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Me, Myself and Christ: Revelation

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My son Greg can become exasperated with me. As a young adult, he is concerned naturally with social acceptance, and seeks for answers to the problems of his generation in the conventional wisdom brought forth from the past. When he has had enough of my contrary pronouncements, he retorts:

You speak with a great deal of assurance, Dad!

Yes, who am I, to assert that I know better than all these others?

For me, the situation is far more ambiguous. My assurance is necessary to those that I attempt to comfort. To those seeking hope, how else can one speak? They need to believe that you believe in the choices that you are offering them.

But to believe that you represent the truth is far different than believing in one’s own authority.

To those familiar with the Yu Gi Oh cartoon series, I can offer a meaningful image. In the cartoon, the young hero finds himself in conflict with evil, and struggles to the limit of his abilities to overcome it. In the lurch, a larger self – ancient, powerful and wise beyond any human reckoning – comes to the fore.

Thus, to my intimates, I speak of myself variously as a “test particle” or “bait” or “a point of contact” or “a beneficiary of a privileged perspective.” So I’ll be dreaming about a troubled baptist, and suddenly I’ll see the scene as though looking over my shoulder and another presence asks “Is that you, John?” I’ll be driving to the aquatic center and have a cardinal from 400 miles away land on me with shame and grief regarding the priestly pedophilia scandal. I’ll wake up at midnight to a pope announcing “I am your father, and I am going to die and leave all this power to you.” I’ll be listening to the opening lyrics of He Reigns, allowing my mind to wander over the continents, and a Muslim leader shows up to say “Here’s another billion people for you to manage.”

To those that don’t understand the challenges of loving, this might seem all very exciting. Having carried the heavy burden of being blamed for things done in my name, to me it’s far more ambiguous.

There are two great challenges to loving, which is to grant strength to the loved one. The first is when the recipient does not adhere to the constraints of loving. Loving them is thus to empower them to hurt others. In consequence, unconditional love moves through our lives like the tide, peaking higher when we honor its constraints, and ebbing when we violate them. The mechanism of this operation is for love to love all things so that it feels the wrongs we commit, and transfers its ministry to those we have wounded. In seeking to serve ourselves, we are indeed our own worst enemies.

The second challenge is far more painful. It is to find the beloved surrendering themselves to us, becoming merely extensions of our personality rather than beautiful manifestations of infinite possibility. A loving personality is surrounded by grateful recipients of love’s strength, and that gratitude amplifies their influence. Unless such a lover is tender, it can overwhelm the weaker links that bind together the beloved, scattering its elements to the spiritual wind.

It is for these reasons that Jesus proclaimed himself as a servant, and testified as to his humble heart.

As if this wasn’t difficult enough, this little pseudo pod of Christ is wrapped up in hostility. The important work to be done is in “binding” and “loosening” things in the spiritual realm, and my interactions with them are at best tenuous. Thus I dream of the great flocks of birds I knew in my childhood, and finding, upon walking out to the deck, that a ravenous dragon is arising from the spot in the ground from which the birds arise. At an Easter service, I cupped my hands around the sun and spread its influence, only to encounter in the asteroids an echo of the ancient cry of grief “No! Don’t kill him!” I receive a visit by an emissary of the two-dimensional race represented as the eye in the pyramid, asking for assistance to travel across the Milky Way, and am warned six months later that the gift of energy caused the output of the sun to drop by ten percent. Or wake, much as I was waken by the pope, to find myself in the midst of a perfectly spherical personality, only to be guided across a great void to a tiny speck, the “most precious place” in its realm, the “only place where life is found”, and to be told “I want to help, but even the smallest mistake would be disastrous. I need people to guide me.”

When I was introduced to the modern interpretations of Revelation, I was told that the first beast, numbered 666, was man. Man, the creation of the sixth day, believing in his own power and being humbled by failure. But not only man was created on the sixth day: in the morning came the livestock. So the correct category is mammalia. This is also the fourth, greatest beast of Daniel’s dream. It is the intelligence of man in service to the destructive Darwinian instincts of our evolutionary predecessors.

The enemy of the beast is the man with the flashing sword of truth coming from his mouth. The birds are his allies. In Daniel’s dream, he is granted dominion over the power of the “Ancient of Days.”

As when he first came, I recognize that Christ – the human perfected by unconditional love – can only become those things that he is allowed to be by those he serves. While he proclaimed his authority in the earlier era, in this era it will be to each of us to proclaim the authority of love in our lives – and thus to receive him as lord in our hearts. He is not our ruler, he is our example. And he is very, very, very close.

