In 1956, my first-grade class participated in the school-wide annual May Day celebration. Excitement mounted up until the special day. The sixth graders did the Maypole dances, and every other class had its own performance across the large playground. For many of us, this was our first experience with being “on stage.”

An old American saying about people who save money only to lose far more in the process: “They would stop a parade to pick up a penny.”

Not all parades celebrate victory or joy. Some parades expose the darkest capacities of the human soul.

When we witness the parade of the Spirit, everything inside us can shift. 

Not every parade is a party. Some are a public march toward cruelty.

Have you ever noticed how something deep inside us stirs when a parade passes by … something older than thought, something that wants to rise, to be seen, and to join the celebration?

Most of us fall into romantic love, dazzled by beauty, charm, personality, and promise. But the longer love lasts, the more it asks a deeper question: Do we love what is eternal beneath what first captivated us?

We do not fall in love with God just once. We fall in love again and again, each time letting go of the God we knew, to discover the God we are now ready for.

Sometimes what we call love is not intimacy at all, but a powerful fixation that quietly takes over our inner life, our perspective, and our behavior. 

Whenever two people love each other, there is a meeting of needs and qualities. These can be physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual. We are drawn to those who satisfy something essential in us. This is true of romantic love, familial love, and friendship alike.

The world brightens, the heart awakens, and another person seems to hold the key to our wholeness. Yet, as Jungian analyst and spiritual teacher Robert A. Johnson reminds us, this intoxicating experience is not an ending, but an initiation.

When we fall in love, it feels as though we have finally found someone who completes us, understands us, and mirrors something essential we have been longing for all along.

Few experiences have the power to rearrange our inner world the way love does. One moment we are standing on familiar ground; the next, we are swept off our feet, changed, enlivened, and wonderfully undone.

Most of us carry a feeling we don’t like but secretly return to. It hurts, it limits us, and yet it feels strangely familiar. In a quiet, unconscious way, it can even feel comforting. This is what some have called our favorite bad feeling.

Entropy can not only diminish our spirituality; it can also affect the body.

We often speak of spiritual or psychological entropy, but our flesh, too, is subject to this quiet diminishment. They say we lose muscle mass as we age. I didn’t believe it until one day I found that I could not lift our luggage with the ease I always had. Entropy, the natural tendency of all matter to disperse and weaken, shows itself unmistakably in the body.

The first sign of entropy isn’t collapse… 

It feels like easing into warm water after a long day. Nothing is wrong. Nothing hurts. And yet, almost imperceptibly, something vital begins to dim. We find that it is not water we are in, but quicksand.

When a difficulty arises, we can cope by sliding into our unchecked ego’s favorite reaction, which is the path of least resistance, and of course, spiritual entropy. The ego is well-practiced in invading us with thoughts, assumptions, and defenses triggered by our fixation. And we are so used to our fixation’s running commentary that we swallow it hook, line, and sinker. Then our behavior unconsciously expresses the fixation.

This reflection includes a story about entropy and a person who regularly trapped me in conversation. Do I fall into spiritual entropy by taking the easy way out and leaving them in mid-sentence, or do I take a more difficult approach?