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Truth to Tell

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The good thing about science is that it’s true whether or not you believe in it.

-Neil deGrasse Tyson

As a physics student, my undergraduate curriculum was dominated by physics and math classes. Even then, though, I had a penchant for philosophy that culminated with Paul Feyerabend’s course on the philosophy of science. I didn’t do terribly well in those classes, having a fundamental misconception regarding the purpose of the term papers. Rather than summarizing the text, I always set out to propound novel thought. The teaching assistants were not amused.

Feyerabend may have read some of what I had written, however, because he called on me in his final lecture and asked me to offer my thoughts on the scientific process. Never one to deny credit where it was due, I began “Well, my father says…” which caused the rest of the class to erupt in laughter. Paul waved his hand and told me “Write a book some day.”

deGrasse Tyson’s observation is representative of the philosophy of those inspired by the engineering marvels of the industrial age. The associated advances in the public welfare seemed to demolish all the works of the past. Philosophers did see the scientific mindset as a matter of concrete truth. But it is far more and less than that. “Less”, because the equations that we teach in introductory physics are wrong. A ball doesn’t fall in a parabola because it is subject to other forces than gravity – air drag is one. What the solution without drag offers is a sufficiently good approximation for most engineering applications. “More” because the engineers so empowered change the truth that we experience. They create microchips and vaccines, things that would never exist in the natural world.

What I had concluded, a few years after taking Feyerabend’s course, is that science is not important because it tells us what is true. It’s important because it guides our imaginings into what is possible. But if you talk to most scientists, that isn’t why science inspires them. Most of them study science because they want to do what others believe is impossible. That was certainly my case – when I went off to college, in the middle of “Whip Inflation Now” and the first OPEC oil crisis, it was with the stated aim of “figuring out how to break the law of conservation of energy.” I wager that many creative scientists feel the same – they actually don’t want to believe their science. They want to prove it wrong.

I know that was the conclusion of my own journey into understanding of the nature of spiritual experience (follow the menu to “New Physics”), and so see a certain myopia in Tyson’s statement. This came to the fore one Saturday afternoon during a workshop run by Tom Owen-Towles, the foremost modern theologian/philosopher in the Unitarian Universalist tradition. In responding to a point Tom made, I offered my observations of the nature of our engagement with the divine source. Before I could get to the main point, a loud, sneering snort came from the assembly behind me. I turned around to face the originator, a man older even than I, and then proceeded to make my point. For the next five minutes, I felt pressure building from my antagonist, and just let it flow into me, finally broadening the focus to embrace the community of atheists that he represented. When I had their full attention, I sent this thought: “And yet here I am.”

And so my response to deGrasse Tyson is this: “You receive love from an inexhaustible source. Whether or not you believe it, I am glad that it is true.”

Sunday, Blessed Sunday

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Friday found me complete worn out – I actually spoke with my supervisor about taking most of this week off. Greg, my younger son, rescued me, after a fashion. His classmates finished the transition to college this week, so he was at lose ends. Runescape is having one of its “Double-XP” weekends, and he was anticipating spending 72-hours glued to a monitor. I convinced him to come out to Barnes and Noble with me all three evenings. We sat on the bar stools along the counter – he reading an assigned novel for English and I working on C# exercises.

We did take some time off Saturday to take in The Intern, having a discussion of “class”, which I like to think of as a quality of character that preserves dignity. But while he ground away at his MMORPG, I went to bed early and slept, and added long naps in the afternoon.

I decided to go down to Culver City today to spend time with Jo Corbett and the community she nurtures with 5 Rhythms dance celebrations. It’s been more than a year since my last visit. I’ve been nurturing heartbreak, and am still very much in love with the woman that I lost down there. What can I say: the day that I met her, I was dancing alone, and turned around to find her gesturing with her arm in the air. We started dancing together, and the connection was just incredibly clear and strong. I noticed the people around us smiling. When I was done, I stepped back to bow in Namaste, and she called me closer, until I stood with my lips against her temple, whispering “That was so beautiful.”

