And so why should we do things the right way?  What is the right way?  The right way is the rightly ordered way.  The rightly ordered way is God’s way.  Every other way is, by measure, the wrong way.  But how do we know God’s way?  We know God’s way because He told us, He tells us.  But what if we don’t know what He told us?  Or what if we forgot?  Or what if we never knew?  Or what if we don’t accept it?  Impossible.  We are the embodiment of told.  We are what has been told, is being told.  Just look at us.  We are magnificent.  

But increasingly the trill of our magnificence quavers.  Our individual strayings accelerating into a collective distortion more violent, more dissonant the farther we depart from the right way, the rightly ordered way, the only way, God’s way.  Chaos.  Chaos is the wrong way, and it is not from Him, and we know this because there is nothing chaotic about Him.  Just peace.  A peace to be ours if done rightly.  Oh, the struggle to just do it rightly, what with all the conceptions of what rightly even is!  We—all of us—are deluded.  Daily.  We admire—wrongly—our magnificence, misunderstanding it, attributing it to our own doing when we have done nothing—absolutely nothing—to create ourselves.  Without Him, we are naught.  Without Him, we never were.  We are created, and so are subject to the Creator.  We are subject to the Creator, and thus to His way.  His way is the right way.  Any other way is the wrong way, and even with rightness of intention, of feeling, our vainly looking inward or to others for what it is we ourselves should do or be renders the luster of our magnificence faded.  We are less than what we should be.  It is why St. Paul says, “Pray constantly.”  He will let us know His unending, unchanging way.  

And so there should be no mess.  Just order, right order.  This is the right way.  And in this right way, this right order, there is flourishment and beauty and freedom.  The ultimate freedom.  Rightly ordered freedom can never fall short of what we may otherwise conceive, because God is boundless, but not amorphous and we, without Him, are simply bound, no matter how free of His way we think we are or should be.  And there is the greatest magnificence in this.  By His grace, and with His strength, and through His mercy there is just that unspeakable brightness, that cleanliness of effort that no matter how deep our failings, will rise to Him, rightly.  This is the right way.  

 

Image courtesy of Unsplash.

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