Response to a post on the Archangel Michael by IB:
Category Archives: Christianity
Posts clarifying the relationship of Christian scripture and teaching to the evolution of Human Nature.
Faith
I’ve tried to collect my meditations on theology on the page linked to the new item on the site header.
If you’re struggling with the “method or madness” diagnosis, it might be of interest.
A Mother’s Generosity
Since that day in 2000 when I surrendered my heart to the cross, perhaps the greatest obstacle to the purpose I have adopted is the received wisdom of Christian teaching. The ambiguity of ancient accounts means that they provide rich metaphors that reflect powerfully on the challenges that we face every day. That, in turn, makes scripture approachable, where if we were to face the events in their full psychological significance, we would feel like corks in a tidal wave, unable to apprehend at all how we might hope to play a role.
This means, unfortunately, that a thick veneer of common wisdom hides the personalities that must be unveiled if scripture is to be fulfilled. These people must be called out of the past, welcomed, and healed. To do that we must try to see them as people struggling against powerful forces, but people none-the-less, sensitive even more than most to the sorrows and joys of love’s action in the world.
To those that have followed my writing, this thread may appear lost in the flood. I have addressed it twice in recent memory: the reposting of Mary, Contrarily from my blog at anewgaia.ning.com, and again in On Following. But it was also there in the first posts I wrote in 2014, though I may have seemed to have been stretching in considering the personality of Christ himself in All the Vice of Jesus and We Can’t Say ‘Thanks’ Enough.
I wasn’t expecting to return to Mary, but two Sundays running I found myself in different settings listening to the story of the Marriage at Cana. In both cases, the speakers focused on the drama engineered by Jesus. The intensity of my sympathy to Mary’s predicament was unexpected, and in one case actually seemed foreign.
Consider the history: On the day of his presentation at the Temple, Mary is approached by Simeon, who prophesies:
This child is destined to cause the falling and rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be spoken against, so that the thoughts of many hearts will be revealed. And a sword will pierce your own soul too.
Then in his twelfth year, after the festival, Jesus stays behind without permission to offer wisdom to the priests. When his parents discover his whereabouts, Jesus explains that he must be about his father’s business, but Mary rebukes him. Upon their return, Jesus grows in favor with God and men, but remains out of sight to the religious and political authorities.
So considering the authority of Mary in Jesus’s life, we may surmise that it was applied to protect this beautiful soul from danger. Against that benefit we have the realities of his era that he was sent to confront. The growing corruption of the temple would not have been unknown to Mary, who traveled annually to the festivals. Nor would the taxation that impoverished the families around them. And so a burden of guilt grows in Mary’s heart, that she trades the suffering of her people for the safety of the son sent to liberate them.
This is the context of the wedding, a rare communal rite, lasting for many days, at which provision of wine was considered essential in augmenting the joys of the occasion. Lack of wine was an ill omen, as well as being an insult to the company that had come from wide and far to share the celebration.
Why did the wine run out at this wedding? Merely a miscalculation on the part of the bridegroom? This strikes me as insufficient motivation. I imagine that this was known in advance, that the family was unable to provide enough due to reduced circumstances under the widespread social injustice suffered by the nation. Some limit is reached in Mary, the burden of the people overwhelms her motherly caution, and she tells Jesus to do something to salvage the situation. What she hears then shakes her in her inmost being:
O Woman, what has this to do with me? My hour has not come.
The first words are an insult to her authority, and might have brought anger, but the last ones: has she not told him this again and again over the years. Yes, he must do the work set by his Father, but not yet – the hour is not yet, let him remain with us just a little longer. And so she understands him as saying:
Dear mother, if you ask me to do this thing, I can no longer hold back the will of my father. Your authority over me will end.
The sword foretold by Simeon pierces her then, and unable in her heartbreak to face him, she turns to the servants and says:
Do as he tells you.
On Following
In response to a post at Beauty Beyond Bones. The comment focuses some of my central themes.
When arguing about the authenticity of the Gospels, I once explained their discrepancies as reflecting the different experiences of 12 graduate students working for a university professor. We tend to focus on what Jesus was doing, but the psychological experience of the disciples is equally fascinating. Unfortunately, they just didn’t have the words to describe the work that he was doing on them. Some of them focus on the rules, and finally John concludes that the main point was to be prepared for an introduction to the force of unconditional love. But the process – isn’t that what the seeker requires on his journey? A sign post that says “Hey, I’ve been here before you! Go this way!”
