We can picture our relationship with God by imagining ourselves to be in a hallway about seventy years long. If we’re 35 years old, we’re half way down the passage. The Majesty of The Trinity is at the end. Between us, there are openings along the hall’s walls. Each leads into a room.
Each opening represents something that distracts us from God. Behind us are the openings we’ve passed. We entered and left some of them, returning to the straight, narrow hall. It’s walls are so interspersed with openings that it’s easy to forget the hall is there. Left, right, ahead, behind, above, and below is the universe we see.
At any given point, we can see where we are, if only by where we’ve been and where we’ve learned the saints have gone. We know we could have done worse. We may not feel enough of a need to be better to actually go through all the trouble of moving along more straightly and quickly.
We can move past the openings alongside, getting closer to God. We can also be so attracted to something in one of the openings that we turn in. Sometimes, people reverse course. They go back down the hall to revisit the the compartments they thought they’d left.
We have a tendency to stay in the same place we find ourselves at any given time. We can live there quite comfortably with others who have progressed as far. “I enjoy being with my friends.”, we say, contentedly.
Those happy where they are tend to think of those who keep moving ahead as “extremists”. Those unfortunate souls who have turned back, and gone back and turned into some favored doorway are a source of pride to those who stay in the same place. “Well, I didn’t go back to doing that.”
That indicates a feeling of superiority to others on the journey. That feeling, itself, is one of the rooms behind one of the openings into one of the many rooms along the hall.
It will be inevitably discovered on closer examination that that room, like all the others, has no floor.
