from journal entry, 6.4月
Luther understood: no matter how diligently, how strenuously your fight for goodness and purity (at least their less popular forms) might be, there is no salvation by these deeds alone. Try as I might, I cannot fight -- and certainly cannot win -- every battle for a mindful earth-society. Purity is not only beyond our reach: it is not even in our field of vision
Instead, it is invisibly inherent to the manner of our reaching. In being so caught up in trying to become pure (in the more popular sense), we lose our insight to how. How do we make our children smile? We give them chocolate Easter eggs, over which they laugh, and embrace you, and become the star feature for Nestle's advertisement. Is it important for us to know that that chocolate was processed from cocoa beans imported from a country that employs children with little or no choice to work under brutal and inhumane conditions (that they cannot get adults to work under!) to gather them? The moment we become aware of this, the purity of the popular (simultaneously, of the ignorant) vanishes from their smiles, for the systemic violence that purported such purity is smeared across their mouths and between their teeth -- dark and vile.
No -- a purity of ends (which has not even an ontology per individual) cannot justify our means. We cannot truly expect to enter the Kingdom if our eyes are cast only to the clouds. Furthermore, we cannot call ourselves true Christians (as in those who follow Christ, in thought and action) if we believe that by our deeds alone we are saved. We must purify our intentions. By this, one cannot say, 'I had only meant to make my child happy in giving her chocolate,' if we do not further intend to stop or to invest in only organic sweets. Good intention can only beget good intention. If we mean to do good, we must carry it out to the furthest extents of our awareness and beyond the conventional understanding of what is pure and impure.
And by what are we saved? It is only by good intention that we can truly create good results. As it is, this intention requires the totality of one's awareness and consequent compassion. And such awareness is beget only by and event of grace. Indeed, it is only by God's grace that we can be saved. Let us never stop reaching.
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and there continues to be the opportunity for 'christians' to learn from 'non-christians' -- beyond the conventional understanding of faith being personally significant (if it all possible) without affirmative experience: "The Buddhist point of view is that we do not have to believe in anything we cannot experience for ourselves. When asked, 'How do we know whose teachings to believe?' Buddha replied, 'Do not believe something to be true just because it is spread by word of mouth, practiced as a tradition or sensationally spread far and wide. [...]'" (more, click on 'Believer Profile' toward the bottom)