Spiritual Honesty: The Truest Measure of Religion Is Not Obedience... It Is Behavior.

By Paul H. Price

The great peril of any religious life is the naturally produced conflict between rules and relationships. That conflict occurs when our focus becomes primarily the living of religion, attending mostly to the outwardness of faith, to the fulfilling of commandments. It is then that religion can becomes its own religion, it can become what we worship, believing that the satisfying of the processes and requirements of our faith are what will justify us.

The rules of any faith are the means to an end, not the sole qualifications. Religion, and the practice of religion, is a vehicle, a catalyst, a foundation designed to facilitate a very authentic change in us, in our nature, in our very behavior. The underpinning of that change is when relationships become the reason for obedience and action, not the blessings and consequences of the rules.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Aug 23, 2012
• ISBN: 9781477219720

Paul H. Price

The author was born and raised in Southeastern Idaho in the midst of the "Baby Boomer" generation and the uniqueness of the cultural and economical and societal seismic shifting that was the 1950s and 1960s. He has adeptly drawn on his own personal experiences and interwoven them with the multitude of extraordinary events and social traditions of that time He has been married to his wife Christine for 46 years and they are the parents of 7 children and they now have 9 grandchildren. He holds a Master's Degree in Education from California State University and is the author of three other books; Last Chance, Childhood Dying, and Spiritual Honesty.

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© 2012 by Paul H. Price. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 08/15/2012

ISBN: 978-1-4772-1973-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4772-1971-3 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4772-1972-0 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012910506

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Contents

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PREFACE

Chapter One IDENTITY The greatest battle, exacts a profound cost.

Chapter Two COST The affixed equalizer of choice, culminates with fire.

Chapter Three FIRE Must exist to create valid change.

Chapter Four CHANGE The requisite catalyst, demands facing ignorance.

Chapter Five IGNORANCE An unnecessary wound, fosters fear.

Chapter Six FEAR The extreme opposite of faith, forerunner to stewardship.

Chapter Seven STEWARDSHIP Beginnings of charity, precursor to consecration.

Chapter Eight CONSECRATION The abandoning of self, to gain a purer love.

PREFACE

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The great peril of any religious life is the naturally produced conflict between rules and relationships. That conflict occurs when our focus becomes primarily the living of religion, attending mostly to the outwardness of faith, to the fulfilling of commandments. It is then that religion can become its own religion, it can become what we worship, believing that the satisfying of the processes and requirements of our faith alone are what will justify us.

The rules of any faith are the means to an end, not the sole qualifications. Religion, and the practice of religion, is a vehicle, a catalyst, a foundation designed to facilitate a very authentic change in us, in our nature, in our very behavior. The underpinning of that change is when relationships become the reason for obedience and action, not the blessings and consequences of the rules. If that transformation does not come, if we stop at the law, then the sole fulfillment of commandments as Paul declared; Profiteth me nothing. Commandments and ordinances and obedience are absolutely essential to the processes and requisitions of salvation, but they are also conditional acts, not irrevocable contracts. The great danger then becomes that we can develop an internal belief system that as long as the obedience is in place, if the list is being marked off, then our actual behavior is secondary, inconsequential, even overlooked. A self-developed notion of entitlement to salvation, regardless of our actual honesty or kindness or patience or purity, is our claim, because we obey.

Our primary and most prolonged battle then is internal and not external. It is a silent confrontation, yet profoundly affects every aspect of life. It is the difficult process of not discovering, but uncovering ourselves, our real selves. The dichotomies of this mortal existence intrinsically create conflicts of interest that require constant reassessment of purposes and direction; for what ends do we identify with and hence, become? The conflict is in discerning our decoration over our dress, appearances over intent. Proper choices and considerations develop a peacefulness within us about ourselves, while improper decisions create discord and uneasiness. The signals are clear, but their origin and resolve is the very underpinning of the challenge.

Identity is eternal and permanent. It becomes obscured and abused in this realm, and intentionally so, for the choice to continue as we were or to alter and abandon original identity with all of the forces, prizes and discrepancies that interact with that process, is the very foundation of agency. And agency is everything. Cost is the affixed equalizer of choice. It is the cost of choice that presses the battle of continual struggle and uncertainty of arrival—just when we thought we had.

