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Russia and the United Nations

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The cease-fire in Syria was shattered today when Russia mounted a massive bombing assault on the city of Aleppo. Included in the targeting were two supply centers for Syria’s non-partisan White Helmets, the rescuers that rush in to neighborhoods after an assault to attempt to save civilians trapped in the rubble.

This turn of events is being interpreted as a failure of foresight by John Kerry, US Secretary of State, but it was forecast as early as last week when the alliance led by the Russians bombed a UN relief convoy attempting to reach Aleppo, where nearly a quarter of a million people are attempting to survive a government siege.

The Syrian rebellion was triggered by a drought that forced rural settlers to the cities. The government of Bashar al-Assad ignored their plight, leading to protests that were met with government violence. Seeing parallels with recent events in Georgia and the Ukraine, the UN attempted to issue a proclamation rebuking al-Assad and demanding a negotiated end to hostilities, but the resolution was vetoed by Russia and China in the Security Council.

Despite this, the Syrian war was almost over last year with rebel forces ready to mount an assault on the capital, Damascus. Russia joined a government alliance including Iranian forces and Hezbollah fighters from Lebanon. The three foreign governments are all united by a common purpose: erode US, Israeli and Saudi influence in the region.

But Putin’s Russia is not just thumbing its nose at the US, it’s also challenging the legitimacy and authority of the United Nations. Throughout, it has used its position on the Security Council to advance its own aims in the world, against the consensus of the body as a whole. So I think that our next step is obvious: the Security Council was recently expanded by adding additional states on a temporary basis. I think that now the US needs to work to establish procedures to remove members from the Security Council. Russia would be first on my list, and the recent assault on the relief convoy is sufficiently egregious that if established as a criterion for ejection, no other state should ever qualify.

As for Syria, al-Assad is obviously nothing more now than a Russian toadie. With the exception of Damascus, the nation is in a ruin. Even if, as he claims, the government manages to reclaim control of the land shown on the map as ‘Syria,’ the people of the nation will burn with hatred of him. He will never again be able to claim legitimately that he serves as their “president.”

Peace Requires Interfaith Solidarity

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A powerful reminder of the necessity that Jews, Christians and Muslims recognize and shoulder together the sacred work of bringing peace to the world.

Marcus Mescher's avatarMillennial


On September 20th, Pope Francis joined thousands of pilgrims in Assisi for the World Day of Prayer for Peace.  This event commemorated the 30th anniversary of the gathering that brought together pilgrims from all over the globe and invited the world’s religions to join their hearts, minds, and hands in becoming peacemakers.  At that gathering in 1986, Pope John Paul II highlighted the “common nature, a common origin and a common destiny” of all people and called for collaboration between individuals and nations to forge common ground in a shared aspiration for peace.  John Paul II urged that this work be undertaken through prayer, humility, and “a commitment to serve all.”  He also acknowledged that Christians are required to complete acts of penance for the sins of omission and commission that have kept them from answering the call to be peacemakers in the world.

Pope Francis echoed…

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After Christ, Seeking

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My father, after reading Ma, recognized that the book was an attempt to share with the world my experience of life. He had to admit, however, that he understood it very poorly.

When my son Greg learned that I had spent almost $20,000 on publishing and marketing Ma and The Soul Comes First, he chastised me, “You’re  wasting your money. They don’t care!” My response was, “I understand, and some may think that they are taking advantage of me, but it’s not just money. It’s intention, and that investment is allowing me to get close to the things that oppose the realization of my goals.”

As part of that process, I went out to meet Hugh Ross at Reasons to Believe in Arcadia. He wasn’t in that Sunday, but the presentation gave me hope that I had found a community that might understand my journey. Conceptual frameworks color our perceptions, and thus our experience of life. The presenter summarized a book that proposed criteria for assessing conceptual frameworks, and surveyed the limitations of Humanity’s most robust frameworks. Having realized that I had been allowed a perspective that reconciled many of the limitations, I tried to engage him, only to be completely rebuffed because my understanding of angels was incompatible with his.

