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Dear Friends:
Here’s looking forward to a year in which we don’t worry so much about who our God or Goddess is, but rather celebrate being the compassionate, creative and courageous people that we become when we share the gift of divine love with one another.
Happy New Year!
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.
Reconciling science and spirituality is a fool’s quest. The peace-maker is confronted with antagonistic camps both convinced that they are in possession of truth. Telling the two camps that they are half-right means that both of them try to shout you down.
Scientists base their claim to inerrancy on their method of discovery. They argue that to understand the world, we must first describe it. Analysis of our records may reveal patterns of experience: for example, certain types of “clouds” may bring “rain”; other types of clouds do not. The scientist codifies those conjectures as falsifiable statements. For example, “strato-cumulus clouds do not bring rain.”
Now these conjectures are important to societies because predicting rainfall is essential to agriculture. Bad predictions are not just a philosophical matter: if grain is planted at the wrong time, the community may suffer, or even perish. Thus the sophisticated scientist receives social approval and perhaps power. This enables them to attract followers to aid them in extending the reach and accuracy of their predictions.
Scientists tend to forget that creative connection. Society does not reward scientists for discovering the truth. It rewards them because possession of understanding enables truth to be created. The community is grateful not because it understands clouds, but due to the increase in the overall yield of their crops.
When scientists argue, society can determine the truth of their claims only by running experiments. In a wise culture, sudden change is not often pursued. Rather, most grain will be planted according to established methods, and each scientist will be granted a portion to manage according to his theory.
Now comes the real difficulty: let’s suppose that one scientist plants his grain in rich soil, and the other plants in sand. Obviously, the yield will be affected by those differences. To prevent these other factors from confounding comparison of their results, scientists attempt to control carefully the initial conditions. Ideally, they would be granted alternate rows in the field.
But there’s another condition that is necessary to the success of science. Let’s suppose that the genetic code of plants was unstable. While the example is ludicrous, imagine that seeds taken from corn might sprout as apples in the next generation, and then as thistle. Or worse – what if the corn turned into thistles mid-way through growth?
The scientist might say “Well, that’s not what happens,” and go happily on his way. But the problem is that this is exactly how people develop. Parents do not produce duplicates, we learn from experience, and we change our view of the world as we age.
In part for this reason, scientists have come to distrust the evidence of their senses. The variability of human sensation means that two observers may see different colors, hear different pitches, and judge weight differently. These discrepancies become critical when scientific theories move beyond simple correlations to precise mathematical prediction of timing and effect (such as became possible with Newton’s theory of gravitation).
Furthermore, our bodies are composed of smaller elements, and obviously our senses cannot penetrate the mechanisms of their own operation. Understanding of those mechanisms enables us to design sensors with finer and more reliable operation than the human senses. Scientific instruments are far more accurate than the human senses.
The advocate of religion considers all of this activity, and while often grateful for the bounty that science makes possible, observes that it has absolutely no impact on human behavior. Worse, science amplifies the destructive capacity of predators. Because it is far easier to break and wound than it is to create and heal, science makes antisocial behavior far more deadly. The great wars of the twentieth century are proof of this thesis. In our time, we can see the effect of tyrannies that wage war on their populations in the developing world.
This is amplified by personal experiences that beset people that the scientist would consider to be “undisciplined” in their thinking, or perhaps just weak of mind. The scientist has tools for organizing his thoughts: logic, dispassion, and rigorous terminology. This makes him often immune to the experience of the scullery maid on the estate of the nobility. This was characterized for me by an Englishman who offered that servants were told “for their own protection” to turn to the wall when a great lord passed.
I had a related experience during my post-doctoral research, being invited to a meeting with a new employee. I found myself wondering “Why am I here? This has nothing to do with me.” The fellow suddenly turned to me, a look of wonder on his face, and my supervisor broke up the meeting. As he left, my peer said “Gee, thanks.” I didn’t have a clue what he was talking about, having never met someone that was capable of turning my mind. Having “grown up” somewhat now, I refuse to dance with women under the influence of alcohol because they fall into me and can’t get out.
