You probably already knew this, but I just learned from City of Wonder that the Land of Boredom borders directly on Meh.

Why the chaos in the Chaos Node? Why don’t I just pick one thing to write about and stick with it?

I know it is challenging to be a reader here. It is not so bad if you come here from Google and just happen to find an entry that is about just that one thing. But if you come back, the next day I probably write about something entirely different.  Certainly if you stay a week, there is bound to be stuff that doesn’t interest you in the least.

That’s because you are not me. I write all the time about things that interest me. Well, some things interest me more than others, but it must at least have crossed my mind to end up in my journal. Lots of things don’t cross my mind very often, like “what’s on TV” or “what’s wrong with Republicans now” or “good places to go out for dinner”, even though many (possibly most) of my online friends are occupied with such topics on a regular basis.  I am not them.

***

It would be easy to write and write about spiritual and religious matters. When you have a Heavenly spirit that lives with you at all times, even if undeserved, you could teach for a thousand years and more without ever running dry.  But to teach with authority, you still have to actually live these teachings for them to become yours. And that is the bottleneck.

Jesus Christ says: “Any teacher who is educated for the Kingdom of Heaven is like a homeowner  who brings out treasures new and old from his storage rooms.” See, you have to own the stuff to be a real “heavenly intellectual” to coin a phrase. You can’t just borrow it from the holy spirit that for some reason has conceded to keep you company. Bad things come from pretending to own what is not ours. Like a spiritual bank crisis or something.

Likewise Paul the apostle says: “I subjugate my body and keep it in slavery, so that I who preach for others shall not myself be found unworthy.” I don’t do much of that, at least by saintly standards (your standards will vary if you are a liberal, for sure) and so I am unworthy to teach many things that I could otherwise say. Because, as I said, I don’t really need to have a plan to teach about various topics of the spiritual life, since the fellow Presence in my life knows a lot about these things and shares freely.

***

It is substantially safer to write about City of Heroes or City of Wonder, even though the marvels there are rather two-dimensional in comparison. And writing about my experiences with cheap, safe exercise is probably a useful contribution to the world, without putting any souls in particular danger, not even my own.

Then again, I wrote about economy for years and years, and people kept making the mistakes I warned them against. Even now they still do. So I guess it could be the same with this. “Oh, this was kind of interesting. I always wondered how this ‘exercise’ thing worked. I had no idea it was THIS easy.” And then you turn on the TV and fall asleep in the couch with your hand in a bag of chips. ^_^

And even though it all went wrong
I’ll stand before the Lord of Song
with nothing on my tongue
but Hallelujah.
-Leonard Cohen.