The Holy Mother

The Feast of the Assumption doesn’t get much press—good or bad—these days. It may have received such little press in your lifetime that you would be hard pressed to say what it is. It is the celebration of the day the Blessed Mother was gathered to the Eternal Habitations. Holy Mary, Mother of God.

Protestant Christians don’t have much to do with the Holy Mother, and many Roman Catholics distance themselves from her because they can’t believe the stories about her, and are somewhat ashamed to be connected through her to such a superstitious past. Here is, perhaps, the clearest, most wonderful imaginable example of how the insistence on a literal understanding of the tenets of religion destroys the heart of religion. The stories of Mary are not believable, we say, because they cannot be true. What we mean is that they cannot be true because they cannot be factual. That last sentence represents the sad loss of imagination for those of us who are children of the rational, intellectual, culture of the west. It represents, as well, the loss of heart and soul. And, we think we have what it takes to be spiritual.

We do not have what it takes to be spiritual as long as we insist that in order for something to be true it has to be actual, tangible, factual, and, hence, real—and that something symbolic, mythological, or metaphorical, cannot be real, or true.

We do not have what it takes to be spiritual as long as we insist that in order for something to be true it has to be historically verifiable. The truth of the matter is that truth has no necessary connection with that which can be observed, weighed, measured, counted, and independently corroborated by expert witnesses. For example, is the moon a white marble floating on a black velvet sea, or not?

But, I digress. I wish we could get together each year to celebrate the Feast of the Assumption for at least three reasons. One is that it would be good to spend some time with all of you, to listen to one another’s stories, to talk about the path that led us together. I would enjoy that. Getting to know you, getting to know each other, the highs, and the lows, the lessons learned and the discoveries made, the joys and the sorrows of our life to this point. The simple act of sharing time with people who may be enough like we are to listen with understanding to what we have to say, and to trust us to hear with understanding what they have to say—I’d like that.

The second reason is that if anybody has a chance to celebrate the wonder of the Holy Mother, it is the people who have made it to this point in this book and are still reading. We can be trusted to know that the real Mary was no more a virgin than any of us are, and that Jesus’ conception was no more immaculate than our own. Yet, we can in all candor, honesty, truth, and sincerity say, from the heart, “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you. Blessed are you among women and blessed is the fruit of your womb. Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.” We can with complete integrity, celebrate the Mother, the Birth, and the Son, because we know the deeper truth revealed in, and symbolized by, these images.

The third reason is that we can acknowledge along with that of Mary, the Assumption of all of those who have lived and died in the service of that which was greater than they were. In remembering and celebrating Mary’s dying, we remember and celebrate all those whose life made a difference-for-the-good in our lives, and in the life of the world.

The Holy Mother is the mother of us all, in a spiritual sense, and a physical sense. And we are all Mary, the Mother of God, in a spiritual sense, and a physical sense. Mary is at once external to us and internally of us. Mary is external to us in the sense that we cannot do it alone, and in the sense that we are not alone. Mary is externalized in the form of the community, in the persons of those who reach out to us, who birth us, nurture us, swaddle us, and bring life and hope to life within us. Mary is personified in the presence of those who are our life, and light, and peace.

Mary is internally of us, is within us, in that we are the ones who say, “Yes, may it be so!” We are the ones who hear, and hearing, do not scoff, or cynically denounce, or turn and run. Mary is experienced internally as courage, and wonder, and trust, and love. The Mary within is the creative openness to experience, the capacity to see beyond the ordinary routines and the hopeless drudgery of our lives into the heart of life, and behold the astounding marvel of being alive.

When we find, and align ourselves with, the Mary within and the Mary without, we have what it takes to be spiritual. We are not alone. And we know our calling, our purpose, is the same as that of the Blessed Mother—we all are the Mother of God. God is coming to life in us, and through us, into all the world.

Every birth in the spirit is a virgin birth, every coming to life in the spiritual sense of the term, is an Immaculate Conception. We are, in the words of Jesus to Nicodemus, “born from above.” We are not responsible for our own birthing. It is a miracle, every time.

With each of us, there are two births: Our physical birth and our spiritual birth. Everyone is born “of water and blood”—that would be the blood of the delivery room, of our physical birth, and the water of life flowing up from the wellspring of living water to bring our physical body to the fullness of life in the spiritual sense of our having life and having it abundantly.

