what i am thinking about

yesterday i read a post by meg fee about taking care of oneself. 

i think most people who went through periods of life that have been full of illness and darkness can relate to that notion. finding ways to deal with it all, trying to live a normal life. concentrating on getting well again.

i have been thinking about this a lot lately - i mean about how to live life. it seems to be quite fashionable to take care of and to love yourself, to figure out what you want and need. 

c.s. lewis writes in the screwtape letters that being detached from ourselves - forgetting what the things are we truly and honestly enjoy and love - is a preliminary of being detached from christ, even though christ "also wants to detach man from himself, but in a different way (...) when he talks of their losing their selves, he only means abandoning the clamour of self-will; once they have done that, he really gives them back all their personality (...) and when they are wholly his they will be more themselves then ever." this suggests that life is not so much about finding ourselves by looking inward but by setting the focus away from ourselves.

lately i have been reading a lot of marx and even though christianity and marxism seem not to be to fond of each other i think that they might be talking about the same thing. they are both basically concerned about alienation - man lost his his true nature - in sin, in narcissism, egoism, individualism - and that brings forth all the exploitation, hate and greed. our so called civilised society is nothing more than a machinery of oppression, even though we know that much of our comfort and wealth is at the expense of people starving and being enslaved we just go on and say things like "ignorance is bliss" -- man, who naturally was a species-being has been perverted to a murderer of his own species.

marx's solution to all that is the abolition of private property, which he sees as the root of the problem. christianity's solution is the abolition of sin through the death and resurrection of christ. 

i personally belief that this could go hand in hand. when we look at the book of acts and the description of the first church we see how people gave up their possessions and shared everything with each other - it was like a first step to a marxist community. the thing is, that man cannot give up greed and egoism out of his own strength - we need christ, because only through him we can overcome our own alienated nature.

in terms of taking care of oneself: i think less is more. what this exactly means - i am still figuring it out.