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The Standard of Truth

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I first read F. Scott Peck, the psychologist and Christian philosopher, back in college. (Ouch! Was that really 1984?) The Road Less Traveled crystalized the wisdom he gained in trying to balance the scientific practices of one-on-one therapy with the creation of networks of support that enabled healing to become a practical way of living for the patient.

One of the greatest causes of psychological distress, as well as the greatest impediment to healing, was the simple confusion that “love” was something that the giver felt. Peck completely rejected this in the case of the confusing loss of ego boundaries that we know as romantic love, applying to this particular form of madness the technical term “cathecting.” That’s close enough to “catheter” that I find it almost repulsive.

Peck’s writing sent me off down a path of rational loving that is just terribly confusing to most people. I don’t expect to feel good when loving somebody until my love actually manifests itself in a way that means something to them. I know that I’ve succeeded in that process when they come and say “Thank-you for loving me.” Ultimately, that’s the only meaningful evidence of my love. I do still offer “I love you” to my intimates, because it’s a comforting token, but I know full well that it doesn’t give me any claim on them until they give me “thank-you” back.

The most awe-inspiring part of this process is the depth to which people reveal themselves, and the tenderness of the engagement. The experience is very much like the “cathecting” that Peck described: it’s a deep surrender of ego. It’s different, however, because I’m not projecting myself into them. I’m actually acting as a doorway of sorts, and on the other side of the doorway is God. In looking into them, I’m simply showing them how I accept God, and letting them use that as an example for their own acceptance.

This is the source of the confusion, particularly to women of child-bearing age. They think that they’re falling in love with me, when in fact what they’re falling in love with is the source of perfect, infinite, unconditional love that reaches out to them through me.

That divine love is the love that forgave Cain, the first son, for the murder of Abel, the second son. It is a love that knows no rules, no boundaries. It is the love that manifested itself on the cross in the ultimate act of forgiveness.

Are rules imposed upon us in this relationship? Only one: to humbly accept that our love can never be so perfect, and thus to surrender ourselves as the conduit through which that love flows to others.

Is that hard? Yes, it’s hard. It’s really, really hard. The reason is that, after we’ve all broken down our egos and learned to offer our hearts up in service to one another, we still have to figure out how to stay alive in this world long enough to make some progress in healing it. That means deciding what we’re going to do, and often it really doesn’t make a difference, in the big picture, whether we eat Chinese or Mexican take-out tonight. But if we all say “you choose”, then nothing ever happens. And if we always insist on making ourselves happy, then our partners will eventually get tired of never having their preferences honored.

The example might seem silly, but when you’ve got a two-career family, and job offers in two states, the decisions become more difficult and painful to resolve.

And so we look for rules – something hard and fast from God that will help us prioritize. In Judaism, those rules were pretty much designed for men (which I interpret as reflecting our weakness). Rules provide structure, and can be a useful spiritual tool. We simply stop investing our egos in practical matters, and move on to spiritual ones.

But the New Testament is about creating people that live outside of the rules, and Acts demonstrates Jesus’s success in that endeavor. After the healing of a cripple, the Sanhedrin throw Peter and John in jail, but eventually are forced to relent, because, as the Scripture says [NIV Acts 4:13-14]:

When they saw the courage of Peter and John and realized that they were unschooled, ordinary men, they were astonished and they took note that these men had been with Jesus. But since they could see the man who had been healed standing there with them, there was nothing they could say.

And so this brings me to the point of this message: the standard of truth, as Jesus always said, is the faith that gives you the courage to give and receive healing. Remember, Jesus never, ever said “I have healed you” – he always said “Your faith has healed you.” Divine love can reach out through us, but unless the target of that love accepts it, no benefit will come.

So believe in what heals you. Allow others to take comfort in the healing that their faith brings to them. And open your heart to each other so that the truth of your healing can be seen to all. For that is the testament that Christ begs for the world to see: not a labored adherence to rules and conditions, but a joyous revival of truth, hope and life in those that once suffered with lies, fear and death.

And you ministers: if you can’t offer the kind of healing described in Acts, please humble your egos to the ultimate authority when your congregants tell you that the rules don’t work for them. Just agree that they need to find a spiritual home elsewhere, and part without prejudicial words on either side.

And for those ministers with the courage to recognize that you have guided your congregation through experiences that have moved them beyond the need for rules: Well: “God Bless You!” and “Welcome to the Journey!”

The Indications of Atheism

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In explaining the dangers of spiritual agency to young children, I used the example of an electrical bus bar. The power of love flows through us, and if we resist it, we can get hurt. But if we let it flow through us to those that need it most, the limit to what we can transmit is the capacity of others to receive from us.