That is the value of your work, and the work of so many others who bare their soul out here on WordPress. It’s to document the journey for others. At some point, of course, that will mean surrendering the wounded self, just as John surrenders the wound of Christ being led to the cross by transforming it into a confident proclamation of victory. I hope every day to hear that shout coming from those that write here!
Rush, Roger and Rove – er – Trump Come on Over!
After the loud conversation back and forth across the floor of the Barnes & Nobles Café, the extollers of Trump’s strength and the virtues of Chinese authoritarianism had settled back into their seats. Suddenly the one at the table next to me stood up and made his way across the floor. He was excited about the Asian gentlemen who had stood on a bench to take a photo of the floor layout, and then probed around under the magazine racks. “That’s just what they do – case the target, looking for places to hide bombs, then they come back spraying bullets.” Five minutes later, the store manager came by with a note written on receipt paper: “He’s our shelving maintainer.”
Shortly thereafter the gentleman’s wife arrived to guide him out of the store, offering me a pleading look.
Fear is such an easy tool to use to suck power out of people. It’s not just Donald Trump – the strategy was perfected in modern American politics by Lee Atwater and picked up by Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh and Karl Rove. It’s the world-view of Roger Ailes at FOX News, a man that maintains a second entrance to the building so that the terrorists don’t know where to wait for him.
There is indeed a lot to be afraid of in the world today, but Roosevelt’s observation still holds true: “The only thing that we have to fear is fear itself.” Those that heed people like Rush Limbaugh and Donald Trump are subscribing to a mentality that divorces them from reality. It is a mentality that they propagate because it is only through that effort that the mentality survives. While there is comfort in the weight of its presence, as its adherents lose their ability to generate value in the world, the mentality must continue to spread in order to keep its power.
I confronted this for the first time back in 2002. Kevin told me that he had a dream in which he was walking to school and entered a secret tunnel that led into the White House. I asked him which backpack he was wearing, and he said “The one from Mom’s house.” I decided to go spelunking in her one night, and just bore down into the fear. I finally broke through into a psychic fog. Feeling my way through it, I discovered that it covered the entire nation. Curious, I put my ethereal hands under it and lifted it off the ground for a few seconds, then let go. It settled back down to earth.
It seemed that people found comfort in it.
Donald Trump’s popularity reflects the realization by the Republican base that their fear-generated loyalties haven’t brought them strength. Well, that’s not going to change until they choose to ally with authentic strength. It’s waiting there for them, what Christians call The Holy Spirit, that eternal repository of the wisdom of loving. It’s a mentality that finds beauty and joy in all things – particularly the weak and wounded that focus its attentions. It’s coming closer to us, and when it arrives, Ailes, Limbaugh, Rove and Trump will discover that all they have done is gather together those that need it most. It will sweep through the ranks of the fearful in an instant, because those that maintain fear have stolen the strength that once allowed pride to insist that it could go it alone.
This is what was meant by “like a thief in the night.” The mighty will trumpet their virtues, and convince the weak to tender loyalty for false promises of relief. But finally the weak will have nowhere to turn but toward love, and the mighty will realize that Christ had been there all along, waiting quietly in the background for truth to dawn in the heart.
And so what would I do, if I was on the stage with Donald Trump, when he begins spouting inane fear-mongering nonsense?
Ha, ha! Ha ha ha ha ha! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!
Laugh for a good thirty seconds.
He, Too
I go down to the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels for Christmas and Easter each year. It forces the Church to confront certain realities. They manage these buildings, and so control whether and when the flock comes and goes. That tends to create some confusion regarding the nature of the shepherd, and many among them take offense when confronted with the authority of love.
So it is at the end of every age.
But while I was down in the crypt, I encountered this stained glass window in the baptismal chapel. Who knows which child, survivor of the school of tyranny, will rise to teach redemption to humanity? Who would turn away that hope?
The Holy Family seeks safety in Egypt.
Faith “Makes No Sense”
Another attempt to heal the wound of scientific materialism that condemns spirituality and so undermines faith in unconditional love:
Christianity is not about having faith in general. Christianity is about a specific faith: a faith in the presence of unconditional love that emanates from the divine source. While I have concluded from my own analysis of the scientific evidence that the existence of souls is not thereby contradicted (being that current physical theory actually contradicts itself), and even come thereby to the conclusion that this reality was designed so that love works, that is not the basis of simple Christian faith. The proposition that compels most Christians is that faith connects us to a source of psychological strength.