Take comfort. Take heart. None are forgotten, even those held captive by those that take refuge in the darkness. There is no hiding from the glory of the light that he brings.

Me, Myself and Christ: Immersion

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I had not set foot in church in almost twenty years when I began looking for a community to provide a moral foundation for my sons. I was pointed at the local Unitarian Universalist congregation, and found myself caught up almost immediately in their vision to establish commonality among all the world’s religions.

I was among them for only a few short weeks when disaster befell us on 9/11/2001. The minister was visibly shaken during her sermon that week, and one critic bemoaned the poor judgment she had shown in reaching out to an Islamic Center in the San Fernando Valley.

These two factors – the hope of uniting people of good will and the terrible cost of failing to do so – prompted me to start visiting the religious communities of the Conejo Valley.

The Catholic Church was not the first Christian congregation that I visited during this exploration. In fact, the evolving pedophilia scandal dampened my expectations that I would obtain any value in cultivating the priesthood. However, recognizing the strength of the Catholic community, I eventually concluded that I needed to experience the faith of the people in the pews.

The site was St. Maximilian Kolbe’s in Oak Park. The church has an unusual layout. The side entries funnel into an alcove before a pool of holy water. The crowd around the pool distracted me. I was feeling some anxiety, recalling my childhood impressions of the angry God. I turned toward the altar, and was astonished by the cross, set off to one side and dominating the space with a larger-than-life figure of Jesus suspended in front of crossed branches. Rather than anger, a deep enduring grief and sorrow beset me. Confronted with this image and personality of human suffering, my right hand went immediately to my heart, and without thinking, I held it out to him and thought “Use this for healing.”

Thus began a relationship that is so palpable and near to me that I never partake of the elements. That was meant for remembrance, and I am absolutely convicted that the time for remembrance is past.

There are several contexts in which that nearness manifests most powerfully. Early on, the passing of the elements itself would cause me to be overcome by sorrow. Tears would roll uncontrollably down my cheeks, and eventually I realized that the sobbing I heard around me was not unrelated to my emotion – a realization confirmed in part by the irritation expressed by celebrants. When Revelation Song was popular in non-denominational congregations, with the opening words I would almost collapse in grief, my entire frame shaking, and the people around me would huddle together in small groups.

I also experienced a particularly deep relationship with the crucifix at the Los Angeles Cathedral. Flanked by roughly shaped limbs and supported by the bruised torso, the peace-filled face embodies perfectly the savior’s surrender and victory. After my first Christmas midnight celebration, I waited patiently to address the cross, looked up into that visage, and – gesturing to the broken body – admonished “It’s time to clean all this up.” Later, I would stretch up onto tip-toes, pressing my hands against the sternum, trying to push strength back through the centuries to sustain him in his suffering.

And then there are the children’s choirs. They sing with perfect and innocent faith, free of the regrets felt by adults. At St. Paschal Baylon’s in Thousand Oaks, when they led the congregation in the Agnes Dei I felt the weight of heaven pressing down on me from above, an experience that persisted in other settings until I decided to push back.

Along with these emotional experiences came visions that I find very difficult to avoid reconciling against the verses of Revelation. I will summarize some of those in the final post in this series. I will conclude today with the culmination of my immersion in Christ.

When my father was working in the nuclear weapons laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico, he and my mother liked to spend time in the mountains that in the last half of the twentieth century came to be known as “Sangre de Christo.” I was conceived there, and born in Los Alamos. For my forty-ninth birthday, I decided to take a trip out to Taos to connect with those roots. It was a remarkable experience in many ways, but the most important insight came as I drove down into the LA basin from the high desert. A palpable feeling of hostility mounted against me. I wasn’t wanted.

The next day, Monday, I was driving out to work from Agoura Hills to Camarillo, and could not shake his presence. The urgency and strain of his struggle on the cross came closer and closer. I was in tears as I descended the steep and winding Camarillo grade in freely flowing traffic, wracked by grief and trying to project that I was endangered. But he refused to let me go. He knew that he was dying, and refused to die until the work was done. We wrestled, back and forth, and finally the image of that first encounter in St. Max’s came to me, and our equanimity was restored as he pronounced:

Our heart is beating still.

Me, Myself and Christ: Awakening

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During the preteen years growing up in Palos Verdes, a recurring dream was of the five of us children gathered in the front yard. My sister jumped gently into the air and floated toward the hill above the school, and the rest of us followed.

I now recognize that dream as a plea from our over-stressed mother. While she was preparing dinner, we typically rambled over the chaparral-covered hill until our father came home and yelled “Children! Dinner-time!”