Here’s a picture of somebody struggling with that problem:

The yearning to love is not commonly understood as the desire to be filled with God. The emptiness itself is recognized by Chris Rice in “Big Enough”:

When I imagine the size of the universe
And I wonder what’s out past the edges
Then I discover inside me a space as big
And believe that I’m meant to be
Filled up with more than just questions

But he believes the answer is in direct awareness of God’s presence in our lives, rather than in surrender of ourselves as a tool through which God enters the lives of others.

Mother Theresa, the great servant of the poor, struggled with this paradox in middle age. She felt God’s presence within her for many years, but entered into spiritual aridity at the end of her life.

Why is that? It’s because as that “space as big” is filled with love, we stretch. We feel a glowing inside of us, and a tingling as that love attaches to the people that we serve. Through that connection, we are aware of the beautiful healing that divine love brings to them. There’s an incredible rightness to it.

But when that love is firmly established in us, and flowing through us at the limit of our capacity, we become habituated to its presence. We become a fount from which others drink, and are filled again so rapidly that we may not even be aware that our pool was disturbed.

A Catholic priest shared with me that he decided to take orders after a visit with a nun. When he returned years later to tell her that he had found peace in her presence, she said that she was not even aware of the interaction. Similarly, though perhaps scandalously, a young donor to Mother Theresa’s work came away from a meeting to say that she “was the sexiest woman alive.” I am certain that she had no such intention in interacting with him: he was just overwhelmed by her energy, and channeled it into the most familiar form of self-love that he knew.

I have described the progression of the traditions of Abraham as the development of discipline through the practice of law, which flowers into spiritual intermediation between God and our community. In Jesus’s time, the pool of candidates for that graduation were limited. But in the intervening centuries, a large number of people were allowed the opportunity to devote their lives to religious orders, and the contemplation of the mysteries and magic of living a life in Christ. Two of the most beautiful lives so recorded are Mother Theresa’s predecessors: St. Teresa of Avila, and St. Terese of Lisieux.

The Apostle John was an earlier exemplar of this way of living. In the Book of Revelation, he describes the progression from the other side of the process: the change in the relationship between God and the angels that Jesus claimed to be working to transform. It begins in a throne room, with God in the central seat surrounded by angels [Rev. 4:2-4]:

[T]here before me was a throne in heaven with someone sitting on it. And the one who sat there had the appearance of jasper and carnelian. A rainbow, resembling an emerald, encircled the throne. Surrounding the throne were twenty-four other thrones, and seated on them were twenty-four elders.

As I describe in The Soul Comes First, twelve of the elders are the masculine angels that guide the tribes of Israel, and the other twelve are feminine personalities that accompany the Holy Mother when she descends to earth. When the work of Christ is done, John describes the “New Jerusalem”, with angels at twelve gates, and a tree of life bearing twelve crops of fruit. He then explains [Rev. 21:22-23]:

I did not see a temple in the city, because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple. The city does not need the sun or the moon to shine upon it, for the glory of God gives it light, and the Lamb is its lamp.

And [Rev. 22:1] the tree is fed by

[T]he river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb…

Where once the presence of Unconditional Love is separated from the angels as a king on a throne, in the end it is woven into every aspect of our shared existence.

So what does the experience of the saints foretell about our experience when we surrender ourselves fully to love? Well, at some point we no longer know where we end and love starts. The reincarnated nun might say “I feel guided by compassion from within, that has no source that I can discern.” Or the reincarnated monk might react to fear and hatred in those that profess faith by saying “Yours is not a god that I would choose.”

The best thing that a person of faith can do to bring such a person to awareness of the ultimate source of love is not to upbraid them for reflecting the standards of Christ back upon us. Rather, it would be to engage them in solving the biggest problems that humanity has to solve, and then to let them rediscover (in this life) the magic of Christ’s presence when those problems begin to overwhelm them.

You see, a profession of faith is only to say “I have God within me.” What Christ wants, however, is for us to seed the entire world with him.

Is this a model for all atheists? No, there are those atheists that seek only to destroy Christ and his works. But there are a good number of them – in my experience a majority – that seem honestly to feel that Christians aren’t upholding the ideals expounded by Jesus of Nazareth. We should not take their witness as an attack, but as an exhortation to do better.

What is Important About Church?

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I have been in a lot of churches, and many pastors raise the alarm that they work in communities that are turning away from God. Often this is accompanied by a call to evangelism: the members of the congregation must go out into the world to bring those outside in.

An element that distinguishes churches are the strategies they pursue as they turn outwards. Some do charitable works, some trumpet the knowledge of the Bible, some run Halloween and snow parties. The problem is that where the church was the only charitable institution in the ancient world, today the precepts of brotherly love are so firmly established that modern governments have institutionalized the provision of charity. During the Middle Ages, the Church ran all the educational institutions: today public schools provide a wealth of knowledge to our children, and knowledge that is more immediately useful in creating value in the material world. And for those who want to have fun, modern expectations for entertainment make Church-run events appear a little tame.

