Jesus vs Germs: Who Wins?

 I just love Martha of Bethay. She's so relatable.

Pretty much everyone who knows the story about Martha and her sister Mary at the dinner they gave for Jesus and His disciples knows about how Mary sat at Jesus feet, listening to Him the whole time while Martha ran around cooking and serving and cleaning up and - oh, yes - griping about it. 

Jesus loved them both, of course, but gently reminded Martha that Mary, in her reverent attention, had chosen the better part. Hang on to the eternal, the supernatural, He seemed to say, and the natural may not take care of itself, but it will be seen to sooner or later in its own proper time.

Well, Martha's second faux pas doesn't get as much press. When their brother Lazarus died and Jesus showed up late, both women expressed their faith that whatever Jesus did or, presumably, didn't do, would be the right thing. But when Jesus instructed the gathered people to move the stone from the mouth of the grave, Martha was horrified. "But he's been in there four days! He will stink!", she said.

She was right, of course, but saw no contradiction between Jesus' ability to do miracles and her idea that He was unable to overcome natural decay. As if He could do one but not the other. In the end, He did both, of course, but like the dinner incident, we are invited to see our contradicting selves through Martha.

One of my favorite places to see a modern contradiction is in our refusal to received Holy Communion in a common cup. Here's my reasoning:

Communion is a miracle of faith as much as any healing or raising from the dead. Bread and wine become a pathway to and encounter with God. But we won't drink it from a common cup because the cup has somebody else's germs. We might get sick from it. It's unsanitary. It might even be dangerous. 

Really?

God can turn bread and wine into Himself but not protect us from illness or danger in the taking of it? He can make the elements holy but He can't make them safe? 

This is not only a logical contradiction worth our old friend Martha. It's a lack of faith. 

Communion is communion both with God and in solidarity with each other - a risk only if the communicant doesn't believe God or doesn't believe there is any sacrament in the eating and drinking of it at all. 

So, who wins in Jesus vs. germs?  Jesus, of course. Now we just have to act like it.

Image: St. Benedict's Table, American Magazine

Whose Side is God on, Anyway?

 

Memorial Day is here again and I'm finding patriotic holidays increasingly uncomfortable.

There. I said it. 

It's not just because the U.S. becomes harder and harder to love (it does), but I'm starting to wonder whether it should even be an object of love and fealty at all.

The more I study this, I can't find a single place where God encourages love for country. Not one. 

He encourages us to obey our leaders (Hebrews 13:17) and to render unto our governments what rightly belongs to them (Matt 22:21) but beyond that, our commanded affiliation is to God and God alone. We are to love God first and then our neighbor. Period. 

We all know of conflicts in which both sides claim God's preference for them and that, of course, is impossible. He can love all men equally, but to prefer one side over another when they espouse opposite aims is not who He is. He loves the humans He made. All of them. And we are supposed to do that, too. 

If we're honest, though, we WANT God to be on our side of whatever conflict we're in. Who wouldn't? But at the same time, we also see the impossibility of opposing forces each allied exclusively with God. This is where philosophy comes in handy, because this is a logical contradiction. God cannot logically agree with both the invader and the invaded. A cannot equal not-A. God loves all combatants equally.

But what DOES God have to say about nations?

First, that He made them all (Acts 17:26) "From one man He made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth." God's nation is not defined by boundaries, but by His creation of them.

Then that He should and will be exalted among those nations (Ps 46:10) (Ps 86:9) (Is 60:3)

Also that no nation is righteous in itself but only insofar as it follows and worships God (Zech 2:11) "And many nations shall join themselves to the Lord in that day, and shall be my people." (Gen 22:18) "And in your offspring shall all the nations of the earth be blessed, because you have obeyed my voice.”

A nation is not favored by God because of history, heritage, location, boundaries, language, declaration or constitution. It is holy simply when its people seek and worship Him and any allegiance is to be sworn to Him alone. In this, all people sharing that allegiance are one. 

God's nation is not the United States of America or any other humans gathered within a man-marked border. We are to have but one sworn identity and that to God, even Israel. When God said,

“For you are a people holy to the Lord your God. The Lord your God has chosen you to be a people for his treasured possession, out of all the peoples who are on the face of the earth." -(Deut 7:6),  He began a work that would eventually encompass every single human being He made. 

"And the kingdom and the dominion and the greatness of the kingdoms under the whole heaven shall be given to the people of the saints of the Most High; his kingdom shall be an everlasting kingdom, and all dominions shall serve and obey him." (Dan 7:27)

As for Memorial Day, my husband fought in the Vietnam War and his combat experience shortened his life by as much as 20 years. Dave never regretted his military service, but its greatest cost to him was not conscripting the years of his life, but putting him in situations that led him to doubt God's mercy and justice. It took him more than 40 years to recover from the scars this war left, but God sent grace enough so that he could again stand before Him with confidence. God and some bizarre national allegiance God might have was not responsible for the damage done. The country Dave fought for was responsible - the United States, the one whose flag we wave on Memorial Day, the one who we say is under God, the one to whom we swear allegiance without remembering all of its lies and errors. 

If a country is good, it is good because enough of its people pay attention to what God demands of each of them individually, not because of some restricted ideology that defines we are smarter, better, stronger, and more righteous than those humans who live 10 or 100 miles beyond a particular demarcation. 

                               (Dave around the time he worked undercover in Southeast Asia.

He burned his green beret in disgust)

The country Dave fought for betrayed him, plain and simple. It didn't act according to its precepts. All countries do this sooner or later. That's why God tells us to identify ourselves with Him, not with them. 

On this Memorial Day, I can honor those who acted according to what they thought was right by fighting and dying for their country, but I can no longer honor the country they fought for. It does not deserve it. 

Images: Dreamstime

Answering the Unanswerable: Why People of Faith Study Philosophy

 

I went back to school yesterday and was reminded of something important. I remembered why I went in the first place - to make sense of things. 

This is what the whiteboard looked like at the end of class.  Let me translate.

