Before I left for the UP last Monday, I thought of Friday the 13th blog - of bad luck mentioned, and even of terrorists killing in the name of God. That evening, while driving back from our son's college, we heard the news of the Paris attacks. It was with the same kind of shock that I got while driving back from my son's grammar school that beautiful September morning on 9/II, when it just could not possibly be: so much was perfect, the town and country bathed in the mild warmth of the changing season. I do not see the former in any kind of prescient light - I did not have a "feeling" that something bad was going to happen. Yet, it is eerie none-the-less.
The time spent at the cabin in the UP was bleak - warm, but very windy and cloudy. Lake Superior threw up its waves onto a beach that a few months before held tourists in bathing suits. One wash from one of those waves could have meant death. It is all around us, this threat, from man and nature. And it is this potential suffering that draws so many people away from religions that offer good news, that offer a release from suffering and a gateway to wonder and joy.
So it was in the bleak, rainy pine barrens that I finished Dallas Willard's Divine Conspiracy, with these things on my mind. On the terrorists, it hit a nerve: these are the very same type of people that many of the Israelites were at the time of Jesus. They did not have bombs and guns then, but they had the will to kill the Romans (who, it is easy to say, deserved it), and the knives, or sicarri, to carry it out. And they did, often times walking up to Roman guards and stabbing them, knowing full well that this would be met by their own death. They were, if not the first suicide "bombers", then the first well-known ones. The Romans considered the Jews lunatic fanatics, and it was considered a punishment for a civil service member to be sent there. Nuts, crazies, these people, all in the name of a curious god.
The Muslim killers today see themselves as singularly blessed by God, Allah, and thus promised a Caliphate to be run from His holy book, the Koran - just as the Jews sought a Messiah to return temporal power to the Jews, run on, in part, (what we call now) the Old Testament. We know this well from the Gospels. Jesus is asked again and again about his kingdom, and he answered again and again, "not what you think." It was, he said, both a "kingdom not of this world," and "the kingdom within you." They are, we are to understand, one and the same, which is, as Willard continually points out, THE message of the Gospels: that God meant us to have a life of beauty both in eternity, and in this world - and both were continuous. If we could only see.
How could we come to see? After finishing the book, I was struck with another vision of the Gospels, and surprised by how much my thoughts of them came from a culture that is, frankly, sick of them. They have become for us a dreaded moralistic nagging that has been pounded on us as a people for centuries, much of it intended for our oppression. It is a moralism that denies us fun, denies us living well with what little time we have on Earth. It is the moralism that tells us to (for some) not drink alcohol, have sex only in a certain manner, to never go outside certain prescribed boundaries. No wonder that when Enlightenment philosophers and scientists gave us a blind path out of a god-made universe - that is, gave us enough information of a certain kind to see the world as a purely natural phenomena - that we jumped at it. Off to the races! Now for fun!
Of course, it has not led to fun; and the idea that spirituality kills fun was, we see through Willard, not the intention, not the point. It was never the point of Jesus, who drank wine, got tipsy or at least allowed others to do so without reprimand, and, for all we know, danced at weddings. No, we have gotten it all wrong. The Gospels, instead, were a guidebook to ecstasy, not only for the afterlife, but for life here and now. So much so, that by coming into the Kingdom that is God's on earth, we will find that even the horrors of suffering and painful death are well worth it.
It is an entirely different view, this other understanding, both from the moralistic standpoint and from the standard modern reality. Jesus taught lessons in the only way they could be taught at that time and place - within the context of the law-giving Yahweh. But, recall: those who practiced the letter of the law, the scribes and pharisees, took the brunt of Jesus's wrath. Following the law on the outside and not on the inside was hypocrisy at its worst, a distortion of the meaning of the law, as distorted as moralistic law is to most of us today. It was never meant to condemn us because we were (are) a fallen people. Rather, we are a fallen people because we don't understand the intent of the law. It was meant to bring forth God from within us by placing our emphasis there, rather than on the external things that society covets. And in focusing on our real being, on our inner connection with God who dwells in all, it was meant for us to become more and more like God- which is joy and love.
And that is it - that is the point of the Gospels. Not to make us feel so guilty we wish to chuck the whole thing, but to make us look to where we SHOULD look, where God resides - and there find real and lasting happiness, both here and in eternity. It truly was an act of love on Jesus's part.
And there is the thing - as a young man, I looked to the East for wisdom, for I hated the dead moralism of Christianity that I had grown up with. And it is only in recent years that I have seen a greater truth - that not only does the East offer us a technology for enlightenment within its own cultural frames of reference, but so does Christianity. Exactly the same thing. It is based not on yoga postures and spinal rigidity (no small things), but on meditation on the reality of our situation. And in this meditation, we find that we are God stuff, worthy and made for it, and in finding this God stuff, life takes on beauty and meaning and the same ecstasy promised by Indian gurus. The same.
On suffering, the East says we must get rid of attachments - which is exactly what Jesus said (thus his misunderstood quote, "hate your spouse and your family" etc. Meaning, do not have final attachment to even them). And in that, suffering does not defile this mortal life. In finding God within, mortal life shares with the eternal. Which it does, as both East and West have always said if we could hear, because it is already here.
