giving up the ghost of the material

in my struggles with faith, i have come to a conclusion, albeit a progressive conclusion and not a stagnant one. that conclusion is that the call of faith, the call of discipleship, is not to obey a certain set of rules or believe a certain set of dogmas. the call on our lives is for us to give up the temporal for the eternal. physical for spiritual. delusion for reality.

you see, most of the things we hold dearly to are things that do not really even exist. we cherish our precious money, but our money has no basis in reality. it only exists because we created it. it has meaning only because we've assigned meaning to it. if one were to take a million dollars to a deserted island, the money would lose all meaning and would exist only as paper in a giant sack. the only way it would ever be of use is if someone came from a culture that assigned value to that particular form of currency.

the same can be said about our bodies. one of the few things we know most about is ourselves, and this includes our bodies. however, we have fooled ourselves into believing that we are our bodies, and this simply is not true. our bodies, while i believe are very attached to our spirits, are not who we are. as c.s. lewis said, "you do not have a spirit; you are a spirit. you have a body." but onward we plunge through life as if we were the sum of dust and water, which allows us to treat those around us in the same way. and so we do not love our neighbor because we do not believe him or her to be anymore than an earthly competitor who will consume the resources we think we need to survive if we allow them to. thus we store up our treasures on earth, guard them with locks, gates, walls, guns, tanks, and most deadly, cold indifference, if not outright hostility, towards the suffering of those without.

if we were willing to give up this delusion of the material, this fascination with all that we assign value to but which we can show no innate value other than that which we give; if we were willing to live like spiritual beings, then it is my belief that we would, in turn, learn to be more human and less animal.