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We use a calendar that has 12 months and 365 days in it. As it nears December 31st, we feel as though something is getting close to an end, and yet on January 1st it feels like a new beginning. Our life is composed of many endings and beginnings. We may live one life, but within this one life we have many different journeys.

(References: Habakkuk 3:17)

102. However, married partners become an image of the marriage between good and truth only as the inner faculties of their minds are opened, because the mind only gradually opens from infancy to late old age. For people are born carnal, and they become rational as the mind just above the body opens and as this rationality is purified and decanted, so to speak, from its dregs - from fallacious appearances that flow in from the physical senses and from urges that flow in from temptations of the flesh. Rationality thus opens, and this is accomplished only through wisdom. Then, when the inner faculties of the rational mind have been opened, the person becomes an image of wisdom, and this wisdom is the receptacle of truly conjugial love.

The wisdom which forms this image and receives this love is rational and at the same time moral wisdom. Rational wisdom views the truths and good virtues that inwardly appear in a person not as qualities belonging to him but as qualities flowing in from the Lord. And moral wisdom shuns evils and falsities as contagious diseases - especially lascivious ones which contaminate his conjugial love.

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