A number of factors contributed to my failure to recognize this and other early experiences of authentic spirituality. The most important were two instances of trying to open up to a new friend. I had this sense of them falling into an enormous space inside of me, which was followed by the panicked telepathic plea “Help! I’m falling!” My conclusion was that I was dangerous to people, and I did my best to shut them out.

My father made an attempt to make me aware of the impact I had on people. The force with which I followed ideas to their conclusions found me often finishing peoples’ sentences for them. After one such experience, he asked me whether I was aware of how I did that. I caught a glimpse of that larger self that has taken over my life in the last fifteen years, and shrugged my shoulders “I guess.” His advised me that I could use that power to get people to do what I wanted. The immediate reply was “But that wouldn’t be fair.”

This was echoed in a distinction I made in college between being a nice person and a good person. “Nice” people solve problems for others; “good” people give them the power to solve the problems themselves. While on the one hand the distinction recognizes the disaster that befalls a dependent when they lose their provider to mortality, it also reflected my sense that people come into life with a purpose to accomplish, and the lessons learned through that process could only be internalized if their free will was preserved.

But my avoidance of spiritual experience also had a dark side. When I left home, I was beset by a deep fear of intimacy. Contributing to that was the terrible eczema that disfigured me in high school, but the fear of intimacy affected even relatively impersonal communications over the phone and e-mail. When I attempted to address this fear, the voices that came out of my subconscious insisted that the consequence of intimacy was pain and suffering.

I have recounted the breaking of my psychic barriers elsewhere, but as the first really deep joy in my adult life, it bears repeating. I was under a great deal of legal, personal and professional pressure at the time, and dangerously deprived of sleep. About three weeks before Christmas, I began waking at four in the morning with the sense that there was a rhythmic pressure all over my body. The pressure became stronger and stronger each morning, and in the second week, was accompanied with a gentle encouragement. “Let me in. Let me in.” On the final morning, the encouragement became a demand. “LET ME IN! LET ME IN!” Deciding that either I needed to confront incipient insanity or that life had some secrets that I desperately needed to know, I submitted. I felt as though a wall had collapsed around me. I had a dim vision of a woman looking over her left shoulder at me. She said:

You are a beautiful man. Do not allow yourself to be destroyed.

Much of the last fifteen years has been an elaboration of that command.

Exorcising the demon of my fear was a major part of the effort, principally through blogging in various forums. I started at Gaia, the spirituality social network, under the soubriquet “Trichronos.” I described in fair detail my spiritual experiences, thinking that I was publishing anonymously, only to discover that the URLs for the posts contained my full name. When Gaia rolled over to ning, I re-published the posts as “Imaginings” at http://www.everdeepening.org, and began blogging at Gaia under my real name. I received strong affirmations from members of that group, but a number of them were refugees from Christianity (some traumatically so), and almost all of them were retired or ministers, which meant that my thoughts in the discussion groups were lost in a blizzard of socializing. Frustrated by the spread of pseudo-science and misinformation about Christianity, I finally began blogging at WordPress where I could have greater control over the framing of the conversation.

This might seem a long and indirect process for dealing with a fairly simple problem. But the shedding of my inhibitions came with increasing closeness to that “larger self” mentioned in my recounting of that conversation with my father. Under the influence of a group of people desperately opposed to my manifestation, my father always spoke deprecatingly of my spiritual journey. So it was to him that this message was finally revealed:

I have conducted myself as I have in this life in order to give my opposition the chance to do the right thing.

Of course, that assertion can only be justifiable if they knew that an authority had come to relieve them of their confusion. In the final post under this heading, I’ll explain how that has evolved.

But first, I have to share how I finally came to Christ.

Me, Myself and Christ: Lover of Ideas

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If to love something is to seek to strengthen it, then in the period between high school and the World Trade Center attack, my life was devoted to the loving of ideas.

Of course, as an initiate to modern scientific materialism, at first I didn’t see it that way. I was strengthening my brain to ensure my future as a knowledge worker. I understood that when exercised, the tissues of the brain become more densely penetrated with energy-delivering capillaries. Neurons that were stimulated by thinking sprouted dendrites that sought axons, and when those synaptic connections were triggered, new thoughts were born.

I didn’t really begin to examine the detailed operation of my mind until my wife began to get angry with me when I didn’t look at her when she was asking for advice. She was a very ambitious woman, seeking a complex balance in life between competing priorities, and when she brought me a problem I would go into a kind of meditative state. Her words would enter my mind, as though through a gateway into a garden that she could not enter. I would hold them all together, not weighing them, but allowing them to find a balance among themselves. When a pathway through the possibilities became clear, I would focus on the most immediate priority and serialize the procedure that would generate the desired conclusion.

