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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.

Why God Comes First

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To the skeptic, holding out the hope that prayer will bring divine guidance is to become a “meat puppet.” This is unfair for a lot of reasons, not least of which is that smart predators make life a lot more complicated for us that it should be. Sometimes we just run out of thoughts at the end of the day, and it’s nice to have other sources of insight to fall back on.

In trying to find a balance here, the pronouncements made by Jesus on the road to Jerusalem can be troubling. They include Luke 9:60 and 62:

Let the dead bury their own dead, but you go and proclaim the kingdom of God.

No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God.

but most distressingly is Matthew 10:37:

Anyone who loves their father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; anyone who loves their son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Whoever does not take up their cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Whoever finds their life will lose it, and whoever loses their life for my sake will find it.

Does this God sound a little needy to you?

We can certainly interpret those quotes from that point of view, but think of it from the other direction. Let’s say that it was your father demanding that he come before your relationship with Christ, the one that tenders to you a perfect, healing love. Would a father that loved you deny you that gift?

And if your father already possessed that gift, would he not want to purify and refine it so that he could share it to its fullest with you? In fact, would he not believe that it was in fact his walk in the presence of that perfect love that empowered him to love you? When you walk into that space of love the he has called to him, all the hurts and pains of the past fall away, and he sees you exactly as you are, and offers you only those things that will make you stronger.

In “My Father’s Eyes”, Eric Clapton shares this experience of nurturing a child:

Where do I find the words to say?
How do I teach him?
What do we play?
Bit by bit, I’ve realized
That’s when I need them,
That’s when I need my father’s eyes.

From this point of view, the reason that Jesus asks us to put him first is because when we do that we become better able to bring his love to others, and that also makes us better at loving them. As with the servants in the parable of the talents, this is what makes us worthy of Jesus: not to hoard his love, but to give it to those around us that need it most with the faith that they will return it to us in our time of need.

So what this leads us to is this: when we fail to put love (which is Christ) first in our relationships, we not only become unworthy of Christ, but we become unworthy of those that we claim to love. In fact, we are lying to them when we say “I love you.”

Why Do We Pray?

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While I declare as a Christian, since renouncing my atheism I’ve only prayed twice. Once was for my children, who lived through a time of great fear in their lives. The other was for the woman I was in love with, asking that she be prepared to receive all the beauty that life held for her.

It’s odd, then, that I often feel guidance coming to me.

I didn’t understand what was going on until I came across Talking to God: Portrait of a World at Prayer. This beautiful coffee-table volume includes reflections on prayer by the faithful of many religions. The essays are collected in three sections on supplication, praise and meditation.

The most common phrase in the Bible is a variant on “fear not.” Supplication is the act of reaching out to the divine power for strength to do good in a world that too often exploits our weakness. The elements, disease, and predation (human or animal) all cause us to expect death, and so the loss of the joy that we have discovered in living. This causes us to call out to the divine presence to direct a portion of its power to protect us. When death is not imminent, the habit of prayer may lead us to ask for intercession in other matters.

Even when no direct response is provided, the psychological benefit of supplication is in allowing us to name our fear. As the Buddhists teach us, this brings the power of reason to work, which helps to quell our dark emotions. Having named our fear, we may be able to speak of it to others, and thus to rally others to our aid.

It is when we move beyond emotion to reason that we enter into prayerful praise. This is a celebration of the virtues that enable us to overcome adversity. Among these are patience, courage, compassion (in ourselves and others) and discipline. While praise of the virtues has always been recommended, I believe that there is a physical aspect to the process that has not been fully appreciated. It is suggested by this quote by Jakob Boehme, the German mystic:

If you ask why the Spirit of Love cannot be displeased, cannot be disappointed, cannot complain, accuse, resent or murmur, it is because the Spirit of Love desires nothing but itself, it is its own Good, for Love is God, and he that dwelleth in God dwelleth in Love.

Thoughts are physical things. When we ponder an idea, we reach out with our mind into a “space of ideas” to establish a connection. Think of it like a telephone line: where at first we have to work laboriously to connect to the strength of a virtue, when we praise it, we build a direct line to it, and can reach it almost immediately.

The amazing thing about this stage of prayer is in discovering the incredible power of the virtues. Why are the virtues so powerful? Well, the reason that predators use fear to control us is because it’s easy. Those people, such as Buddha and Jesus of Nazareth, that struggle and eventually overcome fear have to be stronger in their spirits than the predators that seek to destroy them. Eventually, that strength becomes so great that the are able to actually banish the precursors of fear from the minds of those that seek to harm them. They succeed in this because the predators, in taking the easy road, never develop their spiritual muscles. Furthermore, predators wallow in a set of ideas that really don’t care about them. At the first sign of spiritual weakness, the vices turn on their favorites and consume them. Thus when Jesus went to the cross and forgave his tormentors, their vices could not enter into him, and so turned back against their source.