It is in their need for protection of their personality that the “weak-minded” turn to religion. They lean on the strength of the great spiritual avatars that emanate a protective love. Being told by a scientist that they are delusional is a complete contradiction of their experience of life, and in many cases attacks the basis for trust in the relationships that they depend upon for survival. Is it at all unusual that some among the faithful see science as a tool of the devil?
So let’s return to the original problem: how do we reconcile science and spirituality? The scientist finds power in controlling the parts of reality that lack personality. The religious leader finds power in preventing conflict among the population that does the actual work. In both cases, the society benefits not because the truth is known, but because new and creative possibilities are revealed.
Am I the only one that perceives mutually supportive endeavors? Without love, science destroys more then it creates. Without knowledge, religion cannot protect us from the harsh realities of nature.
The scientist allows us to make objects that would never be found in nature. The religious leader builds communities that work in harmony. In combination, they enable us to create a world that we can all live with. Why don’t we stop arguing and get on with it?
“Let’s say that you are on a camping trip with your son, and he suffers a snake bite. What if there was a source of information, freely available everywhere in the world that could tell you how to prepare the leaves on that bush to make an antidote. Would you accept that information?”
“Nobody tells me what to do!”
That was a real conversation on a Boy Scout outing. I didn’t say that there was a connection between receiving the gifts of love and choices that we make elsewhere in our lives, but that was assumed by the listener. Not that I didn’t make different choices: I was the father that stayed behind on that trip when the other dads went off to gamble, or to the topless bar.
As a physicist, the whole proposition of free will makes no sense to me. Given the initial conditions of the universe, things will unfold according to the laws of nature. Given that I believe that the soul can be encompassed by our theories of nature, there doesn’t seem to be any room left for choice at all. We are simply machines moving through time. Choice is an illusion.
But we have choices forced upon us all the time, don’t we? When a vulnerable person turns to us for security in exchange for sex, we have to decide whether to be faithful to our spouse. When a problem in a contract threatens our company, we have to decide whether to miss coaching the youth soccer playoff game or risk being fired. Those are hard choices, but nothing compared to the man watching his children starve who puts a gun into his pocket and goes out to find money for food. Or in an abusive family, the sensitive child that turns to drugs to block out the psychic pain.
What does making any of these choices have to do with “free will”? It seems like there’s no good solution, at least no solution that allows us to feel good about ourselves. If we have “free will”, wouldn’t we choose to have better choices? And if God truly loved us, wouldn’t he give us better choices to make?
But the fact of the matter is that humanity creates our own choices. We decide to accept sex in exchange for the promise of security, when we could donate to charities that provide a safety net for people in trouble. The lack of that safety net pushes that man out the door with his gun. We could narrow our role in the family to “bread-winner”, never be that soccer coach, and vent our frustrations on that child.
This, then, is the Christian promise: God promises that your soul won’t be trapped in the bad choices you make. Your soul, when it sees the opportunity to receive love, will always be free to accept that offering. That may mean death, as so many Christian martyrs have joyously accepted as a surcease from their struggle against hatred, but they receive it willingly because they can feel God’s love reaching down to them in that moment.
Do you ever think whether God is free to choose not to rescue us when we are in need? Think about it: it’s certainly not easy.
When the adulterer is caught in the lie, is he still going to receive love from the spouse that promised to love in the name of God? When the abuser is finally caught by the social services, is she going to receive love from the child that was blessed with the emotional sensitivity to understand her sorrows?
No, because we were offered love, and chose to strengthen the parts of our spirit that don’t want to receive it. Of those parts that we have denied, we have to look for replacements, because often they have fled back to God of their own free will. Is it right for God to force them to come back so that we can try again?