In this age, then, I would assert that the unique role of Church is to provide spiritual support to its members. This process is not entirely familiar to every minister. During a sermon on patience, one local pastor reported that God was “messing with him.” He had become trapped in traffic during a dragnet for a police shooter. The traffic seemed to just go around in circles with no escape, and his anxiety grew higher and higher. What I offered to him was that, under such circumstances, when people were all enmeshed in a common wavelength of fear, anger and/or frustration, I found that injecting the Christian experience of love, compassion and patience to be enormously effective.

In that practice, the concern for the lone individual is becoming trapped in the psychology of the immoral man, with their greed, lust and fear. Many churches have a “private club” of spiritually sophisticated individuals that work very hard to keep dirt out of their presence.

The problem throughout is that unless people are presented with the knowledge of Christian peace, they don’t know what they are missing. It’s really that peace that is important in the modern world, with the constant barrage of e-mails to read, decisions to make, people to see. It is only in that peace that the still, small voice of the Holy Spirit can be heard. Answers to many of life’s problems are easy to discover in that great gift to humanity: the Holy Spirit, repository of the knowledge of practical problem-solving through love.

I believe that it takes a community of caring to foster the experience of Christian peace. That’s not “peace” in the sense of “protection from trouble”, but the peace of Jesus on the cross: assailed by hatred from without, but above it all. In a Christian community, that strength and peace is shared among us in our time of greatest need. The connection to that peace becomes a reliable support for us as we navigate an unsympathetic world, and I have found it to be the thing that people find most remarkable about my Christianity.

So how do we share this experience with the world around us? By walking in it with our hearts open. Those that need peace most, when looking within us, cannot help but see Jesus there reaching out to them.

Any Road Will Do

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My sons’ mother is an Eastern European émigré. As she described her society prior to the fall of the Iron Curtain, the hypocrisy of communist ideology was a hidden injustice. It was not obvious as a child: the promises of the ideology are fairly concrete for children in state-paid schools and summer camp. The trouble began in college, when the theory of the ideology was transmitted. Successful students learned to regurgitate the rhetoric without being troubled with internal logic or consistency with state policy.

How, then, did the ideology serve to organize the state? Simply as a “semiotic system” used to evoke behavior. Dealing with oppositional or inconvenient people was a simple matter of threatening them with the right labels. Whether the labels were applied logically or even consistently was not a matter of great concern. In fact, everybody violated the ideology. What was critical was to avoid the ostracism or incarceration that came with the labelling.

Did Marx and Engels understand the rhetoric they invented? Almost certainly, but not as the communist leaders ultimately did. Remember that Marx laughed when asked whether Russia itself could lead the transition to communist society. He understood that the political sophistication of the Russian workers was insufficient to support communist practices. If brought back to analyze the political scene today, he would almost certainly identify Germany – the most profitable economy in the world – as the nearest to his ideals.

The inconsistency between Eastern European politics and ideology reflected, to a great degree, the impoverished practical context and political skills of the societies forced to try to implement the ideology. They had no way of visualizing the reality that Marx was trying to evoke, and so corrupted the rhetoric to serve purposes that made sense to them.

This is also evident in the rhetoric of the Christian fanatics. As a means of fueling my output here, I subscribe to a conservative Christian magazine. The editor recently sent out an e-blast linking Planned Parenthood to sex trafficking. The assertion was that traffickers brought girls in for abortions when they became pregnant, thus preserving their sexual availability. The stupidity of such a situation appeared to escape him: there are so many means of preventing conception, some of which are desirable in the sex trade to prevent the spread of STDs. Even if these are not used and pregnancy does result, bringing kidnapped girls into a center focused on reproductive health runs a terrible risk of exposure: the procedure requires a physical exam, which would be likely to reveal signs of abuse that, in the case of under-age girls, must be reported by law. And if the trafficker really cares so little about the health of their victims, legal abortions aren’t the only means of ending an unwanted pregnancy.

But the writer wasn’t concerned with logic or plausibility. The bald assertion at the beginning of his diatribe justified his rant: life begins at conception. I have previously refuted this statement, making it clear that only a mother knows the moment when a spirit enters her womb. But once made, the assertion justifies the labelling of Planned Parenthood for the purposes of its destruction. Because Planned Parenthood brings an essential social good – providing for the reproductive health of women – those that oppose it have been able to demand enormous resources from those that subscribe to their attempts to destroy it.

All this because, as in Eastern Europe, the process of bringing life into the world is not understood.

In the New Testament itself, we see the Apostles struggling with this gap between ideology and rhetoric. Sometimes this appears in the disjointed nature of the exposition. Consider this apparent non sequitor:

The student is not above the teacher, nor a servant above his master. It is enough for students to be like their teachers, and servants like their masters. If the head of the household has been called Beelzebul, now much more the members of his household!