The most common phrase in the Bible is a variant of “fear not.” If you haven’t studied neurophysiology, fear is antagonistic to reason. The rule-based system of laws in the Old Testament was authorized by God after the story of the Flood, where he basically said “I’m tired of managing you squabbling children. It’s time for you to try to manage yourselves.” That exercise in rule-making was a demonstration of the limits of reason. Jesus came along to point this out, confronting the hypocrisy of those that used the rules to separate the people from God, and taught them “OK, you’ve learned how to reason. Now it’s time to [focus on] love.”
Looking at this program of development and the state of affairs in the world, I’d hope that you’ll be better able to recognize those Christians who write here in an attempt to facilitate the same development in those that still struggle with fear and moral confusion. Yes there are those that use “faith” (as they define it) as a way of browbeating others, [but] Christianity contains elements within itself that motivates believers to heal that wrong. IB and I are among them, and you should recognize and respect the intellectual and moral resource that we represent.
God and Human
One of the more frustrating problems faith is trying to make sense of pronouncements that characterize realities that we cannot understand. In Christianity, a great deal of dialog, derision and good-old-fashioned blood-letting revolves around the concept that Jesus was at once both God and man. It is related to the problem of the Holy Trinity that was the most controversial issue in the Council of Nicea, and continues to divide the Catholic and Orthodox Churches.
To critical onlookers this probably appears to be ludicrous ado about nothing, merely an attempt to layer a veneer of respectability over a huckster’s mumbo-jumbo. But to those that take the program of Christianity seriously, the mystery is a real problem. Jesus clearly expected us to be more. That is hinted by his repeated pronouncement “Your faith has healed you.” It becomes more explicit when he tells the disciples “there is nothing I do that you cannot do yourselves” leading him to observe peevishly, when waken on a stormy sea, “Oh ye of little faith!” And of course, ultimately he avers to his students “Things even greater than these shall you do.”
Clearly, Jesus’s expectation was that he was only an existence proof, not a singular phenomenon.
So how do we become like him? What is this faith? What power does it allow to enter into us? And as Jesus demonstrated, how do we establish a permanent and continuous living with and through that power?
The key, I believe, is clear through Jesus’s teachings. He began with parables that characterize the unconditional and infinitely forgiving love of the Father. At the midpoint, he simplifies the Law as “Love your God, and love your neighbor as though he was yourself.” And finally, in the great struggle in Gethsemane, he conquers the fears of the flesh and surrenders himself fully to his love of the world. And in his resurrection, his glory testifies to the authority earned in his remaking of heaven and earth through the mechanism of his sacrifice.
So he is God and Human. But why God? Why the best, most powerful God? What is it about love that is so powerful?
To understand this, we have to turn to the realm of the Almighty, where the ethereal host evolves under different laws of physics. What we know is that angels do not have flesh. They are souls living in pure relation. What is common between their realm and ours is that some of those relationship are beneficial, and some harmful.
Two forms of relation are particularly potent. First is the relation of Death, which creates insuperable barriers between the angels, preventing them from entering in relation. Although there is a certain restfulness in death, by its very nature its grasp is difficult to escape. The second is Unconditional Love, which seeks restlessly to maximize the benefits of relation. It is a force that helps angels escape circumstances that suppress their expression, liberating them into mutually beneficial engagements that generate new and unexpected possibilities. As we are told, liberated spirits facilitate the spread of love by “singing” its praises.
In the Book of Revelation, John is brought into Heaven. While Heaven is not the Realm of the Almighty, but reflects its dynamic. Around a throne occupied by Unconditional Love, twenty-four principal angels are gathered wearing crowns. When the living creatures sing the praises of love, the angels are compelled to lay aside their crowns and bow in praise to the one on the throne.
Why is this so? If so powerful, why should love sit on a throne, isolated from us, guarded in fact by fearsome predators? That is not its desire, as revealed in the final Chapters, where no light and no temple is found in the city of God because love has been woven into its very fabric.
The problem is that when offered power, we think first of ourselves. Trapped here in this physical existence, full of pain and struggle, we use our strength to compel others to serve us. We violate the compact of unconditional love. We corrupt it with “sin.” To become as Jesus, we must surrender our self-concern. We must think only of others, and trust that they will concern themselves with us.