We can live without being alive. Just because we are living doesn’t mean we are alive. Just because we are 98.6 and breathing, just because we are upright and intact, just because we can “sit up and take nourishment,” just because we can walk to the post office and to the bank, doesn’t mean we are alive. Being alive in the fullest, deepest, surest sense of the term is the essence of spirituality, and it is a gift “of the spirit,” a gift “from above.”

It isn’t about believing anything. It’s about a shift in perspective. It’s like an optical illusion, except that it is as real as it gets. You look one minute, and there is life, and you look the next minute, and there is being alive. You walk over to the crib and pick up the baby, or the grand-baby, and it hits you, and you will never be the same. You go to the dairy section of the grocery store and, reaching for a carton of eggs, your eyes catch the eyes of the person next to you, and there is an experience of seeing and being seen that is remembered forever, and changes everything, though no words are ever spoken, and you never meet one another again—yet the memory is a source of life and goodness for the rest of your days upon the earth.

You see the same old thing that you have always seen, yet you see it in a way that exposes, reveals, discloses, more than you have ever seen. You hear the cows coming to the barn again, yet, you hear it for the first time ever, and are reborn into a world of amazing wonders. It happens in a million ways, and none of them have to do with doctrine, with catechism classes, with being instructed in the creeds and the confessions of faith, or with memorizing the Books of the Bible in order. We are living, and then we are alive, and like that, we see, and hear, and know, and understand, yet, we can’t say what we do to effect the seeing, or hearing, or knowing, or understanding.

This is an Immaculate Conception! An experience of Grace! A Virgin Birth! Ave Maria! We are all Mary, the Mother of God, God being born in us and through us as a blessing unto all the world.

The Wall of Death

There was nothing about being born from above, or toeing the straight and narrow, or minding your P’s and Q’s when Abraham was taking God up on the deal for progeny and promised lands. It was just a straightforward “I’ll be your God, and you’ll be my people” kind of understanding. There was nothing about keeping the law, or believing everything in the Westminster Longer (or Shorter) Catechism, in order to get—and stay—right with God. In the beginning, things were not as they came to be. It is a principle that is valid and true everywhere in our lives.

Today, the world is different from the world we were born into. Tomorrow, the world will be different from today. It may well be different enough for us to notice the difference immediately. “Hey!” we may say upon getting out of bed, “Who changed my life over night?”

Streets are re-routed, baseball stadiums are built, and old ones become parking lots, new housing developments crop up where woods and pastures once were, our hearts quit working, cancer is diagnosed… The list is long. We cannot count on anything staying the same very long. You might think we would get used to it. We don’t. We buck and snort at the very idea every time. Change that is thrust on us without our permission is one of the things we hate most about our lives. We grow less tolerant of it as time goes by.

We become accustomed to the way things are. It becomes exactly our idea of how things ought to be. Our expectations are often disheveled by a simple unannounced turn of events. This isn’t what we are looking for! This isn’t how things are supposed to be! Where are the monkeys? Where are the clowns? What kind of circus is this, anyway? Once we begin to impose our idea of circus on the experience at hand, we cut ourselves off from the experience, and wander lost among the ruins of what once was our life.

When the map we are using no longer fits the territory, we have to update the map. We have to let go of how it used to be, and accommodate ourselves to how things are. There used to be a dairy farm where the shopping center is, and a feed and seed store where the exit ramp is—or, maybe not. There were hills here then, everything has been leveled, and it’s hard to know where anything was. The trick is to stop trying to orient ourselves in this world based on our fond recollections of that world. To have a chance in this world, we have to let that world go.

If we were space explorers stepping into the landscape of a new planet, we would not be disturbed to find that things were different than they were in the world of our origin. We would expect differences, embrace them, experience them, wonder about them, open ourselves to them, and see what we could learn from them. The truth is that we are explorers, getting out of bed each morning, stepping into the landscape of a new world. There is much to be learned in it—much to be gained from it. Life is unfolding before us, opening up, waiting for us to open up in return, so that it might show us unexpected wonders, and introduce us to magnificence beyond imagining.