Taken on the face, this appears to be a rather dour assessment of the human condition, suggesting the prospect of an irreversible decline into depravity begun with the expulsion from Eden. Collecting such statements out of context, the atheist builds a powerful case for rejecting Christian practice. That people such as the editor above align their theology with the axiom is a great assistance to the atheist.

Why does the statement appear so disjointed in the original telling? Because the Apostles did not know where they were heading. Matthew records the statement in the chronology of events, but it is only in the demonstrations reported in Acts that the statement makes sense:

  • First, Jesus was sending the Apostles out into the world to assume his role as a healer and teacher. They were frightened, and his statement is an admonishment that unless they liberate themselves from the mindset of the student and slave, they will never accomplish the work that love required of them.
  • Secondly, the statement is an indictment of the authority of human religious leaders. The require dependency in their followers. The Apostles were conditioned by their culture to believe that they needed teachers and masters to survive. Those relationships must be set aside if the followers were to grow into the strength Jesus was offering them.
  • Finally, Jesus was identifying a contrast with other gods from the relationship his parables declared that the Father sought: not a relationship of dependency, but a relationship that flowered, as in Jesus, to full equality when children became adults.

In this light, the statement becomes a source of deep wisdom. That wisdom is revealed only in the context of the purpose that Jesus pursued in the world.

So let’s reassert the quest documented by the Bible: it describes the process of guiding humanity into the embrace of unconditional love. The goal is to demonstrate the felicity and power of a surrender to love.

In that context, the fear used by the editor is revealed as an incredible perversion. And the logic of the atheist is refuted.

Why elaborate this truth? Because if we don’t know where we’re going as Christians, any road will do. Evangelism can succeed only when it supports the purposes that Christ established: to join our souls to the Father’s. When it does not, it becomes incomprehensible, subject to corruption from within, and risible from without.

Worship

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The ancient Romans insisted that the rites of the gods be honored, on pain of death. The concern was rooted in practical experience of the consequences of pissing them off. Why would failure to practice the rites make so much difference to the pantheon?

A clue is found in the Greek spiritual practice that has been revived as Hellenismos. The Greeks believed that the mystical progression began with simple human heroism. It continued after the hero’s death when grateful people gathered at shrines to celebrate his (or her) accomplishments. If the personality of the hero inspired further heroic achievements, justifiably the celebrations would increase. The accumulated psychic energy would eventually make the hero a daimon. Adherents might then invoke to power of the daimon in times of need. If the daimon responded effectively, the continued outpouring of gratitude might eventually elevate the personality to Olympian stature.

So worship is important to the gods because, as suggested in The Matrix trilogy, human beings are psychic batteries of a sort. Our attention is part of a political partnership.

As cultures evolved from local to regional to continental extent, this process became politicized. The Roman emperors spoke of becoming gods in their own right. King Louis XIII of France had himself crowned “The Sun King.” The Capital dome in Washington D.C. is decorated with a mural celebrating “The Apotheosis of Washington”. And the sanctification of Ronald Reagan is evidenced by the evolution of the exhibits at his Presidential Library. Given hundreds of millions of adherents, power similar to a Hercules might be accumulated within a decade or so, where before it might have taken generations.

Cynicism about the process is evident in certain religious controversies. Despite the similarities shared by Christian and Buddhist sages, some Christian theologians complain that the avatars of compassion and loving kindness celebrated in Tantra are actually “demons”. I have some challenged in attempting to reconcile that accusation with Christian celebration of saints and angels. The characteristics of the Tantric and Saintly personalities are almost identical.

Despite all of this commonality, I am going to assert that the worship Jesus offered to the Apostles is fundamentally different. I believe that our own selfish aspirations to saintliness blind us to this understanding: we have a vested interest in subscribing to practices that increase our personal power.

For Jesus did not command us to worship. He admonished us:

You shall love the Lord you God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the great and foremost commandment.

If worship is to prop something up to make is stronger, then loving is not worship, for the goal of love is to bring something closer. In a kind of virtuous circle, our loving calls to us the perfect love of God. We can attempt to corrupt this love, but in doing so only succeed in driving it away. It stands just aside from us, until we relent in our harshness, and allow it to come again into service to us.

Why is love so efficacious? Because it holds power in readiness for others. It does not spray out in gaudy shows, but preserves its energies until it finds spirits calling out in genuine need.

Amy Grant renders this so beautifully in Better than a Hallelujah:

We pour out our miseries
God just hears a melody
Beautiful, the mess we are
The honest cries of breaking hearts
Are better than a Hallelujah

The desire of Unconditional Love is not to be served, but rather to be of service.

What about the other gods? Well, in seeking after worship they are in fact seeking after love from their adherents. If that love is given conditionally, the deity is at risk of losing their elevated status. Of course, the only way to secure unconditional love is to love reciprocally, because if the deity loves conditionally, the adherent will eventually realize that they’re getting the raw end of the deal. So the most powerful gods, in their relationship with their adherents, are eventually suffused with love, and ultimately are subsumed by it.