This was the compact that Adam and Eve sundered in the Garden of Eden. Given the task of tending God’s kingdom on earth, they thought of themselves. God tried for many generations to overcome that sin, but the gap was too great between his perfection and our fallen state. Jesus came down to experience that fallen state, to struggle with its frailty, to have his compassion sharpened on the point of our daily peril. It was only in the intimacy of the disease that healing could be given.
So this is how Jesus was both God and Human: he was a one-way street. Through him, only love came. Impervious to self-concern, no sin went back the other way. And through the humanity of his courage, love gave those he encountered the strength to turn aside from fear and accept the healing power of love.
And finally, in his encounter with death on the cross, love suffused that presence and turned it into the agent of peace. Death is no longer a final separation, but an agent that brings surcease when fear pushes us into violence. Having submitted death, the Prince of Peace is capable of cocooning us in love until we recall our better selves.
So this is the answer: in submitting to the teachings of Christ, we become gods in loving one another, and thus receive from each other the power to bring good into the world, and thus experience good to the limit of our capacity.
Faith and Intellect
The atheist’s complaint against religion is frequently rooted in charges of anti-intellectualism. This is evident in Nicholas Baker’s article in this quarter’s Skeptic (Volk. 20 No. 4), Christianity’s Negative Impact on Modern American Education.
I must admit to being befuddled by these charges. Upon encountering atheists decrying intellectual incoherence in the faithful, I often invite the critic to come out and respond to the writings under the New Physics page of this blog. I have also offered the material to scientists through various forums. So far, I have received no response.
A colleague at work invited me down to the atheist Sunday Service in Santa Monica. In the event, a couple of sarcastic remarks regarding faith rankled, but for the most part I found a group of well-meaning people that seemed to have no interest in their spirituality. I confirmed this with my friend later, saying that I didn’t think that I would fit in to the community. When I offered that my experience was that my very presence forced people to confront their spirituality, he confirmed my decision.
It is the anti-spirituality of atheism that concerns me most. Until it is recognized, I am afraid that it is going to be impossible to reconcile the two communities.
An anti-spiritual emphasis is not entirely unique to atheism – I had a Kabbalist tell me that men were not to enter spiritual experience until they were forty. The violence outbursts of nationalism that rocked the world in the 20th century may be symptomatic: where once European politics was dominated by the egos of kings, public education may have facilitated the formation of gestalts that were driven by the masculine urge to power. Jung’s work on the collective unconscious may have been an attempt to understand the dynamics, and he writes in his biography of looking up at the mountains before World War II and seeing a tide of blood pouring over them. I sometimes suspect that, in the aftermath of the war, psychologists settled on denial of spiritual experience as a necessary practice of quarantine to prevent future epidemics. I have encountered some that say they diagnose schizophrenia only if the voices create fear in the patient. And when I sought counseling to deal with family-related stress, once the therapist determined that I was stable, she began asking me questions about reincarnation and process theology, with a focus on understanding why so many of us are immature spirits.
Unfortunately, any policy of denial creates a context of conspiracy that feeds a revolutionary counter-reaction. I believe that this is probably the basis of the anti-intellectualism that Mr. Baker confronts.
The illustration for Mr. Baker’s article shows Jesus whispering a test answer into the ear of a struggling student. This is a point made explicitly in the article: “When it comes to academic achievement, helping a student solve a math problem, using math and the student’s actual brain, displays better family values than does teaching the student to distrust intellect while pleading for an answer to fall from the sky.”
Mr. Baker’s attitude is rooted in the conflation of the brain and mind. While I did not force my children to read the Bible, I struggled against this prejudice with making them aware of the nature of intellect. As I perceive the operation of my mind, the brain is not a logic circuit, it is an interface that ideas use to become invested in the world, and an anchor that they use to create new forms of association. Ideas are spiritual constructs. As possessors of brains, we are their dance partners.
The most painful part of parenting my children through the prejudice of scientific materialism was when my younger son, struggling with his studies, attempted to engage me in discussion only to have his older brother come downstairs and tell him how wrong he was. For years I had attempted to open Greg’s mind to the world of ideas that Kevin had gained access to as an infant. Before Kevin’s intervention, I had felt the door finally opening, and it broke my heart to have him slam it shut. I dealt with the matter pretty harshly, telling him “If you don’t stop abusing your brother, I am not putting a single cent into your college education.” In later conversation, I told Kevin that “ideas are strongest when they are shared.”