The friendship that I offered to ideas was the maintenance of the preserve in which they organized themselves. I didn’t force them together. I have never been invested in the outcome of the determination. I was interested in the truth that was revealed. When none became apparent, I would produce a plethora of possibilities for my interrogator, intuitively probing for more constraints so that I could produce a definite conclusion.

Most people, of course, found this incredibly confusing.

In the quiet hours alone, I continued to grapple with my growing concerns regarding the stability of our civilization. What I realize now is that I was reaching ever deeper into the space of ideas, and that exploration was allowed because I was trusted. Ultimately this manifested as a terrible intellectual force that simply brushed others aside as I pursued ideas to their conclusion.

The outcome on my professional relationships was distressing. In one case, I had identified a fundamental inconsistency in a design method, revealed only through a seven-step chain of reasoning. I tried to offer this to the lead investigator, who fought me at every step. When I finally wore him out one day and was able to lay out the logic, he broke off with the complaint “If you talk long enough, Brian, you can convince people of anything.” In another situation, a potential collaborator noticed me breaking eye contact when he asked a difficult question. I was looking past the blank wall of the cafeteria into the space of ideas. Intuitively, he tried to follow my gaze to enter along with me, but was rebuffed. And finally in 2005 I had a female sponsor show up in my dreams one night, offering to usher me into the quantum realm. She slipped through the atoms of the wall, pulling me behind her, and I simply bounced off. When she mused “I wonder why that happened,” I realized that I was in possession of a view of reality that led into deeper truth.

In the spiritual awakening that occurred after 9/11, I came to understand just how great a gift I had been awarded by the ideas that accepted my attention. My elder son Kevin gained access to them early in his childhood. Distressingly, he considered that space as a private preserve, and worked systematically to exclude his younger brother. So Greg learned to access ideas through his peers.

As they grew older, I offered them some advice. To Kevin, “Ideas are strongest when they are shared.” And to Greg, “People can introduce you to ideas, but eventually you need to make friends with them yourself.”

While in my childhood I was in awe of the past, I am relieved to say now that I am blessed with the awe of realizing how deeply they have integrated that advice into their lives, and to observe how their moral and intellectual skills mesh to create value in the world. While I try not to impose my expectations upon them, I find through them hope for the future.

Me, Myself and Christ: Naivety

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When I met Trey (a fabricated name) at contemplative prayer, I shared that I had written two books on apologetics. He skipped past my contributions, asking whether I had read his favorite writer on the topic. I simply shrugged and countered:

My perspective is grounded in unusual experiences.

Most popular Christian writing focuses on the theology of redemption or the experience of healing. I cannot claim to have been threatened seriously with destruction by sin – either in my own weakness or as prey to others. I was raised in a white, upper-middle-class community by a brilliant father and a mother committed to saintly service. The household had its issues, but they were issues that reflected the opportunity to negotiate choices, not the pressures of fear and want.

When my mother and I were discussing the psychological challenges facing her grandchildren, I observed:

We were a household of children raised by strong and caring parents. We spent our formative years struggling for influence over one another. It was only very recently that I realized how powerful my will had become, and so to appreciate how hard others had to work to maintain their autonomy.

The characteristic attitude of my childhood was an awed gratitude for the past. The most representative memory is standing with one foot on the sidewalk below the school, staring at the seam between the asphalt and concrete, and realizing that many people had invested their energies in manifesting this magical conduit that guided cars, people and water, each in their proper places. But my gratitude also kept me in reading my history books long after my siblings had gone out to play.

We were a Catholic family until I graduated from elementary school. I attended St. John Fisher in first grade, the strongest memory of which is kneeling for communion near the angry cross, and wondering why people worshipped that kind of God. I was consoled by the Catholic Children’s Bible, which I read in second grade. I found the Old Testament to be suspiciously like the Celtic and Norse myths that my elder sister brought home from the library, but the New Testament was an attractive promise of healing for the world. My father, unfortunately, could not reconcile the science of the day with Christian theology, and his critical analysis of faith eventually tore the entire family away from the Church – with the notable exception of my younger sister.

Faith was replaced by secular ethics. The foundation was gained in Church: our parish was a liberal Vatican Two congregation with an active lay membership. My parents were active in Democratic politics and the Civil Rights movement. Cub Scouts also provided a grounding in service to others, with weekly paper and bottle drives organized in collaboration with the Boy Scouts.

