"'How do I know I'm saved' is perhaps the central question of Christian life. Each tradition & sect finds different answers.

Most end up engaging in some flavor of works righteousness. For someone it is straight-up synergism. For others, it's the more subtle "fruit checking." /1

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If you have a spiritual practice, this would be a good time to double down on it.

If you don’t have a spiritual practice, this wouldn’t be the worst time to start one.

1/x


Thread on why


Do yr spiritual practice. Even when you don't feel like it.

“Hardly does our head begin to ache than we stop going to choir, which won’t kill us either. We stay away 1 day bc our head ached, another bc it was just now aching & 3 more so that it won’t ache again.” Teresa of Avila

Ok: a spiritual practice. Something that you do regularly, and if you do it with the right intention, can transform your relationship to yourself, other people, the world and your place in it and (if this resonates with you) the divine.

Prayer. Meditation. But also: making art. Walks in nature. Going running, for some people. I wrote a whole entire book on parenting as a spiritual practice. Intention matters.

You don’t have to be religious to have one.
just a my thought...

❶/12 Roughly speaking, primitive Buddhism was about liberation from the inner suffering of the ordained individual. In contrast, Mahayana Buddhism, especially the teachings of the Lotus Sutra, emphasises 'the salvation of all people, together'.


❷/12 In short, people of Mahayana Buddhism do Practice as Bodhisattva for all in the secular world. Strictly, these are different religions, and primitive Buddhism is not well suited to being associated with the state or secular communities.

❸/12 I believe that if anti-secular primitive Buddhism had arrived in ancient Japan it would not have spread very far. In Japan, where rice cultivation is very important, the idea of destroying the community would have been a threat of people's survival.

❹/12 By the way, it's perhaps inevitable that the purity of the teachings will diminish depending on how they are disseminated in society. In other words, I think that, roughly speaking, what develops away from the original form can even become a civilization.

❺/12 But anything that significantly reduces the quality of the original should be called a degeneration. I think that Christian civilization, although flawed, has built a civilization in tension.

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