Spiritual Responsibility is Not All Sweetness & Light 04/05/01

this was a posting of Mom's on the Caritas (not her Mindwalker1910) dist list

Subj: [Caritas] spiritual responsibility is not all sweetness and light
Date: 4/5/01 9:35:48 AM Eastern Daylight Time

Nita (Junge Holm) - you asked for more background on my thoughts about abuse of drinking and the level of spiritual responsibility our faith places on the individual. This has been a general thought in the back of my mind for many years. I thank you for the opportunity to clarify to myself what I mean by what I said.

I have long had a niggling feeling that there could be a link between self-abuse, including alcoholism, and a sense of having a "high maintenance" faith such as ours can be. By that, I mean:
>> having full responsibility for our own spiritual welfare - instead of believing in salvation through Christ or through the church (confession)
>> having responsiblity for actually reading the Writings and drawing a personal understanding of doctrine from that reading - which was what I grew up believing we were supposed to do
> the cost to those raised within the faith or who marry into the faith of moving past the New Church to a faith that more fully reflects what is in the heart - especially dealing with the potential loss of sense of place, of community and culture
>> perhaps most of all, the awesome beauty and fierce life goals defined within the Doctrine of Use, the Doctrine of Charity, the Doctrine of the Lord, the Doctrine of Conjugial Love, which could be experienced as setting too high a bar for mere mortals to ever achieve.

FYI - - I think that people can "get their knickers in a twist" about the details and forget, as I was taught, that the foundation stones of our faith are simply a belief in one God and that the Lord God Jesus Christ is that god, that we are to shun evils (first) as sins against God and do good (second), and that we are to love the neighbor as ourselves.