This is the truth articulated by Paul in Colossians 1:17:

He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together.

And should we want it any other way?

Christian Healing

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One of the consequences of guilt is the resistance that it brings to the process of healing. When we internalize the wound of guilt, we create with our minds a bastion that cannot be reached by forgiveness.

The presumption that Humanity brought sin into the world in Eden is a universal guilt – a guilt that says Humanity is unworthy of the trust that the Divine has invested in us.

And so I must quibble with the Christian teaching that Jesus died on the cross for our sins. A sin is a sin because it leaves a wound in the soul. As Jesus loved us, so his goal must have been to heal us.

As creatures given choice, however, that is only possible if we open ourselves fully to the power of that healing. “Forgiveness of sins” is only a waypoint on that journey. It is a gift that says we do not have to be worthy of healing.

We have struggled with that lesson now for 2000 years. That guilt blocks us from healing justifies the half-truths of the Pharisees – past and present. Because guilt prevents Humanity from receiving healing, the only way to manage spiritual wounds is to make rules that prevent them from happening. Rules can only be enforced by punishment, and that eventually perverts the whole purpose of the exercise, as we wound the souls of those that do not have the strength to resist their selfish impulses.

This is the truth: he comes again when we give up control over others, and invest ourselves with the faith that the Divine power of Love can heal all. He comes for the healing.

Suffering Children

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A former football player held court after yoga yesterday morning, explaining his role as a private coach. He is a huge name, so strong in the arms that the instructor warned him against straining his leg muscles in the binding poses. “It’s not just the athletics: I try to be an advocate for the athletes.”

“I suppose that’s only for boys?” asked one of the mothers present.

“Well, I used to think that, but I am opening the program to girls. I realize that they need that advocacy, too. They need a strong father figure to help them believe in themselves.”

Down in Watts yesterday, surrounded by people that came barely to my solar plexus, those words echoed dissonantly in my mind.

I have sought opportunities to share the energies that I possess with the youth of my community. I gave a service at church one Sunday a couple of years ago, and the next week one of the children sought me out and sat on the floor next to me. His mother, a firm atheist, gave me an irritated look and dragged him back to his seat.

Or a more extreme example from seven years ago: I had taken my sons out on Easter to the mega-church down the freeway, pastored by a charismatic speaker. As I walked up the steps into the stadium seating, a young lady gave her heart to me. After the service, the boys enthused about the charismatic pastor, and urged me to fill out an information card. The next weekend, I was woken early on Saturday morning by two parents. The wife asked, “Excuse me, who is this?” before her husband demanded “We want to know where our daughter is.” He carried on until she broke in “He doesn’t know, dear.”

I still have my sons, but – whether they understand it as such or not – they have already learned to draw energy form the eternal source. They really don’t need me any more. So when I read in Unite 4 Good about the Red Eye program down in LA, I was open to the calling.

The prospect down on 114 Street was daunting. It is lined by split-level apartments, perhaps four hundred square feet on each floor, windows and doors heavily barred. A long block breaks the progress of the street about three blocks down from Compton. The program address was the recreation center. Across the street, a group of middle-schoolers were gathered around adults in azure t-shirts. The basketball court inside was occupied by high-schoolers and adults. I asked around about the Red Eye program, but those loitering at the entrance claimed no knowledge of it.

There was one other Caucasian present, a young woman hiding in the hallway. Next to her, a dark-skinned girl, almost her height, regarded me with reluctance. I struck up a conversation, discovering that we were all there for the same reason. When I asked for her name, the girl said “I don’t have one,” but then relented when I just shrugged and turned my attentions elsewhere, and offered “Dazzle.” We admired the antics of the four-year-old on his four-wheeled scooter (the kind that moves when the front wheel is turned).

Brenda, the young woman, identified the organizer Justin when he pulled up, and we all congregated in the gym. I asked about registration, and was pointed at Edna, who advised me that there was no agenda – our role was just to “pour loving” on the kids. I spent most of the next two hours on the basketball court, watching the older elementary-aged boys heave up shots from well outside their range, and trying to keep the bricks and outright air-balls from beaning the younger ones.

With some surprise, I did discover that my efforts in hot yoga were paying off: the bone spurs in my right elbow have subsided. I’m able to snap at the top of my release again. The first ten minutes on the floor were pretty embarrassing, though. My muscle balance is grossly different than when I last picked up a ball seven years ago, and my only form of exercise involves holding isometric poses. But things began to come back, and the boys were admiring, asking me, in order, whether I could dunk, how old I was, and how tall I was.

I was by far the oldest person on the floor. Most of the other volunteers were twenty-somethings.