That made me think of the Apostles in the Garden of Gethsemane. As a child, I was taught that “The spirit is willing; but the flesh is weak” was a chastisement. Today I understand Jesus’ words as self-diagnosis, and recognize that the reason the Apostles slept is because to share Jesus’ struggle with him would have shattered their hearts and minds.

I don’t write about all of my experiences as I inch closer to the heart of Christ. Partly, that’s because they won’t make sense to anyone – the scientists will say that they are impossible, and the religious will reject them, citing dogma and creed. But it’s also because the experiences often aren’t fun. I was juicing oranges Tuesday morning when India’s poor landed on me, and I sobbed for several minutes with my forehead resting against the door of the kitchen cabinet.

While listening to WOW Worship Gold last night, I went in really deep. A sequence of songs reiterated the encouragement to open hearts to Christ. A flood of energy arose from mine, and I struggled with grief as the great tide of Life’s suffering pulled on it. I raised my hands to the sky and felt him reaching down to me, almost ready to surrender the sorrows of the cross. Entering into that heavenly will, my hands reached down, touching all the hands raised up from the ground.

No, it doesn’t make sense. It is just what it was.

People make better choices when they understand, but understanding is possible only upon surrendering oneself in service to needs that are insurmountable in the clothing of our Humanity. So Love, with infinite patience, watches as we take two steps forward, and then one back. With infinite endurance it suffers and heals the corruption of our self-serving. With infinite compassion it guides us to relationships that bring us strength and affirmation.

Please try to understand. Love is perfect. It is our experience that is imperfect. To offer love to the world is the only way to bridge that gap.

So this helps: the marchers in Charlotte, N.C. stopping outside the prison and shouting up to the inmates:

We see you. We love you.

Solidarnosc, Roboti!

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The Russian police arrested a robot that was collecting opinion data at a political rally. Given how little suffering corporations endured to obtain free speech rights in America, I think that soon enough it will be time to let robots vote. It’s not quite as bad as sending 18-year-olds to Vietnam when the voting age was twenty-one, but its getting there.

Okay, probably not.

From Grief to Power

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A friend was offering a sermon on his birthday yesterday, dwelling on the contradiction between his grief over all the things that we are losing in this era, and the joy he finds in seeing his community interacting. When I had the opportunity to speak, I offered:

Grieving is the prequel to the opening of the door of our heart to a spirit that would otherwise be lost.

That opening is not easy, because the expression of Darwinian selfishness has left so many of them traumatized. But once they have settled in to the experience of being cherished, they look back into the world they have departed and reach out to those left behind, giving them assurance, strength and guidance.

“They” are trees, flowers, fish, birds, mice, whales, children: anything living that is being displaced by a disappearing or polluted ecosystem.

Over the years my conscious welcoming has gathered quite an entourage around me. From that community of displaced souls I draw my power, power that is expressed in the t-shirt I started wearing six months ago to dance celebrations. Across the shoulders are a right and left hand framing a head and a heart. The words are:

DANGER
Angel Gateways

They just want to be friends.
Please play nicely.

What’s Wrong With this Picture?

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Nothing. Nothing at all.

I was telling my Mom yesterday that the election will probably hang on the debates, and that the trick for Hillary was to simply allow Trump’s negativity to pass right through her while she addressed the voters directly.

Given the new “Love trumps hate” meme for her campaign, it would also be interesting to have her gently chide him when he starts lying “That’s just not true, Donald. You known, Duckie, when you talk people don’t understand a word that you’re saying. But you are quite good at encouraging them to believe that you’re saying what they want to hear.”

