I will conquer this steel!!!

I posted this picture because it reminded me of a great conversation I had with my friend Bekah last night about service and spirituality. This picture was taken on ASB, aka Alternative Spring Break, this spring in Jonestown, Mississippi with my Catholic Sheil buddies. We were working for Habitat for Humanity and in addition, we did some work in town at the carpentry shop and the building which used to be a brothel but will soon be a youth library. In this picture I am doing what could seem like a fruitless act of trying to get a small piece of welded steel off of a larger piece so we could use it to brace the crumbling door frame. While in fact I never did get that damn piece off and we had to use another piece of steel and a four by four (or foh by foh as Tim says), I was ready to rip that steel apart with my teeth if it meant keeping the kids of Jonestown safe from a crumbling wall.

And that's where I find spirituality, in serving others even if I dont' even get to meet those people. In serving others, I feel close to God. As Bekah and I talked about, its a way of finding "samadhi" which you'll recognize from my blog title. It's really hard to explain samadhi but my basic understanding of it is a transcendant form of consciousness where you are concious of everything at once and in a spiritual way. It's kind of a union with the world around you which I interpret to being a good thing because it leads to understanding. So service is one of the ways of trying to reach that state because it is an action relating to a part of the world we so commonly look over or dismiss. And in a very Catholic way, I believe service is what Christ calls me to do and it is a way to become closer to God. A spiritual union not through solitary meditation and prayer but instead through the prayerful assistance to others.

Well, that's enough mysticism for this evening. Just wanted to share. It was a great conversation.