Not to mention the fact that a life of true conscientiousness can rarely be lived without, at some point, encountering an instance where to obey the authority of humankind, rather than to disobey it, amounts to moral cowardice.
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Though I’d be remiss if I did not also say that the life of the ‘good thief,’ as I have sometimes imagined it to be, in first-century Judea, under Roman occupation, puts me in mind of all those people, down through the centuries, who, driven by privation, and not by malice, find themselves involved in circumstances that would be adjudicated as ‘crimes’ by the machinery of the systems under which they are oppressed. Which is to say by the letter of the law, though not necessarily by the spirit of the law (had there existed in these contexts anything so beneficent to speak of).
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Which isn’t to absolve such a system, or to say that manmade justice, or carceral and retributive procedures, are never reprehensible, or not in conflict with a divine ethos, for often they are, but that, in this particular instance, even the subject of the system regarded his punishment as not unwarranted, or, anyway, not indicative of any kind of karmic imbalance.
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Of course, the judgment of the state, with regard to a person’s character, is not a reliable measure. And it is only by way of this particular thief’s admission of his crime, and his contention that his punishment had been just, while that of Christ had not been, that we can add depth to our picture of him, and know with some certainty that he had not always acted so admirably, and that the penal system that had delivered him to this fate was not functioning entirely outside its design, or with an arbitrariness that was absolute.
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I would suppose, in a similar way, that the man known to history as the ‘good thief,’ who, after defending Jesus against the jeers and castigations of the other criminal who was executed with them, at Golgotha, appealed to the mercy of Christ, and was promised it, had not led an entirely honorable life before that moment, to have ended up as a prisoner of Rome, condemned to death; and that he managed to say what he said through an effort of will that ordinarily he wouldn’t have been capable of, and for which he found the resolve only in his last hour, when his mortality asserted itself to him, and had a clarifying effect.
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I’m reminded of those words that Augustine used, somewhat facetiously, though not completely, to describe his tendency toward prayer in his youth, “Lord, help me to be pure — but not yet.”
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You might even say that, as the moribund person is an inhabitant of a condition that, though foreshortened or magnified, belongs to us all, the work involved in bringing one’s self into harmony with one’s conscience, if such a thing is possible, is more properly the work of a lifetime, and not merely of the concluding episode of a life, which is what most of us would ask it to be.
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Excluding those whose sanity has departed from them, so that they cannot be said to understand the consequences of their situation, and whose exclamations or utterances do not represent the condition of their soul, as their actions no longer originate in the free or unhindered expression of their will, such people can be divided into two categories, or can be grouped into one category that exists along a spectrum that has two polarities: those who, despite moments of clarity (during which they might reach for a benevolence or courage that would go some way to reconciling themselves to their fate), will ‘gnash their teeth,’ and persist in the melodramas and illusions that till then have sustained them (though vainly, and in unreality), so that they would not have to face the honesty of their conscience, and involve themselves in the work of repentance, which is humbling and can seem to be thankless, and to have no reward, but that is nonetheless for one’s good; and those who divest themselves of these melodramas and illusions to which all of us, to different extents, are bound, in order that their conscience might bear itself upon their actions and utterances, in the time remaining to them, however inglorious doing so might be, so that they might draw to themselves their better angels, to assemble inside themselves a landscape of fortitude and peace; and so that, like a ship that has been listing but that now has been righted, their soul might be aided in its trajectory.
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If you want to be convinced of this, look no further than any account of death that includes, in its rendering, not only the fact that a person dies, but a description of how that person comports themself once they know for certain that they are going to die, or that the ailment with which they are afflicted is fatal, and will soon reach its completion.
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In fact, no matter how skilled one might be in the sort of channeling of energy, or metaphysical athleticism, that I have described in terms of qi, one’s actions count for nothing if they aren’t guided by one’s conscience, which is the mechanism by which the Holy Spirit would speak to us. For the person who heeds their conscience, though they might die today, is ready for death, insofar as a harmony with one’s conscience is the measure by which a peaceable death occurs. Whereas the person who does not heed their conscience, though they might postpone death, and accrue to themself the sort of material and social and psychological effects that make life, for a while, pleasant and easy, will find, when finally they meet it, that they are not ready for it, as the shape of their soul no longer fits the shape of the passage through which their soul would travel, for they have so disfigured it.
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Which isn’t to say that any such energy (or maneuvering of energy) is necessary in order for a person to be in friendship with the Holy Spirit, and to act on its promptings, for providence does not value us according to our abilities in that direction (or any direction), but loves us gratuitously, whether we are skilled at something or not, merely because we exist; and it will find ways to communicate with us, and make use of us, and bring us into the circumference of its intention, in whatever condition we find ourselves, in the lives and the bodies we have been born into, even to our last hour, so long as we are receptive to it.
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Further, it is possible to say that whatever energy there is, that some would refer to as qi, can be brought to bear on one’s actions, to give mastery to them, during occasions of suddenness or import, by a person who would listen to and be guided by the Holy Spirit.
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The difference being, I think, that where qi has something of a physical quality, or is an energy that permeates the physical world, and can be detached from any morality, a prompting of the Holy Spirit, because it originates in a part of the Godhead that is not incarnate, would not have so near to a physical articulation, and will always be attached to a morality, though it will often initiate, in the person who listens to it, a response that is evident in physical terms.
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For this reason I think of qi as it relates to the Holy Spirit, or, more to the point, I think of any activity that would involve the summoning of qi, or the deployment of it (I’m not sure how best to describe what occurs) as an attuning of the body that, while amoral in itself, might ready the individual for the promptings of the Holy Spirit, which always have a moral component.
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What recalls this to me now, in reference to that ‘dilemma’ imposed on us by time, wherein a balance between liveliness and restraint would seem to address itself to the dilemma, or respond to it, is my impression that the manifesting of qi, within the marital arts (or within any activity that would unite body, mind, and spirit in a particular configuration and intensity), is a way of achieving such a balance, if only temporarily.
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One could say, anyway, that the energy in the room where our class assembled would arrange itself differently before, during, and after the practice of tai chi. So that, to some degree, we could direct that energy, or work in concert with it.
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Into different regions of the space around our persons would we move our spheres of qi, in a slow but inevitable cycle, all in silence, and in unison, as if they were a treasure or a precious commodity, which I think they were, for there was, in the conviction of our routine, and also, I suppose, in its sincerity or goodwill, something like a mode of invention by which the objects of our focus, while invisible, yet became real, if not substantive, or sensible to touch.
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That ball or globe of energy, I was given to understand, was where our qi found its center.
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I remember how this professor encouraged us to visualize, and to shape, with mime-like precision and the curvature of our hands, a ball or globe of energy that, floating before us, somewhere near the height of our torso, we would move and push and otherwise direct, with firm but loving care, in accordance with the motions that comprised the tai chi.
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When I was an undergraduate, in an acting class that I’d enrolled in as an elective, out of interest and for fun, our professor would have us practice, at the beginning of each meeting, twenty to thirty minutes of a very slow form of tai chi, which involved, in the rhythm and circularity of its movements, the summoning of this energy known as qi, the purpose of which, according to our professor, was both to relax us and to increase our ability to focus.