Jesus said, “Wretched is the body that depends on a body, and wretched is the soul that depends upon these two.”
———–Gospel of Thomas (Logion 87)
The spiritual life demands an entirely new orientation. We’ve been looking at our feet. We’ve been obsessing over what we are going to do in the coming months. But if we want to enter into the spiritual life, we need to stop and look up. We need to attempt to take in the big picture and to understand where we came from and where we are headed.
So where did we come from? Where are we headed? This passage warns us not to answer these questions in a facile manner. On one hand, “we are what we eat” and a baby comes forth from the body of its mother. Our bodies depend upon an entire chain of complex causes,––there is a horizontal line of bodies that we can trace back, and through this chain of causes we can explain everything.
But the spiritual life demands a different type of understanding. More….