2008-11-15T17:47:00.000-08:00

The Spiritual Virus

By Walter Vaughn

I know what’s right or what I should be doing, I definitely know what’s expected of me. Another day and another broken promise as I stumble between two worlds. How does one retain any spiritual identity in the secular world? All must venture out into a society driven by fervent competition with the hope to survive another day, week, or year. It's so easy to find oneself consumed by the demand and temptations of our world. We become like those who have contracted a virus that leaves it’s victim depressed, angry, weak, and alone.

Sometimes, it’s the many little things that accumulate upon the heart that has the potential to weaken us over an extended period of time. In other instances, it’s that one big sin that binds us and pulls us away from G-d. The virus seems to be able to mutate from person to person playing upon each ones individual weakness. Our physical nature leaves us caught in between two worlds. What good can possibly come from this?

Perhaps, this is a part of G-d's plan in order to refine and tune the soul. Quite simply, it's serving G-d amidst the battle. There would seem to be two wars that confront us. That battle within our self, as well as the battle outside our self. One has some control of the war within but little control of the society (outside battle) in which we live. If there was no resistance from day to day, we would simply stop growing and in essence stop learning/ living. Certainly, we all have our own battle ground in which we live. It could be a financial problem that is always with you, always on your mind. Perhaps it’s a painful illness, relationship, politics, food, pornography, gambling, drugs, alcohol, and yes, including religious doubt. The list is great and could circle the earth many times over. This spiritual virus mutates from person to person in order to prey upon each individual weakness and our walk with G-d.

The first symptom of the virus is the absence of pray or communicating with G-d.

This can bring on feelings of guilt, fear, and utter loneliness. At times these emotions mutate into hate and anger which may be directed towards friends, family, and perhaps G-d Himself.

No one escapes the enemy, absolutely no one. In a TIME article entitled " Mother Teresa's Crisis of Faith" by David Van Biema writes,

"A new, innocuously titled book, Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light (Doubleday), consisting primarily of correspondence between Teresa and her confessors and superiors over a period of 66 years, provides the spiritual counterpoint to a life known mostly through its works. The letters, many of them preserved against her wishes (she had requested that they be destroyed but was overruled by her church), reveal that for the last nearly half-century of her life she felt no presence of God whatsoever — or, as the book's compiler and editor, the Rev. Brian Kolodiejchuk, writes, "neither in her heart or in the eucharist."

That absence seems to have started at almost precisely the time she began tending the poor and dying in Calcutta, and — except for a five-week break in 1959 — never abated. Although perpetually cheery in public, the Teresa of the letters lived in a state of deep and abiding spiritual pain. In more than 40 communications, many of which have never before been published, she bemoans the "dryness," "darkness," "loneliness" and "torture" she is undergoing. She compares the experience to hell and at one point says it has driven her to doubt the existence of heaven and even of God. She is acutely aware of the discrepancy between her inner state and her public demeanor. "The smile," she writes, is "a mask" or "a cloak that covers everything."

Mother Teresa freely gave her life over to the world's forgotten. She witnessed up close disease, poverty, and hunger, turning the world's attention to those who needed immediate assistance. Yet, I believe her greatest work can be found in her letters to her superiors. There in lies the greatest truth and the mark of a faithful servant, that being integrity and honesty. Being true to yourself even when it finds you in opposition to what appears to be G-d's will. If G-d's most beloved servants can have these moments in life, we the lesser will certainly experience them as well.

To experience life or to live in the flesh is to be removed from G-d.

This is a time to refine the soul with the hope to progress to a higher reality. Judaism teaches the soul exists before it enters the body and leaves the body at the moment of death. Only in the flesh can the soul achieve whatever it needs to learn, in order to return to it's source. Perhaps there is a certain task the soul must complete or to rectify a certain sin. At the end of our life G-d makes account of our life's work which will decide our future existence. This all takes place for our benefit to grow and to ultimately reflect the image and likeness of G-d. For most if not all, it may take many lifetimes in order to reach this goal. The time, place, and family we are born into will provide the necessary elements to refine and tune the soul.

Gilgul, Gilgul neshamot or Gilgulei Ha Neshamot (Heb. גלגול הנשמות) refers to the concept of reincarnation, emanating from the Kabbalistic framework within Judaism. In Hebrew, the word gilgul means "cycle" and neshamot is the plural for "souls." Souls are seen to "cycle" through "lives" or "incarnations", being attached to different human bodies over time. Which body they associate with depends on their particular task in the physical world, spiritual levels of the bodies of predecessors and so on.

Our imperfect world with all of lifes unfortunate circumstances provides the perfect stage, backdrop, and spiritual obstacle course designed to refine the soul. All of of this takes place in a most severe and dark enviroment we call earth.