If we were mere flesh and blood, the pallid, empty dailiness would be fine with us. The spiritual life is that which makes life whole. It is quite possible, in fact, it is relatively easy, to dis-integrate ourselves, to divide and estrange ourselves, and to let the spirit become still and die. The suicide of the spirit is accomplished when we fear and distrust those aspects of our humanness which we cannot control and manipulate easily, which frighten us with their power, which, like love, like desire and hope, often bear with them the pain of loss. Those aspects of being can be shut away, buried in some dark tomb of being like a threatening pretender to the throne one dare not kill outright but will not give light of day.
Spiritual suicide is within the reach of everyone.
There are those moments in the lives of each of us in which the deep hunger of the spirit presses to the foreground of consciousness. And, secondly, must come the discipline by which the spirit is invited nurtured, enhanced. The decisions made in our dailiness come out of the same place where the sea-wind has blown about, where the moonlight through the trees has shone, where the laughter began. Our spirits are various and wondrously diverse. Our hungers are not the same.