SPRINGBOARDS and WALKING STICKS

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Buying Places of Honour

Ego is the voice inside us that says ‘I’ — loudly, persistently, and almost always at the expense of ‘we.’ It goes by many names: pride, self-importance, confidence, self-esteem. Spiritual teachers across traditions have called it the false self , the small self, the self we must outgrow. Whatever the name, the behaviour is the same. Ego grasps. It reaches for power, money, position, recognition — not because these things are wrong in themselves, but because ego can never hold enough of them. It is a hunger with no bottom. It never arrives. It never says: this is enough. Richard Rohr puts it starkly: for ego, everything is a commodity. Everything can be acquired, traded, leveraged. Even God. In Matthew 20: 20–28 , a mother comes to Jesus with a request. She wants her two sons — James and John — to sit at his right and left hand when he comes into his Kingdom. It is a breathtaking ask. And what makes it more than a footnote is the way she asks it. She kneels. She adopts the pos...

Most of Us Are Not Listening; but Loading or Waiting

Think about the last real argument you had — with a partner, a friend, a colleague. While they were still mid-sentence, something in your brain had already started its engine. You were finding the flaw, preparing your counter, mentally lining up your words. You heard sounds, but you weren't really there. This is the first kind of listening the document describes: listening that is already formulating its response. It's egoistic. Its whole point is to win. This isn't because we're bad people. It's because our ego is frightened. If what they're saying is true, something we believe might have to die. And the ego doesn't die quietly. The second kind of listening looks civilised — and it is. But just barely. This is the polite dinner-table version. We wait. We don't interrupt. We nod at appropriate moments. But underneath, both people are just taking turns broadcasting . You speak. I wait. Then I say what I was going to say anyway. Two monologues wearing the...

Hypocrisy or Being Trapped Inside a Structure?

We are quick to blame the person. When a leader disappoints us, when a leader becomes the thing she once opposed, when a man who spoke of liberation finds himself, years later, administering the same quiet oppressions he once named — we call it hypocrisy. We say he changed. We say she forgot where she came from. We say power corrupts. And perhaps sometimes it does. But far more often, something else is happening. Something less dramatic and more structural. Something that deserves a different word entirely. The word is architecture. A building shapes the people who live in it before they ever make a single decision. The height of a ceiling affects how freely a person thinks. The arrangement of chairs in a room determines who speaks and who listens. The placement of the executive floor above all the others is not a neutral choice; it is a lesson in hierarchy delivered daily, silently, through the feet. We absorb the structure of our spaces long before we begin to question them. And...

Demanded Respect Is a Concession

There is a difference between a man who is feared and a man who is trusted. Both may walk into a room and find it fall quiet. But the quality of that silence is entirely different. One silence is the silence of held breath; the other is the silence of attention. One empties a room of ease; the other fills it with it. We know this distinction instinctively. And yet, again and again, in our institutions, our homes, our public life, we confuse the two. We pursue the silence of fear and call it respect. Respect that is demanded is not respect at all. It is concession — the appearance of deference worn by people who have been given no other option. A child who calls an adult ‘sir’ out of the threat of punishment is not showing reverence; he is showing survival. A subordinate who nods along in a meeting, who never disagrees, who praises work she privately finds poor — she is not honouring her superior; she is protecting herself. Demanded respect produces perfect mimicry of the real thin...

The Transfiguration Is Rising Above the Valley and Seeing Beyond

There is a kind of seeing that ordinary life will not permit. The valley is too loud, too close, too insistent. It fills the eyes with the immediate and the urgent, leaving no room for the vast. And so, across the ages, those who have needed to see clearly have done the one thing that changes everything: they have climbed. Transfiguration is, at its heart, a story about what happens when we dare to rise above the level at which we are condemned to live. It is not, as it might first appear, merely a miraculous episode in the life of Jesus. It is a grammar — a recurring pattern in the human encounter with the divine — written first in the life of Moses, then in the life of Elijah, and reaching its fullest expression on an unnamed mountain where three disciples stood blinking in astonishing light. Moses knew the valley well. He had led a people through it for decades — a people prone to grumbling, prone to despair, prone to fashioning golden gods whenever the true God felt too slow i...