What I realized was that, while with every woman before her, I felt like I was being drawn in and wrapped up, the dance that we had shared involved an expanding through each other. That night, my dreams were filled with turmoil, with people clamoring for my notice, only resolving in the early hours of the morning when she announced “I was Persephone.” The last time I saw her, I told her “Jamie Grace, every time I see you, I see all of life. Everything that I have done here has been in an effort to give you the power you need to heal yourself. I am sorry it hurts, and I wish that they would just stop.”

I still dream of her, but her mother is also in the community, and seems to still believe that she has the right to manage our affairs. So I withdrew, hoping that my lady would call me back when she was ready to take on the work that we were meant to do together.

It seemed that the signals were becoming more positive, so I decided to head back down. I woke this morning, however, to a tumult in my mind, with churches all over the Conejo Valley clamoring for my visit. I thought to go out to Malibu for some peace, but the early services were all underway by the time I was ready to leave. So I decided to just skip church, and go out to Malibu Creek State Park.

Pool at Malibu Creek State Park

It was not entirely a mistake. I haven’t been out there in years, and was devastated that the river was dry. The chattering voices on the trail kept interrupting my communion, so I headed down the bank to the dry, lime-covered river rocks. I crept back to the trail at the bridge crossing. A shady copse called to me, but I kept on heading down the trail, and was surprised to hear what I took to be rustling in the dried leaves from the other bank. The wind didn’t seem strong, and when I rounded the last curve, I was happy to see the source of my error: apparently the Park was diverting water to the pools that blocked the trail at its end. I sat in the shade of a reed bed to luxuriate in the air’s moisture.

Down in Culver City, I encountered many new faces, but no Jamie Grace. I did what I always do there, however, trying to clear the psychological space around those that needed it, letting them connect to the healing energies that were trying to reach them.

What was really different, however, was that others began to reach out to me. This culminated near the end of the celebration. Jo was playing a melancholy meditation on the modern state of affairs, with lyrics that prayed for patience from an unknown source. I internalized the plea as directed to the Earth itself, and felt just overwhelmed by the sorrow of the land that we had suffocated with asphalt and concrete. As I bowed my head to the floor, two people came up to press on my back.

That had never happened before.

Recovering somewhat, I rolled over, and felt this beautiful energy reaching down to me from the sky. Jack-knifing to bring my heart closer to the heavens, I was suffused with joy, and laid down on my back, arms outstretched. I felt hands on my head, and a gentleman stroking my solar plexus. They kept on stretching me out, perhaps not understanding what they were unlocking.

And so it happened again, for the third time in the last three months. My heart filled with sorrow, and I arched on my back and shouted my agony. They didn’t run away, but hung on as my body arched in powerful spasms, settling only to arch again. Gathering myself, I shut the door again, and rested. When I recovered, I embraced them each in turn to whisper, “It’s going to be OK.”

There must have been some talking as I changed, because afterwards two women came up to ask if I was the man that had “cleared” today. Upon my confirmation, they said that they were really glad that I had – that everybody in the room felt a great release when I did – and thanked me for having the courage to share my sorrow with them.

I know what specific images I have when these experiences occur, and often wonder whether others share them. But they seemed confused when I alluded to the matter. They weren’t directly involved, however, but I wonder how long it will be until the consequentiality of the phenomenon is obvious to others.

Understanding, Hope

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The ferocity of the wildfires raging in Northern California was given a human face last Monday morning when one of the staff at AMC shared that two members of her family had lost their homes and everything they owned when their town was devoured by the flames. As I write today, the fires have destroyed 1400 homes.

To some, it is human crisis that makes global climate change palpable to them. For me, once a wanderer of the trails above the Conejo Valley, the cries of nature have weighed on my heart for far longer. The day that I first encountered the great Muslim love poem, Yusef and Zuleika, these words caused me to weep as I looked out over the hills:

To my wounded heart this soft balm to lay,
For not beyond this can I wish or pray.
The streams of thy love will new life bestow,
On the dry, thirsty field where its sweet waters flow.

