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<div class="MsoNormal"><b>Wellness unto Life</b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">We are unapologetically making a play on the Dane's
reflection on <i>Sickness unto Death, </i>a
phrase that has since been used to characterized the conscious human condition. Soren Kierkegaard identifies sickness as
"despair", defines its three forms as not being conscious of having a self, not willing to be
oneself, but also despair at willing to be oneself. He connects the word "spirit" and
ties it to the notion of "God":
<i>A man’s life is wasted when he
lives on, so deceived by the joys of life or by its sorrows, that he never
becomes decisively conscious of himself as spirit, as self, that is, he never
is aware in the deepest sense that there is a God.</i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><i> </i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">I was
with him on the first half, the reality of despair, but was left behind when he
moved "self" as spirit towards God.
Modern theologians talks of despair and its identification with human
depravity, but nebulous when delving in "the other world in the midst of
this world", a metaphor born in our age but easily subverted to a return
to the medieval G-o-d up in the sky, or lurking behind every apparition of
existence, embodied in Jesus as the Christ, leaving it as convenient
explanation of everything <i>deus ex machina</i>.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal"> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">Mystic
Teresa de Avila wrote:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal"> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center;mso-pagination:none; mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none"><i><span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">C</span></i><i><span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">hrist has no body but
yours,</span></i><i><span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;"><br>
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,<br>
Yours are the eyes with which he looks with compassion on this world,<br>
Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good,<br>
Yours are the hands, with which he blesses all the world.<br>
Yours are the hands, yours are the feet,<br>
Yours are the eyes, you are his body</span></i><i><span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">.</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">While
G-O-D disappears and the upward longing avoided, Christ remains a mystical
redeemer and savior where the Jesus "self" is subsumed under the aegis
of idolatry cum exalted role popular in mainstream Christian circles. The Carmelite's
covenant of marriage to Jesus as the Christ, and the Jesuits to Mary, mother of
God, spawns psychological perversions!</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">Rodney
Rippel, a colleague with the Ecumenical Institute (EI) took the categories of Nikos
Kazantzakis' <i>Savior of God </i>and Hermann
Hesse's <i>Journey to the East </i>imagery,
and wrote a self-reflection. In <i>Miles from Moberly: A Man's Journey To The 21st
Century, </i>he rehearses both his external experience in space and time with
the roles he played and the story he spun.<i> </i>It is unfinished. One hopes that if writing is cumbersome, that
orally recording incidences in the remaining years of his life is
technologically available. His speaking
is probably more down to earth than the syntactical requirements of writing
anyway. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">He touches
on the paranormal in one (out of 50) chapter.
In a poem, he <i>asks god to get real,</i>
and sums up his Christian heritage:<i> "we
do not require a Messiah" is God's Messianic Word -- a final word, the
Ultimate Word. To desire more than God
provides is an illusion. That there is
no savior is the Saving Word. </i>The
last two chapters are reserved for Jesus of Nazareth <i>sans</i> the Christ role and Mary of Magdala.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal"> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">Rippel
treats parental traits and history as definitive of the personae of offspring,
not unlike the medieval penchant to explain things away on the unknown<i>. </i>In
our time, we are no longer preoccupied with final causality to explain things. Narrative of the way life is, suffices and
sustains.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><i> </i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">Rippel
exemplifies what will be the literary form of the "selfie" age, with
Georgie Bush's "love account" on his father close to the genre. I call these the "wellness unto life"
accounts, to affirm the facticity of individuals with feet on the ground,
neutral without the bias of <i>dejado </i>(at
a disadvantage) at the gate, or in the garden of Eden. Rippel and I just are, our showed-up-ness our
value, for which the decision to be grateful becomes its own virtue. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal"> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">The
classic lifetimes in Hinduism are four <i>Ashrama,</i>
the student, the householder, the hermit, and the ascetic wanderer. Eighty as a very ripe age, the four lifetimes
may be transposed to increments of 20 years.
The first is of youth learning. Next
is the adult establishing a household.
The third is the hermit in self-consciousness to the minutest of
details, and the fourth is the ascetic wanderer who empties himself unto the wholeness
(holiness) of creation, a wellness unto life! </div>
<div class="MsoNormal"> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">Shakespeare
has seven ages in <i>As You Like it, </i>from
infancy to incapacity bookended by helplessness<i>.</i> Mine has five phased
existence of 17 years each, the first, an age of innocence, the second, a journey
of adventure, the third, the expenditures in service, and the fourth,
sharpening skills in a profession. I
just entered my fifth, seven years of writing and ten years of silence to the
portals of completion and oblivion.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal"> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">All
five phases constitute a <i>Wellness Unto
Life </i>journey, where birth is the supreme achievement and everything that
follows a matter of choice. The question
is not the validity of my phases, the feasibility of the Hindu scheme, or Shakespeare's
laughter. What is the wellness unto life
that your journey is about? Or, are you
still bewailing your sickness unto death?</div>
<br>
<div style="clear:both"><i>j'aime la vie</i><br>
<div><i>yesterday, appreciate; tomorrow, anticipate; today. participate. In all, celebrate!</i></div>
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