Costs exist and are present regardless of our belief in their existence. They are powers we do not control, nor escape. Agency is a freedom of choosing, not a freedom of doing and with each decision, costs and benefits interplay. For everything won, something is lost, and for everything lost, something is won. That principle underpins our continued search for answers. All choice is about direction, and to change direction, fire must envelop and destroy old tendencies.

Fire changes naturally grown characteristics that are obtrusive, inhibiting the upward struggle of true identity. Fires exist simply because there are things that need burning. Natural attitudes and propensities require dismantling and eventually purging so that spiritual attitudes and propensities may reign. Fire is a most profound internal friend. It provides the environment for growth where growth has stopped, and the seeds of life when life’s sweetness has died. The difficulty is the pain. The world is spiritually corrosive and all change requires suffering, and it is that pain that changes us.

Change is a catalyst. We oppose it and welcome it in the same breath. The great conflict is our tendency to believe that change is abstinence, or forced denial. Change is reconstruction and its powerful authenticity does not tolerate mere abstinence, and its command will continue to press our characteristics until they comply and forsake and abandon earthly appetites and passions. This process will not allow appearances to imitate change, nor showmanship to disguise itself as sincerity. All hypocrisy is known, its face is distinct and recognized by the spirit, and the spirit will force the encounter. Change demands facing our ignorance.

Ignorance is an unnecessary and painful wound and the most prominent cause of anxiety and fear. Part of our ignorance is manufactured, in part due to ineptness, in part due to the creating of our own knowledge, formulated by our desire to believe in things the way we want them to be, not necessarily the way they are. Forcing falsehoods to act as truth in our life is the most stinging ignorance and hardest to correct. We wander roads with self-created, temporal maps, inviting fear and worry.

Fear is a child of vision. It is generated by our view and our perception. It is a choice, it is not a circumstance. Opposites exist in everything. There are positivisms and negativisms to each exclusive experience and occurrence in this life and must be for agency and choice to exist, and agency and choice must be, and are, participants in everything. Fear is the extreme opposite of faith. Fear is temporal viewing, faith is spiritual viewing. Faith is the power behind and in all action. Any action. Faith is the frame to any thought, any motive, any movement. Its power is inherent in our true identity and is in all things. Faith is the tool for uncovering true self. It is the instrument of courage to move without seeing, to act without understanding. It chooses good over bad and correct over incorrect instinctively, when allowed to be the chooser. Its force is unleashed by simple use. Faith is continual hope and its basic foundation is positiveness and trust and movement and works. It is the substructure to stewardship.

Stewardship is the beginnings of charity. It is the arena in which we begin to discern the truth and wonder of identities being uncovered in proportion to our willingness to lose them. Its lesson is that greatness is found in not seeking it, nor being concerned about it. Hypocrisy and destruction have their birth in outward performances and gain their foothold in our concern for human approval. Stewardship is arduous enough to display our priorities and protracted enough to prove out real intents and designs. The natural man’s motive is self-aggrandizement, the servant’s is relationships. Self-serving action has no hope of future or continuation. Stewardships create eternal properties in us and are the forerunner of sacrifice. Sacrifice is the means and processes, which produce the energy and courage necessary for enduring. Sacrifice has no power in the effort unless earthly value is exchanged in the workings. It is not found in service for service sake, or in labor when nothing else is forgone. Sacrifice is an offering, an exchange, a giving of value for things less tangible or marketable. It is required for any blessing, any increase in faith, and any addition of light. It is the forbearer of consecration.

