pride, possession, and something about karma

bigbro and i were speaking long ago about his bearing of the burdens of a rather wealthy other, and the stress connected with being instrumental in attending to this person's freedom from the darkness that had dogged his every step...





I've learned that a man can shed his demons and there is a really good feeling of freedom that comes with that shedding, but there is also a loneliness, because those demons were all the guy had for company for a long time......bigbro aka fred call

taking on the demons of another? some heavy sledding there.
two things:

1) the demons don't want to leave, and

2) their hosts are usually terrified of the hole that will be left. a friend of mine was telling me about how he quit music altogether after going through rehab because he was terrified of what would happen if he stepped onstage straight and tried to do what he does better than anything in the world without the usual buffers. it's been four years now...

anyway, it's true; prosperity and loneliness seem to be together a lot.
the story of king midas comes to mind...

and so bigbro continued:
As for Z: He had money. He had demons. Then he realized he couldn't buy his demons off with money. He really didn't want to live. I think he wanted to beat his bad karma before he died, so he didn't have to take it with him. My instincts say he had a better chance of taking his money with him than he had of taking better karma with him. In the final analysis, it was his decision how to go. That he's gone, I think he's happier. I just hope he managed to shed the bad assed karma that gave him cancer in the first place. Otherwise, he's got to go through chemo again in the next go round.

could the whole deathwish thing be inherent in our preoccupation with ourselves? navel-gazing spiritual beings finding themselves relegated by their behaviour and the attitudes or perspectives that give life to that behaviour into something less than was originally intended? even though we fear death and the uncertainty that it holds for anyone in search of hard facts, we still feel more comfortable with despair than with hope because this allows us to essentially remain the same, being ever victimized by things beyond our apparent control in the process..

as i read about bigbro's wealthy friend, i was reminded of something i had read just the day before... i love those nexus moments where things just appear to randomly connect and to inform each other... what we do with those connections is another affair, but i think if we can at least recognize them when they come together there has to be some benefit.

"God, in his power, drags away the rich. They may rise high, but they have no assurance in life. They may be allowed to live in security, but God is always watching them. And though they are great now, in a moment they will be gone like all others, withered like heads of grain. "Can anyone claim otherwise? Who can prove me wrong?" (job 24.22-24, NLT)

i remember being told once -probably back in bible school- that job is arguably the oldest book (or at least the oldest story) in the bible apart from the creation narratives themselves and the stuff about the adams family ('adam' meaning 'son of dirt' or 'first man') ... all this to say that, in my view, apparently the whole notion of wealth and the basic disparity of the human race has been with us for awhile.

and so in what ring of dante's hell was the rich man standing when he begged michael to send lazarus down with a drop of water for his tongue? and why in the hell did he think that it was the poor man's job to serve him beverages?

in sri lanka, august of 2005, clues as to an answer for this second query came in through the back door.

traditionally the sri lankans are a hospitality culture, offering preferential treatment to anyone who arrives at their door having journeyed long- they are still that way, even while in the throes of a twenty-five year old civil war. one day we arrived at this guy's place, having traveled for about 6 hours or so in a van with no air-conditioning. he greeted us warmly (although he was surprisingly more aware of the fact that, due to spot checks and road conditions, we were arriving two hours late than we had expected him to be) and proceeded to draw a bucket of water from the family well (only about 3 feet of water in it at the time) for us to wash our hands before he then washed our feet with the remainder of the water. he would not allow us to share a bucket- a new one had to be drawn for each guest.

now in my western oh-no-not-me-i'm-so-unimportant vanity, this would have been awkward and there would have been this graceless non-receiving of a kindness offered that probably would have led to pain, as this man would be left pondering a cultural question:
'what have i or my family done, that you would not accept this humble kindness from us?'

however, having been there nearly two weeks already and therefore used to hospitality by then, i just said thank you.

see, whether it's having this sick entitlement thing that presumes some form of dominion over another, or having this nauseating false humility thing that refuses to allow another the freedom to give selflessly, it seems to me that the main problem- the swelling that makes the camel far too large for the needle's eye- is humankind's inability to get over itself.

i think that that's probably the bad-assed karma of which bigbro spoke. like edgar alan poe's imp of the perverse, it drives us to to self destruction through the destruction of others. as a species, we're really good at putting ourselves first and attributing our selfishness to natural selection or something. it's how we got here and it's how we'll ultimately leave.