The real connections began to develop as the adults and kids trickled out to the playground. I started giving advice to some of the kids regarding their shot mechanics. My focus was to get them to come in a little closer and get their muscles to work smoothly together. As the arc of their shots increased, the ball began to fall more softly on the rim, and bounce its way in instead of out. When I enthused “Look at that! That’s how it’s supposed to work!”, they opened up to me, one by one, and I’d feel this surge of energy move into them. They took it all in stride, just going back to their practice with extra enthusiasm.

Edna finally broke camp in the gym and brought everybody together up front for the walk to the store, along the refuse-lined sidewalk between the apartments. It was a local market, full of alcohol and snack foods. I was worried that I didn’t have any cash, but learned that Justin was covering the charge for snacks and drinks. A number of high-school boys and hookers joined the parade, but Justin didn’t mind. He even waved across the street to an older man in a wheel-chair, and sent his friend inside to get a drink for him.

As we stood in line, I noticed Dazzle braiding a friend’s corn rows into a pony-tail. She felt me looking at her, and glared back. I stepped closer and sympathized, “I know it’s hard to open our hearts, but we have to keep trying.” She got this vulnerable look on her face, and went back to her work.

I chugged down a bottle of 24-oz Gatorade, then squatted with my heels on the curb to meditate in support of the good will that was gathered. My little friend on the scooter stopped in front of me and shouted “You’re sleeping!” I opened my eyes to find him with a finger pointed accusingly at me.

“No. I’m meditating.”

“What are you meditating on?” Wow, this kid didn’t miss a beat.

“About good people.”

“Good people?” His tone suggested that it wasn’t a concept that he encountered very often.

“Yeah. Everybody here is a good person. I’m meditating to support that.”

Either satisfied or mystified, he walked off. I turned around to discover a three-year-old sucking the frosting out of his mini-bite cookies and tossing the crackers into the dirt. I advised: “Oh, you should eat the cracker, or we should throw them away. If we leave them there, animals will come, like rats.”

“I don’t want to talk to you.”

“I’m sorry, I can’t help it. It’s just the way the world is.”

He started chewing the cookie in his hand. His older sibling came by, mouth full of metal caps on his teeth. The little guy admitted, “My Mom has rats in her house.”

On the way back to the rec center, I saw their future on the sidewalk. A cluster of five thirty-year olds was gathered around a dice roll. The two contestants danced about with money in their fists, the roller throwing down or picking up bills after each toss. Energy bled from the scene and dissipated into the harsh light reflecting off the pale blue stucco.

Most of the volunteers and kids didn’t go back into the gym. I found a cluster of boys on the bleachers, and spent another fifteen minutes with them. Getting really hungry, I found Edna out front and said that I had to leave. She remarked that it looked like I had fun, and, not wanting to ask whether that was the point, I shared that it was good to pick up a basketball again, and talked about my bone spurs.

But as I drove away, I reflected that I had been allowed by the children to pour water into their thirsty spirits, and recognized what a blessing that had been to me.

Who Is in Charge Here?

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A common motif in corporate management is the analogy of competition as a sport. A certain visceral energy comes into a community of people when they stand over their fallen enemies.

One of the challenges employers have in managing me is that I recognize the fundamental nature of that experience: the energy comes from feasting on the spirits of our foes. It’s literally vampirism. It’s wrong, and I refuse to participate.

A survey of the lives of prominent business and political leaders reveals a trend – not universal, but powerful: many of them crave attention. They are needy. They are unable to bring energy from within, and so must consume that produced by others. This creates conditions in which the culture of our organizations is not controlled by the needs of its constituency (workers and customers), but by the personal needs of its psychologically neediest members.

This is not an abstract problem. It severely damaged America during the terms of Presidents 42 and 43: Clinton hungered for the attention of women, and his indiscretion led to wasteful impeachment proceedings. W hungered for a father, and his need to outdo Bush Sr. in the Gulf lead to rash decision-making that cost the nation trillions of dollars and tens of thousands of ruined lives.

Why does that happen? Why do we allow these men (in many cases, empower them) to run our lives?

This is, in fact, the central conundrum of the Bible, starting with Cain and ending with Christ. Some women think of Christianity as a “men’s club”, but I don’t see it as something to be proud of. The Bible focuses on men because our weakness is the greatest problem to success in the mission we have been given.

When John is invited into heaven (Revelation 4), he encounters twenty-four “elders” celebrating the presence of unconditional love in their midst. Twelve are identified as the patron angels of Israel; the other twelve are encountered in the tiara of the holy mother who comes to bring the savior to humanity. So in heaven, there is a balance between the masculine and feminine angels.