When we pray in praise, we tap directly into the strength of the virtues built in the space of ideas by our great religious avatars. As we see this taking hold in our lives, our praise becomes more and more fervent. Because we seek joy in our lives, we walk about sharing our strength with those we care for, protecting them from fear as well. This is the stage of meditation.

In meditation, we enter into experience without expectation or judgment. We seek, not knowledge, but the sensation of our bodies, hearts and minds. In allowing those sensations to enter into us, we close the gap between the experience and the virtues that surround us. When there is pain or dissonance, we allow the virtues to enter into the experience to create healing and harmony.

The first time I realized that I was meditating (almost constantly) was in Cub Scout monthly meetings. The Scout Master was a shy about public speaking, and I would get this strong sense of fear from him when he stood up to present. I would just close my eyes and send him my confidence and admiration. His voice would steady.

For those that aren’t in the habit of praying, this can be a frightening experience. It’s like an invasion of their selves. I’ve had some really hostile reactions. Many aggressive men assume, for example, that I’m gay. They aren’t habituated to receive affirmation in any other way than through sex. The rest of their lives are organized around conflict.

In organizations, the response is more complicated. When we start to heal anger and fear, the participants become aware of their psychological dependencies. As victims become aware of how their trust is being manipulated, they may react to the healer as the source of paranoia, or even worse as the cause of the breakdown of trust in their relationships with predatory leaders. Such leaders often present themselves as noble interlocutors in the conflict that they engender among their followers, and when that strategy is revealed, the followers often rally to those that prey upon them, blaming the healer for the insights they bring!

As Boehme testified, the healer succeeds eventually when (s)he seeks nothing except the opportunity to allow the virtues to enter more deeply into the workings of the organization. Others finally realize that they feel far better in the presence of the healer than otherwise, and begin to work effectively against the true source of their problems.

So what I’ve come to understand is this: we pray to bring the divine presence into the world. Whether we are asking for help or mediating in its delivery, the end result is the same. The only way that God comes into this broken world is through prayer, and in its ultimate expression, that occurs through those that surrender themselves joyously to love of everyone willing to receive it.

The Imitation Game

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I’ve been known to get emotional at the movies, but it’s been since Alien that I’ve been as broken down emotionally as I was today by The Imitation Game.

Alan Turing not only made fundamental contributions to the mathematical foundations of modern computing, he also formulated an inspirational goal for machine intelligence. Known as the Turing Test, it proposes that if a human communicating through a neutral interface (such as a teletype) can’t distinguish the responses of a human from those of a machine, then the intelligence of the machine must be considered to be comparable to a human’s.

My father, Karl Balke, was one of the men that plowed the field cleared by Turing and others. As he described the think-tank at Los Alamos, the researchers brought every intellectual discipline to bear on the problem of transforming logic gates (capable only of representing “on” and “off” with their output) into systems that could perform complex computations. Their research was not limited to machine design. Languages had to be developed that would allow human goals to be expressed as programs that the machines could execute.

In the early stages of language development, competing proposals shifted the burden of intelligibility between human and machine. The programming languages that we have today reflect the conclusion of that research: most computer programs are simply algorithms for transforming data. The machine has absolutely no comprehension of the purpose of the program, and so cannot adapt the program when changes in social or economic conditions undermine the assumptions that held at the time of its writing. It is left to the “maintenance” programmer to accomplish that adaptation. (Today, most in the field recognize that maintenance is far more difficult than writing the original program, mostly because very few organizations document the original assumptions.)

I believe that my father’s intellectual struggle left him deeply sensitive to the human implications of computing. As I child, I grew up listening to case studies of business operations that came to a grinding halt because the forms generated by the computers were re-organized to suit the capabilities of relatively primitive print drivers, rather than maintaining the layout familiar to the employees. People just couldn’t find the information that they needed. Worse were the stories of the destruction of sophisticated planning systems implemented by human methods. When automation was mandated, the manual procedures were simply too difficult to describe using the programming languages of the day. The only path to automation was to discard the manual methods, which could cripple production.

Turing confronted this contradiction in the ultimate degree after building a machine to break the Nazi’s method for secret communications, known as “Enigma.” If the achievement was to have sustained utility, the Allies’ knowledge of Axis military planning had to be limited: otherwise the Nazis would realize that Enigma had been defeated, and develop a better encryption method. As a consequence, most Allied warriors and civilians facing Nazi assault did so without benefit of the intelligence known to Turing and his team.

