no confidence, no obligations
Are we to have confidence in anything within us? We live in an age of rights and speaking up, of many causes to get behind of reasons to "call out" the actions of others. It is not that any of this is inherently wrong, but rather it is all deeply flawed from its foundation.
The famous writer and Nobel Peace prize winner Aleskandr Solzhenitsyn has said thus in his Harvard: "It is time, in the West, to defend not so much human rights as human obligations."
St. Basil The Great said, "Learn then brother, that it is not he who begins well who is perfect. It is he who ends well...above all things beware of confidence in yourself, lest you fall. (Letter to Chilo)"
It is then worth considering that we are not so much to put confidence in what our hands have produced, the laws we have had passed, the causes we have marched for but upon the last deeds of our dying breath that have come from the cultivation of a well-lived life.
What more could be meant by could be meant by human obligation? It seems to me that more atheism is more concerning with the more removal of existential obligation than it is with the truth. It seems to me that modern intellectual passivism is the same way. We must see that disagreements are not hate crimes, defined morality is not bigotry. We must not remove our obligations as people of God, as holy men and women to live and act in accordance with the faith we have received.
The most outspoken life is the one well lived. But this is over the course of an entire life. It is the true struggle. It does not have a rush. It does not give you the feeling of accomplishment. It is not extravagant. It is quite simple. It is the everydayness of patience with children. It is exercise on a regular basis. It is taking out the trash. It is buying a rose for your beloved on a weekly basis. Is the dollar you put in the cup of the homeless man you pass daily on your way to work. It going to bed on time. It is reading a book a week. It is the culmination of many little, mundane and ordinary things over a lifetime. It is very likely that most of the time you will not know what the magnitude of the good you produce if you are truly living the way you should. It is not a happy life. Though it is also far from a miserable life. It is a deep life, one dug with much effort that has itself rooted in the scriptures, in the fathers, in the saints, in the love of God and neighbor. It is a life in which your corpse can be presented to God as a seed planted, to produce much fruit.
A song that fits:
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