Unfortunately, it was clear that my peers were intimidated by me. I was aware that my intelligence separated me from others, and it was a tool that I applied forcefully to understanding of the world. Paradoxically, it was also the engine, powered by my father’s skepticism, that kept me from recognizing the silent voices calling out to me in my childhood. The closest encounter was on my first Jamboree. The other boys went off to make friends, but I found myself wandering on the paths above the campground, drenched in the peacefulness of the trees and brush, until a scout in my patrol ran up to warn that I needed to follow the buddy system, and dragged me back to camp.

With mature perceptions, today I recognize how my elders used my calming dispassion. For myself, I was far too busy trying to figure out how the world worked to think much about the impact I had on my peers. I studied physics in college because it was the most fundamental of the sciences, but in the rich social and political environment of UC Berkeley, I could not avoid the understanding that morality and politics determined the ends to which power was turned. I absorbed the popular ethics of the day, reading F. Scott Peck and Rollo May, supplemented by Foreign Affairs and the Christian Science Monitor.

There were a few signs of the impact my devotion had on those that managed to get close to me. After discussion section one afternoon, I followed the professor and my friend Peter up the hill toward the Campanile, thinking about how wonderful it was to have people like them in my life. They had moved ahead twenty feet, talking seriously. I was moved by a great joy. They stopped, looked at each other, and turned bemused smiles to me.

Sorrow Drowned

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Matthew 14:13-21 begins:

As soon as Jesus heard the news [of John’s death], he left in a boat to a remote area to be alone. [NIV]

Sister Gloria chose this for our reading last night. She asks two of us to repeat the reading, and when she offered me the first repetition, I knew that I was in trouble. Jesus’ grief came over me, and – struggling to control my breath – the first line came out four words at a time.

I, too, have been drawn to the solace of the water. The day that I wrote Darkened Lives Matter, I was overcome with sorrow and left work to walk the pier at Port Hueneme. Fishermen tended their lines above the rhythmic swells, the ocean full of billions of years of assurance that whatever life it surrendered would be replenished.

But that was not solace enough for Jesus, for in the loss of John – his cousin and only vocal supporter – Jesus had a foretaste of his trial. In the march to Jerusalem that follows, I feel a certain grimness in him, as though hope had been stolen.

For over what had John lost his life? A meaningless confrontation with the queen over the minutia of the law. If not John, then who among his followers would grasp the essence of the New Covenant, the covenant of forgiveness, healing and love?

Then comes the next sentence, and I found his grief braced by the consolation of purpose:

But the crowds heard where he was headed and followed on foot from many towns.

He was not alone. These many had arrived, not just to reflect on the greatness of the one lost, but to tender John’s authority among them to Jesus. Embraced by their faith, Jesus offers them the healing communion with the father.

As the day comes to a close, the disciples counsel him [NIV Matt. 14:15]:

This is a remote place, and it’s already getting late. Send the crowds away so they can go to the villages and buy food for themselves.

I did choke on these words. The suggestion itself seemed painful. Jesus’ response as offered in the King James is revealing:

They need not depart.

This is a foreshadowing of the miracle of the loaves and fishes that follows, but I felt something in the emotion below. It was as if to say: “But…I find comfort in them. We need each other, these people and I.”

When the morsels of food are gathered, Jesus “look[ed] up to heaven” and broke the offering. This final act of beseeching was the culmination of the grief. It was a supplication: “Dear Father, give these gathered a sign that they are not alone.”

And so those that partook did so with angels gathered at their shoulders, awash in the infinite ocean of God’s love.

Santa Barbara Treasure

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I took the first of my five necessary day trips out to Santa Barbara today. “Necessary” in the fiduciary sense because I bought a ten-trip Amtrak Surfliner pass that expires on September 6. “Necessary” in the personal sense because the move out to Port Hueneme has separated me from the dance communities down in the Santa Monica area, and if I don’t dance, I think that I’ll curl up and die. The nearest substitute is the Santa Barbara Dance Tribe that meets at the Gustafson Dance Center on Sundays from 11-1.

I thought that the weather was auspicious for the 4-mile pedal up to the Oxnard train station, but the fog burned off early, and my clothes were pretty damp by the time I pulled in to the station. Fortunately I had a number of shirt changes in my backpack, so the ride out to Santa Barbara wasn’t unpleasant.

Once in Santa Barbara, the sun was a little less harsh, but it was humid. The three mile ride out to the dance studio was up a slight slope, as well as going under the freeway in a couple of places. The footpath routing algorithm in Microsoft Maps also left me in a cul-de-sac at the bottom of a hill that carried the road over the freeway. Again, I was soaked with perspiration when I arrived.