We were studying Kierkegaard, an angst-ridden Dane who had some of the same questions I did. Can God exist (in  philosophical terms, He can't - more later) and what in the world are we doing when we look for Him? Can He be found? And if He can, what does He look like?

Yes, this actually happened in a public university classroom and nobody cast aspersions. Nobody walked out. Nobody even objected. In fact, this is probably the only place anyone can ask these kinds of questions anymore. You can't ask them in church. Try it sometime. I have, and what we get is a combination of outrage and deer-in-the-headlights. Here, in school, when taught by a person of faith, we can arrive together at reasonable, thoughtful answers that can provide a platform for actual living.

So what does this mean? It started with whether God can exist. In philosophical terms, He can't because existence includes some kind of material presence. A pure spirit does not have that kind of existence.  And that's OK. That doesn't make God less God. In fact, it accommodates exactly what He claims to be. More than this world. Not made of a thing of any kind. 

And then there is telos. This is one of Aristotle's terms used to describe the final or highest cause of a person or action, the highest good of any living being, a fully realized consciousness, even the state of ultimate happiness. In short, Absolute Telos is the philosophical description of God. See the words underneath? These are the words philosophers have used to describe God. Highest Good, Transcendent, Unconditional, Impossible. All words for God. 

Why do we need these words? Because the best religion can do is vague references to God as being beyond understanding, or moving in mysterious ways. Blah. That doesn't help. Philosophical descriptions provide more - a starting point for understanding just what is the difference between God and everything else in our spiritual experience. They don't just paint a foggy picture. They establish a baseline, one we can expand on.

The expansion comes with the list to the right on the board, the list of relative telos. You see, in philosophy, states are separated into absolutes, those things that exist independently of anything else, and relative, those things whose definition depends on something else. In this case, God is an absolute telos, but our lives are lived primarily through relative ones. A relative telos might be the good that comes from careful parenting, or studying to graduate, or stopping at red lights, or putting your shopping cart back at the grocery. It is a goal we recognize as working toward accomplishing personal peace or social justice. 

The thing about relative telos, though, is that we usually do them (if we think about it at all, which philosophers do) to get beyond them. We don't just want to graduate, we want to have an ultimately satisfying life. We don't just want to be good parents, we ultimately want to do our part in making the world a better place for everyone. We engage in relative telos to achieve whatever of absolute telos we can muster. We do good in this world to find whatever we can of God. 

And this was Dr. Magnusson's last powerpoint slide, the point to which he built the lecture, which was to remind us of the goal we all want. 

Some people simplisticly call it heaven, but the philosophical idea of heaven is exactly how Sunday school might define it using different words. In Sunday school, Heaven is some undefined place up there where we are completely with God. In philosophy, the same state is found as we progress through relative telos, always with our eye on the absolute, when our orientation changes us every time we find a piece of that absolute, until we find we can "live in the finite, but not have our roots in it." 

This is where we find heaven, but not some pie in the sky we get after we die, a heaven available whenever we have the focus and faith to reach for it. 

That's why people of faith study philosophy. 

Bookends - Looking at the Big Picture

 Define miracle.

Go ahead. What event or series of events qualifies as a miracle?

Google thinks it's an extraordinary event that defies natural law and is often attributed to divine intervention. 

That's a pretty good definition, I think. The world chugs along, after all, according to specific and understood rules, ones that bear equations and formulas that are provable and repeatable. This is a good thing. It helps us maneuver through life. Even if we didn't make the rules, at least we can predict them. A dropped rock, for instance, will always fall down, not up or sideways, on planet Earth. An action causes an equal and opposite reaction. Energy is not created or destroyed. But you know all this.

Jesus, however, got famous partially for breaking these rules and we call these instances his miracles. He healed people who just touched his clothes. He brought dead people to life. He made food appear from nowhere. It's interesting, though, to consider the first and last of his miracles - the miraculous bookends in his manipulation of physics.

You probably easily remember the first - the changing of water to wine at a wedding feast. As his miracles go, this was a pretty innocuous one. No one was spectacularly cured or brought to life or magically fed. It was just a favor he did for a friend of his mom's.

But fast forward three years and move the venue from a party to an upper room, from public frivolity to a hideout. There's a cup in front of Jesus that is already full of wine and what does he do with it? He declares it to be his own blood. Not actual blood, mind you. It still smells and tastes like wine. But the declaration broke a law nonetheless - not a material law this time, but a supernatural one. 

At this point in his human experience, everything is escalating. The Cana incident at the wedding was easy to understand for anyone there who knew what was going on. In this world, water cannot spontaneously become wine. It defied physics. But the second incident involved much more. The wine in that case became blood not in the natural realm but in the supernatural one. It no longer nourished the body but it fed the soul. Each result was appropriate to its need. The wedding guests had something proper to drink and the disciples, who shared the cup of consecrated blood, had something of their teacher that was uniquely their own and would sustain them over and over until they, too died.

In many ways, these two incidents, the first and the last transformations Jesus enacted during his human life, became perfect bookends - the second as the completion of the first, almost as if he'd planned it that way from the beginning.

Oh, yeah. He did.

Images: How Stuff Works, Etsy

Made for Each Other

 

What is more important? The spirit put into me by God's hand in creation or the body with which He surrounded it in specific intent? Surely they were meant to live together, one  not necessarily superior to the other except as pertains to longevity. The spirit lives both before and will live after the body but, while they cohabit, they can both be used for the glory of God, since He both conceived of and created them both. Reaching for God and finding Him glorifies what He put in the spirit. Using the body in charity, in communion, in profitable physical labor and in giving and receiving love fulfills what it was made for.  

The body, contrary to what so many religions teach, is neither corrupt nor despicable unless it is used for a corrupt purpose. A life of destruction will destroy it. A life of looking for God, of searching out the connection between body and spirit, elevates both of them and God. Things to seek out - 

To see and be seen:

Comprehend that the world is the vehicle we are given as a mirror for us to find God at whom I cannot directly gaze but who in reflection will find my own face.

To hear and be heard:

Harmonica and violin, birdsong and baby's cry, the sigh of final breath and triumphant hallelujah. The sound of my own careful breath against velvet silence.