While the point is not made obvious, the movie illuminates the personal history that conditioned Turing for his accomplishments. Isolated psychologically from his peers – both by the social stigma of his homosexuality and by what today might be diagnosed as autism or Asperger’s syndrome – Turing was confronted from an early age by the question of what it meant to be human. Was it only the degree of his intelligence that distinguished him from his peers? Or was his intelligence tied to deviant – if not monstrous – behavior? My belief is that these questions were critical motivations for Turing’s drive to understand and simulate intelligence.

That parallels the experience of my father, burdened by his own psychological demons, but also critically concerned that artificial intelligence answer to the authentic needs of the people it empowered. That belief led him to devote most of his life to creation of a universal graphical notation for representation of the operation of systems of:

  • arbitrary collections of people and machines,
  • following programs written in diverse languages.

That technology, now known as Diagrammatic Programming, was recognized by some as the only provably sufficient method for systems analysis. Unfortunately, by the time it was refined through application, the economics of the software industry had shifted to entertainment and the world-wide web. Engineering was often an after-thought: what was important was to get an application to the market, structured so that it held users captive to future improvements. Raw energy and the volume of code generated became the industry’s management metrics.

The personality traits that allowed Turing to build his thinking machines ultimately cost him the opportunity to explore their application. He was exposed as a “deviant” and drummed out of academia. Accepting a course of chemical castration that would allow him to continue his work privately, he committed suicide after a year, perhaps because he discovered that the side-effects made work impossible.

My father was afflicted by childhood polio, and has been isolated for years from his peer group by degenerative neuropathy in his legs.

While my empathy for both of these brilliant men was a trigger for the sadness that overwhelmed me as the final credits rolled, the stories touch a deeper chord. Both were denied the just fruits of their labor by preconceived notions of what it means to be human: Turing because he thought and behaved differently, my father because he attempted the difficult task of breaking down the tribal barriers defined by the languages that separate us.

So what lesson am I to draw from that, as I struggle to prove the truth of the power that comes from a surrender to the purposes of divine love? Is social rejection inevitable when we surrender what others consider to be “humanity”?

Is that not what condemned Jesus of Nazareth? His renunciation of violence and self-seeking? His refusal to fear death?

Distributing the Treasure

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In the parable of the fields, Jesus says of his kingdom that:

The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure hidden in the field, which a man found and hid again; and from joy over it he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.

Then in the parable of the talents, Jesus addresses the Apostles and says of the servant that hid the money he had been given to invest:

‘You wicked, lazy slave…take away the talent from him’…For to everyone who has, more shall be given, and he will have an abundance; but from the one who does not have, even what he does have shall be taken away

The two parables illuminate the challenge of bringing divine power into the world. The unsuspecting finder of faith has no idea what to do with it. Looking at the history of the Hebrews, it is obvious how fragile faith is. From Aaron to the Pharisees, from Saul to Herod: the leaders of the nation of Israel corrupted faith for political and economic purposes. Aaron acted in good faith because the people were afraid when Moses disappeared on the mountain, but in the time of Jesus the Pharisees twisted the fear of divine retribution to line their pockets. Saul, having been anointed king by Samuel, was angered when others threatened his authority. In Herod’s time, that pattern had become so entrenched that oppression of dissent was not even remarkable. Given this, perhaps it would have been best to keep the treasure hidden.

But the Apostles were students of a master who prepared them to exercise faith in service to the oppressed. They had seen what faith could do. All that they required to see it multiply was simple courage. For those demonstrating courage, the master would not judge between those with greater or lesser skill in the exercise of power, but reward them all. For those lacking courage, the portion of power that was given them would be given to others.

The tension between the two parables should be heeded by us today as we ponder how to go about distributing the riches that Christ has provided us to do good in the world. As people of compassion, our natural tendency is to respond to fear and righteous anger with promises of aid. The obvious first step is to eliminate the cause of the fear and/or anger. When that cause is hunger, it would be hard to fault an offer of food. But when the cause is political tyranny, forceful intervention (as currently in Russia) can be propagandized to justify further oppression. The Russian people have offered adulation in response to Putin’s aggressive militarism.

So we have to ask, when offering aid, “What are you going to do with the power we offer you?” When the hungry man is fed, will he then seek employment? If an oppressed people is offered political assistance, how will they organize to overcome the tyrant? If these question can’t be answered, then their troubles are merely symptomatic of a large social disease that must be addressed before individual problems can be solved. They may need education, or political enfranchisement – or assistance in finding a leader that can articulate their needs.

