When Logic Meets Its Limits
Faith awakens freedom.
But the moment we step into the world, that freedom collides with the scaffolding of scarcity —
a world built to measure, trade, and withhold what was once freely given.
We enter a system of opposites:
privilege and poverty, power and dependence, excess and emptiness.
Each side insists it is right.
Each believes the other must change.
And yet both, in their extremes, are estranged from grace.
⸻
Privilege is the illusion that control guarantees meaning.
Poverty is the illusion that surrender guarantees belonging.
Privilege is rehearsed through insulation;
poverty through invisibility.
Both illusions are sustained by ritual, reward, and rhetoric —
the stories we tell ourselves about who deserves comfort
and who must atone for it.
This is the quiet tragedy of human polarity —
our ability to create opposites from what was meant to be one.
⸻
Religion, too, absorbs the logic of polarity.
It baptizes hierarchy, crowns success as blessing,
and names struggle as sanctification.
It tells the wealthy that charity can buy innocence,
and the poor that endurance can buy love.
Doctrine becomes a ledger;
grace a transaction.
The sacred becomes stratified —
a marketplace where the privileged pay for purity
and the poor pay for entry.
The offering plate becomes a mirror —
reflecting not generosity but dependency,
not devotion but distance.
When faith becomes currency,
reverence becomes collateral.
God becomes a gatekeeper
rather than the ground beneath both feet.
⸻
If privilege shines in gold,
poverty fades into gray.
When poverty begins to pay privilege to belong to God,
the color of faith drains to ash.
The poor tithe not from abundance
but from belonging debt.
They offer reverence because they have been denied recognition.
They give until they disappear.
But the Christ of Proximity refuses this palette.
He stands between the gold and the gray
and turns both back into sky —
a color that belongs to everyone who looks up.
⸻
Privilege and poverty are not just social conditions —
they are the proof that we are still straying from union.
Still wandering from the world
where creation was simply good and enveloped in grace.
Not great, worthy of praise.
Not meek, deserving mercy.
Just good.
That was the first order of things —
before we learned to measure worth by difference.
Before greatness and meekness became opposing virtues.
Before we forgot that goodness was never a reward,
only a reality.
In that first world, goodness didn’t need applause or pity.
It simply was —
like light,
like breath,
like love before language.
But the moment we began to divide creation
into strong and weak,
rich and poor,
sacred and profane,
we broke the circle of grace.
Privilege and poverty are the fractures left behind —
reminders that we have mistaken separation for structure,
and hierarchy for holiness.
Yet even in our distance, goodness waits.
It is still here,
beneath our striving and survival,
quietly remembering what we’ve forgotten:
that we were made not to be great or meek —
only, and always, good.
⸻
Christ does not flatten the human polarity;
He transforms it through nearness.
He does not command the rich to become poor,
nor the poor to remain grateful.
He calls both to become near.
To the rich, He says: Sell your distance.
To the poor, He whispers: You were never outside.
He dismantles the theology of transaction
and restores the truth of relationship.
He reminds us that belonging is not earned;
it’s remembered.
This is proximity —
the undoing of distance,
the return of color,
the rediscovery of presence as the only true wealth.
Presence is the sky returned to breath.
⸻
Faith may be the ultimate expression of free will,
but proximity is its ultimate test.
Will we choose to be close
when the world rewards distance?
The opposite of poverty isn’t privilege.
The opposite of both is presence.
Because presence cannot be priced, possessed, or performed.
It can only be practiced.
It is what happens when love reclaims the space
that fear and hierarchy once held.
⸻
Perhaps this is where reason itself begins to bend —
when we finally stop dividing the world
into winners and wounded,
and start seeing every breath as belonging.
The next step is not to understand more,
but to stand within what we already know:
that goodness does not need to be proven,
only perceived.
That knowing itself can become wonder.
⸻
Human polarity is not privilege versus poverty.
It is presence forgotten versus presence restored.
Christ is what happens when distance ends.