Once again, this arrives far too late in the week, and what a week it has been! I would be lying if I said that the transition to the new job is going smoothly. Not that I have any issues with the new job in and of itself; it’s technically challenging, and the team at the new office benefits from my background in security; it’s a skillset they didn’t have access to previously, for the most part. I could say more for the commute, of course; I miss taking the bus. Equally, I find myself left reeling from not having the opportunity to work on the site — or my other projects — half as much as I used to, and that is becoming a significant stressor which I need to find a way to mitigate.

Case in point: whereas I used to be able to hammer out four or five posts a day, I’ve barely put up that many this week, and I’m only now getting around to something that should have been posted on Sunday…or at least no later than Tuesday.

But I digress. Where did we leave off?

If we think about Spirituality — either as depicted in the Ultima games or as it is conceptualized in the real world — we are often left with the impression of something “higher” (that might not be the best term to use, but it’s what I’m going with). The Virtue is represented by white, and is presented as being somehow synonymous with beauty and purity. (Its real-world representation differs little, in these respects.) Or consider the Shrine of Spirituality, which is literally “higher”; it floats above Britannia in the Ethereal Void. It’s an otherworldly, openly magical place.

And yet, as we’ve seen in the last couple of meditations on this topic, Spirituality in action is…rarely so high, or particularly unstained. Often, the opposite is true: Spirituality is often gritty and intensely personal (in the sense of “carried on between individuals directly”), which aspects of it seem far removed from its initial presentation as something loftily above the mundane circumstances of daily life. Indeed, it would almost seem there is a disconnect or tension between “the concern with one’s inner being and how one deals with truth, love, and courage” and “the awareness of the love that unites one’s own inner being to those around one”; often, the pursuit and living out of the latter can have significant impacts on the former.

Consider the circumstances I began this article with. There were many reasons I opted to pursue the new job, not the least of which was that it ostensibly required less travel than my previous career as a cyber security consultant. That travel was indeed fun, and afforded me the opportunity to explore new places, meet with fellow Dragons, and even visit Mythic’s studio twice during the development of Ultima Forever. And yet, my children did not handle my absence well, and the travel often put a strain on my wife as she worked to keep our home in order whilst raising our three children. So when the opportunity came along to pivot to a career that wouldn’t send me far afield anywhere near as much as before, I opted to take a chance on it. (It made for a significant pay increase, as well, and I won’t deny that this has been advantageous in many respects as well.)

Did I act on “the awareness of the love that unites one’s own inner being to those around one”? Hopefully so.

But has that impacted my “inner being” and how I “[deal] with truth, love, and courage”? More on that in a moment.

You can see the same tension in the story of St. Joseph of Copertino, or in the example of Hasidic Judaism: the outward focus of the spirituality of both often comes at the expense of the individual(s) in question, whether in the form of the very unfortunate life that St. Joseph lived or the volunteerism and charity — and 10% of one’s time spend on such pursuits adds up to a LOT of hours per year, and a lot of time one cannot spend on oneself — of Hasidism. Is there a tension there?

It’s worth noting that in both of those examples, “the concern with one’s inner being” (and, for that matter, “how one deals with truth, love, and courage”) is not strictly a function of one’s own personal, inner sense of peace and contentment. The innermost being, in both Judaism and Christianity, is the rational soul, the divine and eternal aspect of one’s being. And the concern for one’s rational soul is not an exercise in ensuring that one is consistently content, but is rather a function of believing on and living out the moral law which proceeds from first principles and, ultimately, the Almighty. And so what seems at first a tension between the outward and inward focuses of Spirituality is in fact not a tension at all, but rather a complementary relationship.

That is not to say that living out this ideal is at all easy…far from it! But such is the nature of Love, which (the Reader will hopefully recall) is the animating and connecting force at work in Spirituality. Love isn’t always unstained and unscathed. Love unites our own inner being to those around us, in such a way that our outward efforts nourish and enrich that being, even if the efforts themselves leave our bodies tired and our minds and hearts occasionally frustrated.