Leaders Making Policies Incline to Become Self-Serving

Leaders are not necessarily authors or originals who have created something of value and thereby earned the allegiance of followers. In most modern systems, leaders are elected, appointed, or seize power through various mechanisms, and once installed, they enjoy authority, privilege, and the instruments of state power. This raises a fundamental question: when those who hold power are simultaneously empowered to make the very policies that govern society, can we expect them to act against their own interests? Would they craft rules that might diminish their authority or challenge their privilege? The evidence from authoritarian governments across the globe—regimes that have extended their terms, eliminated opposition, and reshaped constitutions to perpetuate their rule—suggests a troubling answer: power seeks to preserve and expand itself. There exists a fundamental incompatibility between holding executive power and making policy. Leaders who simultaneously wield authority and wri...

Integrity Demands Deep-seated Honesty

Who can lay claim to be not on the same boat as sinners. This truth is uncomfortable, yet deeply human. Some of us are seen doing wrong; others do the same in secret. What one person does with pride in the light of day, another does with shame in the silence of night. The difference is often not the act itself, but the exposure. We are quick to judge what is visible. We condemn the scandal, the public failure, the open wrongdoing. Yet we rarely examine the hidden movements of our own hearts. We measure morality by appearance. But integrity is not about what is seen. It is about what remains true when no one is watching. There is a tendency within us to divide humanity into two groups: the righteous and the sinful. We imagine ourselves on the better side, simply because our faults are less visible. But this division is fragile. It rests on illusion. If all secrets were made public, if every hidden motive were brought into the light, the lines between “us” and “them” would disapp...

Ashes, Nostalgia, and Resistance

Cleaning and tidying, repenting and returning, and renewal, rebirth and resurrection are all profound human needs. It happens in every realm of human life, like, physical, financial, social, and of course, in moral and spiritual realms. There is something irreducibly human about the desire to start over. We feel it in the urge to throw open windows on the first mild morning of spring, to settle old debts, to write a letter of apology long overdue. Across every domain of life — financial, relational, physical, moral — we are creatures who reach, again and again, for the possibility of renewal. We are not content to remain in our accumulated disorder. Something within us insists that things can be otherwise. Lent, beginning with Ash Wednesday , gives liturgical form to this insistence. It is the Church's great annual act of honesty: a forty-day acknowledgement that we have wandered, that we are not who we meant to be, and that the distance between where we stand and where God calls...

Purity Culture

Across cultures, religions, and centuries, virginity has been elevated from a biological state to a moral category, transformed from a neutral fact about a person's experience into a marker of worth, honour, and social belonging. The preoccupation with virginity is not a moral or spiritual concern at its root, but a mechanism of social control—one that disproportionately burdens women, reinforces patriarchal power structures , and severs individuals from their own bodies and autonomy. Virginity: Control Dressed as Virtue The language surrounding virginity is invariably the language of value. Girls are told they are "pure," "precious," or "unspoiled"—and implicitly, that to lose virginity outside sanctioned contexts is to become contaminated, devalued, ruined. This framing reveals the ideological function virginity serves: it is moral currency, a commodity assigned to women's bodies by social and religious institutions that profit from it. This cur...

Able to Face Suffering Is the Ultimate Defense of Human Freedom

For Fyodor Dostoevsky , suffering was not a glitch in the human machine; it was the engine of its soul. To understand his philosophy, we have to look past the grim reputation of his novels and see suffering as he did: as the primary tool for spiritual awakening and the ultimate defence of human freedom. Suffering as the Proof of Freedom: In Notes from Underground , Dostoevsky argues against the " rationalists " of his time who believed that if society were perfectly organised and all needs were met, suffering would vanish. Dostoevsky disagreed vehemently. He believed that if you gave a human being everything they wanted—food, sleep, and comfort—they would eventually smash it all just to prove they are not piano keys being played by logic or biology. We choose to suffer, sometimes, simply to assert our "capricious" free will . Suffering is often a manifestation of our refusal to be a mere "statistic." It is a declaration of our individuality. The Sole Ori...

Life Will Break You Regardless—Would You Break Open or Break Apart?

Viktor Frankl found meaning in Auschwitz. Marcus Aurelius found wisdom during a plague. Dostoevsky discovered consciousness in a Siberian labour camp. Not because their sufferings were noble—but because they chose to transform it. Epictetus , who was a slave and crippled, wrote: “It’s not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.” Here’s the hard part: you can’t choose whether or not you suffer. Life will break you regardless. The question is: will you break open or break apart? The tragedy isn’t that we suffer. It’s that we suffer meaninglessly. Suffering is the universal constant of the human experience, yet it is rarely uniform. From the biological pangs of our evolutionary ancestors to the existential dread of the modern urbanite, the weights we carry differ in both origin and purpose. To live a life of meaning is not to avoid suffering—an impossible feat—but to develop the discernment to know which kind of suffering is a hollow cage and which is a necessa...