After services at St. Kolbe’s today, I was moved to stand on the floor where the gaze of Christ fell. I was struck suddenly that the last thing that he beheld was the earth under the cross. The earth that held in place the instrument of his destruction, but also that had carried him on his wandering, that had brought forth food for him to eat, and provided all the tools of weather and life that had responded to his authority as he tried to teach his people to heal the world.

We could have avoided this destruction. Not just the destruction of families, cities and nations, but the loss of species and the poisoning of water and earth that will delay their recovery. Both to the reasoning mind and the intuitive heart, these consequences have long been apprehensible. Now, faced with the undeniable evidence of doom, we still hesitate to act, for we think first of what is close to us. Our families, our homes, and our land: they all suffer, and so we take from elsewhere to preserve them. We take from those with no voice: the poor, the uneducated, and the natural world.

But what else are we to do?

I write here because I understand things that others do not, and so I perceive solutions that are beyond their grasp. It may seem small-minded to decry the folly of Elon Musk and his peers, desperately trying to disperse the human species so that it can survive all the threats of the natural world: black holes, solar instability, and human greed. But I do so with sympathy for them, for they cannot see how much power is available to us if only we understand it.

On the New Physics page I offer a model of physics that holds these truths: space is not empty. It is filled with a medium in which light propagates, the medium that physicists once called the “aluminiferous ether”, and now call “dark energy.” That medium is wrought through with threads that appear most obviously to us as electric charge when bound to the medium, but that may also float in the medium. The floating threads interact, merge and evolve to form what we know as “souls.” The souls merge with matter to “live” as plants, animals and people. In that form, they are capable of warping the fabric of space. In most cases, that warping occurs through the use of their physical manifestation – in humans, we commonly use our legs, hands, and mouths.

Through our actions, we join other things in the service of our will. That can be a temporary affair, such as when we throw a light switch or press the accelerator pedal. We are often seduced by the temporary thrill of such expressions, a thrill made accessible through the efforts of engineers to remove souls from the world around us, ensuring that it responds only to our will.

But any great lover knows the permanence of the bonds that arise when we ask permission before enjoying a gift, and attempt to reciprocate in kind. In those exchanges, we make persistent spiritual arrangements – persistent precisely because the participating souls do not seek to escape them.

So this is how we save the world: we surrender our self-concerns. We open our hearts in compassion to the suffering of the world. We marshal the displaced souls of the natural world and join them together to warp the fabric of space to create a lens that bends light away from the earth. And we reward them every day with the expression of our gratitude for their service.

Are we enough to do this, by ourselves? Perhaps, and perhaps not. But we should consider this: there is a billion times as much energy leaving the sun than comes to us on Earth. The source of that energy is not unintelligent. It is, in fact, the “Ancient of Days” described in Daniel’s Dream of the Four Beasts. It would help us if it could, but we are so terribly small, and one mistake would destroy us all. It needs us to guide it.

I had a friend challenge me once that with faith we should be able to move mountains. My response was: “Yes, if every living thing on the mountain and the land around it agreed that the mountain should move, the mountain would move.” But if any voice claimed privilege over that power, the result would be chaos. It is for this reason that I decry the ugliness of the Republican debates. If we are going to save all of the world, the power of such voices will still be among us. The destructive effects of their expression cannot be risked. They must learn self-control.

I was late getting to church this morning. As I organized my thoughts to write this post, I sat down to the reading from Acts. I wept as these words were read [James 4:2-3]:

You lust and do not have, so you commit murder. You are envious and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel. You ask and do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, so that you may spend it on your pleasures.

Oh, humanity! Why must the world suffer so?

The Soul of Technology

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My father, once holder of an open fascination with Darth Vader as the ultimate integration of man and machine, for many years sought to keep me focused on technology by disputing the validity of my spiritual experience. He’s mellowing in the last few months of his life, and we’ve had some great conversations. Sunday afternoon’s brought us around to Elon Musk’s ambition to terraform Mars. He asked my opinion of the idea, and I said that I felt a certain sympathy for Mr. Musk. I countered the claim that we needed an escape route from the mess that we were making of Earth. We’re going to have to solve our problems here, and when we do, the personality of Mr. Musk – from wherever it is at that point – is going to look back on this life and say “Wow. What a boondoggle that was! What a complete waste of my time!” He seems like a man with good intentions, and I’d just like for him to be able to look back and be proud of what he has accomplished.

