The beautiful wholeness of righteousness

Righteousness gets a bad name because of two distortions: legalistic religion that tries to control matters that should be left to individual freedom, and self-righteous swagger with its hostility toward for broad classes of humanity. When Jesus assured us, "Happy are those who hunger and thirst for happiness," he had something different in mind. He was pointing the way to the beautiful wholeness of righteousness. The hunger and thirst is stage one. The divine gift of righteousness is stage two. Isaiah: "My soul shall rejoice in the love of my God, for he has clothed me with the garments of salvation and covered me with the robe of his righteousness." Stage three requires us to learn an expanded concept of morality that wisely coordinates an understanding of the truth of universe process as it takes place on this evolutionary world with an understanding of the meaning of the relevant truths of spiritual experience: love and mercy, worship and service, joy and liberty, faith and assurance, and so on. When we learn to live in such truth-coordination, we exhibit the beautiful wholeness of righteousness.