To taste and be tasted:

My tongue on sharp lemons and plump chocolates. A lover's tongue on my own salt and musk. The holiness of blessed bread and sacred wine. God with us.

Body and spirit. While the body lives, they can't be separated. At the end, though, God peels them carefully apart, leaving only what is most like Him, spirit made moreso by how the body has increased it while it lived. 

See me, feel me, touch me, heal me.

Holy body, holy spirit.

Made for each other.

Images: Spirit of Man - Christ, shutterstock

Not Just the Two of Us

 

"The exchange of love is illegitimate if consent on both sides does not come from that central point in the soul where YES can only be eternal. - Simone Weil

A friend of mine makes bets at weddings regarding how long the marriage he is witnessing will last. It's harsh of course, but chilling and pragmatic also. After all, we all know the statistics. Half of marriages end in divorce. My own history bears that out. I've been married twice. One ended in divorce and the other survived until death.

The one that didn't last was not founded on love of any kind, but on appearance and convenience. It never had a real chance to succeed. The second was founded on love, but not the kind Weil was talking about. The love was carnal, not eternal. At least not at first. The marriage managed to last because part way through, we adopted a new focus. Part way through, we decided to put God front and center - to follow Him and trust Him to bring us together in common purpose and He did. I daresay that marriage, too, would have ended in divorce otherwise.

It's no wonder that Weil's quote hits home. There's only one way to have a love founded on the eternal because God is the onlly eternal entity to whom we have regular access. 

The sad truth is that two humans have a hard job of it to love one another properly because, well, they're human. Weak sometimes. Fallible often. Well meaning, perhaps, but hurtful anyway. We are not to be totally depended on. Ever. 

Two people holding hands and walking into the sunset or staring into one another's eyes with love and longing are little equipped by one another's weakness to manage a satisfying, long-lasting union. But two people side by side following God are. Now that's a marriage that can last. A marriage, or a friendship, or a partnership of any kind can last only if it is supported by the eternal.

Image: Pinterest

Who Wants to Hear the Truth, Anyway?

 

I'm re-reading Atlas Shrugged, a 1000+ page novel written by philosopher Ayn Rand in 1957. It's a startling book I first read during my first year of college in 1970 and it changed my way of looking at the world and the way we live in it. Rand describes what fear and disconnection do to human beings and ultimately their society, destroying both their joy of achievement and their respect for morality. She's been generally despised for unveiling this world and how it operates but I didn't realize until now, more than 50 years later, that I've been living in the world she predicted the whole time.

Rand describes a world in which neither innovation for ambition has value, where a person's ability to think clearly, take responsibility, and act on those thoughts has no place, but where following orders, even questionable ones, is the only way forward. Around 1977, I had a job as a purchasing agent in a small plastics company near OHare airport and I had an idea to combine and change purchasing patterns to save money and enhance reliability. My boss, the owner's plodding son, told me I was not paid to think, but was paid to do as I was told. He used Rand's exact language and just like Rand's characters did, I quit that job.

Rand also describes a world in which the appearance of a thing is more important than the fact of it and that the players in the resulting schemes collude to cover up injustice. I remember when, as Vice President of a small steel company in the 1980s, I was told to obtain a price increase from our best customer when the conditions contractually allowing that increase, an increase in the price of steel, had not been met. I was expected to take a falsified invoice to the customer and I refused to do it. My employer was upset, of course, but not because I questioned their methods. Their only demand was whether I was declaring myself better or more virtuous than they. They never considered whether what they were asking could be honorably done (it couldn't). They just wanted to know if it was presentable. In the end, after my refusal, someone else did the deed and I learned that all involved on both sides of the table were aware of the subterfuge and knew the supposed negotiations to be a false mockery, a cooperation of farce. I quit that job, too.

Rand further describes a world where government regulations strangle creativity and productivity and in which people work ever harder and realize less benefit for either producer or consumer, leading to the breakdown of supply systems and in the end, the society they are supposed to support. Last week's New Yorker profiled a Kentucky farmer stymied by government controls on crop prices while he watches food being shipped overseas to poor countries even as local family farmers struggle to exist in the financial framework their own government allows. The farmer predicted a world where family farms, the backbone of our food supply, no longer exist and the food supply cannot recover.

In 1970, I didn't expect, really, that any of Rand's predictions would come true but they are - in these few and many more - in instances where we watch the government perpetuate itself rather than acting in the interests of a vital, alive future.

Frankly, hardly anyone likes Ayn Rand. My philosophy classmates once booed me for saying I did, and I still disagree with her in many ways. But in these ways, at least, she has told the truth. Come to think of it, that might be why she is so unpopular. The truth is, too.

Image: Thoughtco

The Danger of Indecision OR: What's for Dinner (AGAIN)?

 

A friend of mine once reflected that no one ever told her that getting married meant having to decide what's for dinner every night for the rest of her life. And she was right. It's true. It's just a fact of life. We have to eat and when we share life with someone, that's a decision someone has to make. Every day. 

But that's not the problem. It's not the decsion itself - whether to get Chinese takeout or throw some burgers on the grill - it's the incessant necessity of making decisions to the point of wanting to flee.

Sometimes decisions are unrelenting, pressing in from all sides, demanding attention in the guise of work or responsibility to friends or community obligations. Decisions are what can transform an ordinary Wednesday afternoon, any Wednesday afternoon, into a long tunnel that makes you feel like coiling into a little ball and rolling yourself under the nearest couch with the dust bunnies and hiding.

It would be such a relief to just put one foot in front of another awhile and nothing else, just to leave the determining of fate to someone else, to release into an effortless few days without the insistent pressure of the next move.

BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ!!!!!!!!

Nope. No can do.

And this is why:

The minute we lay down the responsibility of decision for our own life, we hand over the privilege to someone else and, unless that person is God, they are not up to the task. 

No one else knows what we want from life but us. No one else is capable of our conviction or purpose. No one else knows what we are or are not willing to sacrifice to achieve something. No one else understands who or what or how we love.