the apostle paul said that 'the wages of sin is death but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ.'

okay, now i'm not being one of job's buddies here, providing some pretty hollow words of explanation as to why bad things happen to good people. (in truth, i think that the problem is that there aren't actually any good people... now there's an encouraging topic for a whole nother blog) i'm simply suggesting that if we want some answers as to the pain that assails us all- not the physically or emotionally detailed, circumstancial, case-sensitive pain of an individual, but that pain which systematically dismantles us while defining us as one people, one race, one species- we probably don't have to look very far.

unfortunately, as long as we continue to preoccupy ourselves with ourselves, i think that we're stuck with it for awhile longer.

UFC, dragons and the image of God

"When we place value (the only value) in the overcoming, or transcending, or triumph over these things, (struggles, difficulties, sufferings etc.) we empty them of their positive content and value. When it comes to people then, the victim is valued when they overcome their victimization, the addict is valued when they have triumph over their addiction or when they clean up and the "criminal" has value when they are delivered from their "deviance" and rehabilitated." (hineini)

i think i hear what you are saying, hineini.

last summer, i was in a meeting where somebody made a statement that all they had had to do was pray and they were healed... that their faith had made them whole.

now, i have no problem with feeling this- i mean, it's even biblical.

however, feeling and articulating are two very different things. one must needs be careful with this kind of testimonial because of the message of hopelessness and failure that this kind of announcement indirectly puts out there for someone who is still struggling with and being overcome by something that is completely out of their control. to put it another way, the victim of an infirmity feels devalued as a person because of his or her inability to somehow slay this dragon and bring back a victory report to the crowd.

a friend of mine, an old 'saint' and one of the most faithful followers of Christ i know, had been struggling with major kidney failure and had been doing and receiving from others a heckuvalot of prayer- but was losing the battle. to make this glib 'mind over matter' kind of statement in his presence was to suggest that his faith was somehow not strong enough to overcome this physical ailment. what was intended to be a shout of victory for the encouragement of the masses within their own circumstance probably just rang out as hollow hopelessness for my friend. try to tell someone who has been praying against something for years to no resolution that 'God has no favorite children' and then listen to their side. there is this pervasive 'well why not ME then?' question begging for an answer- although my friend would never say this, i believe i might if i were in his place.

even beyond this, contrast western prosperity theology and all this 'child of the king' talk with war, hunger, starvation, disease, homelessness and natural disaster in any of the three or four worlds and see how well the rhetoric holds up to real life. i remember being rather stuck for an answer when a new friend of mine in sri lanka asked me point blank the first time we met:

"what do i tell the people of my village who have lost everything- family, friends, home, livelihood- to Tsunami? who is this God that i am to share with them?"
(rev david gunasari)

d'uh... good question.

journeys down 'alleyways of strife' have and always will be things of beauty... but not the comfortable, renaissance, dayglo psychadelic or off-in-a-field-somewhere-with-the-archbishop-of-canterbury kind of beauty... the kind of wild, action-painter beauty of jackson pollock paintings, bearing upon them the scars of the creative battle itself; the beauty of jacob's walk after his all-night UFC bout with an angel of God; the beauty of my friend rev david's angry resolve to hold tightly to his faith in an invisible God- the only thing in his life that wasn't destroyed by the disaster that destroyed his village and killed many of his family and friends.

there are very few things as inspiring to me as seeing the faith of one who is fighting an ongoing battle with something and refuses to relent on either the battle or the faith that brings greater strength to contend.

i find great inspiration in the white-knuckling of faith in the face of all manner of opposition. job's refusal to accept the advice of his wife to just 'curse God and die' makes him already victorious- but not in the manner of the 'colonial triumphalism' described above, which seems to be a 'fought the good fight, ran the good race' kinda thing.

in my view, job's 'victory' is an ongoing one of day to day conviction and plain perseverence- not in naivete but in hard-nosed faithfulness. rather than being the opiate of the people, faith for people like job and my friend is adrenaline, enabling them the supernatural strength to somehow do things that they really shouldn't be able to do.

but i don't think that any of this is what hineini is saying.
what i take from hineini's comment above is a challenge...

