Judging Goodness
11/15/09 Inspirations Spirituality attends to the “rightness” of the way we are when we are wrapped up in God. Religion tells us we please God by following the rules of “rightness”.
This example of the difference came to me: A spiritual woman was so immersed in the things of God that she was seldom moved to look at herself in a mirror and didn’t feel that putting on makeup was important to her. So without giving it much thought, she didn’t wear makeup.
A religious woman was taught all her life that wearing makeup is a sign of wantonness and self-adoration, so she didn’t wear makeup because she believed to do so was to sin against God.
Both women were of a mind to do the right thing, but this “goodness” in the spiritual woman was an effect of abandonment of self to God while this same “goodness” in the religious woman was reached by adherence to law.
If you are waiting for me to tell you the spiritual woman’s way was more pure than the religious woman’s way, you need to hear about the third woman in my example. This woman belonged to a religion that didn’t put forward any tenet at all on the wearing of makeup, but the only time she wore makeup was at church. Why? Her thought was that all week long she sweated and toiled for the sake of keeping body and soul together. On Sunday she was going to church to worship her Creator and wanted to make herself look and feel special for the occasion.
And I don’t know for sure, but it seems logical that there are places in the world where a person doesn’t feel they’ve honored God properly if the ritual didn’t include full body makeup.
We really confuse ourselves when we allow ourselves to judge “goodness”, especially when we move beyond self-examination and into the realm of judging others. That’s precisely why I do believe in the purity of motive that comes with spirituality, even if religious and plain old secular “goodness” is fine as well. It’s because in spirituality we immerse ourselves in God first and exude goodness because we’ve taken on His attributes. We are good because God is good; not because God has given us rules to follow and we’ve followed them.
The less self-interest there is – when our own goodness surprises us – the more evident that we treat goodness as a gift from God instead of as a reason to be rewarded for our own work.
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