Oddly enough, it matters less which decisions we make than that we just make them. Almost all poor decisions can be redeemed in one way or another, but letting go of the reins we were meant to hold means that the horse is likely to run wild, out of control in the wrong direction.

One thing I know for sure is that, assuming the Matrix really is fiction, I live. I have been given a life and that life is a pure gift, meant to be LIVED. 

Life means something. It has a purpose and it is my joy and privilege to find mine. God gave me something very fine and I will, until it is taken away from me, show Him I love Him by directing and using my life rightly.

This is not done by accident. It is done by decision.

So decisions can be at their least, a pain, or at worst, dangerous, but bring 'em on. I won't get through unscathed, but that's all right. What I will do is use the life I'm given for the glory of Him who made it, bringing in the process satisfaction to us both. 

So, anyway, what IS for dinner tonight?

Images: Shutterstock, Adobe

Exquisite Pain: Yin and Yang

 

You've heard people say it. 

"God never gives us more than we can handle."

And you know that's not true. 

He gives us more than we can handle all the time.

Or it feels like it anyway.

The bills we can't pay. The illness that won't go away. Betrayal. Accident. Death. As beautiful as it sometimes is, life sometimes sucks, too. And we can't do anything about it.

I swear, the objection to faith in God I hear most often is wondering why He permits so much evil in the world - why children die in horrible wars, why planes crash with whole skating teams on them, why neighbors thinks it's necessary to shoot the guy next door. And I don't blame the people who do the wondering.

The Right Question

The problem is that they're asking the wrong question. 

The rotten things in life aren't separate from the wonderful ones. They are all part of one thing, and that thing is life.

Even Jesus said we would always have poverty. (Matt 26:11).  God causes the sun to rise on the evil and the good  (Matt 5:45). 

Get it? 

The right question is not why God allows evil and struggle. 

It's why we aren't taking a harder look and trying to understand the world that God actuallty made.  He didn't make a Disney world, with dragons and prince charmings duking it out to see who wins. He made a world where the horrible exists side by side with the wonderful.

The One

That's why our Asian friends use the yin/yang comparison. One life. One thing, With evil and good existing side by side in exquisite tension and in beautiful pain. 

We have one God and He made one life for us, one that includes both blooms and death, and we are to love Him and one another through it. 

It's actually quite a beautiful thing, when you think about it. Not treating trouble and pain as adverseries but as teachers that have their place. 

Something will eventally kill us all, after all. It will be good to understand that whatever does is part of the plan.

Image: Woo-Han, Substack

Love as the Consent Not to Reign

I've been reading Simone Weil.

If you've never heard of her, that's no big surprise. She's part philosopher, part mystic, and neither makes for a reputation anywhere near that of Stephen Colbert or Ozzie Osbourne. Simone has an interesting history. Jewish and living only until the age of 34 in prewar France, she began as a firm agnostic and gravitated slowly to Christian mysticism, remaining at the edge of organized religion, preferring a pragmatic rather than an emotional or more entirely spiritual approach to faith and wove ideas from Greek, Egyptian, and Hindu practice into her view of the eternal. It made for an interesting worldview.

But she has some important things to say. This is one of them:

God brings the universe into existence by agreeing not to command it even though He has the power to do so, but instead He allows the mechanical necessity of matter and the autonomy essential to thinking people to reign in His stead. His consent to do this is love. - Waiting for God

She sounds like a philosopher, but she applies her capacities of reason unapologetically to God. 

Unpacked, this makes for some deeply affecting resonance. 

First, it allows that God is responsible for creation, not only its physical components - earth and sky and the physics that govern them - but for humanity as well. However, it also sets apart his only thinking creation, humans, as separate entities altogether, given discrete privileges not granted the rest of creation. In an echo of the metaphorical Adam and Eve of the Bible, Simone applies both philosophy and theology simultaneously to what she observes to make sense of it. Physics, she says is what God made it and its mechanics run His universe without interruption or excuse, which is God's customary way of operation. God steps aside, however, when it comes to all matters of will. He has a will of His own, of course, but does not impose it and this, she says is how God loves us.

Then there's Simone's idea of our response to this:

God gives us our being so that we can give it back to Him. He allows us to live apart from Him and it's up to us to refuse the authorization. Humility is the refusal to exist apart from God - Gravity and Grace 

So there is a beautiful harmony in our intended relationship with God. God withholds the imposition of His will, deferring to our independence, and we withhold the exercise of that independence, deferring in turn to Him. 

That is communion. Perfect.

Image from The Drift

Staring at the Sun

 

I have a basket of flowers in my house. They are old and dry, many dusty from fragile years of saving. It's my basket of love, I tell anyone who asks its origin - roses and mums and others given in thanks or in consolation or congratulation or with any kind of empathy that seemed at the time like sweet fellowship. They retain some of their color, but aren't really a decoration. They are a reminder of love given and many times returned. A reminder of the parts of this life that were well-lived and tenderly remembered.

Yesterday, I found a poet who described why I've kept them.

Master, how serene
Are all the hours 
We waste

If, as we waste them,

We place them in a vase

Like flowers.

There are no sorrows

In our lives

Nor joys either.

Let us learn, then,

Innocent sages, 

Not to live life

But to pass through it,

Tranquil, serene,

Taking children

As our teachers,

Eyes full

Of nature...

Beside a river,

Beside a road,

Wherever we are,

Living life

With the same

Light ease.

Time passes,

And tells us nothing.

We grow old.

Let us learn almost

Mischievously,

To feel ourselves leaving.

There is no point

In doing anything.

There is no resisting

The monstrous god

Who devours

His own children.

Let us gather flowers.

Let us bathe our hands

In the calm rivers,

And from them

Learn their calm.

Sunflowers eternally

Staring at the sun,

We will leave life

Tranquilly, not even

Regretting

Having lived.

--Ricardo Reis

Image: Farmer's Almanac

A Spiritual Workout - Yearning for the Life

 

 

Last week, a friend of mine mused out loud that he thought he might give up Lent for Lent. Just Lent. I’m not sure exactly what he meant, but it may be the thought that Lent just doesn’t work for many people and, if that’s what he meant, I think he might be right. The whole idea of giving up something, or even of doing something extra, for 40 days just doesn’t make sense. And it doesn’t if we just look on the face of it. It seems kind of silly. Until we do it in earnest, trying to look at it from God’s point of view.

