On Mondays, I’ll be sharing a quote from Christian history to help us learn and grow by engaging with those Christians who come before us as we sit at a soul table. Gerald May writes, “Homeostasis is necessary for life. It provides a stable home base, a resting place from which the body can respond to the surrounding world. When something threatens this stability, we experience stress. . . . In the service of homeostasis, addiction acts upon the human spirit like gravity upon a planetary body, seeking to hold it within a stable orbit against the planet’s own centrifugal striving for the stars. . . .

“With no stretching, reaching, opening, or yearning to counteract our gravity, we would collapse in upon ourselves like stars becoming black holes. Often we do try to choose that option. We choose safety over freedom; we entrench ourselves in inertia. We dull and occupy ourselves so completely that we stifle our desire, anesthetize our yearning, restrict the energy of our passion. This does not remove us from the ongoing birth of creation, but it deadens us to it. And to some extent creation is subdued by our dullness; the beams of love are a little less bright. We all opt for safety on occasion, when the beams are too hard to bear. Most of us choose it more than we would like to admit. Some of us choose it continually.” — Gerald May, The Awakened Heart

Image Credit: “Number of Atoms in the Universe.”