When I was blogging out at Gaia, one of the most persistent voices in the “Question of the Day” group was a Kiwi nearing the end of his life. Every question produced a number of lengthy posts on the same topic: the necessity of investment in digital technologies that would allow us to monitor everything, and then to link the information to a master control system that would ensure the well-being of everyone on earth. When pressed, he claimed that this was important to him because if it didn’t happen really soon, he knew that he wouldn’t be able to live forever. I offered him the observation that he seemed to need God so deeply that he believe that mankind must create him.

The protagonist in both Ma and Golem is an alien named Corin Taphinal, come to Earth to try to protect life from destruction at humanity’s hands. He describes the situation this way:

The digital technology of [Earth’s] civilization had fascinated him. It was based upon the conversion of the most mystically inert substance in the universe – amorphous silicon – into precisely contaminated crystals. Its proponents spoke of blanketing the globe in digital sensors, constructing communications networks and data centers to aggregate the data, and the development of expert systems algorithms to assure the stability of human communities in the face of massive ecosystem disruption.

Why, in the name of all that was sacred, would anyone choose such methods? Over billions of years, the insinuation of Life into any planet’s surface established a far more sensitive and detailed sensory apparatus, supported by the most widely and freely distributed source of energy available, with representatives far better adapted to local conditions than people.

With this background, you might ask, “Why, Brian, do you work in technology?” Is it just to pay the bills?

I’ll protest my own rhetoric: that’s just going too far. Just because I don’t believe that technology is the ultimate solution to our problems doesn’t mean that I don’t find merit in its pursuit.

First, the world is an unstable place. I’m not just talking about natural disasters: for large parts of the year, seasonal variation makes life pretty tough for most animals. Technology stabilizes local conditions, allowing us to focus on developing our personalities. I appreciate that I don’t have to think full-time about weather, but can rely upon sensors and actuators controlled by computers to do it for me. That our solutions are making the challenge more difficult (global climate change) doesn’t mean that the technology isn’t valuable. The problem is that most of us, rather than developing our personalities, use our freedom from existential threat to indulge our procreative urges.

The solution to that is education. While knowledge is dangerous (life is incredibly vulnerable in engineering terms), I believe that understanding empowers us to make far better choices. We know that when the value of a woman’s mind has been affirmed through education they become pretty determined to limit the number of their children. The response of traditionalists has been to beat women down with fear. In that case, the best means of breaking down the rationale of political demagogues is disintermediation: bringing people together to demonstrate that the “enemy” is a lot like us. Communications technology addresses both of these problems, providing open access to knowledge in the privacy of the home and bridging the distance that separates us.

And finally – motivating my particular fascination with programming – software rescues philosophy from academic obscurity. The purpose of philosophy is to strengthen our ability to describe experience and thus to negotiate solutions. Through linkage to our financial and industrial infrastructure, software allows us almost instantly to express the solutions we negotiate. That is not just a one-off experience when (as in object-oriented design or COBOL) the software is defined using terms understood in the application domain. These act as sign-posts for the maintenance developer given the task of implementing new requirements.

I spoke, however, of rescuing philosophy, and I mean that. Software encodes philosophy, not as a book on a shelf, but as an agent for delivering solutions to the philosopher’s constituency. With the Affordable Health Care Act, software allowed us to implement social programs, assess their effectiveness, and adjust the rules to achieve better results. This is a demanding test of our philosophy, both as regards the degree in which they reflect the truth, and its value in organizing the use of our intelligence when conditions change.

As I have offered before (see The Trust Mind), I believe that eventually we will be freed from the material infrastructure we use to distribute power. However, as I see the long period from the Covenant of the Flood (in which humanity was authorized to create Law) to Jesus as an exercise in demonstrating the fallibility of fixed systems of rules, so I see this era (as articulated by Jeremy Rifkin in The Empathic Civilization) as a proving ground for our compassion. As technology accelerates the pace of change and resources become more and more scarce, only ideas of real merit will survive. Every thinking being will be confronted with the necessity of disciplining his thoughts.