Jesus gave some pretty simple instructions:

First, He said, "Follow me." The early disciples did it. They left nets and families and literally traipsed along beside him. They traveled and listened and learned. We are supposed to do that, too. 

Then, He said, (paraphrased) "Do what I do." Or more correctly, "Why do you call me Lord, Lord and not do what I say?" That's a good question and I have an answer. Two of them. Because I'm human and because it's hard. But I keep forgetting something important. 

Being human isn't just something "only". Being human is being designed by God in the pattern of God. Being human means that we are more than flesh and blood. Being human means that we are infused with longing for perfect love, unfailing trust and justice, and an assurance that what we endure in this life ends in a condition that is beautiful and complete. It doesn't matter whether a person believes in God or not. We all want these things. The thing is that if we're ever going to get them, we have to DO something.

I broke my arm in mid-November and it's taken me until mid-February to regain most of my ability to do the things I used to do. In the meantime, I was necessarily sedentary and lost a lot of strength and vitality. Now that most of my maneuverabilty is back, I have to start moving  - yoga, dance, lifting weights, stretching. All that stuff. Not stuff usually on the top of my list for fun, but I know what the result is, having been this way before. I will become a person more fit for the life I want to lead. It's not the body I'm after. It's the life.

The same goes for my spiritual life. I have to spend time in the spiritual gym to prepare myself for the spiritual life I want and quite simply, as far as I'm concerned, there is no spiritual quest but the one toward more of God. More grace. More joy. More union. And I'm convinced that's what he wants for me. "The kingdom of God is in you". And I want to let it out.

God will do lots of things for us, but this is something WE have to do. 

So what equipment is in our spiritual gym? For me in this season, the weight I have to lift is restraint. Self control. Self denial. Jesus said that "If any man would come after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me." He meant it. The qualites that make this life most worthwhile are not those that amuse and satisfy ourselves. They are the long-term struggles that we can look back on and know that we have done something lasting and worthwhile. Neither doing a job well or raising children is fun most of the time, but afterward, we know we have done what is right and builds up not only our own world but the world of the people around us. 

Spiritual weightlifting is like that. Restraint, that is holding back our power and abilities to achieve something greater, is like that. And Lent is kind of the kindergarten for restraint. It puts restraint in a box for a time and tells us, "Don't do this destructive thing. Do this other thing that builds up for eternity. Do this other thing that will still matter tomorrow and will not build a thing you keep for yourself but will build a thing you share with God."

So Lent is kind of silly if all you do is stop drinking coffee or stop eating your daily M&Ms, but it's not silly if we can take the larger view. After all, God isn't ever small. We have to aim high and climb if we're ever going to get closer to Him.

Image: Terri Gillespie

The Dream that Doesn't Die

 

I'm going to see Bob Dylan live in concert for the first time on March 30. In preparation for that, I've been listening to what I hope will be, before then, all of his music, knowing that I'd missed so much of it after the early 70s. I want to hear all his music in order before then and now that I'm pretty far into it, am finding him sunk in some places deep into what sounds like a real life exposure to Desolation Row.

Listening to the music and how it changed along the way, I'm trying to figure out what happened. He got lost somehow. Something vital drained away. He deflated away into a memory of the inspired genius that had made him someone we looked toward for a glimpse of what we might be - outraged at the venality and mediocrity of a world we knew could be better - a constant prodding toward beauty and the glory of humankind - a voice that said not 'get more' but 'be better', 'think', 'act'. A command to not only 'love' (if loving could ever be an only) but 'Be love'. 'Be real.' 

And then it all stopped. Or more like it, braked to a gradual, deflating stop. It took years for him but it happened, I'm thinking, to the rest of us, too.

That's why the 60s were special. That time has been called a brief, shining moment for some of us. There were real palpable dreams for the possibility of what we might be. And what we might be had faces - Jack. Bobby. Martin.  

In the end, they had to die, of course. Mediocrity is jealous. It does not harbor excellence or dreams of egalitarian glory.  Glory, because it reminds us of what we cannot hold in our hands or even easily imagine, has to die, too. Jesus should have helped us remember that but although his name is often evoked, what he taught never quite caught on in spite of the crowds still in churches every week. 

Glory necessitates reaching beyond flesh and blood - not only beyond our own grasp but beyond our comprehension, forced to be content with desiring most what we can only approach but never attain. 

Dylan wasn't the only one who lost it. We all did, but some of us never stopped looking for it again - the beauty that just seeped away. Everyone looked in different places and some got lost in drugs or in corporate striving. Me, as it turned out - I went to Italy. I remembered the beauty of the Renaissance and recognized it as what we'd grabbed by the tail once long ago. There, I could literally reach out and touch genius, the kind of genius that is supernatural or metaphysical. More than flesh and blood. More even than mind.

Once that kind of genius is actually touched, even for a little while, everything else looks small and insufficient, because it is. I am still disappointed in the everyday that does not aspire to lift human souls to what can only be termed a kind of heaven. And that's what I saw in Italy. In the Farnese Hercules, I saw the disillusionment of doing what we think will make things right and finding that it doesn't:

In Michaelangelo's David and the ceiling of the Sistine, I saw physical representations of the discovery of human glory:

In Donatello's Magdalen, I see how these glorious discoveries can ruin flesh, can throw what we are and what we could be into a conflagration that cannot be resolved:

And this is where we are left today. The beauty of what we are made to be still calls. It's harder to get near now because we have no one alive who knows how to lead there, but the yearning still lives, and not just in this old hippy's heart, but in so many people who have been born to ask questions and wonder why the world is the way it is. I still believe that the dream of glory never dies. 

"You can be in my dream if I can be in yours.: - Bob Dylan said that.

