The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Babylon (9)

Watch the path of your feet, and all your ways will be established.  Proverbs 4:26  NASB

Your feet – “Look where you’re going!”  The warning isn’t just about physical danger.  “Watch where you’re stepping” is good spiritual advice too.  Close examination of the path (maʿgāl—cow path) will keep you from stepping on something unpleasant whether it’s a “cow pie” or the heart of the Golden Calf.  Isn’t it nice to know that Hebrew is so down to earth?  Who would have thought that avoiding cow pies could be a lesson in spiritual awareness?

Watchfulness is something only you can do.  There are no spiritual babysitters, no magic prayers, no cognitive escapes.  In fact, even those we look to for spiritual guidance can’t solve the problems of pathways for you.  “What we can expect to learn from Ramchal, or any true spiritual teacher, is not the answer, but the method of finding our own answer.  That method is heshbon ha-nefesh, the reflective accounting of our actions that is at the heart of Mussar.”[1]  Reflective accounting means personal vigilant examination.  It’s not done easily.

Consider (not for just a moment) the last conflicted decision you made.  Not just the routine you’ve trained your mind and body to follow.  No, think about that last time when you had to pause, no matter how briefly, because there was a twinge of conscience, or a sudden flash of awareness, or a feeling that maybe this wasn’t the right choice.  What happened next?  Did the momentum of the situation push you ahead without further consideration?  Did you brush aside that hint of concern because you’d convinced yourself that it was okay?  Or did you stop, listen to that inner something, examine the discomfort, the feeling of ill ease, and ask the crucial question, “How will the success or failure to act in this way affect another person?“  The act doesn’t even have to be “personal.”  The effect will always involve another no matter how “private” it may seem at the moment.  Why?  Because we are all connected, not only in physical community but also in spiritual harmony.  God is the center of the connected cosmos and anyone or anything connected to Him is connected through Him—and that, of course, is everything.

Now to Ramchal’s point.  There is no magic pill.  What has to be done has to be done by each one of us.  Struggle is the way of salvation, as Paul reminds us, and we must each work it out “with fear and trembling.”  So, my answer to my battle is not your answer simply because my answer comes from me—from my history, my emotional baggage, my relational dynamics.  Yours will be different.  All I can do, all that any of us can do for another, is work out our own answer with vulnerability.  Hidden successes are more disastrous than public failures.  We all need to know that someone has overcome, and that, by the way, is the crucial claim of the Messiah.  At least one of us overcame.  Follow him.

Watch where you walk so you won’t have to clean up a mess later.

Step 9:  Pay attention to the twinges.  Tread carefully.

Topical Index:  answers, maʿgāl, cow path, reflection, heshbon ha-nefesh, Proverbs 4:26

[1] Ira F. Stone, in Moses Hayyim Luzzatto, Mesillat Yesharim: The Path of the Upright, p. 47.