While the demagogues continue to rant and rave on television, conditions are evolving under which every individual will find such blathering contradicted by direct personal experience. Then we will progress beyond the “birthing pains” mentioned by Jesus into the full flowering of the influence of Christ in our lives. When our ideas are angelic, they will be received and implemented by angels. Life will be vastly different then, and our digital infrastructure, with all its energetic excess, will largely fall away.

I see my work as intimately connected to the manifestation of that future. My work in motion control creates systems that relieve people of drudgery, thus liberating their energies for mindful and compassionate engagement with the world around them. My work in as a software developer builds discipline that is essential in organizing and propagating ideas that I believe are of merit. It’s not enough that those ideas are clever – they actually have to work.

Curating the Treasure

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I was at Barnes & Noble yesterday afternoon, plowing through the examples in Troelson’s Pro C#, and a large gentleman waved his derriere in my face as he sat down at the adjoining table. I kept my head in the work, but he interrupted to offer “Sorry to stick my butt in your face like that.” I responded, “It happens,” and kept on grinding.

The place began to thin out at five, so I shifted to the counter against the wall, as the tall chairs allow me to open up my abdomen and breath. He followed a few minutes later, actually pointing out that he was following me. Trying to make it clear that I wasn’t avoiding him, I explained that I preferred the bar seats.

What followed was one of these interesting negotiations that I recognize as attempts by concerned spirits to engage with the work that I do. I remarked that I had noticed his interest in cosmology (he had been perusing a shelf copy of Hawkings’ A Brief History of Time). Through a process of disconnected association – in which the same words were repeated with different meanings – he revealed that he held a patent on a new electrical motor drive method.

Along the way came this story of how he had found a card for a $10,000 invitational for venture capital funding. He thought that was an interesting message from the universe, but when he called the number on the card, the responder just hung up again and again. Not to be deterred, he went to his Ninja master who advised him to print a fake business badge and gain entry to the venue on the pretext of inspecting the air conditioning. Changing clothes after entry, he made his way to the meeting. Identifying a British peer among the investors, he waited at the exit as the body guards passed before reaching out suddenly to grab his hand.

Intrigued by this intervention, the peer invited him to have lunch with another group of investors. The locale had a Japanese temple gateway, which my new friend understood required him to remove his shoes and bow before passing the threshold. He was followed by a group of Japanese investors, which marveled at his sophistication. Into this milieu came the peer, who congratulated him on having “married” the Japanese, who were considering a $400 million investment with Lloyd’s, the British reinsurance group.

After lunch, the peer took him aside to determine his interest in the VC meeting. My acquaintance offered the idea of laying a motor design out flat, as was done in a large accelerator facility. When asked how the idea was originated, he had offered that it came from a privileged supernatural source.

The story wrapped up with the observation that Thomas Edison had succeeded with direct current power because he knew the ins and outs of politics, while Nikolai Tesla just wanted to play with alternating current.

By this time, I had returned to typing in Visual Studio, prompting as I did so with questions just to let him know that I was paying attention. Story concluded, he pressed a business card on me and left.

There are people of influence, such as the British peer, who wander the world casting the net of their wealth around them to attract opportunity. They don’t understand the mechanisms by which it works, they just rely upon it as a privilege. The peer rewarded my acquaintance because he was a sensitive and responsive tool for facilitating the acquisition of wealth.

And then there are those that submit to the purpose of that talent – the goal of joining all of life in a web of mutual concern – to whom that actual mechanisms of the process are revealed. They are given possession of the treasure of the fields, of which Jesus said [NIV Matthew 13:44]:

The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field. When a man found it, he hid it again, and then in his joy went and sold all he had and bought that field.

Lack of money isn’t the problem. The problem is the injection of selfishness into a process of co-creation that makes the participants (both biological and ethereal) incredibly vulnerable to exploitation. Once we learn to discipline ourselves, we’ll find that there is far more power available to us than is required to solve the problems that we confront.