The celebration was really nice. Two moments in particular stand out. The most energetic of the women danced joyfully with a number of men, and then settled to the floor to rest. I had been moving through the gathering, and found myself in her vicinity when the DJ put on Etta Jame’s At Last. The lady had settled on her shins, hands swaying gently in the air over her head. I swooped past her in a low lunge and then spun around behind her, and the air around us burst with energy.  She accepted my attention as I filled the air around her for the next two minutes, smiling at me once or twice, but she didn’t get up on her feet.

The second was towards the end, when many of the dancers had settled to the floor to ground the energy we had raised. I found myself scooping the air on one side, reaching up and out to gather in the messages that were waiting for me, curling my arm over my head before pulling them into my heart, and then doing the same on the other side. It wasn’t easy – just a lot of sorrow. When I had taken as much as I could bear, I lifted my hands to the heavens, and felt something enter from above, providing my heart with the responsive energies it needed.

I couldn’t schedule the bike passage for the mid-afternoon train back to Ventura, which left me six hours to fill until the 6:59. So after the dance I pedaled back down to the train station (fortunately mostly downhill this time). After checking my backpack, I backtracked to the Neighborhood Bar and Grill, where I had a great veggie burger and honey wheat ale.

The train station is only a few blocks from the beach, so I rode down to the shore and took the bike path up the strand. Santa Barbara has an art walk every Sunday. A lot of what I saw was touristy, until I came to Yin Ping Zheng’s booth. The work was classic Chinese brush calligraphy and painting on rice paper. On the edge of the booth, a typical vertical nature study caught my eye: a cluster of starkly colored peonies – deep red, yellow and pure white demanding the eye’s attention – anchored the bottom of the strip. They were subdued from above by a delicate pink cluster, annotated in the classic Asian style. The obvious contrast of masculine and feminine energy also seemed to suggest the contrast between Western and Asian art.

I ended up buying this piece and another that also displayed Zheng’s unique sensibilities. The second is a panel of ungrounded bamboo poles, rendered in rich green but punctuated by black-fingered leaves with white speckles (snow?). Two sprays of pink blossoms enter the frame in the upper left, cupping a featureless moon set against a pale ground of blue-white snow. I noticed the calligraphy on the right side, and Zheng shared that it was the last line of a poem that offered the moon’s witness and solace to two lovers sundered by distance.

Zheng is devoted to his art, and as we waited for BofA to pre-authorize the purchase, he talked about his training, confirming my sense that he was attempting to introduce strong Western color to add tension and dimension to the introspective style of Chinese rice paper painting. He also kept offering concerns that his devotion was not earning him material rewards – a point that resonates deeply with me.

It’s my birthday tomorrow, which is my way of justifying the extravagance of the purchase. But I did so with honest pleasure, and was gratified  that Zheng accepted my stumbled expression:

Thank-you so much for being here today. It added a special aspect to my day to have had the opportunity to buy two such beautiful works of art.

Zheng has a blog out here at WordPress, but it only has one photo. I’m too tired tonight to unroll the pieces to take pictures of them, but I’ll get some details posted on Tuesday night.

Infestation

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In decrying injustice, we tend to focus on the tall nails – the people with power that misuse it. In the end, though, these people really do not amount to much, because the power accumulated in love is so much greater than the power that they can scrape together here on Earth.

Rather, it’s the “scraping together” that is so hard to overcome. It’s like a disease of a certain type. We have these gifts all around us to use in healing the wounds left in us by selfishness. These gifts include food, air, light and companionship. The disease is to consume those gifts and do nothing with them while others do the work of bringing love into the world.

Anyone that has had the flu knows what it’s like to host this kind of activity. Jesus’ teaching on the matter reflects that reality. At the end of the parable of the talents, he commands [ESV Matt. 25:30]:

…cast the worthless servant into the outer darkness. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

This metaphor is the prop for conservative political philosophy. Indeed, the only coherent definition of “Conservatism” holds that institutions are extremely difficult to create, and are the first thing to collapse when resources are wanting. Therefore they must be conserved at all cost against the locust-like masses.

Unfortunately , the trap that has snared so many Christian Conservatives is built right into the parable of the talents. It is the convention that money is the measure of value, and so we weigh the contributions of our companions by the wealth they have accumulated. As explained in The Soul Comes First, however, Jesus’ reference to wealth was intended to be ironical. The parable was offered to a collection of disciples that didn’t have two minahs to rub together on the road to Jerusalem. Jesus didn’t inspire them with wealth – he inspired them with courage, purpose and faith. The disciples were being cautioned to mind that investment, and seek to expand its reach.

If on the cross Jesus took sin into himself to heal its effects, how would infestation have manifested in the project of Christ? Today I see it in ministers that substitute rigid rules for compassionate and creative problem-solving. It manifests more subtly in the queen bee that organizes social pressure to protect husbands and ministers threatened by those that seek to put love before convention. But it is also in those that come to church on Sunday seeking forgiveness for the sins they commit every other day of the week.

