Change From Within

I have just finished reading the prologue to a book titled "Los Dos Mensajes del Islam", or the two messages of Islam by Spanish scholar Antonio Elorza.  I cannot give a full account here but while reading about the tenets of Islam involving all people being subjugated, by force if necessary, to obey the law of Allah, it really occurred to me just how harmful religion is, when it is externally enforced.  We cannot even make ourselves good, much less anyone else, but if we allow God to become for us real and living then change does happen from within.  It isn't magical but if we allow the Holy Spirit to work in our lives and hearts then the Kingdom Of Heaven is being established here on earth.
     I have a vision of living my faith and I would be the first to admit that this vision is highly personal and perhaps idiosyncratic. It is rather an updated version of bringing the spiritual reality, perhaps purity, of the early desert fathers into our post modern reality.  Of living in and interacting with the world without being tainted by it.  It is living out the reality of being salt and light in the world. 
     This is not something that can be organized and I don`t think it would even be possible to do this in the context of intentional Christian community without somehow distorting and corrupting the beauty of this ideal and creating a kind of Frankenstein`s monster.  Having experienced several different forms of such community over the years I believe I can make this claim with some authority.  This is not to put down such existing Christian communities where this is being attempted and to some extent successfully achieved.  Regardless of where we find ourselves God will find us wherever we happen to be.
     The image I sometimes have is that I am sequestered away in a cell somewhere in a desert and it is early morning.  The sun is just rising and I am on the doorstep of my cell, facing the rising sun and reciting aloud from the Psalms.  I have no idea how I live in this place, how I earn my living or find my food and water or what I have for a community, only this abiding image of an austere life of holiness in the desert.
     This is not an ideal, or a caricature of holiness that I try to live out in every excruciating detail.  True, my way of life is quite ascetic and simple but I would say this is more the fruit of seeking God than the means of doing so.  There is something about this vision that helps ground me in the reality of living in God`s presence in the midst of a world that rejects him or is simply uninterested.  It is also an abiding metaphor of the deepening, purging and refining work of the Holy Spirit in my life as I carryout my daily routine, obligations and errands.
     I experience also through this vision a sense of security, not in external comforts and ballasts, but in knowing that God is real and ever present and that it is he and not I who does the work of changing and transforming my life, or that rather this is a work of cooperation between God and myself.