For many people, many, many people, the spiritual situation is like that of a young boy who decides to take up the piano. This boy likes the piano, likes the sound the keys make when he touches them, likes the feel of the ivory against his small fingers. Perhaps he knows someone, or has seen someone, who plays well, and this inspires him.

As he grows older, he continues to play and to practice. As he practices perhaps someone criticizes him in an unkind way, or perhaps he begins to see that he cannot play as well as the person who inspired him, that he makes mistakes, that his hands do not always work the way he wishes them to work, that it requires effort and sacrifice to improve.

By the time he is a young adult, he is somewhat accomplished at the piano—some of this came from natural ability, some from his love of music, some from practice. He plays well, sometimes at gatherings of friends or family. But then, as he grows older, he decides that, even though he can play well, he will never play very well. He will never play perfectly. He is not good enough to be a concert pianist, just as, in the spiritual realm, on this complex earth, he believes he will never be good enough to satisfy his idea of a God who looks over him, so he stops really trying to do so, stops thinking about such things.

Probably he does not even form these thoughts in such a way. He just sets up, between him and the next level of piano playing—the next level of his interior life—a kind of invisible barrier. He makes a limit where there is no actual limit. This is not bad. He is not an evil man. Just the opposite, he is a good man, but he builds this limit the way you would build walls around a room, and then he lives there, within that room, not completely satisfied but not knowing what he can do about his dissatisfaction.

He grows old. He waits for the end of his life, for God to pass judgment on him, and chases as many decent pleasures as he can while he waits. This is just the way life is, he says to himself. This is as good a player as I will ever be. He would, in fact, like to play the piano better, but what keeps him from venturing outside that room is a kind of fear, the idea that he might fail, that people might mock him for his ambition, or that he would then not be the person he believes himself to be. But where did this idea of who he actually is come from? In the spiritual realm, or, if you prefer these words, in the emotional or psychological realm, what is he denying himself by staying inside these walls?

Visit Merullo’s site here for more of his work.