In my own case, I’ve been struggling for some time with another manifestation of infestation – a purely spiritual manifestation. In the great struggle against selfishness, there are personalities that live by the zones in which pressure builds. They siphon away energy, creating little kingdoms without contributing to the creation of a world guided by love.

Addicts call theirs “the monkey on my back.” In my own case, it’s been described as a fairy that chops at the side of my head with an axe. It’s been a source of injury to me. I’m not certain that was its intention, but in trying to manage my influence on the community I love, it’s drawn in all kinds of sin. Inevitably, it’s become infected itself.

Down at LA Ecstatic Dance yesterday (my last dance with them, unfortunately), Ataseia got me on the massage table and tried to push it out. He was really conscious of the process, pulling its roots out of my back and arms to push it up into my left shoulder, and then through my neck and up toward the crown chakra.

The immediate benefit has been a greater sense of connection to the left side of my body. But I’m not ready to let it go yet. It’s tied to one of those kingdoms I mentioned, and now that I’ve got it up in my mind, it’s time to cast some light into that realm. They’ve had their reasons for hiding, but now it’s time to put their talents to good use. While the rulers of that realm will resist the loss of autonomy, I’ve found that most subjects will embrace enthusiastically the opportunities presented to them.

It’s not the last such problem I’ve got to deal with – there is something wound about my waist that doesn’t respond to reason.

I offer this today to stimulate similar introspection in others. Each of us has a world inside, and some of those worlds are rich enough to support independent personalities. To discipline them to loving is necessary to our own immersion in Christ.

Trimmed to Size

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I am in the third stage of down-sizing my living space, preparatory to relocation from a 1200 square-foot apartment with attached garage to a 700 square-foot space. Considering the expense of a storage unit, I have steeled myself to discard or donate everything except the bedroom set and my tech tools. I began the final purge and boxing up for the move last night, and stuff that had survived the first two cuts is now either piled up in the garage pending a trip down to Good Will, or sitting in the dumpster.

Strangely, the two collections represent very different aspects of my life.

The primary impetus for down-sizing is that my sons are off to college. I’ve held back their child-hood memorabilia, most of it stored under my bed, which is were it will be again after the move. The rest of me as a father is destined for Good Will, including the power tools that I used in fixing up the house their mother now lives in, the racks that stored their backpacking gear, and the last of the storage bins that held their craft supplies.

In the dumpster lies the record of my intellectual life, starting with the journals I wrote in college that marked the beginning of my attempts to understand the power of love and why it was so hard to transmit it. Also from that era are the remnants of the comic book collection that I accumulated up to the date of my marriage at thirty-five. More significant are the last of the evidence of my investment in Diagrammatic Programming, the systems analysis technology developed by my father who passed away just before New Years.

The furniture and appliances are no loss. But these things hurt somehow.

From the comic collection I did hold back my run of The Puma Blues. It’s been sitting on a wire rack for three months, but made it to my bed last night. My elbow began aching around 9:30, so I decided to turn in. Instead, I ended up propped up by my pillows, trying to decipher the faded scratches of the hand-lettered dialog, while a voice in the back of my head keep on observing “This was the only thing in your comic collection worth keeping.”

Puma Blues, which ran only 24 issues, charts the experience of Gavin, a young man confronted on all sides with the futility of the struggle against death. It was created by two Canadians with deep environmental sensitivities. The artwork lovingly captures the natural world, with a moodiness that sometimes makes it difficult to discern the minutiae of artificial existence.

Set at the turn of the millennia, the ecological context of Gavin’s life is terrifying: global warming, acidification, ozone depletion and nuclear terrorism have brought the natural world to the point of collapse. Strangely, in seeking refuge from hopelessness, Gavin finds himself posted at a nature preserve, monitoring the pH of a lake that is being limed to allow the fish to survive, and thus to support the rest of the ecosystem. But with too much free time on his hands, Gavin is brought to confront a more direct experience of mortality, in the form of videos made by his deceased father that consider darkly the larger question of humanity’s relationship to eternity.

The storyline offers two promises for healing, promises that I regret were barely formulated before the series was dropped. The first is the assertion by Gavin’s father that “rebellion is the beginning of faith.” In the backdrop of Gavin’s life, the rebellion is evident in his rootless refusal to engage society, and it is indeed that rebellion that allows him the opportunity to engage his father’s voice. But from my writings here, it might be gleaned that I believe that the whole of religious experience is a rebellion against our Darwinian programming. In both cases, rebellion manifests as a pig-headed refusal to participate in systems that create death.