Consecration is the abandoning of self. It is the fruit of realization that partial obedience is painful and simply cycles itself over and over. It is choice and agency and requires eventually periods of solitude and of being left to oneself, to prove out actual intents of the heart. Consecration is not an event, it is our life, and our life becomes that which is consecrated. With true devotion, self-appointed purposes become nonexistent and the debate of vacillating choices ends. It is supported by reverence and loyalty and relationships, and transcends all earthly endeavors. The workings of which invoke the attributes of Christ and His love. The Love of Christ is not a love for self but of the potential of self, and of others. It is a quality that values friendship, compassion and empathy more than possessions or notoriety. It is love that is dependable, unwavering, honest. It is a concern about imbalance and circumstance, it is aware of pain and injustice, of empty shores and broken hearts. It embraces the forgotten, the ill, the persecuted. It understands unfairness, is not ignorant of quiet suffering, or isolated despair. It caresses brutal hurt and confronts evil doings. The pure Love of Christ is awareness, is sympathy, is action. It is the insight that change is slow, that each move at their own pace, that mistakes must be met with inexhaustible forgiving. It is the awareness that we go together or not at all. It abandons competition and invokes unity. It is the only attribute that will never fail, and never end, and above all else, it is the Patience of Christ.

Chapter One

IDENTITY The greatest battle, exacts a profound cost.

purpose, reality, temporal, despair, discernment.

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As we pass through this mortal existence with its intrinsic distractions and side-roads, we have the constant, almost unceasing need to remind ourselves of who we are. That imposing perspective must certainly be the foundation for a correct daily decision-making process. Who we are and not what we are.

An identity crisis can occur when what we do and what we have becomes our principal concentration. Things around us cannot only become important to an abstract degree, they often become our support and our frame and our motivation. Temporal identity unaided is inherently destructive because it must someday end. When it is lost, we are lost. Eventually, all will be gone except who we are.

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Substance becomes our downfall if it has become

our only identity.

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We live in a world that attempts to promise everything; happiness, love, youth, ease, abundance, peace. In every facet of our lives we are inundated with the purported ways and means to lay hold on these promises. The cruel irony is that worldly things alone are unable to sustain any of these most valued gifts. Hence, we live in a society of people pursuing ends that they cannot achieve on their own, cultivating great frustration and bewilderment, unhappiness and eventually evil. The very process of this worldly pursuit, by heavenly design, is an unbalanced fabrication. Yet we expect it to produce the desired result and by itself, it simply cannot. To chase a mirage, thinking it to be reality, can only lead to one outcome in the end.

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Temporal achievements can enhance our happiness, even enlarge it, but unaided they cannot generate it,

nor sustain it.

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No one is immune from the deceptive realism of this false process of pursuit. In truth, it can become even more pronounced and difficult the further we travel the road. Wanting to be happy above all else, yet putting energy and effort into worldly things that we think will bring about that goal in and of themselves. When in reality the very mechanics of that singular pursuit are what bring about the antithesis of our seeking—unhappiness.

The dichotomy of this world—the temporal verses the eternal—is the very core of the eternal plan. We are to ascertain for ourselves by our own experience, the good from the evil, joy from enjoyment, indulgence from discipline, temporary from permanent, light from darkness. In this mortal sphere it is by this order, this necessary conflict of interest, that we are taught, then eventually proven, by virtue of our choices. It requires constant reflection to determine if our identity is grounded in who we are or if it is grounded in what we have, or want to have. What kind of a person are we without prosperity and possessions? What are our attributes when we stand alone, nothing around us, when we ourselves become our only identity? The realization of that eventual day causes one to consider a deep and elusive truth. Our identity is not found only in what we have, nor only in what we have achieved, but preponderantly in who we have become.

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Happiness is not a singular function of success or failure; it is in having a life in harmony with truth.

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We are not doctors and lawyers, builders and drivers, housewives and hobbyists. What we do and the means we use to pass through this mortal state are essential to our temporal salvation, but it is not who we are. Consider; does our character and well-being rise and fall with our substance? Is our attitude toward ourselves and our neighbors dependant on our status, and theirs? Our very essence is that we are spiritual beings—intelligence, or light and truth. That is what we are. Somehow when the remembrance of this authenticity stays secure and constant, priorities and perspectives remain undaunted, strength to endure flows steadily, the conflict is more easily discerned and difficulties become more manageable.

Samuel the Lamanite was sent by the Lord to the once great city of Zarahemla. Being overrun and strangled by their own evil and anger that comes when false choices have run their course and been proven out. From high on the city wall he spoke truths that should resonate in our ears daily; For ye have sought all the days of your lives for that which ye could not obtain. (Helaman 13:38)

Unrealized expectations and inflated desires combine as one of the single furthermost destroyers of men’s souls. They