This is the true miracle of this day, the day of the Savior’s birth. Unconditional Love came as man to prove that we have all the parts that we need right here. We have each other, we have the gardens and animals: we can choose to love them, and when that choice is abused by the recipient, God is there to fill us up again, and rescue us when the physical world rejects our gift.
You see, it’s not “free will” from love, which is the choice that only a crazy person would make. It is freedom from the crazy people that refuse love. It is the promise of an escape from the boot on the neck: we don’t have to succumb to the bastards that want control more than they want to share in our choices.
And for the crazy people, it’s the promise that there’s a way back that doesn’t depend upon fixing all the wrongs that you’ve committed. Eventually, yes, you will want to make up for them, but the door opens for free.
Did love have a choice? No. The sacrifice of Jesus was the only way that it could be done: Humanity was given the gift of intelligence to do this work of salvation of the world. It wasn’t enough. Love had to come in human form to show us how it was done.
But it was a gift given freely, of love’s own free will.
Particularly during life’s difficult moments, religion is a source of comfort for us. When a child dies, when we lose a job: we are sustained by the relationships and wisdom that we develop in worship, study and charitable work.
Because this aspect of religion is so important to us, we seek in scripture for meaning that applies to us in our lives as human beings. We tend to emphasize that part of the story, and when we don’t find what we’re looking for, maybe even expand our searching into parts of the story that don’t really apply to us.
But if spirit is a part of the natural world, a form of consciousness woven into the very fabric of space, why should intelligence have manifested only here on Earth, in humanity? If spirit began evolution when the universe formed, or even earlier, it stands to reason that it’s got a long history of its own. What would coming to a planet be like? How would spirit go about learning about a new world? How would it go about improving itself through that investment?
When I re-read the Bible after developing a physical model of spirit (not really a theory, because the mathematics needs to be elaborated), I saw it in this light. The Bible made a whole lot more sense to me than it did when I turned away from it as a teenager.
That understanding is captured in The Soul Comes First, which you’ll see as a link on my sidebar.
Now the Bible is a complex book, with a lot of ideas in it. Summarizing it in seventy pages, even when looking at it from 30,000 feet, means compressing a lot of ideas into very few pages. So it’s heavy going. Here’s the short skinny:
Items 2 and 6 establish that paleontology and evolution science have revealed things that were known to the ancients long before we had the science to study them.
I grew up on Rue de la Pierre in Palos Verdes, California. The development was a young professionals’ haven. The street up and down the block was overrun with children, and the school yard was only a hop over a barbed chain-link fence. We had the run of the street, my siblings and I, when we weren’t running up and down the sage-brush hills between the school and the golf course.
About half-way through fourth grade, I realized that I was losing my connection with that crowd. I would come out of the house after studying and discover that the kids had already divided up into play groups. I’d hunt them down the street or hop the fence and discover, more often than not, that I was the odd man out.
It was then that the epithet “Brain” was first donated to me. You see, I was staying in after finishing my homework to read ahead in my history book. Given the social consequences, I found myself wondering why I felt such a strong compulsion. Sure, curiosity was part of it, but more than that, I just felt that it was really important to understand how we had arrived at this place with all of this stuff made available for our use. Not that I considered myself to be blessed in any way, I was really just amazed. Cars, houses, teachers, jobs: I mean, how did it all get here?
So in spite of the fact that I am an iconoclast and an out-of-the-box thinker, I’ve always considered it important to maintain contact with the world of the past (though not with my own past: that’s entirely different – somehow I have trouble considering myself to be at all important). So when I found myself with a working physical framework for explaining spirituality, I was driven to figure out how it related to the great religious teachings of the world.
I didn’t need long to realize that complete reconciliation would be impossible. Just look at the great religious divide between east and west: one embraces the idea of rebirth (or reincarnation), the other rejects it. Clearly, one or the other has to be wrong. It was an easy judgment to make: I’m firmly convinced that reincarnation is a natural consequence of the physics. But recently, I’ve begun to realize how fundamental that decision was: everything about my ability to resist fear is rooted in my belief that I’ll have another chance to try again if I don’t accomplish my goals in this life.