This parallel will be offensive to lovers of nature, but I stand by it: while it is fashionable to believe that humanity has disrupted a natural balance, that is only true on the human time-scale. Looking at ecology even on the time-frame of tens of thousands of years, and we see a constant rising and falling of species and ecosystems. There is no stability, and the instability brought by death was the agency of our evolution.

Gavin resists faith, however, even though the second promise for healing is nothing less than an absolute miracle. Symbolically, it reflects the hope of life itself, a hope that it will find some way to outgrow the disasters that humanity is visiting upon it. Along with his environmental monitoring duties, Gavin is occasionally ordered to seek out and “transmute” aerial manta rays. Physiologically, there is no concession in the artwork to biological necessity. The rays sport gills, and flutter their wings gracefully as though under water. But they fly through the air none-the-less. Obviously, the only explanation for their survival is access to some other form of energy, a form that is not channeled by the normal metabolic means.

This is the promise that I offered my sons all through their childhood. While I try not to show it, it hurts now to hear them enthuse about terraforming Mars (to which I think: “Really – invest all that energy so we can move there and screw it up?”) or spread nanoscale sensors all over the Earth (“Disrupting the digestion of the insects and worms just as our plastic refuse does that of the birds and fish?”). I do understand, of course: they must survive in a culture that abases itself before its technological avatars, because they offer the promise of complete control of the world through the use of digital technology.

But the problem, as I see it, is in seeking control.

Here’s an experience: I was working at a climate change modelling institute in 2004, back when the fossil fuel industry really began to push back against the scientific community. The ozone layer was a serious concern: the CFCs used for foam production and refrigeration catalyzed the breakdown of ozone, thereby allowing cancer-causing ultraviolet radiation through the atmosphere. While replacements had been found, the chlorine atoms at fault would remain in the atmosphere for decades.

As a physicist, I was mulling one day over the thought that neutrinos from the sun could catalyze electron emission from a neutron in the chlorine nucleus, transforming it into argon, which is chemically inert. Thinking more and more deeply about this, I visualized the neutrino field being emited from the sun, and then honed my attention on the thin shell of the atmosphere. I felt other minds joining mine, and then a frission of energy.

A few weeks later, one of the climate modelers came by after church to say: “We were pretty worried about the ozone layer, but it seems like it wasn’t such a big problem after all.”

And so I find myself a little disjointed today, juxtaposing my promise of hope against the paranoia of Gavin’s father, whose faith manifests as belief in UFOs and the hope that some higher species is standing in the wings to engineer our salvation. Neither my sons nor the authors of Puma Blues seemed ready to proclaim that we are the intervention. We are the tool by which God conquers Darwinian violence.

We just need our rebellion against death to mature into a surrender to love.

City on the Hill

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I’ve started attending a contemplative prayer gathering. The process starts with twenty minutes of silent meditation on any devotional word that comes to mind. Then we read a passage from the Bible three times, allowing time between each recitation for it to settle, until a single word or phrase stands out from the text. After sharing our personal reflections, we close with reflections from the greater church on the passage, allowing us to project our personal focus against the longer backdrop of Christian experience.

This week’s passage was Matthew 5:13-16, the famous “You are the salt of the earth.” Most of the reflections celebrated both the salt and the light. But before the incongruous image of the city on the hill, I heard a contrast in Jesus’s assertion:

But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot.

This was the condition of the people – their kings and priests had sundered their bond with God, and the Romans arrived to trample them underfoot.

I held my tongue, though, as the gathering celebrated the qualities of salt, only after the meeting had ended calling the facilitator over to engage her in discussion. When I suggested that Jesus was offering a metaphor on the condition of his people, I felt truth cementing our connection. She did not repel it, as so many do when confronted with a contradiction of received wisdom, but bowed her head and said “Yes, that is how it was.”

So I continued, as I have never been allowed before, observing that Jesus was proclaiming that they were no longer salt, because he was making them a light to the world. He, the lamp lighter, would not hide their light, but send them forth to inspire faith in God. And she simply continued to nod, saying  “Yes, yes. Brian, you have a gift.”

We talked further, affirming each other. The things she said were so terribly confounding. I have decided to move out to Port Hueneme, seeking to find simple people with open hearts who don’t ask “What’s the price?” when they are offered a gift. It is a form of withdrawal from the world, which has given me some deep wounds recently. But I woke up this morning, and realized that nobody in my life had ever said what she said to me, an affirmation that sums up to this:

Brian, people need you. They might not realize it; they may even act frightened of you. But keep on doing what you are doing. They need to hear what you have to say.