Peek-a-boo with the Prince of Peace

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When the disciples received the Holy Spirit, they were at the end of their rope. There was no resistance to its presence, because they had surrendered their lives already. There was no place to go but up.

As the repository of truth, the Holy Spririt opens us into understanding that may make our prior lives seem shallow and vain. That was certainly true for the disciples, but it was an experience that they received joyfully for suffering had been their prior occupation. To have revealed the purpose of that struggle was to discover the extent of their own strength.

To understand the mechanisms whereby Christ arranged this transformation, we have to understand the nature of Death. Not “death”, which is the end of our physical existence, but “death” as revealed in Revelation: one of the six forms of selfishness that-  approximately three billion years ago – were released upon the world when the seals of the scroll were broken.

Death is not the destroyer, but a divider. When we die, we pass through a door that human love can rarely penetrate. In moments of intense psychic focus – when our lives are threatened, for example – messages may pierce the veil, but the grieving that survivors suffer reflects the loss of a relationship with the departed soul. Death is the personality that manages that barrier.

Sometimes there is value in separation. It allows us to shed associations that are harmful to us. As suggested in the parables of Hades and the Inferno, that process may continue even after dying, as we surrender to Death the destructive energies we accumulated during our lives. Consider the pride of the pathetic Sisyphus, mindlessly pushing a rock up against the pressure of Death’s will, like a galley slave pulling an oar. This is why the evil fear to die – they know intuitively that their spirits will be broken and repurposed in the afterlife.

So why did Christ struggle for us against Death? Because Death serves no purpose but the spread of its influence. It is a greedy spirit, and loathes to surrender its captives. Indeed, it held sway in the world for a long, long time. The drives of Darwinian evolution are simply an impotent exploration of biological strategies for avoiding Death’s grasp.

This is why the innocent Adam was told “Do not eat of the fruit of the tree [of the Knowledge of Good and Evil], for surely you will die.” The pull of death on our physiology is manifested by a deep winding of its influence within our DNA. When God “breathed life” into Adam, it was to dispel that presence. When the fruit was eaten, we opened our hearts once again to death.

We are nearing the end of the long road of pain and suffering that was set before us. The key is to embrace the Prince of Peace. Looking at the degree to which human history is defined by our wars, we need to step back and consider why that has been so difficult.

The short answer is because it is like dying.

You see, when Jesus took up his cross, he did not conquer death. He confronted it, let it work its will on him, and suffused it with love. Jesus tamed death, chaining its hunger to the service of love. There are things in the world that do not work well together. The tension between Hitler and Stalin is an illustration, as is the tension between freedom and government. To prevent those tensions from flaring into destruction, sometimes things need to be separated. They need to “go to their rooms,” not as punishment, but to give them time to relax and envision a resolution of their differences.

This is the authority that Christ gained on the cross: To turn the talents of Death to the purposes of healing and creation.

The challenge that we must confront is our investment in the psychological practices of death avoidance. For many of us, they define our existence. We create conflict around ourselves as a means of protecting ourselves from loss of life. In a sense, the strong still eat the weak, it’s just that they do it indirectly, using the police to impose the Sisyphean burden on our underclasses. Having acquired that power, we console ourselves with the construction of a facade of elegance and civility, a facade now being torn away most notably by Donald Trump.

So to accept the Prince of Peace is to become aware of that social vampirism. It is to become aware that there are others that need his attention more. It is to become aware that we are the cause of our own pain.

That is why those that have the power to elaborate it instead run from the Truth that transforms the world.

Pity poor Christ in his suffering for the oppressed. Calling out with love to the powerful is the only method allowed to him.

Stopping the Violence

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The exhausted pleas of the Mayor of Kansas City touched me deeply today. Decrying the shooting death of a one-year-old child, he observed that our city officials can’t be everywhere at once, and exhorted all of us to stand up against violence. As a policy prescription, that translates to instituting restrictions on gun access.

