The spiritual life is concerned with form. Pleasure and pain are concerns of the body. The body when guided not by spiritual form, but by pleasure or pain, is the secular. The secular is a place of demonry and deceit. A false place where spirit dies.
To pray unceasingly is the call of the Orthodox. To at all moments be in prayer. To at every moment be spirited. There is no secular. There is only the spiritual form of life. The pleasure and pain of the body is subservient to the form. The form must not break down. Ignore the pleasure or pain. They arrive as challenges to the form. Perhaps they arrive as enemies. But when properly approached they increase the spirit, they grow the spirit by antagonizing the form. Each day invite these enemies of form, for when encountered properly they will strengthen the form and expand it.
The pushup form must
not waiver. Neither the pullup. To neglect the form is to encourage
injury. Should pain cause one’s form to waiver one must stop the
exercise to rest. One has reached his limit. To push past is to push
for numbers and not for form. To push past with bad form is an act of
the ego. To claim numbers of reps and records. But it is the form, in
its complete range of motion, its strictness always, not the number of
sets and repetitions, that is the goal. Perfect form. Each rep. The pushup and pullup have become ascetical exercises.
So goes each day for
the man of spirit. In all things the spiritual form repeated unceasingly. Discovering the
spirit in new ways, extending and growing it. Never allowing discomfort, whether it
be soreness or sickness or fatigue, to affect the form. Never
allowing pleasure to distract from the form. Never thinking about tomorrow.
