C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

    Lately, my life has been pretty awful, and yet pretty awesome at the same time.  And, although most of the awfulness in this case is because of my own stupid choices, I think most of our lives are like this most of the time.  But that doesn’t mean that my life is just a mixed “blob” of these two ways of living - in other words, I truly mean that it’s both awful and awesome at the same time.     Many years ago, and in much better - not to mention cleaner - prose than I could ever hope (in the first case) or want (in the second case) to ever write, the pretty-much awesome writer of great Catholic apologetics, GK Chesterton, wrote that Christianity loves red, and it loves white, but it has a healthy hatred of the pink.  You see, good, healthy religion - and I think this can apply to Zen as well as Christianity, although Christianity at its finest is the best example - is never a blending together of opposites.  Nor is it a rejection of one pole in favor of the other. (Thi