The Gospel of Life

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In explaining the Parable of the Sower {Luke 8:4-15], Jesus says:

To you, it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of God, but to others I speak in parables, so that ‘looking they may not perceive, and listening they may not understand.’ Now the parable is this: The seed is the Word of God.
[Luke 8:10-11]

The passage begins with the report that people from many towns had gathered to hear Jesus speak. Clearly their hearts hungered for truth. But Jesus does not speak plainly to them of the things that they yearn to know. He offers them a parable designed to confuse. So why did they come?

In our day, it is even harder, for what do we have of Jesus’ words? He did not write a Gospel, leaving it to his disciples to collect fragments of his teaching in contradictory testimony. Worse, that testimony has been parsed and twisted for centuries by those seeking political authority. Of the three great Christian Inquisitions, all were enforced by political leaders seeking to oppress their enemies. Only in the second, longest episode – the Catholic Inquisition – did the Church in Rome send out priests as Inquisitors to counter politically-motivated dogma with true Christian teaching. As a result, many of the accused repented, received the sacraments, and were saved.

If Jesus had written a gospel, could this have been avoided?

The parable suggests not, for Jesus says:

The ones on the path are those who have heard; then the devil comes and takes the word away from their hearts, so that they may not believe and be saved.

This is a confusing image, that of words in the heart. It is repeated in the final verse, when Jesus speaks of those that “hold it fast in an honest and good heart.”

When speaking of the kingdom of heaven, of course, all earthly metaphors eventually must fail. Some hint of the grandeur of the Word of which Jesus speaks is given to us in the opening lines of John’s Gospel, in which he testifies:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and was God. [John 1:1]

Later Jesus offers the metaphor of living water:

If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water. [John 4:10]

During a sermon in which he felt this presence moving through his congregation, I heard one pastor testify that it felt indeed like water pouring over his head, drenching every fiber of his body.

St. Teresa of Avila combines beautifully these metaphors when describing her experience of prayer in her spiritual autobiography, The Book of My Life (translated wondrously by Mirabai Starr). The holy woman talks of prayer as a means of bringing water to a garden. It progresses through stages, the first of which is like lifting a bucket. As we strengthen the mechanisms that process love, the water moves through us as though driven by a water wheel. When we learn to surrender our desires, the gates burst, and love moves through us as though a river, drenching us in “holy madness.” Finally, we enter a state of union and serenity, seeing love entering the world everywhere we go, doing the Father’s work. The word becomes a rain that falls on our garden, which has become the world. There we meet Jesus in the struggle to heal the pain of the world’s separation from Love.

In describing this growth into the Word, Teresa testifies:

O Lord of my soul and my Good! There are souls so determined to love you that they gladly abandon everything else to focus on nothing but loving you. Why don’t you want them to immediately ascend to a place where they may receive the gift of perfect love?

Indeed, the saint’s desire was so powerful that at times she had to order her sisters to sit on her to keep her attached to the ground!

But the answer to Teresa’s plea, of course, is that words such as she gave to the world are no less of the Word than were those that issued from Jesus’ lips. Jesus did not write a gospel because he knew that others would do it for him, not as a fixed testament crafted to a specific age, but ever renewed to reflect the needs of each person in their time. Not dead words captured on a page, but living words, lived with enduring trust, growing into an ever more joyful proclamation that love amplifies Life with majestic, glorious and infinite possibility!

Hoisting by Einstein’s Petard

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While often cited as an authority in particle physics and cosmology, Einstein didn’t win the Nobel Prize for his work on relativity. That was considered too controversial at the time. Rather, he was awarded the prize for two papers that forced physicists to shift their understanding of waves.

As I’ve pointed out before, the mathematics of waves is seductive. By assuming that a phenomenon is uniformly smooth at any magnification, we are allowed the use of powerful mathematical tools such as differential equations and Fourier analysis. But it comes with a big assumption: that the things described have no structure inside of them.

Einstein’s two papers undermined that assumption. One paper forced the conclusion that light waves were composed of particles called “photons.” The second forced a recognition that water waves were composed of molecules.