First Image: Stereo Times

Old Lady Racing: How to get out of a Speeding Ticket

 

Back in the 80s, I used to drive a race car. Of course, that was then. These days, I don't have nearly as heavy a foot as I used to, although ironically, my street cars are more powerful. That's just the way cars (not trucks or SUVs - those don't count in my world) are made these days. 350HP and doubly aspirated, but with a two-body trunk and a back seat that easily accepts a car seat. Go figure. 

Driving is a weird thing. For some, it's independence. For some, it's just a way to get somewhere. For others, like me, it's like holding onto a hurricane. When I press the ignition button in my cockpit, feeling again the push of pistons against the fire that moves them and hearing the low growl of heat and air moving through the system, I smile. Something will happen when I step on the accelerator. Yes.

Then there are those days, of course, when a little too much happens. That's another thing about my car. It has plenty of power, but wears it secretly, hiding behind efficient mufflers and noise dampeners. Sneaky. And just a little dangerous. 

Like when I pull up alongside 4 16-year-olds in a convertible 5L Mustang on a sunny summer day. Grandma in her sedan. Ha. I've had two of them. Sneaky sportscars. The first was an SHO. Yowser, it was fun. Pure muscle and guile:

Until a truck nosed its way into somewhere he didn't belong and power couldn't get me out of:

That was a sad day. So I got a hot rod Lincoln. Ahh....

So when the light turned green for me and the Mustang, I'm a quarter mile down the road before they've left the light. Oh my, that feels good.

Not so good, though, when there's a patrol car up ahead with a not-so-friendly county sheriff in it. It's happened more than once, and I don't like that part one bit. These days, however, I have a secret weapon. 

My granddaughter, Autumn. 

She's gotten me out of two tickets. She didn't mean to, of course, but she sure did it.

The first time, she was in her car seat in the back. I'd just pulled out on the highway on the first leg of what was to be our first road trip together and just before engaging the cruise control, he caught me. Way too fast, like 20 miles or so too fast. 

"Why is the policeman coming here, Grandma?"

"To keep us safe, honey."  Yeah, right. 

I rolled down the window, smiled, and handed him my license. Then he saw Autumn in the back seat. 

"I want to be a policeman!" she told him. That's all it took. He scolded me and let me go. Well done, girl.

It happened last Friday, too, and this time Autumn wasn't even in the car. Going only 12 miles over on a minor highway in a small Wisconsin town was enough to trigger the blue lights, though. 

"Where are you going?" 

"To my granddaughter's choir concert."

"Where is it?"

"Salem School." He knew the school was just down the street. It was a test. And again, he sent me on my way. 

Score. Not so bad for a grandma driving a sneaky sportscar. It's been more than 5 years since I've gotten a speeding ticket. I don't look too dangerous, after all. And Autumn surely doesn't. Good thing they can't read my mind. 

Please excuse me while I do a few donuts. 

It's Ash Wednesday - So What's Burning?

 

Lent begins with Ash Wednesday.
“Remember that you are but dust and unto dust you shall return.”

The celebrant rubs ashes on our forehead and we are supposed to be reminded of our sins and that we will, like it or not, eventually die. With that in mind, we then enter into six weeks of reflection that’s often marked by giving something up, or sometimes taking up a new practice intended to bring us closer to God, and these are good things. Often, however, if we’re honest, it’s just another season in the church marked by different colors, different customs, different routines and not much else.

The dust thing is interesting, though. In this context, dust means two things. The first is the dirt that God took up to make the first human being. So dust means dirt, but here it also means ashes, the grit and fluff that's left over when something is burned. Here, what's burned is supposed to be us and the dust referred to is connected with feelings of disappointment or disillusionment and with the ancient practice of visible humility. Job threw ashes on himself when his family had all been struck down. It is a symbol of great mourning, often intensified by the wearing of sackcloth, an intentionally uncomfortable, scratchy garment made of goat’s hair supposed to remind the wearer of their sins. It was painful on purpose. Sackcloth and ashes. 

But there is another recurring theme in the Bible connected with this practice, the idea of dying, specifically dying to self. Burning is a particularly final way of ending something. What is burned is pretty much completely destroyed and along with our former sinful ways, we are encouraged to not only get rid of our wrongful deeds, we are supposed to get rid of everything - EVERYTHING - that separates us from God and, contrary to what some say, it's not only sin that does this. 

In addition to what we do that we know is wrong when we do it, although this is a big obvious roadblock to a life with God, we also have to understand what we did in ignorance that we should not have done. If I think the speed limit is 50 but it's 35, the policeman still gets to give me a ticket for going too fast. Ignorance is not an excuse. Not really a sin, but still not OK. The attachments we form with other people that loom larger than God. A degree of busyness that gets in the way of our devotional life. Desire and addiction of almost any kind. We lose our focus and as a consequence, we lose God. 

So, what's burning is us? Our ego.  Whatever part of our humanity that interferes with the narrow way. That's why it's narrow. Not because it's exclusive, but because it's hard and takes work. However, we are a New Testament people, forgiven in Christ. We don’t put on sackcloth and ashes anymore, but there is symbolism here that can be useful to us, too. Rather than concentrating on our sins, we look to our transformation in Christ. The dust and ashes, the knowledge of all the times we have fallen short and need forgiveness is still important, but not for its sense of loss or hopelessness. We bury our old lives, yes, but as we do so we look to the new one. We die to something we thought we loved for the sake of something better so that we can embrace a newer life, a more perfect life in God. There is Lent, but there is also Easter. 

image: Vecteezy

The Arrow vs. the Circle - The Shape of the World

 One of the most enduring ideas I learned in college is that not everyone thinks like I do. 

It's true. And in all likelihood, they don't think like you do, either. This goes way past contemporary journalistic and talk show fodder about a divided country or prevailing politics. It goes all the way down to the how we think the world is made and the way it works beyond physics and biochemistry. It's about the nature of living things and, adjunctly, what we can expect or not expect in the process of living. Overall, there are two basic ideologies that not only dictate how we live, but they also dictate how we think.

