Now that we've all forgiven ourselves, and potentially all love ourselves, let's go on coping. Let's carry on. To proceed along life's journey, we need to keep putting one foot in front of another. Right foot, left foot; right foot, left foot. On and on and on. We cannot be stagnant. We have to keep making progress. In living this life of ours, the only one we've got, we have to keep moving forward. Forward ever, backward never, as they say. This post will explore a simple spirituality of coping, a simple blueprint for moving forward.
The first step in moving forward, in coping, like we all know, and like we've said several times, is forgiveness of the self. We all need to forgive ourselves. We need to accept that the formative, background, circumstances that made us who we are have happened in time, and there is no time machine to allow us travel back chronologically and change them, and so we need to "let go of the hope that what has happened (our formative experiences) could be any different." We need to accept the "so-what" of our life and proceed with the now-what. We've talked about this is a previous post.
Once we've forgiven ourselves, the next thing is to understand through sacrifice what God's will (destiny, roadmap) for us is. This comes through reflection and introspection. The reason it is important to figure out what God's will is for us is so that we know where we are going. If you're going on a journey, you need to know the destination. You need to know where you're headed, so that you don't keep driving around aimlessly and wasting fuel. You need to consult with a spiritual director, or engage in epistemology, or trial and error, or research, or meditation, to center your life on God and find a purpose for it.
Once you have hitched on a practical epistemology, the next thing is to keep faith with the life map. Concerning David, the bible tells us that once he knew what was the will of God for his life, he deviated neither to the left nor to the right of it. We need to engage in practical ethics after epistemology. This is a sure way to happiness. Again, we've talked about this in a previous post. The fruits of our contemplation are not for naught. They are for acting upon. We should act on what we know to be true. Once we know something to be true, we should deviate "neither to the left nor to the right of it," but keep steadily at it, in spite of difficulties.
As we proceed ethically along our epistemological path, we should dream. Think in this regard of a technician. As he works with his tools, he progressively imagines new, creative ways, of doing his work better and easier, and he adopts these new ways. Similarly, we need to dream for ourselves. And we need to dream big. BIG is an acronym in this regard that refers to: B, believable. Our dreams should be credible and believable. I, implementable. They should be practical enough to be implemented. They should not for example be dreams of finding two unicorns in the woods, or discovering the lost city of Atlantis. Those kinds of things only happen in Phineas and Ferb, or other fantastic programs on television. Understanding your purpose in life and ethically pursuing it should allow you to dream only teleologically. These dreams should be practical and credible.
For example, I dream of making it through my seminary formation and becoming a priest. I dream of becoming a good pastor to the congregation I minister to. I dream of becoming a spiritual writer of human development books and workshops that help people; of being a good counselor and spiritual director and confessor. I dream of grooming young minds, and of helping my religious community to grow. These dreams to my mind are teleological and will help me attain humility by pouring my life out in service of others. Dreams in any case, no matter how practical and believable, are contingent. They depend for their realization on the mercy of God. This brings us to G, God. And so we need to pray and trust in God, who alone has the power to make our dreams come true.
Above all, we should fix our sights on the afterlife. Everything we do to cope in this life positions us more and more for the afterlife. The love that bears faith in good works leads us to hope in the eschatology of the divine life. We look beyond the physical, the current, the temporal, the ephemeral, the mundane, and on to the supernatural, the everlasting; the divine. God. This way, we realize that all we do and all we feel and all we say are in the context of the divine will. And so we keep putting one foot in front of another, having forgiven ourselves; understood the purpose of our life through epistemology; endeavoring to ethically follow through with such purpose, and dreaming big everyday; praying to God perennially for favor; God who alone can make our dreams come true, especially when they are teleologically ordered toward his divine will.
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