This is known among mature scientists. Edward Teller’s office at LLNL had pictures of all the great scientists of his era, and I could feel their personalities reaching out through them. In another incident, I saw a divorced father at dinner with his son, the beautiful mother, and the wealthy man she had married. The son had asked a technical question, which the father answered after a pause. The child challenged him “How do you know that?” To which the father could only answer “I was informed.”
Personally, I had the experience in high school AP Biology of working in a classroom of collaborative students. During the AP exam, I became stuck on a couple of questions and found the answers arriving during final review. The teacher reported that to her surprise – given the brilliance of students in prior years – we had achieved the highest average score on the test in all her years of teaching. And in discussing morality at work, I have shared that when I reach a road block, I frequently open my mind and an answer comes to me. At times that has been as explicit as having a person’s voice come into my head and say “Do it this way…”
Baker does not articulate this experience, and given his reaction to Christian values, I think that he may not be conscious of the operation of his own mind. If he was, he would understand the preconditions for sustaining such exchanges. It requires surrender of the ego (something that nature often forces upon scientists) and a genuine concern for others. This is the teaching we find in the Bible. In denigrating the value of the book’s moral teaching, Baker and his colleagues are undermining the attempts by Christian parents to open the door to the gestalt of civilized ideas known to the faithful as “The Holy Spirit.” That is no small matter.
Until they arrive at an alternative technology, Baker and others might do well to be more gentle with their public pronouncements. The emotion they attach to their crusade is going to make it extremely difficult for them to reconcile themselves to Christ when those investigations force them to confront his existence.
Christianity and Paganism
In response to this post in Gods and Radicals.
It is misguided to found any argument about the future of a spiritual tradition upon the success of political figures in corrupting Christianity.
All gods wish for their followers to worship only them, because it is through the acts of their followers that they are invested in the world. That investment long predates humanity – there were Neanderthal gods, and before them gods of mice and gods of dinosaurs. The problem facing humanity was to create a human god in the context of billions of years of predecessors. That is the project of monotheism – to create a god that manifests and supports the expression of humanity’s unique talents.
Now perhaps the essence of humanity’s talent is political organization, but I see it differently. Looking at our evolutionary success, I would argue that humanity is a manifestation of intelligence. For the original adherents (not those indoctrinated in service to the priests, which is a problem in any tradition), the attractive proposition of Christianity was that the divinity served humanity. Christianity is the original humanism – it is to assert that the human god should be a god of love, and serve all equally, without regard to station or industrial skill.
Obviously this is a reasonable proposition, and the power of the Church in the Roman world came not because of the allegiances that joined the interests of emperors and priests. Rather, it was because in the Roman context of utilitarian worship, the Church followed Christ’s edict of charity. The Church, though oppressed, took care of the orphans and widows, the sick and poor, and organized their gratitude to the service of others. When the Empire collapsed, the Church assumed control because they were the administrative and organizational backbone of Roman society.
I see paganism as a political act on the spiritual plane. Humanity, having succeeded in propagating the tyranny of utilitarianism through the application of intelligence, is confronting the fact that it is destroying the fundament of its own existence. It needs to think about all of those forgotten gods. It needs to infect them with rational understanding, and engage them in expression of mutual support. In other words, Humanity needs to join in loving the world, rather than just itself.
This is a difficult pivot. Our religions are still infected by expressions of our physical vulnerability: as an illustration, the vulnerability of a child whose cave is invaded by the saber-tooth cat while father and mother are away. Many people still live in circumstances of vulnerability, although the predators are no longer other species, but rather politically powerful people.
Jesus preached that the meek will inherit the earth. As a reaction against abusive political structures, I see paganism as furthering that goal.
everdeepening 
I have this wisdom from Jakob Boehme taped across the top of my monitor at work:
Mi-ke-el translates roughly as “seeker of the godly.” I would guess that in most cases the fear felt by others was fear of self-knowledge – of their distance and isolation from God. Even worse, perhaps that the seeker Michael would penetrate the fortress of personality that guards what little of God remains in us, and thus bring about the loss even of that portion.
The ultimate rebuke of love is for the sinner to become aware of how badly they have hurt themselves. It is to gently show them what they could be if only they surrendered self-love and accepted the gift of love that is tendered from the Divine Source. So when I see someone pointing a finger of condemnation, I always look at their faces and body language. Are they hurting themselves with their rebuke? If so, I tend to question their motives.
I see this as being very much of a piece with your post yesterday. Well done.