The Arrow

The first way of looking at the world is as a straight line. Having a specific beginning and a specific ending, this view is most common in Western cultures (eg: ours) and most often coupled with a world governed by duality. That is, this world knows two opposing forces, each one working against the other to cause tension in our everyday lives. Right and wrong, good and evil, constantly at war with each other to the point that  determining one from the other and choosing rightly so as to live as decent a life as we can muster occupies a great deal of our time. 

In this scheme, whatever we consider bad is to be avoided at almost all costs. Poverty, illness, danger. We assume that it's possible to live a life with less bad and more good, not only through what we do ourselves, but overall  - as a group or society - and part of our job as humans is to tip the balance toward the good whenever we have a chance. Whether or not we think that goodness will alter a fate that extends beyond our physical life or not, this trend toward goodness is something to be desired and if our beliefs tend in the direction of a heaven, well then, there is an opportunity for all goodness to be realized.

The Circle 

Known as yin-yang, this is an Eastern or Asian view of the world in which all things in the universe consist of complementary, opposing forces in constant flux. These forces are unavoidable and interdependent, that is, one cannot exist without the other so that good and evil operate together necessarily and are not usually associated with  the same intensity of value judgement as they do in the Arrow model. 

This model also does not have any definite beginning or end. There is no Garden of Eden here, no Second Coming. The cycle, samsara, simply repeats until the individual gradually navigates their way into perfect communion with an awareness free from all suffering. That communion, that place of liberation, is called Nirvana and is reached in much the same way as is heaven: ethical living, mindfulness, and the wisdom gained by them. What this view does avoid is the struggle to right wrongs since what we might often call wrongs are a necessary and functional part of living that we have to learn to navigate to get where we want to go. 

Not the Same, But Not Completely Different

We're pretty much born into one of these worldviews. It's pretty hard for someone born in the U.S., like me, to think about things the way a Buddhist or a Taoist would. Most of us grew up balancing the voices between the bickering angel on our right shoulder and the nasty little devil on our left. The idea that those two rascals don't exist, that my ideas of good and evil are pretty much irrelevant, that there is no heaven or hell, well, that's a reach. But it also makes sense in a way because we know from experience that suffering can hone us to sharpness and difficulty can breed a kind of wisdom that ease never does. That they should need each other to make us the best we can be may not be so crazy after all. 

As for me, I like the idea of working to make this world a better place but at the same time the thought of floating off into an egoless Nirvana where good and evil don't matter anymore sounds pretty appealing, too. Maybe like you, I don't exactly know what will happen when I shrug off my physical body, but until then, Donkey has some good advice:

Images: ergo blog, jade dragon school

No Clocks in Eden

 

Sommarøy, a small Norwegian island above the Arctic Circle off the coast of Norway, decided in 2019 to get rid of all of its clocks. Anyone traveling there will find a land whose summer sun shines all day long and whose 300+ inhabitants are free to swim Caribbean blue waters or laze on sand beaches in the middle of the night because, well, nobody there cares what time it is. 

Just Imagine

Look around. Right now. How many devices do you use to tell you the time? I have two in the room I'm in and another in the room next door. I look at them constantly, even when the time doesn't matter. Like now. It's a kind of reflex, a way of grounding myself. If I know the time, I've got a handle on the world. 

But that's not true.

Of all of the constructs of man, time is one of the most insidious. We're either early or behind. We're constantly being measured by it. We worry about how much time something takes, or whether we have time to do this or that. We hurry through nearly everything to make sure we can fit it all in. If we didn't care about time, we would never have to be busy in the same way. We wouldn't constantly be rushing past people or things of ordinary beauty. We might finally be able to stop and SEE.

Time and the Spirit

It's not just the clock that's the problem. The clock is just a natural extension of the idea of time in the macro. It's looking at life in terms of what happened yesterday or what might happen tomorrow. It's the concepts of past and future. That's time, too. 

We often talk about the importance of living in the NOW, being present for life's events as they occur as if that's all we have because, well, it IS all we have. The concept of time, the idea that we can in some way hold on to or influence what has already happened or what has not yet happened hogties our life. It is the origin of both regret and fear. Without time, we wouldn't give yesterday or tomorrow a second thought and they don't deserve it.

Time and Eternity

God, who made us, lives beyond time. Everything in His consciousness is happening right now, to everyone everywhere. Every person who lived, every person who will ever live, you and me, are equally present to Him every second. Time, the hours of it and the passage of it, are an entirely human concept and the more we tie ourselves to the idea that time is real (it isn't), the farther we put ourselves away from God. 

Do you really think God put clocks in Eden? Of course He didn't. Nobody needed them. Those walks He took with Adam in the cool of the day had no limit, no recorded beginning or end. Their union was without any kind of limit, time or otherwise. 

Hmmm...  I stopped setting my alarm clock about 40 years ago, but darn. Looks like I didn't go far enough. Those folks on Sommarøy might be on to something. 

Image: Islands

Suffering, Self, and What to Do With Them

 

Who was the Buddha?

The person we know as the Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama, summed up his teaching in a simple sentence: "I teach only suffering and the end of suffering". I doubt there is anyone to whom that doesn't sound good. No one wants to suffer and the Buddha maintained that there was a way out of it, a way out of Samsara, the unending cycle of suffering that humans endure. This is what he taught, and this only. 

The way to do that, he said, was to undo our humanity completely, to dismantle all the pieces that make us discrete human beings, to define all the parts of our actions, thoughts, and personality that comprise our Self and to jettison them into the aether, leaving spirit unencumbered and absorbed into the stream that is life itself. There are no desires, no evils, no joys, no sorrows. We are completely and perfectly free forever. Nirvana. 

He said this was possible for anyone and his followers say he achieved such a state, but returned to teach others how to do it. He became bodhisattva, an enlightened being who delays entering nirvana out of compassion and helps all willing sentient beings to achieve awakening as well. He became a teacher and is said to have passed down (verbally - Gautama never wrote anything down) the way to do what he did and many have followed him. 

Sounds Pretty Good to Me

I can't blame them. Who doesn't want to leave suffering by the wayside and live in perfect happiness? Pretty much everything we do in life is geared toward making either ourselves (primarily ourselves, if we're honest) or someone else happy. It rarely works the way we think it does, of course, because generally what we think will make us happy is more life, not less. More love, more money, more health, more ease...more, more, more...and what it usually gets us is more complications and often more trouble. 

