Gnome eats wild strawberries found along a trail
near the small mountain town of Montezuma, Colorado.
For Maximus the Confessor, the kingdom of God is one of love. Outside it, man is divided against other men and himself. He clings to distinctions generated by culture and ego- "human beings begin to feel themselves at first distinct; later, isolated; and, finally, opposed to each other in fear, greed, envy, lust, etc."
So, distinction leads to isolation- that familiar feeling of anomie and loneliness revealed in the writings of Kierkegaard, Walker Percy, and Camus. The isolation fosters a opposition- the sort of thinking that frames life as a battle, us vs. them, America vs. Russia, and so on.
For Maximus, faith is a twofold experience which involves first opening our souls to God's grace and love and then applying this faith or fidelity toward other men in a way that heals the divisions that separate us.
To love is to be penetrated or inhabited by the other.
The existence of one is the condition for the other- lover and beloved, loving and beloving.
To be truly undivided, one must re-create the self as belonging to another. And, by belonging to another, one is no longer divided against the other.
There is a way in which this undergirds my ecological thinking- this desire to keep things whole, to feel myself as living in a world in which bees are not merely "other", nothing separate.