In the interim, I’ve come to identify very strongly with the “Process of Christ”, as I call it. I’ve been blogging and dialoging on-line with people that follow the official Christian teaching about rebirth, which is that it doesn’t happen. My own reading of scripture seems to find strong evidence for reincarnation, though it’s not a central issue in Jesus’s ministry. The first is the identification of John the Baptist as the returned Elijah. Another is the teaching that the rich that do not care for the poor will themselves be poor. This is so much in contrast with the way the world works that it can only be reconciled through the Eastern concept of karma, which brings balance for greed in a future life.
Given that reincarnation as a spiritual reality comes directly from Jesus’s lips, you have to wonder how it was drummed out of Christian dogma. The turning point, as with so many issues with Christian dogma, was the council of Nicea. The central issue for Emperor Constantine, as well as for many of the Church fathers he gathered, was to protect the authority of the Church. Today, we take a somewhat jaundiced view of that imperative. If we believe that we only get one chance to get it right, those that claim to offer us reliable guidance gain social leverage which can be turned fairly easily to personal advantage. This avarice is often held out as the explanation for the council’s rejection of reincarnation, which was represented by Origen.
But the authority of the church is not a trivial matter (see The Conservative Agenda). The church offered the sacraments to its flock: baptism, marriage, confession, last rites. In offering those rites, the priest is using ritual to prepare the recipient to receive the divine presence. So what happens, as is all too often the case, it turns out that the priest is a sinner? Are all the sacraments he offered now null and void? This is the Darian heresy, which held that only a saint can administer the sacraments. This led to a certain elitism in that movement, as well as a lack of respect for the Church as an institution.
To deal with this problem, the Church fathers upheld the Divine commission of Jesus, who founded the church in Peter. If that commission was to be unassailable, then Jesus must be a unique spiritual figure. It is for this reason that the Creed says that he was “begotten, not made.” His relationship with God is absolutely unique, unlike those beings made in Genesis, and so the authority of the sacraments rests with the Church that he specifically commissioned, not the priest.
As for the rest of us: we are like Adam. God breathes his spirit into us at the moment of conception, and we return to him at the moment of death.
Taking away the hope of future lives to achieve redemption does cast the great mass of humanity into a desperate situation. Most of the world has very few resources to devote to spiritual improvement, and it seems contradictory to say that a loving God would only give them one chance to get it right. But there’s a flip side, and that’s in the pressure “one life” focuses on those with the resources to do some good in the world. There’s a lot of teaching on this as well, including not least the young man of wealth that asks how to enter the kingdom, and is told “sell all your belongings and give to the poor, then come follow me.” Conversely, if reincarnation occurs, then why not just enjoy this life? If you do wrong, you can always make it up again later, can’t you?
Sadly, in our secular age the belief in one life actually works the other way. Those that exploit the world around them believe that they won’t have to clean up the mess that they’ve made. Eat, drink and be merry, for God doesn’t really exist anyways!
I tend to believe that today the moral balance supports recognition of the truth of reincarnation that will be obvious when we fully understand the physics of spirituality. I believe also that this is most consistent with my faith in a loving God. It will be interesting to see if I can square that with the Church that Jesus founded, or whether, as with Galileo, they will resist science in misguided attempts to secure their authority.
I have some reason to believe that the Church understands the dynamics in a practical sense. I went up to Valyermo a couple of times to visit St. Andrew’s Abbey, a Benedictine Monastery. After Mass one Sunday, I went for a walk on the grounds, and found myself on the flat above the Monastery where they maintain two graveyards.
The first was for the public, and as I walked among the graves, I had a strong sense of walking among their spirits. A voice came into my head: “Please leave our dead alone.” However, I didn’t intend to disturb them, I was just fascinated by this strong sense that they had chosen to take a rest from the vale of tears that is human life. They longed for Christ’s return, and one of the gifts that the Church offers the faithful is a sacrament that allows people to rest until he does.
