv. to con- con- + spīrāre to breathe

To breathe together... what an impossibly romantic, beatiful, image. Two people, or more, together, breathing as one. Who wouldn't wish to find the one with whom he could conspire with for the rest of his life? Together conspiring in harmony; conspiring until expiring and retiring as one.

But it was not to be. Such intamcy has no place among the English people. Breathing as one? It's indecent. Fleshy. Secretive. How can two people so close be trusted by anyone else? So the Latin word is disparaged, spurned, and turned into something to avoid, to uncover, to destroy.

And in its place we have solid, dependable, unassuming "cooperate". A word that doesn't bring to mind the organic, symbiotic relationship of two breathing as one, but the cold, hard, efficient whirring of cog-on-wheel. Everything shipshape and Bristol fashion, working together, but with clear definitions of what is what.

Ah, but true unity - that comes in destroying egos and clear definitions.

True untiy only comes when we conspire together.

This is the chemical butane-1,4-diamine, a rather simple molecule made up of just four carbon atoms in a row, a nitrogen at either end, and 12 hydrogens along the whole. You'll all probably have experienced this chemical at some point in your lives and butane-1,4-diamine's common name - putrescine - might give you a clue as to where.

Putrescine is produced through the breakdown of proteins, putrefication, and is one of the main chemicals that causes "rotting-meat smell". When we smell the decay of meat, or a rotting corpse, it is molecules of putrescine that are hitting our notstrils. It is this chemical which causes a visceral reaction of disgust, in extreme cases a gag reflex or even vomitting, and can do so whether we can see the source or not.

And yet to a carrion fly, this same chemical causes an opposite reaction. The fly is positively attracted by putrescine (an instinctive attraction some tropical flowers use to their advantage) so that it may lay its eggs and continue its life cycle.

Our reaction to this chemical is very much at a biological level, rather than a learned response, which is just as well because putrescine is toxic at high levels; however, it is of course not the chemical itself that we have to be most wary of, but the decaying flesh that produces it.

Nothing that I, or a fly, does can change what putrescine is. It always contains four carbons, two nitrogens, and 12 hydrogens per molecule. A man cannot raise putrescine's melting point above 27 °C, and nor can a fly add to putrescine's molar mass. If anything, it is putrescine that defines us - it is this chemical which can divide living beings into humans or flies, and the reactions we flies and men have are just proof of this. Because if a man did find putrescine attractive, then he would most probably die of some disease unless he could control his urge; and if a carrion fly found putrescine replusive, then it would starve with its eggs still inside it.

This is important to remember. We discern and define the world - our surroundings - but so too does the world define us. Putrescine can drive away a group of men like a swarm of flies, and attract flies like a rabble of hungry men. And to be found on the wrong side of this chemical's divisive act leads to starvation or poisoning. Is it true for other things too? Are we sometimes attracted - by sight, sound, smell or taste - to something which is ultimately poisonous? Can we be turned away from something because it is repulsive, only to be starved by its absence? For either to be happen would mean we are diseased in some way, so that we react against natural instincts that should be salvific. But that's possible, isn't it?