I like to think of spiritual writing as someone documenting views from different parts of a mountain. On one part of the trip things look a certain way. As a person continues to climb the view changes. They can look back and appreciate their former perspective, but see it for what it was, as partial. The new view transcends and includes the previous one.

Thomas Merton said somewhere that he didn’t mind if something he wrote early in his career seemed to contradict something he wrote at the present time. He was in constant development.

One example that stands out to me is the concept of mortification. In the Christian Tradition (and others), there is a strong emphasis on mortification – deliberately giving up things you desire or are attached to. Mortification is work. It takes effort. It’s painful. It can feel like dying. Mortification can be seen as a means to the end of breaking oneself of one’s selfish-will. Breaking oneself of interacting with the world through a lens of “I want this,” “I want that,” and simply living, in subtle or overt ways, for self.

Perhaps on one part of the journey you should mortify. You should give up the things you want in order to break yourself of your selfish understanding of life. Maybe on a further part of the journey you should engage with the beautiful things of the world that you are naturally drawn to as part of partaking in the miracle of life. Maybe, at that point, when one has developed, you are naturally attracted to the right things, the genuinely beautiful things of the world. “Love and do what you like.”

So different things can be true on different stages of the journey.