From our perspective and experience in life, our bonds are eternal. We cannot break what chains us, nor heal ourselves of our spiritual, social, psychological, or moral disorders. Self-help is a fiction. We do not have the answer to our own problems.
We come to realize that we must look outside ourselves for some wisdom, experience, resources, and power to aid us in our struggle against what limits our lives. There is a truth of self-help though, that our dilemma requires that we must do something, and in that sense we must help ourselves, even if what we must do is to reach out beyond ourselves.
This is an evil in all that is done under the sun, that there is one fate for all men. Furthermore, the hearts of the sons of men are full of evil and insanity is in their hearts throughout their lives. Afterwards they go to the dead. Ecclesiastes 9:3
Ecclesiastes describes life from the point of view of our lived experience. A first reading laments that everyone goes to the grave from which there is no reprieve. But we also need to read Ecclesiastes as a spiritual metaphor speaking to us of Christ and his work. Read this way, death is representative of how we are eternally bound, as far as it depends on us, within our problems. We need someone or something else to do what we cannot.
The solution that Christian thought offers concerning our intractable situation is a paradox. The very help we need, which cannot come from ourselves but must originate beyond our own resources or capabilities, is in fact residing in us. We name we give this inner reality that has the potential to heal us “the image of God”, who is Christ himself (Colossians 1:15), in whom, for whom, and through who we have our very being. It is “Christ in us, the hope of glory” (Colossians 1:27).
The bonds which seem eternal may be broken by what, or rather who, is within us, but not of us. What I truly need is not at all what I was expecting.
Perhaps at first I believed I could overcome my struggles, but then I came to accept that only a greater power could do what I cannot. Finally, I discover that greater power was with me always, lying dormant as far as I was aware, while I tried everything else.
Our hope is not to be found where we expect or in what we expect. If we are to be healed, and the apparent eternal bonds broken, we must give ourselves to the power that is for us as it actually is, and not as we might want it to be.
God breaks what for us is an everlasting captivity to spiritual sickness. God is at once both beyond and outside us and ever present within. Who expects that? We have infinity within our finite frame, the very source of our wholeness was with us all the time.
It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me. Galatians 2:20
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