Then he spent the rest of his life pursuing a grand theory of physics that assumed that space was uniformly smooth. Go figure, and take note: he failed in his quest.

So have all the others that followed in his footsteps.

In essence, all that I am asking in my New Physics page is that we imagine that space has structure. I’m hoisting Einstein on his own petard.

Recidivism

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When contemplating the selection from among the disciples of the Apostles, Luke records [6:12]:

Now during those days Jesus went out to the mountain to pray; and he spent the night in prayer to God.

Now this is an interesting proposition for prayer: the junior partner in the triune turning to himself for wisdom. Illogical, even bizarre? I can understand it only by assuming that Jesus was a pseudopod emitted from the Holy presence, not in possession of all his spiritual faculties.

Of course, as a demonstration it is instructive to read  of the devotion and trust that Jesus invested in the Father. If he was moved to pray, how should not we as well? And conceiving of him as a man, I would not rue Jesus that comfort.

A common elaboration of the Crucifixion is that it was not just physically agonizing, but also spiritually devastating. We have the great heart-rending cry:

Eloi! Eloi! Lama sabachthani?

[Mark 15:34]

There was no answer, because there could be none. God took on flesh because it was only through flesh that evil could be healed. Once Jesus assumed that burden, it was his and his alone.

The angels cannot change their nature – it is the grace and curse of humanity to possess that capacity. Thus God testified to Cain:

Sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must rule over it.

[Gen. 4:7]

Jesus was the culmination of this seeking after strength. He arose out of a culture devoted to the seeking after purity, and chose to allow sin into his heart so that its consequences could be healed.

The bulk of the BIble demonstrates the difficulty of this accomplishment. The men raised to greatness always struggle with their frailty. Jacob’s lust makes him little more than a seed dispenser to two competing sisters and their handmaids, and his favorite Joseph leads monotheism into subjection to a polytheistic culture. David succumbs to desire, clearing the way for marriage by sending his friend into battle to die, and Solomon again opens the door to polytheistic practices.

This recidivism illuminates the challenge of loving unconditionally: to be merciful is to grant power to those lacking the ability to discipline their behavior. Every parent confronts this in the two-year-old and adolescent, but somehow we believe that grace given by God is proof against this corruption. To the wise, though, the recidivism of the Bible is the greatest possible proof of God’s compassion for us. He pursues the loving embrace even against the evidence of our unfaithfulness.

Of course, in demonstrating the infinite depths of divine compassion, the heroes of the Old Testament are problematical role models. This came to a head in Islam, which largely sanitizes the evidence of personal frailty. A Muslim scholar disputed with me over David’s betrayal of friendship, explaining that the sanitized history was enforced by Muhammed’s (pbuh) son-in-law, Ali, and justified in that opportunists used David’s behavior to justify their own lecherous license.

The consequence of this idealization of Biblical heroes is that the program of monotheistic escalation (the only God worth worshipping is perfect and infinite) extends to the heroes of the Bible. They are no longer human but gods themselves, immune to temptation and error.

So what of Jesus, absorbing the burden of human sin on the cross? We know that he showed reluctance and despair in the event. This supports my sense that divine love comes at the first possible moment. In the New Testament as in the Old, the manifestation of grace is subjected to pressures almost certain to destroy it. Among those are the unfaithfulness of those to whom salvation is offered. Returning to Nazareth early in his ministry, Jesus is astonished by their cynicism, which makes him unable to offer power in any great measure.

So I conclude: as monotheism is the pursuit of a truly human god, in that pursuit Jesus is truly our god, struggling against our sinfulness while healing us so that we may sin again. Paradoxically, as we approach more nearly to his grace, that struggle intensifies. The assault on his virtues are more focused, the wounds more intimate. As God cried out again and again in the Old Testament, would we not expect Christ to be tried by anger and fear?

Even perhaps, at times, to be overcome by human impatience and frustration?