The Narrow Path

 Matthew 7:13-14

"Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few."

 

I’ll try to take a quick look at those lines. I have seen in Orthodoxy, teachers speaking of the errors of going to the right or the left of truth, falling into error for example into a self-righteous Puritanism on let’s say the right hand of the narrow path, or indolence and sloth regarding discipline on the left side. One absolute key aspect of the incarnation of Christ into the world is the sacralising of the life within the material world, of the reconciliation of spirit and matter. Let’s say on the right of this path is the idea of life in the material world as a painful embarrassment to the spirit, which cannot come to terms with something so fallen; i.e. so obviously full of sin and error. Life is so considered Maya or illusion, a contradiction to truth, the creation in gnostic thought of even of an evil god at odds with he true god, and so truth is in a sense disembodied, we have to somehow disincarnate ourselves. Here a term like ego can be shallowly thrown around as a justification for escapism from incarnation. This overall ethos plays even into things like abstract art, where initially at least this was considered a means of escaping the fallen material world. By abstracting ourselves from it, we can return to disembodied perfection.

On the other hand, what I’ll call the left hand of the narrow path away from reconciliation with incarnation - not just Christ’s but our own incarnation in this life - is falling into materialism, a shallow rationalism leading to atheism. Whereas the right side of the narrow path falls into sacrificing life as spiritually superfluous and false, the left side sacrifices the spirit as superfluous and false. This leads onto all kinds of horrors of lack of faith in life, with everything crumbling to dust in its hands, 

I haven’t time now to go any further into this so I’ll just post it as is. But anyway, the narrow path is the true path!