the divided life

i am currently reading a great novel by Wendell Berry titled Jayber Crow. it's really well written and kinda challenging it some of the ideas he presents. today it has be thinking about the divided life. here is a quote from the book - taken from a time when the main character resides in an orphanage . . .

At The Good Shepherd I entered for the first time a divided world - divided both from me and within itself. It was divided from me because it did not seem to be present unless I watched it. Within itself, it was divided between an ideal world of order, as prescribed and demanded by the institution, which was embodied most formidably by Brother Whitespade, and a real world of disorder, which we students brought in with us as a sort of infection . . . Order was of the soul, whose claims the institution represented. Disorder was of the body, which was us.

. . . Everything bad was laid on the body, and everything good was credited to the soul. It scared me a little when I realized that I saw it the other way around. If the soul and body really were divided, then it seemed to me that all the worst sins - hatred and anger and self-righteousness and even greed and lust - came from the soul.

so i have been thinking about all that we clean up to make others believe we are 'okay.' we clean up the fleshy stuff - the symptoms. and it made me wonder if authenticity is possible. if we can clean up the soul stuff so that it matches the fleshy stuff. afterall it's difficult to know even ones own motives.

but then i read this - For he himself is our peace, who has made the two one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility, by abolishing in his flesh the law with its commandments and regulations. His purpose was to create in himself one new man out of the two, thus making peace, and in this one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility. Ephesians2:14-16