Why don’t we feel the presence of those angels? The intimacy of their involvement with the doings of Earth is described so beautifully by John [Rev. 4:9-10] (emphasis added):

And when the living creatures give glory and honor and thanks to Him who sits on the throne, to Him who lives forever and ever, the twenty-four elders will fall down before Him who sits on the throne, and will worship Him who lives forever and ever

In reading this, I have the image of a great welling up from all the living things of the Earth: the animals, plants, fungus, even the bacteria. This welling up travels up through the souls of the elders where it literally forces them to their knees in praise.

But after Eden, humanity was placed under quarantine. We are not allowed to participate in this upwelling, for as it says [Gen 3.24]:

He drove out the man, and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim and a flaming sword that turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life.

Being cut off in this way, our experience of life is dominated by the material world, and predominantly by the fear of death. When wielding fear to control others, men, whose natural participation with the creation of life is so distant, have less compunction than women. Too often, those that cherish life submit to the terrorism of aggressive men.

What Jesus demonstrated to us was the power that is available to us when we relinquish fear. It is to enter again into that upwelling, and with disciplined minds not only not to pollute it, but moreso to help to channel it. In so doing, we are embraced and sustained by it, just as Jesus was. It is this channeling, and not physical control, that was meant in Genesis 1:28:

God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”

In that divine relationship, the power of love sweeps all else before it. I once had an employer tell me that I was a “free spirit.” Not at all: I am constrained to avoid the use of fear, which in this world is to surrender power over people. But in surrendering that power, I have submitted to the purposes of a power that overwhelms all others, and so I cannot be turned by fear as others are turned.

Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the way is broad that leads to destruction, and there are many who enter through it. For the gate is small and the way is narrow that leads to life, and there are few who find it. [Matt. 7:13-14]

Dawn of the Dread

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At the Reagan Presidential Library, a plaque commemorating T. Boone Picken’s financing of the Air Force One hall also recounted his influence over Reagan’s financial policy. He had apparently explained to the President that “like Eastern Europe, money should be free.” One manifestation of that policy was the deregulation of the Savings and Loan industry. What had once been a sleepy industry used by the middle class to finance home purchases and college education became a cash cow for some of the nation’s most imaginative financial schemes.

The details of the ensuing Savings and Loan disaster invoked justifiable moral outrage. At the same time that the industry was liberalized, Reagan cut the regulators responsible for monitoring the industry. This meant that two banks in Colorado could trade an undeveloped property back and forth, increasing the purchase price each time, and treat the land as an asset to secure loans for ten times the final purchase price. When the banks went under, it was the government that was obligated for covering the depositor’s losses.

This pattern was paralleled in the history of the hedge fund industry and the mortgage arbitrage disasters of the 1990’s and 2000’s. Industry professionals lobbied extensively against regulation, citing the power of innovative methods to reduce overall financial risk. In both cases, the sense of security encouraged risk-taking at unprecedented levels, until major players in the market collapsed.

In all cases, it was the public that bailed out the industry, not just through tax receipts, but also through the release of trillions of dollars in low-interest or no-interest money to the financial industry through the Federal Reserve. This is money that the government must nominally pay interest on through the promissory note mechanism. Through that method, the nation’s money supply is issued by private money-center banks, and the government pays interest to the banks for the privilege. Is it any wonder that the financial industry accounted for 50% of corporate profits in the year immediately following the 2008 mortgage disaster?

The recent disasters reflect a more dangerous trend: the complexity and speed of modern market mechanisms make it almost impossible for either regulators or consumers to assess the nature and value of the services provided. The use of complexity to defraud consumers was most visible in the health insurance industry. The availability of health care outcome data allowed new players to enter the insurance market and target only those subscribers least likely to need health care. Obviously, these subscribers were those that in their prior plans funded the claims of patients needing extended services. As they were siphoned away, existing health plans went into the red, and premiums skyrocketed. A large number of chronically ill patients fell out of the pool of insured, and their conditions worsened. To ensure access to a doctor, they began to lie on their health insurance applications. Carrying an insurance card, they would then be admitted to a hospital, which by law could not discharge them until their condition was stable. The hospitals would find out after the provision of services that the patient was not covered, and would have to pass the unrecouped billings on to regular patients, which drove up their premiums. And on the insurer’s side, a whole army of bureaucrats was hired with the goal of finding cause to deny coverage. Thus the system was further burdened with administrative costs.

The net result was that, prior to the Health Care Affordability Act, health insurance was on its way to being a “pay-as-you-go” system with enormous administrative overhead. The rational choice for those that could finance their own care was to be uninsured.

The complexity of market mechanisms also played a large part in the Enron fraud in the California electrical supply market, which saw traders calling up friends at power plants to take generators off-line during brownouts to create leverage over state regulators. It also was a major factor in the Madoff financial fraud.