I think that many of the world’s problems today require the last: for those offering Christian compassion to go beyond simple charity to supporting the development of leaders motivated by Christian ethics. In assessing candidates, I favor strongly the wisdom of Lord Baden-Powell, founder of the Boy Scouts. In developing leaders, the program upholds this law:

A scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent.

These qualities are an interlocking web of virtue that ensure that power is not diverted for personal gain, but rather directed towards those that first inspired our compassion. They are not qualities that necessarily translate to the easy currency of popularity. That is gained all too often through promises of an end to fear and oppression that cannot be made good until the people themselves begin to manifest the qualities of true leadership. As it is said in the Chinese I Ching:

Of the great leader, when the work is done the people say ‘We did this ourselves.’

God took 2000 years to work his will on the people of Israel. For those continuing that work in the world today, patience (although perhaps on a more human scale) is essential. As in Jesus’s relationship with the Apostles: It is not upon us to do the work ourselves, but only to offer the oppressed the hope that it can be done at all. Hope is the seed of courage, Christian compassion is the seed of faith. When courage and faith combine, anything is possible.

Call Me Crazy

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In The Soul Comes First, I suggest that the only way to make sense of the Bible is to think of this reality as a place of healing for wounded souls. That was something that we were originally meant to do as innocents in Eden. Given our tendency to wonder “Why?” (which is really what got Eve into trouble), it was perhaps unavoidable that we would wander from that role, and end up serving that purpose only after graduating from the school of hard knocks.

In science, the discipline that most directly deals with these issues is psychiatry. From Wikipedia, we have the definition “Psychiatry is the medical specialty devoted to the study, diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of mental disorders.” It has two sub-disciplines: psychiatric medicine and psychotherapy.

I am not going to survey the complex social issues of modern psychiatric practice. Our friend at Taking the Mask Off surveys many of the disconnects between drug-based therapy under DSM guidelines and actual human needs. What I can offer, however, is an attempt to trace the source of the disconnect.

The root is in the mechanistic model of the mind. This is the idea that our minds – the seat of our intelligence and consciousness – can be explained fully through study of the brain. This is based upon the success of neurophysiologists in explaining the behavior of simple organisms (such as worms), and the correlation between damage to human brains and loss of function.

In On Intelligence, Jeff Hawkins of the Redwood Neuroscience Institute explored the challenges of explaining adaptive behavior using the mechanistic model of the brain. The Institute has put together some simple paper-doll cutting illustrations of these methods. However, my assessment was that the scaling was simply not going to work. When Jeff came to speak at my place of employment in 2005, I offered to him “Maybe the brain is a time-travel device, and you’re focusing on how it works looking into the past.” That thesis is the only way I have of explaining my personal experiences of precognition.

As for the correlation between brain damage and loss of function: correlation does not imply causation. If our creative intelligence and consciousness resides in a soul, and the brain is the interface to that soul, then damage to the brain will result in loss of function because the exchange of information with the soul is cut off.

The “fuzzy” side of psychiatry was recognized by many of its original practitioners (including Jung), and we can still find recent testimony on the matter. A great example is A General Theory of Love, by Lewis, et al. In that work, the therapeutic process is summarized as follows: the therapist walks the patient up to the moment of their trauma, and suggests “No, go this way instead.” As they testify, the two most important factors in therapeutic success are the moral clarity and courage of the therapist. If either fail, then the therapist becomes trapped in the patient’s trauma.

The connection to the problems described in The Soul Comes First can be found in F. Scott Peck’s Glimpses of the Devil and Father Amorth’s An Exorcist Tells His Tale.

Peck was a world-renowned theorist of applied morality and a practicing therapist. He was conned by a priest into accepting two patients with severe psychological disorders. As the relationship developed, Peck was driven inescapably to the conclusion that the disorders were caused by possession. The final course of treatment, in both cases, was exorcism.

Father Amorth was a Catholic exorcist who was alarmed that the Church has accepted the psychiatric models of personality disorders, and has therefore left its flock unprepared to manage spiritual infestation. He documents a lifetime of experiences that defy explanation using modern theories of physics.

Psychiatric medication is the alternative for those seeking to avoid such confrontations. It isolates and shuts down the neural pathways that are triggered by defective souls (whether damaged or infested) to generate antisocial and self-destructive behaviors. The problem is that it doesn’t address the root cause: the defective souls survive, and simply go about seeking strength to exercise their will through other pathways.