It is true that ready access to firearms inflates violent death. Emotional shock or dehumanizing abuse can create a driving urge to remove the source of our pain. When a gun is at hand and familiar to the touch, it represents an immediate solution. But equally true is that a strong person does not employ that solution unless life is under threat.

The problem is that people are becoming weaker, not stronger. This is obvious in the comments on conservative bulletin boards. A steady theme is that the average American is not valued by the social elite, whether political or business leaders. Looking at the decline of the middle class, it is hard to argue with them. We suffer from the naivete of politicians that believed that the war on drugs could be won through incarceration, or that growth would stimulate China to liberalize its economy. And we suffer from the greed of business leaders that lobby to hold down wages and weaken environmental and public health regulations, often using the threat of Chinese competition as a rationale.

A recent study on sexism and racism on gaming sites reveals the social dynamics of the downward slide. What the researchers discovered is that the most successful gamers are nice to everybody – it’s those that struggle that hurl abuse. That abuse is reserved for new entrants to the competition – the skill of winners is widely admired. The abuse is directed at those trying to enter the community and acquire skills. It’s a means of keeping down direct competition.

I think that this is an important aspect of America’s perverse love affair with guns. They provide a false sense of security to those that bear them. They allow the dispatch of the physical intruder that comes to take our property or our jobs, while the elite collects credit card interest every month, drives up working hours and pushes mortgages into default.

But the love affair doesn’t end there. Our over-sized military and jails are social support systems, providing for the basic needs of large cohorts of our society while incubating violence. Our media appeals to our primitive psychological urges with the portrayal of life-threatening circumstances visited upon sexually attractive people whose mastery of physical violence produces victory. And our sports heroes become ever more powerful and intimidating in their performances, to the point that no padding can protect them from long-term disability, and so we simply throw them into the arena without covering for anything except their genitals.

This sounds terribly gloomy, but the celebration of brute physical power above strength of mind and character has a silver lining. It makes those that struggle against violence all the more powerful.

It’s hard to explain until you’ve actually experienced it (though I try in Ma and Golem). It’s to be stalked by a mountain lion in the moonlight, and to calmly escape it from ten feet after freezing it with the mental command, “Go eat something that can’t talk.” It’s to react to the men squared off over a woman in a night club – not by screaming “take it outside” – but by sucking the violence out of the air to the point that the one that threw a punch actually fell over on the floor, reporting later that “I just got all weak all of a sudden.”

But it’s also to give of our selves. It was the CEO of FMC who, having planned a series of acquisitions that created a vertically integrated company without redundancies, offered to the employees of a small, struggling subsidiary that he had “felt your pain.” It is to look the homeless in the eye, validating them as people. It is to tutor in a school for children that walk mean streets every night to homes that may not contain food to fill their stomachs.

It is to let people in fear know that “Yes, this is what it is to be loved.” Once they know, the short-term thrills of adrenaline and lust just don’t have the same attraction.

And more: through an encounter with a disciplined mind and compassionate heart, the promises of our religious avatars become obvious truths. The overwhelming power of those instruments has no material support – they are what they are only because an infinite source of unconditional love enters the world through them. It is through this knowledge that the long-suffering find patience that blossoms into enduring hope. In that endurance and strength, the threat of violence loses the last of its power.

Marriage, Clerk, Hypocrisy

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The reactionary right has seized upon the cause of the Kentucky county clerk jailed for failing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. When challenged to justify her position from the New Testament, two passages of scripture are offered.

A reference to Old Testament law, of which Jesus said [NIV Matt 5:17-18, emphasis added]:

…I have not come to abolish [the Law and the Prophets], but to fulfill them. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until all is accomplished.

That “all”, of course, being the crucifixion and resurrection, through which the fulfilled Law is superseded by the New Covenant.

But then there is Jesus’s response to the Pharisees [NIV Matt 19:4-5]:

“Haven’t you read,” [Jesus] replied, “that in the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female,’ and said ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united with his wife, and the two will become one flesh’?”

Of course, if you back up just one verse, you’ll see that this is in response to a specific question [NIV Matt 19:3]:

Some Pharisees came to [Jesus] to test him. They asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any and every reason?”

