All our steps

It occurs to me that some (most?) of my readers may be wondering how it is that, at my age and with a lifetime’s contemplative practice, one way or another, under my belt, I am still at times subject to these odd changes of direction and language. I sometimes wonder myself. Proverbs 20:24 (NRSV) reads: “All our steps are ordered by the Lord; how then can we understand our own ways?” Benedictus Spinoza wrote (Ethics, Prop. XXIX): “Wherefore all things are conditioned by the necessity of the divine nature, not only to exist, but also to exist and operate in a particular manner, and there is nothing that is contingent.” Free will perhaps is more a sensation than a condition of being – a thing more desired than factual. We do not choose our place and time of birth, nor the conditions into which we are born, nor the genetic disposition with which we are born. These things happen to us, as does life itself, at least from the point of view of the individual self. It seems to me that the…