Cold Harsh Truth 3: Life is a spiritual combat.
My mother has worked for more than two decades in an extraordinary place: a nursing home for religious.
It is a place of exclusive access to people who have dedicated their lives to spirituality: Exorcist priests, missionaries, cloistered nuns, and monks who lived years with a vow of silence.
“La creme de la creme” of spirituality.
If spirituality were the NFL, these people would have won the Super Bowl.
All of these people have pearls of wisdom to share with the world. The problem is that people today don’t want to spend time visiting older adults in geriatrics.
In my case, sometimes I would go to pick up my mother from work and while waiting, I had the privilege of listening to the stories of these spiritual people, to have them share with me some cold, hard truths that only over the years I have come to understand, as it is not enough to intellectualize them, they require being highly spiritual to truly integrate them into the heart.
Cold Harsh Truth 1: Bad thoughts are more debilitating than people realize
According to some cloistered nuns, renouncing the material and their worldly desires was not so difficult.
The most challenging thing was to control their thoughts because what you think becomes like a liquid that envelops you and simmers.
Evil thoughts turn us into frogs asleep in the boiling water.
I remember a nun quoting a phrase from Evagrius Ponticus, one of the spiritual fathers of the church, and it goes like this,
“The soul due to thoughts of laziness that have lingered in it, has become weak and weary. It has faded in its bitterness.”
The nun meant to refer to her thoughts of idleness that haunted her like a little voice trying to lure her out of her convent cell, convincing her that being a contemplative nun was worthless.
Lesson: Toxic thoughts can become like a barrel of acid that corrodes everything you put into it, including yourself.
Cold Harsh Truth 2: Believing is creating
On one of my visits to the convent, I played cards with an old monk who had worked as a librarian, and he recommended that I read the essays of one Miguel de Unamuno, a Spanish writer and philosopher belonging to the generation of ’98.
Reading a guy who was born in 1864 can be like trying to understand an alien, even if he writes in your language.
In particular, I didn’t understand very well an essay titled Faith, where Unamuno wrote this little dialogue,
Master — What is faith?
Disciple — To believe what we do not see.
Master — No. To create what we do not see.
When I asked the old librarian about the text, he told me, “Having faith is not about believing in the invisible; that’s what worldly people believe. Having faith is about creating the unseen in harmony with the creative source”.
Lesson: You create what you believe in. That’s why they call “limiting beliefs” what keeps us from moving forward.
Cold Harsh Truth 3: Life is a spiritual combat
On one of my visits to the nursing home where my mother worked, I played dominoes with a group of old missionaries who had worked in Calcutta.
They had seen horrors that few people have ever seen, but they didn’t just talk about hunger and poverty; they spoke of the smiles of the children amid all the horror.
I asked them, “How can you smile in such adverse situations?”
One of them replied, “The problem with people when something bad happens to them is that they spend the day wondering “Why me?” instead of “Why not me?” Life is spiritual warfare. The children of Calcutta learn this from infancy.”
At the time, I did not understand the old missionary’s words, but over the years, I have discovered that we all fight battles that others do not know about, we all live in our own Calcutta, and we have to learn to smile despite adversity.
Lesson: learn to be happy when you have no reason, and you will always have a reason to be happy.
A virtual hug
AG
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