Which is elaborated further [NIV Matt 19:7]:

“Why then,” [the Pharisees] asked, “did Moses command that a man give his wife a certificate of divorce and send her away?”

In other words, Jesus was confronting the hypocrisy of the Pharisees, who reference the Law of Moses as higher than the direct effect of God’s presence in the lives of a married couple [NIV Matt 19:6]:

“So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.”

Understand this: such joining occurred without the sanction of any court. It was a natural state of union arranged by God. A marriage license is merely a recognition of that spiritual reality, backed by conventions and sanctions that ensure that the temporal fruit of that union are shared equitably when the union is dissolved.

So, there is no New Testament justification for asserting that “marriage” is only between a man and a woman. Trumpeting the faith of a clerk that refuses to issue same-sex marriage licenses therefore has no foundation, particularly as the woman has been divorced four times. Of course, the Law of Moses appears to justify the practice of divorce, in spite of Jesus’s direct teaching on the matter.

I, for one, will continue to celebrate the sensitivity of clerks that recognize when God has joined same-sex couples, clerks that proceed joyfully and proudly to issue licenses that ratify the spiritual unions that God has formed.

And lest these words be taken as a declaration of war on divorce, let us be aware that God can separate as well as join. The state of spiritual union is something known only to the two parties to a relationship. Let not material concerns prevent the parties from seeking renewed fulfillment with other partners.

Mercy for Abortion

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Pope Francis proclaimed today that during the Jubilee year starting on December 8th, priests will be allowed to absolve contrite women of the sin of having procured an abortion.

Francis hails from a region with both a high rate of abortion and relatively religious populations. As my mother continued an active role in church after starting birth control in the ’60s, I wonder how many women who have had an abortion continue quietly to participate in Catholic life. The proclamation of mercy may simply be a concession to practical realities.

I have offered meditations on the problem of abortion. In the wording of his proclamation, I feel that Frances has a heart that is open to the realities described in my first post. Abortion is not a choice that any woman would seek, and it indeed leaves scars. Those scars deserve healing. It is here that I find Pope Francis’s message to be yet a little tone-deaf, in that it trumpets “mercy” rather than healing.

When incarnation has already occurred, among the most significant scars of an abortion arise from the struggle of the infant spirit to disentangle itself from its mother’s womb. I know of two ways of solving this problem: one is for the chastened mother to seek a stable relationship in which a baby will thrive, and to bear the worthy father of a child. Church should be an incubator for such relationships, and keeping women out of Church is contrary to that purpose. The second mechanism is for a mature spiritual practitioner to aid the infant spirit in its liberation. This is an intercession by Divine Love that priests are supposed to mediate.

I also am frustrated that the conditions of mercy are limited to “a contrite heart.” I have voiced the opinion that religion should be seen as the mechanism by which we bring people out of primitive spirituality into a rational engagement with the divine powers. Cain was not punished for the murder of Abel, but sent away to reflect and learn. I believe the same is true for any sin, including abortion. The repentant woman should be asked not only “Are you sorry?” but “What did you learn, and how have you changed your life as a result?”

There are women trapped in circumstances in which the answer will be “Nothing.” I offer my own proclamation here: whether or not the Catholic Church is willing to forgive you, Christ will be with you when you are ready to receive healing. That may be in the final moments of your life, when the hold that the pimp or abuser or pusher has on you slips away. Be unafraid, and open your heart to healing. It is from the heart that unclean things come, but it is also from there that the light of Christ enters into the world. When you receive it, those that have forced themselves into you will be infected with compassion, and you will enter into the ranks of the angels.

Yes, Francis, I think that you understand me: it is the place of the Church to help the burdened carry their cross, rather than to beat them down with it.

Love Works Posted

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Just a note that I’ve uploaded the rest of Love Works. Click on the page link on the banner. The post explains the delay.

The document was originally created in OpenOffice, and the images acquired a grey background in the port to Word. At some point I’ll fire up my old laptop and break it apart in OpenOffice. If there’s an immediate need, let me know and I’ll push it up on the priority list.