Categories. We try so hard to make our lives fit into the compartments we have devised. And very often even these compartments fail to fall neatly into categories that ease our minds. We find that life is complicated and that separation to the key to our spiritual and emotional survival. Yet perhaps it is this very separation that leads to our eventual collapse into the madness of a half-lived life?
Imagine the businessman who failed to distinguish between his personal life and his business life. Or the deeply religious man who carried the weekly service in the Sundays of his heart. Imagine a school teacher without the confines of walls, touching all who wished to learn. But all too often the categories of our lives cut short the potential for true spiritual outreach.
It seems that the only comfort that we can afford ourselves is to keep separate work from pleasure, business from relationship, and spiritual from our mundane affairs. And it’s a shame. It’s a shame for each of us who allows the door of separation to close us from the world of life and the love that permeates reality. Business is not reality; it’s a minor category in the endless existence of us all. And yet we commit sins in the name of business, the only sin there really is, the denial of the light of another, the denial of our own light as well. This is sin…and we are all sinners from time to time.
But with a little awareness we can ask ourselves important questions that open the doors to a greater sense of community and openness. Is there really such a thing as “just business”? Can politics ever be removed from spirit? How can we kill in the name of justice? Or peace? If we truly ponder these questions doors will open to insights and the walls of categories will fall in crumbled heaps of useless separation.
This is not to say that no one should ever be punished, or fired, or even removed from society to protect the whole. But how we do so is the point, and why we do so even more. To act under the false protection of a self-defined category brings no real comfort to anyone. We know and we suffer in the depth of our beings the sins we have committed. Nothing escapes consciousness and the fruits of our misdeeds spring unexpected throughout our lives. Unexpected….and often unexamined. Leaving us to ponder the “why me” of our existence.
We are not and can never be removed from one another. We are links in an endless chain of further links into a world of deeper understanding. If we knew this in our wisest hearts, nothing could ever be just business, it could only be all business. The business of loving another as we ourselves would wish to be loved. The only business there is.
Love,
Eric
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