In my own experience, I have found that faith in Divine Love allows me to navigate waters that terrify professionals. I find that most destructive personalities are simply doing what was done to them in the hope of discovering someone who can show them how to survive their experience. What I share with them is my experience in opening my heart to the source of my pain until they are bathed in the divine source.

In my New Year’s message, I said that we find compassion, creativity and courage when we share the divine presence with each other. I believe that this addresses the limitations described by Lewis: the practitioner is not responsible for overcoming the evil experienced by the patient, but only for making the power of healing available to them. Both Amorth’s and Peck’s experience substantiate this truth.

Islam and Christ

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The Christian Bible is the story of how one people succumbed to corruption, thereby surrendering a privileged relationship with God, and then wandered in a spiritual wilderness until Jesus demonstrated the discipline to surrender himself in caring for the world. In navigating this process, God relies throughout on the law of natural consequences: when the people heed the inner voice that guides them, they prosper; when they disown it, they suffer. For this reason, while history trends steadily upwards, it has its high and low points.

What is true throughout is that God meets us where we are. That’s a source of a lot of confusion when interpreting scripture. For example, in Matthew 5:18, we have:

For truly I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest letter or stroke shall pass from the Law until all is accomplished.

And then Jesus undermines its authority (Matt. 19:8):

Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because your hearts were hard.

And in John 8:7, he says:

Let he who has not sinned cast the first stone.

So Jesus is saying to teach the law, but set it aside when it suits us? As a child “Do as I say, not as I do” drove me crazy. Or is this “Say as I say, but do as I do?” In either case, hypocrisy seems right around the corner.

The difficulty can be resolved with the understanding that different people are on different stages of the journey. The Law is a code of conduct that seeks to prevent the spread of moral corruption. For people without the tools to heal corruption, that discipline is essential.

Jesus introduced his Apostles to a new stage of the journey, making them healers of the flesh and spirit. As reagrds the Law, his is final teaching to them was [Math: 22:37-40]:

Love your God…and love your neighbor…All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.

However, this was not the entire Jewish people – it was only twelve of them. Was the law to be demoted for everyone, or only for those twelve and the others like them? I think only for the twelve and those like them. This does create some difficulty for those teaching Christianity that don’t claim to be able to do the things that the Apostles accomplished in Acts. Where are they on the scale, and how are they to lead their congregations into apostolic faith?

The solution, in the modern age, is that Christians chose the congregation that helps them take their next step on their journey to Christ.

Along the way, though, a stop was made in the Middle East. The Islam teachings of Muhammad (pbuh) came at the people of Mecca out of left field. There was no cultural tradition of Law. The community was at the level of Abraham in their relationship with God.

The Islamic path is therefore “The Middle Way” between the strict legalism of Judaism and the conditional morality of Christianity. It has rules – though far less pervasively than in the Law – that allow people to establish themselves in religious practice. While eliding Hebrew history, it upholds the character of the prophets as exemplars to inspire Muslims to maturity. Finally, it disintermediates the priesthood, upholding a personal relationship with Allah with promises of forgiveness and ultimately salvation.

The principle problem with this program is the divinity of Jesus. If he was the word made flesh, then the overwhelmingly difficult conditional morality of Christ stood as a barrier to Muslim practice. It meant that those that worshipped according to the rules would be second-class citizens in the faith. That the teachings of Jesus were received second-hand would be no obstacle to those interested in manipulating such divisions: there is enough in the Gospels to prey on the fear of those unprepared by experience and education to understand Christian moral philosophy.

To prevent this exclusion from the faith of those that needed it most, Jesus was demoted, being made only a prophet. This was extended to his crucifixion.

Should this make a difference?

The point of faith, as I see it, is to provide us with the strength to do good in the world. Most Christians find great strength in the sacrifice made by Jesus. But there are also those that flee Christianity because Christians cannot act according to that standard. If Muslims find hope that they can do good without failing the standard set by the Son of God, is that a bad thing? Particularly if their tradition holds out the hope that they will ultimately aspire to that standard?

I think not. I think that God meets us where we are, and that all that matters is the degree to which our faith encourages us to open our hearts to him.

Beautiful Christmas Homage

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I picked up WoW’s Christmas collection a few years back, and found the first CD uninspiring. I finally loaded the second into my car CD player, and was completely ravished by Audrey Assad’s cover of Chris Tomlin’s Winter Snow. It captures so wonderfully the painful hesitancy of a love that wishes to sweep us all up, but dare not because to do so would be to overwhelm us.

So it must watch and wait, and come so very, very gently when we call it into our lives – often only when we’ve gotten to the point of crying out desperately for healing.