i am being challenged to find inspiration in the life lived in desperation, struggle and strain; the life lived to ultimate 'failure' in these Victory in Jesus terms; the life lived to bear testimony to the love and lifebreath of God simply because it is a human life, and being such bears the truth, the dignity and the opportunity to enlighten that is the very image of God.

upside-down

a friend was telling me recently of his journey through the book of Job. in this guy's view, Job was self-righteous- not in the 'naughty naughty you spiritual snob' way, but in that he was applying the method and effectively doing so to the point where he and anyone paying attention could draw the conclusion that there was some pretty sweet causality engaged here. until the time of testing, his view was no different than the views of his three friends or his wife.

this shines a light of plausibility upon the words of satan in the beginning of the book...

"look, this guy's sussed it- he's figured out the system, that's all. if you change all the rules and his sure-things become obviously much less sure, he will abandon this righteousness of which you, his creator, are so proud... you don't believe me? prove me wrong..."

here was, after all, the whole problem- he hadn't dropped the ball at all. things were just not the way they were supposed to be. the apple was not falling to the ground, it was just hanging in the air 'precisely the way bricks don't' (douglas adams)... somebody had reordered everything and the dramatic irony of it all was that the most righteous man alive was the only one who knew it (agonizingly so because of all of the pontification he had to endure from this wife and these friends that were supposedly there to bring encouragement and strength).

centuries later, Jesus would turn everything upside down in the same way- breaking the implicit order of things just when people were starting to get the hang of how to play the system. the old methods of establishing credibility and worth were no longer valid- the old causalities no longer held true... like a law in science that is suddenly overturned by some rogue coincidence leaving everyone wondering what else is out of sync that they just haven't discovered yet.

perhaps this is the spiritual bankruptcy of which paul speaks.

left, left, left right left

we were talking about this whole holy-militia approach to social issues. a good question came up:

are believers supposed to march or simply stand?

i mean, you can have your own stand on a social issue without marching around trying to spiritually bully people.

next up for incineration- the harry potter series... but narnia is fine.
and we can only drink milk from a christian cow.

onward christian soldiers
marching as to war
with the cross of Jesus
going on before...

i know that the brown shirt variety of believers make it very hard to even briefly consider that the God they serve may be valid, however they are hard right minority and like their islamic counterparts the al qaeda network, they don't speak for us all... they just think they do.

matt7.21-23 comes to mind... it's better to let God do the judging.

but everywhere we look, it becomes apparent that people are getting really tired of a bad-news gospel. take my friend fredcall... please! (jokes)

if i remember correctly, the conversational thread that led to fred's story about his younger brother began when he sent me a note that had been written proudly by a mother whose elementary school-age child had torn nearly the entire book of leviticus out of a bible because of basic justice issues arising from a literal misinterpretation of the scriptures.

i made a remark about this jefferson bible maneouver being simply an anti-religious expression of the same mindset that has books like catcher in the rye and huckleberry finn removed from schools and burned.

and, well, off we went, exploring together the differences between theology and ideology.

Ideology and spirituality are not one and the same. Unfortunately what is passing for fundamentalism (Christian, Judaic, Islamic, Scientologists and Moonies for example) are basing their beliefs on ideology, not spirituality...

Theosophically (or philosophically or politically or scientifically or whaterver) understanding what you are talking about goes a long way toward something along the spiritual line of tackling life's situations. Manchurian Candidate ideology is far short of anything I look upon as spirituality. If you (figuratively you) are marching to war, do you understand why you are marching to war, or are you wound up by an invisible hand- turned key. -fredcall

if i read his attitude towards most things correctly, he is interested in people's ability to sort things out for themselves rather than the simple adoption of a company line with regard to topics of ultimate importance. although fred's approach is confrontational and mildly unorthodox, his quest is the pursuit of enlightenment- not only for himself but for others- and it is fueled by, among other things, love and frustration.

love for his younger brother (which could be pretty much anyone who has been drawn into a faith that has robbed him or her of the capacity for reason amidst the faith) and frustration with empty words and pat answers in an increasingly complicated world.

One time I playfully asked my kid brother what he thought about Free Will versus Determinism (as bandied about by Dante and Milton and lots of others). My kid brother got this far away look in his eyes before saying, "Let me think about this before I answer." To which I said, "Sure, take your time." He went back to his (church) Elders with my question and they told him point blank rote what to say to me. He came back with some kind of response that were not his words. He didn't even understand what he was saying. He had memorized what he was told to reply without the foggiest clue what it all theosophically meant.