If the myth of efficiency and rationality in financial markets wasn’t bad enough, the pathological influence of the philosophy has extended to the provision of basic public services. When workloads at forensic laboratories exploded with the war on drugs, private contractors stepped in, claiming that they could adapt more rapidly to the increasing work load. What has become apparent as these laboratories entered the Physician Health Plan market is that they have accomplished higher throughput by cutting corners on procedures. The profit motive drives all other factors aside. As those profits grow, these providers have used their resources in the political arena to generate legislation that opens new markets for their services.

What is truly frightening in this last case is that the failure to adhere to scientifically defensible practices has made the public at large responsible for huge claims for wrongful incarceration. Prior to privatization, local law enforcement had some visibility and control of the forensic laboratories. Now they are completely beholden to them, and the possibility of class-action civil lawsuits brought for lost income and privileges during incarceration makes disciplining the contractors unpalatable.

So I see patterns emerging, and those patterns all point in the same direction: siphoning of resources from the public to those with control of the nation’s financial and social infrastructure.

What is the impact on the spiritual plane? I’ll offer an experience I had in the aftermath of 9/11. I was struggling with fear in an intimate, and decided to go spelunking one night to find out what was driving their anxiety. After plunging through their personal fears, I found myself on a wavelength of fear that had as a fog enveloped the entire nation. Curious, I put my psychic mitts under it and lifted it up to look around. When I let go, it fell back down to earth.

What is the solution? As an act of will, stop being afraid. Love those that are close to you. Recognize that the financial elites, as always, are divorcing themselves from the reality that sustains them, and will fall when we organize ourselves around relationships that create value, rather than relationships that promise us security.

And seriously consider whether God isn’t a key asset of that discipline.

Who is to Blame?

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When I began listening to praise music five years ago, my most powerful reactions were to two types of songs: those that express gratitude for the cross, and those that describe the patient suffering of a parent confronted with the loss of a child.

There is no experience in life that more powerfully contradicts the premise of a loving God than to watch an innocent child succumb to cancer. The experience of the Amish families that lost five daughters to a gunman in 2006 is far more shocking, but the faithful can rationalize it as the work of an external evil working through fallen humanity. The silent killer that consumes from within is a horrifically intimate violation.

The pain of that struggle is captured powerfully by Mark Schultz in “He’s My Son”. It takes real strength to face this loss without anger.

So why does it happen? Why does God allow this, and so many other bad things, to happen to good people?

The depth of our outrage is sharpened in the West, where so many religious traditions teach us that we have only one life to get it right. I’ve touched on this before in On Dying. When the nature of the soul is revealed, it will be obvious that reincarnation occurs, and that – as our Eastern siblings have been telling us for so long – we have many chances to free ourselves to spend an eternity in the divine embrace.

But even so, why should good people have to suffer?

It might help to back away and look at a case that is not so terrible. I have a friend, a great strong man, that cross-dresses. He has married and had children, but is overcome with the need to wear women’s clothing. He shared with me one particular experience: he served in the navy on an aircraft carrier. They were at port, and on this occasion all men had been called to their quarters in preparation to return to sea. My friend grabbed a dress, changed, and went out on the flight deck. When he was spotted, an all hands was issued. Changing back into his uniform, he participated in an exhaustive search of the vessel for a female stow-away.

When I heard this story, I had an apprehension of a father holding his daughter while their ocean liner sank. He had promised to keep her safe, and had failed her. She was afraid to go out into the world again, and so was journeying with him in this life to overcome her fear. That was, in part, why he had joined the Navy.

When I listen to Mark’s song, I have similar visions. In the child is a spirit that has never received love, and suffered terribly in a past life as an adult. They need some strength to face that journey again, some reason to hope. So they come into the world to have some time with parents that love them. They push all their pain into the disease that consumes them, and leave it behind when they die, filled with the love that their parents have poured into them.

Yes, it is a heart-breaking work for parents to perform, but so beautiful and full of purpose.

The story of the Amish children has a similar sense to it. The girls were trapped in the schoolroom with a deeply disturbed man. When he determined to kill them, the eldest girl stepped forward to say (I paraphrase) “I am oldest. Leave these others alone and kill me.” In that moment, she conquered his evil. And during the preparation of the bodies for burial, the elder watched the women at work and counseled “We must not think evil of this man.” In fact, the community gathered resources to sustain his family.

In The Soul Comes First, I interpret the Bible from the perspective that good people are medicine used by God to heal the wound of selfishness. What these experiences have given me to believe is this: bad things happen to good people because their light is needed in the darkness. While Jesus confronted the greatest darkness – the evil of systems of justice that destroy the people that come to bring healing to the world – all good people carry that cross to a greater or lesser degree. We bring light, and the world that suffers in darkness attempts to steal it from us.

So, please, if you can: when confronted with evil, or pain, don’t collapse into resentment against God. Just open your heart wider, and let his love brush back the pain of the world around you. Maybe you won’t change the people that prey upon you, or heal the diseases of those that you love. But you will give hope to others that suffer as you do, and leave them with the strength to do better next time.