The second graveyard was a short way off, and was for the priests. As I walked past them, I had a strong sense of them as guardians. They were ranked in order by burial date.
It was a long walk around the rim of the plateau to get back down to the grounds, so I thought it would be worth looking for another route down. As I walked along the rim towards the front of the Abbey, I encountered a Wiccan woman sitting cross-legged with her yoni pointed at the priests. She was trying to entice the youngest back into life. I circled her once (“Not on my watch!”), and as I did so spied a trailhead that led back down to the amphitheater below.
A statue of the Holy Mother at St Paschal’s has been a soothing presence to me for the last 18 months. I typically stand on her side of the sanctuary, as it puts me across from the children’s choir whose invocation has such a compelling simplicity. But the calling that reaches me through her image has become a compulsion of its own.
“Come here. Rest in my peace for a time.”
This confident and generous assertion of self contradicts the popular image of the young virgin. It began nagging at me this Christmas. Was she simply the passive, albeit perfect, receptacle for her nation’s Messiah?
I cannot reconcile that with the Gospel of Luke. The song that he records she sang to Elizabeth was not a literal event, but rather a way of placing into context the spirit that moved her into the tide of events. It reads, in part [NIV Luke 31-33]:
He has brought down rulers from their thrones but has lifted up the humble.
He has filled the hungry with good things but has sent the rich away empty.
Would these have been the words of a 14-year old? Obviously not, but would they have been far from her concerns?
What is it like to be a child in a state ruled by tyranny? We in the developed world forget, but it is to be told to look to the ground when the tyrant’s men appear, to hide when they come with weapons at the ready, to whispered news of families taxed into poverty. Not lessons shared idly, but as a parent’s moral necessity to ensure that children survive.
Would it have been unexpected for an empathetic and intelligent girl to contrast this reality with the promises of her faith? Would it have been a surprise for her to conclude that this was a time for God to honor his promises to his people?
There are two ways to fall on the edge of this dilemma: into doubt, and onto certainty. What I feel is the presence of certainty in this young lady. Certainty that God would honor his promises. Certainty that holy men always came into the world through a woman that loved their God. Certainty that such a woman would be found, perhaps a woman like her mother or a beloved aunt. Certainty expressed in prayer early in the morning and before laying down to rest at night.
And through that expression of faith, the angel that had waited, as angels must, for the day of their service to Love, awoke in heaven, and came down to explain: “Yes, it will be done, and this is how.”
I’ve been active on the Religious Tolerance group on Facebook. I declared my position fairly early on in a posting that stated “all great religious teachings serve to transform an existence driven by lies, fear and death into an existence guided by truth, hope and life.” However there are those that see me as a Christian proselytizer, largely because I quote scripture. This makes me sad. I write there because I believe that “Christian intolerance” is rooted in false teaching, and that if we look in scripture, we will find evidence to that effect. I quote scripture because I believe that it is the best tool that we have for combating intolerance masquerading as Christianity.
This is nowhere more evident than in those that use death threats in order to conquer institutions in “the name of Christ.” I have been made aware recently of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, and the death threats issued against its members and their families by Christian militants.
We don’t have to attain much depth of spiritual experience before we become aware that spiritual evolution did not begin with humanity. The dominant personalities in the spiritual realm, prior to our emergence, were the predators that stand atop the biological food chain. These would have been the dinosaurs (which appear as the serpent in the Garden of Eden and the dragon in Revelation) and the bear and great cats (the mammalian predators) that appear in Revelation and Daniel’s Dream of the Four Beasts.