I had to bite my tongue cause he's my little brother and it's not my place to embarrass him in front of his fundamentalist friends. I just nodded and left the discussion at that having learned a lesson that I can't engage this (church) ideological bunch in a theosophical discussion.

well, now that is one heckuva playful discussion topic.
yeah, let's keep it nice and light and then we'll go wrestle in the backyard!

yet so much of our take on what's happening with regard to the big questions (and, might i also say, others' big answers) has to do with how we've managed to sort through this one in order to sleep at night.

in the last month, not prompted by anything circumstancial or situational or relational, I have been reading job. interesting book- especially as we read behind the dialogue that takes place between job and his friends. I really believe that these friends love him and that they are sincere, but their theology continues to take them around the horn to one particular notion: job has done evil and is refusing to acknowledge it.

we, the readers, have a pretty nice little role in the story: do nothing and learn all there is to learn vicariously. we read job's words to his friends and feel his frustration. we read his friends' words and hear the conventional, cause-and-effect wisdom. yet we have the luxury of knowing before the whole thing starts that God is in charge and job is, in fact, righteous. the discrepancies and the real spiritual danger for job lie in the fact that these dear friends are being used to cause job to doubt himself, his heart and his life, considering the possible integrity questions that are inherent in the statements that these guys make in order to defend himself against them. when they could be bringing strength, they are instead bringing doubt.

the book of job is a pretty good example that this kind of discussion has been going on for as long as people have been trying to sort out why so many bad things happen to good people in a world created and overseen/manipulated (big fork in the road right here) by a God who is supposed to be sovereign.

but will one man's answer ever really satisfy the longings of another man's soul? hmm.

i was thinking about an interesting quote by brian d mclaren from his book finding faith and decided to try to google it in order to cite his words correctly. i ended up at the site of a blogger whose online handle is based upon the same quote by cs lewis as my own... (http://jollyblogger.typepad.com/jollyblogger/2006/04/tim_challies_on.html)
well anyway, whether by free will, determinism or just a goofy coincidence, this guy has a post dealing with the emergent church... citing and acquiescing with, in particular, one guy's (a certain tim challies) misgivings with mclaren's take on the emergent church in the postmodern world:

The faith McLaren commends is a faith that always questions, always doubts. It seems that the only faith McLaren hates is the faith of a person who knows what he believes and is convicted by Scripture and by plain reason that what God has revealed is truth--true truth. As others have observed, the real enemy of the Emerging Church is conservative, biblical Protestantism.

well, regardless of challies' feelings about brother brian, the description cited is exactly what makes the work of mclaren resonnate with me. since when is questioning wrong? although Jesus likened people to sheep, i don't think that he intended for us to adopt the orwellian animal farm sheep's characteristic blind, unthinking ascent. Jesus also said that we are to have the faith of a child and, as you know, little children ask a million questions a day because it is in seeking answers to questions that people grow. if there's any point at all to this, it is that our asking of questions is as crucial to our brother's journey as it is to our own.

a friend of mine is a successful financial planner who was once a seminarian and decided that he just had too many questions of God to continue. well, whether he missed some sort of calling or not is between him and God, as he seems to be doing quite well managing other people's fortunes for fun and profit. i like going out for a guinness with him because the conversation is always engaging and always challenging.

i once said to him that if he were to ever meet someone who could ask him questions that stretched him and ripped conversational remote control from his hands long enough for him to begin searching for the answers, his faith journey might resume. you see, he knows that no one can respond to his questions with answers that satisfy his reason, so he does not have to change or grow.

i think that the primary factor at work in the heart and life of the 'questioning faithful' is that person's desire to actually discover the answers to the questions posed. sometimes we just ask questions to make points. who has time for all that rhetoric?

as for all this marching, standing, and burning things, there is nothing wrong with being activistic. however, sometimes we can be so convinced that we are the only ones who are right that everyone left is a liberal or heretic. the important spiritual, not ideological, discernment helps us to determine whether to march or to stand still to listen to the message on the wind. (yep, that's a fredcall soundbyte)

how much love is there in calling anyone an anything?