For the East, it is said that life is a dream; for the West, that it is sin; but what both mean is, we see it all wrong, as if it were a dream or a meaningless life of suffering. It is neither. And we have been given the technologies to discover this, even right here in the now self-hating West. Even is Islam, where many continue to look to God to give them back their earthly Caliphate, just as the Jews looked for an earthly king; so wrong now and then that we might as well call it a sin. FK
The time spent at the cabin in the UP was bleak - warm, but very windy and cloudy. Lake Superior threw up its waves onto a beach that a few months before held tourists in bathing suits. One wash from one of those waves could have meant death. It is all around us, this threat, from man and nature. And it is this potential suffering that draws so many people away from religions that offer good news, that offer a release from suffering and a gateway to wonder and joy.
So it was in the bleak, rainy pine barrens that I finished Dallas Willard's Divine Conspiracy, with these things on my mind. On the terrorists, it hit a nerve: these are the very same type of people that many of the Israelites were at the time of Jesus. They did not have bombs and guns then, but they had the will to kill the Romans (who, it is easy to say, deserved it), and the knives, or sicarri, to carry it out. And they did, often times walking up to Roman guards and stabbing them, knowing full well that this would be met by their own death. They were, if not the first suicide "bombers", then the first well-known ones. The Romans considered the Jews lunatic fanatics, and it was considered a punishment for a civil service member to be sent there. Nuts, crazies, these people, all in the name of a curious god.
The Muslim killers today see themselves as singularly blessed by God, Allah, and thus promised a Caliphate to be run from His holy book, the Koran - just as the Jews sought a Messiah to return temporal power to the Jews, run on, in part, (what we call now) the Old Testament. We know this well from the Gospels. Jesus is asked again and again about his kingdom, and he answered again and again, "not what you think." It was, he said, both a "kingdom not of this world," and "the kingdom within you." They are, we are to understand, one and the same, which is, as Willard continually points out, THE message of the Gospels: that God meant us to have a life of beauty both in eternity, and in this world - and both were continuous. If we could only see.
How could we come to see? After finishing the book, I was struck with another vision of the Gospels, and surprised by how much my thoughts of them came from a culture that is, frankly, sick of them. They have become for us a dreaded moralistic nagging that has been pounded on us as a people for centuries, much of it intended for our oppression. It is a moralism that denies us fun, denies us living well with what little time we have on Earth. It is the moralism that tells us to (for some) not drink alcohol, have sex only in a certain manner, to never go outside certain prescribed boundaries. No wonder that when Enlightenment philosophers and scientists gave us a blind path out of a god-made universe - that is, gave us enough information of a certain kind to see the world as a purely natural phenomena - that we jumped at it. Off to the races! Now for fun!
Of course, it has not led to fun; and the idea that spirituality kills fun was, we see through Willard, not the intention, not the point. It was never the point of Jesus, who drank wine, got tipsy or at least allowed others to do so without reprimand, and, for all we know, danced at weddings. No, we have gotten it all wrong. The Gospels, instead, were a guidebook to ecstasy, not only for the afterlife, but for life here and now. So much so, that by coming into the Kingdom that is God's on earth, we will find that even the horrors of suffering and painful death are well worth it.
It is an entirely different view, this other understanding, both from the moralistic standpoint and from the standard modern reality. Jesus taught lessons in the only way they could be taught at that time and place - within the context of the law-giving Yahweh. But, recall: those who practiced the letter of the law, the scribes and pharisees, took the brunt of Jesus's wrath. Following the law on the outside and not on the inside was hypocrisy at its worst, a distortion of the meaning of the law, as distorted as moralistic law is to most of us today. It was never meant to condemn us because we were (are) a fallen people. Rather, we are a fallen people because we don't understand the intent of the law. It was meant to bring forth God from within us by placing our emphasis there, rather than on the external things that society covets. And in focusing on our real being, on our inner connection with God who dwells in all, it was meant for us to become more and more like God- which is joy and love.
And that is it - that is the point of the Gospels. Not to make us feel so guilty we wish to chuck the whole thing, but to make us look to where we SHOULD look, where God resides - and there find real and lasting happiness, both here and in eternity. It truly was an act of love on Jesus's part.
And there is the thing - as a young man, I looked to the East for wisdom, for I hated the dead moralism of Christianity that I had grown up with. And it is only in recent years that I have seen a greater truth - that not only does the East offer us a technology for enlightenment within its own cultural frames of reference, but so does Christianity. Exactly the same thing. It is based not on yoga postures and spinal rigidity (no small things), but on meditation on the reality of our situation. And in this meditation, we find that we are God stuff, worthy and made for it, and in finding this God stuff, life takes on beauty and meaning and the same ecstasy promised by Indian gurus. The same.
On suffering, the East says we must get rid of attachments - which is exactly what Jesus said (thus his misunderstood quote, "hate your spouse and your family" etc. Meaning, do not have final attachment to even them). And in that, suffering does not defile this mortal life. In finding God within, mortal life shares with the eternal. Which it does, as both East and West have always said if we could hear, because it is already here.
For the East, it is said that life is a dream; for the West, that it is sin; but what both mean is, we see it all wrong, as if it were a dream or a meaningless life of suffering. It is neither. And we have been given the technologies to discover this, even right here in the now self-hating West. Even is Islam, where many continue to look to God to give them back their earthly Caliphate, just as the Jews looked for an earthly king; so wrong now and then that we might as well call it a sin. FK
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