Revelation is best understood as the history of the unseating of predation as the driver of evolution in favor of intelligent engineering that is informed by unconditional love. This is not a clean and simple process, and is made more difficult because humanity has only a dim perception of the spiritual dynamics. What transpires in Revelation 13:11-15 is that the dragon dresses up as the lamb and empowers the mammalian predators to religious dominance. As it is written: “All inhabitants of the earth will worship the beast – all whose names have not been written in the book of life belonging to the Lamb that was slain from the creation of the world”, that lamb being Christ. Clearly, those that follow the beast do not follow Christ.
The beast continues to promulgate teaching that “anyone that does not worship the idol must die.” The beast famously bears the number “666.” While John points out that this is the number of man (who was created on the sixth “day”), six is also the number of the “day” of mammals that attained evolutionary dominance after the fall of the dinosaurs.
So what is directly written in the Bible is that the use of death threats is false teaching, and actually anti-Christ.
That this teaching is particularly strong in the military, which is an institution organized to harness the forces of predation, is not at all surprising. As I see it, those that resist this process, such as Mr. Weinstein and his colleagues, are agents of truth and life, and regardless of their profession of faith, are held in the heart of Christ with the most tender concern and honored regard.
For the last two years, I have been frequenting a restaurant down in Calabasas that has live music Friday and Saturday nights. One of the owners decided on Friday that I couldn’t dance there anymore. The band had come back on stage, and the floor that the DJ had filled up was emptied. I went out, as I usually do, and danced by myself, filling the floor up with joy. When I walked off, the party of twelve at the front table began applauding wildly. That’s when he walked up and told me to never dance that way again. I frowned at him, and asked “Why?”, and he just stalked off.
The bouncer came up and told me that, while he didn’t agree with the owner, he had been told to tell me that I couldn’t dance there. So I took my sweater and left. The manager intercepted me at the parking lot and made his apologizes as well. I asked him not to worry about it, and to have a wonderful holiday season.
The thing that cracks me up was that people have approached me and said that they had seen videos of me dancing on YouTube. The bands have approached me, too, just to say how wonderful it is to play when I’m there with them. So here I am, generating trade for this venue, never having hurt anybody in two years, and they basically throw me out.
While some rationale was put forward about liability in case of an accident, I have a sense that something else was going on. There’s a group of four gigolos that hang out there, and they’ve been really proud to make a point of setting the owners against me. One of them in particular is actually dangerous: his “come-on” move on the dance floor is to trip the lady and throw her over into a deep back bend. I’ve actually seen girls walk off the floor in pain. Recently I had a woman ask to dance with me, and the first thing out of her mouth was “no back bends”. I had a pretty good idea who had put that into her head.
Their problem is that they can’t pick up women when I’m on the dance floor. We just get this glow of joy going. While I’ve had women come on pretty strong, for me it’s not a sexual thing. It’s just the joy of feeling what women feel when they no longer have to fight off the dirt that the world heaps on them.
There’s a “Freedom From Religion” group out on Facebook that cross-posts to the Religious Tolerance group. I decided to go out and see what their dialog is like on their home turf, and the first post quoted a male sympathizer of the women’s suffrage movement. In summary, the quote said that the Bible was a piece of trash that never taught anything of value to anyone. The issue of the day, of course, was the admonition in Paul’s letters that women should be “submissive” to their husbands, which was used by some to justify the denial of voting rights to women.
I have to admit, until you get to Luke, the Bible is really not good to women. When I was at Torah study one day, a young lady got really upset about that, and I leaned over and whispered: “You know, you’re right. But the Bible is all about men’s problems.” We weren’t good enough for you ladies, and that’s part of why Daniel 11:37 describes Jesus as “the one desired by women.”
So what is the problem with men? Well, we’re designed to change things. Unfortunately, the easiest way to change something is to break it. I see so many men struggling with this, and I have to say, I have submitted myself. What’s kept me steadiest is the strong sense of feminine approval I receive when I try to fix things. Mostly, of course, that’s fixing people’s hearts, and women bring me a lot of opportunities. Not just to work on them: women feel things deeply, and carry people around with them.