It's possible that the Buddha was on to something by telling us we are better off with less of ourselves rather than more. Desire is thrilling and can make us feel ecstatic and alive but it is not always our friend, often leading to bad decisions, waste, and misery. I wonder, however, whether he took his idea of achieving happiness a few steps too far and for those who think their humanity is not a misshapen impediment, it might be worth looking at an alternative.

Die to Self

The Buddha wasn't the only one who thought we needed to rid ourselves of too much Self, but it's a matter of degree. Jesus did it, too. But Jesus' dying always carried with it a resurrection. In other words, Buddha undressed us and escorted us into a different kind of existence stripped of flesh, bone, blood, and intellect, but Jesus did something different. Jesus changed the clothes of humanity. He taught a way to remove the cloak of pride and selfishness and destructive desire and put on a new one, removing a forbidding, fortified heart of stone and replacing it with a vulnerable heart of flesh, open to hurt and death but somehow enlarged by them. 

In short, Jesus taught us how to remain human, suffer constructively, and still find happiness. 

How to Be Human and Happy

There are some Christian sects that treat our bodies like a red-headed stepchild, of course, who say that we are unavoidably and irredeemably corrupt by physical nature, and in that, they have philosophical agreement with the Buddha. But Jesus was a man. A man who never apologized for being a man or tried to undo his humanity. A man who lived fully and died fully, too. A man who knew that complete divorce from suffering was not the way we were meant to live and demonstrated it by suffering with intent right before our eyes. 

Rather than undoing his humanity, He detached his humanity and his suffering from their catastrophic nonessentials, the desires and decisions that augment our sense of self but lead to nothing but the loss of the love, peace, and happiness we think we're working toward. He did leave a couple of pretty plain roadmaps for how to do this: his own life and the Sermon on the Mount. The sermon gives practical examples of which desires we should keep and which we should work to abandon. It tells us what we will look like while this is being accomplished - we will look like Jesus. 

I admit I'm tempted to say Duh here because that is his aim all along - to make us like him. He said to "follow me" more than 20 recorded times and in that, please note, that He did not live any nirvana. He suffered and in that, I deduce that, even when we are following and doing as much of the right thing as we can muster, we will suffer too. It's part of the deal. It's part of life. It forms us. It confirms our humanity, and in case you haven't noticed, we are, at least for now, all human.

The Alternatives

It turns out that we can have our cake and eat it, too. Sort of. We have a Self and do not need to kick it to the curb to know joy and peace. With that Self and the desires that it brings, however, we will also suffer. That's the deal. It's either that or the way of the Buddha: immolation of the Self and absorption into a blessedly sense-free Nirvana. 

There is a kind of happiness in either path.

I came so that you might have life, and have it more abundantly.-John 10:10

image: owlcation

Winter Full Moon - and Living 100 Years

 

Winter full moons. Their blue light and the way they look cast on snow. Not reflecting, but drawing out what can't normally be seen. A stark beauty only possible because it happens in harshness. Is this why we have seasons?

Living to 100

I've been reading the diary of Calvin Tomkins, a former writer for The New Yorker, and his comments regarding how he is spending his 100th year - what he's thinking and how he feels. The changes happening to him and how he assimilates them into what he's known as his life until then. It comes down to this: most of our lives (or mine, anyway) assume a level of health and lucidity. We are supple and flexible and energetic and strong. We get sick sometimes, sure, but then we get well again, as well as we were before the illness. We get used to being this way. It is our normal. 

Our Timeline of Progressive Maturation

Put in terms of a projected timeline, we reach physical maturity in the first season of our life, and that is our main concern. We, well, we grow up. Then, however, if we're paying attention, spiritual and psychological maturity start to catch up. We've reached the best our physical body will ever be and we start to build other kinds of muscles. This is middle age. Then our body begins to decline. Slowly at first, but somewhere in the 70s the disassembly begins to accelerate. By 99, Mr. Tomkins has a long list of physical  facilities that don't work anymore. Ones that just seemed to sneak up him almost overnight, one after another. 

We grow up, you see, mostly without much effort. It just happens. One's cells know what to do automatically. We become our most beautiful and vital selves so easily that we can sometimes stop other people in their tracks. We hum with electric pleasure. We are immortal and it feels so good, like the natural order of things. And it is. For awhile.

We aren't immortal, though, and sooner or later, our body begins to remind us. We learn the rest of the natural order and this, too, like our strength, is a kind of gift because while we are exulting in our vitality, our spirit is awakening and growing. What our body has long known, our spirit can also now know. We have been men and women who strode with gods in the flesh. Now we can learn to stride with God in the spirit.

This is the final and complete maturation. 

What if Feels Like to Live It

This last spiritual growth signals its arrival, like the first one, through the flesh. What was a strong, beautiful body sags and greys and begins to grow slack no matter how much we try to build it up. Skin and bones thin. Organs stutter and fail. When we sicken or fracture, we may heal, but not to prior levels of vitality. We have to get used to lower physical plateaus, new normals, reduced horizons. And it is from this place that the fruit of the spirit stands out in greater clarity. The spirit we grow during our waning days of physical strength becomes our final, sustaining strength, bearing us up not to greater physical feats but to different heights. The God who first showed himself during the noise of our vigor becomes our entire beautiful world. The voice that was still and small grows to a symphony in crescendo. 

I do not achieve much in the flesh anymore, so what I do achieve originates not from the flesh but from the spirit. I have a broken arm now and it is healing, but it will probably not heal to a level as supple and nimble as it once was. This new level will dictate my next reduced physical plateau and as such, is a gift not only to gently prepare me for my end, but to give me a chance to marvel at the grace that brought me here. 

What I Had, What I Have

I will never again be completely healthy. 

I will never again know spiritual poverty. 

The moon is full tonight while I find I am in my life's winter.  It is beautiful because what is real in me lives still unlimited, unfettered. I can still sing. 

Photo: Forbes, Sports Health