So: thank-you for being what you are. Please just try to remember that you’re supposed to feel that way all of the time. And grant me the benefit of this testimony: the example of Jesus is what made me what I am.
When I sat down with the pastor at St. Maximillian’s to discuss my spiritual journey, the pitch was pretty blunt: “Tell me, Brian, do you want to die, or live forever?”
Today, I have arrows in my quiver that I didn’t have then. “For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will find it.” [Matt. 16:25] Not that I wasn’t concerned about survival then, but that concern was overshadowed by incredibly powerful dreams. I needed somebody to help me sort through them, so the response he got back was a disappointed stare.
Now I didn’t expect to die, so the sense in which I was losing my life at that time was that held by most people reading Jesus’s words. My way of living was being consumed by powerful forces that I could not overcome with force. The only weapon that I had was my heart. I was committed to surrendering myself to loving, no matter the cost.
But in an earlier era, most people would have taken those words as a literal pronouncement: those that perish for me will find life. Certainly death was part of the early Christian experience, with thousands of martyrs to the faith. But how is that “for Christ”?
We celebrate sacrificial nobility in those that died in combat securing our freedom. That was perhaps also the understanding of those that died fighting for the faith during the Crusades and other Christian wars. But how does that square with the first part: “Whoever wants to save his life will lose it”? Doesn’t every warrior wish to return to home and family?
Christ died on the cross to bring perfect love into the world. In Matt. 10-38, he admonishes “…he who does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me.” From this, it seems clear that to die for Jesus is dying to bring love into the world. That is hard, because the only reason that our lives are not filled with love is because we chose, of our own will, to reject it. Why would we do that? Because we’re infected with a disease called selfishness.
Look at what Jesus did on the cross: he submitted to the religious and secular authorities of his age. They forced their wills upon him, and he did not resist. Because of that, they became stuck in his compassion. He infected them with the seeds of loving.
Obviously, that is taking a great long time to work itself out. But the message is that dying is nothing to fear, at least so long as the manner of our dying is to bring love into the world.
Now Jesus’s surrender to evil was obvious and dramatic, involving public orations and processions. Very few people in Jerusalem would have been unaware. For most of us, taking up the cross is a lonely, silent affair. We don’t wrestle with Satan in all his power, we wrestle with petty evil in spouses and bosses, employees and rapists. That can have its toll on us. A family member once shared an anecdote about a visit with a rich business partner, a man that took his children up to the top of a building to throw paper airplanes down into the streets in violation of a sign that said “Do not throw paper airplanes.” (Think about it: would you go out of your way to do that?) This was a pattern in his business dealings as well. His wife was a twisted crone, beaten down by the burden of the anger that the world had mounted against her husband.
How long should we struggle against the burden of others’ sin? Only so long as we can face it without falling into fear. Trying to live with uncontrollable pain is heroic until we lose our heroism. Then it becomes a slow cancerous submission of our souls to evil.
Is there hope? Always, but Jesus offers the guarantee this way: “whoever loses his life for me will find it.” Jesus could have chosen to hang on the cross in suffering, suffer into eternity. But he did not because he knew that another life awaited him. He knew that to attain that life he needed to surrender his body.
Thus it is with those that suffer pain in this world, pain brought on by their sin and the sins of others. They need to lose their bodies to selfishness, to let it wind itself into their flesh, and then to escape into death, purified in spirit as was Jesus. It is thus that we weaken evil by trapping it in decaying matter, and free those portions of our soul into loving as are willing to accept love.
So when you pronounce against death, remember that death was Jesus’s tool of choice. Look into the soul of the person dying, and do not push them past their ability to endure. Do not block that moment of release, lest you stretch it into a torment of possession.
Rather, send them off with that most tender of incantations: “S(he) has gone to a better world.” With that little push too empower them, perhaps they’ll be motivated to look back in time when they get there, and reach out to pull us through behind them.
everdeepening 