We are looking for the monkeys and the clowns, and our life is tugging at us, trying to get our attention, so that it might take us through Tomorrow World and beyond—and perhaps give us a spin on the Wall of Death.

The Wall of Death, made famous by the song with that title by Richard Thompson, is a motorcycle ride that is a step or two beyond carousels, guaranteed to provide you with thrills and chills, and maybe, spills, aplenty.

I’m using the term, “Wall of Death,” as a synonym for being “born from above”—because the new life “from above,” will eat your old life alive. Or did you think the metaphors of Gethsemane, and Golgotha, have nothing to do with you transitioning from your old life to your new life?

Death is the prerequisite for life. In dying on the cross, Jesus is saying, “This is the way it is done! Come, follow me!” Somehow we missed that in all of the Bible studies, sermons and Sunday school lessons. The Spiritual Journey is a remedial course in how thing are. First we die, to how we thought things are, then we live, going, “Ohhhh… So this is how things are!”

This is a good place to recall Joseph Campbell’s words: “That which you seek lies far back in the darkest corner of the cave you most don’t want to enter.” We have to die in order to live.

Nicodemus went to talk to Jesus at night, perhaps to keep from being seen, and  is startled to hear that his old, comfortable, staid religion has been superseded by a lusty, young, start-up faith of the streets and market place. We are always stunned and undone to discover a new world has replaced the old one overnight. However, once we understand the Bible as the history of the evolution of the idea of God, it all begins to fall into place. Jesus stands before us all and says, “What you seek is in the back of the cave.”

The God the writer we call Second Isaiah perceived was radically different from the warrior God of Moses. The God Jesus called Father, was radically different from the God who sent Elijah to destroy the prophets of Baal. Nicodemus has to confront the fact that what he has always thought has to be re-thought, re-formed, transcended, in order to keep pace with the power of life that is always breaking out of history to transform the world again, with the spirit that is “like the wind that blows where it will.”

Jesus tells Nicodemus he has to take his chances in a world that is different from the world he has always known. God is up to something outside of the Temple! Outside of Jerusalem, God forbid! Out there in the wilderness of Galilee, of all places, and beyond!

God is stirring things up and making all things new! There is a fresh, innovative spirit blowing over the face of the deep, and Jesus is the harbinger of things to come, the merchandiser of new wine skins, the ticket master of the Wall of Death.

Being born from above means taking our chances. It all starts with being open to the moment, with our being alert to the nuances of the time that is at hand. Jesus’ indictment was that the people did not know “the time of their visitation.” They were looking for something else. They were looking for the comfortable old depictions of the Messiah to be unfolded before their eyes—but the Messiah wasn’t who they thought he would be.

Fred Craddock said the message of the Messiah is: “There is no Messiah!” There is no one to do for us what we must do for yourselves! And Meister Eckhart said, “The final leave-taking is leaving God for God.”

We all have to “take our chances on the Wall of Death.” We each must make our way to the back of the cave we most don’t want to enter! What we want is not what we get. The first thing that has to go is our idea of how it ought to be—and, that’s generally the last thing that goes.

We like our little nests. We like our comfortable constructions regarding who God is, and how the church is supposed to be. When it doesn’t feel like “church” to us, we blame the liturgy, or the hymns, or the sermons. We don’t allow our resistance, our objections, to show us anything about ourselves. We don’t open ourselves readily to new experiences that are capable, if we let them, of leading to surprising reversals, inexpressible wonders, and amazing revelations.

We cannot look at the world in the same way we have always looked at the world and see how the world has changed. We have to see the world with new eyes if we hope to see a new world, if we hope to see the world that is blooming, budding, and unfolding before us. To have a chance of seeing more than we have ever seen before, we are going to have to expose ourselves to new ways of looking, new ways of perceiving, new ways of experiencing—all of which are part and parcel of knowing “the time of our visitation,” and being “born from above,” and going for a life-long ride on the Wall of Death.

Will we do it, is the question. Can we do it, is the other question. Can we die to one way of life in order to live to another? Will we?

Will we set theology, and doctrine, and dogma aside, and embrace full emptiness, step into the silence, sit quietly in the stillness, and wait to see what emerges? And follow where it leads? And go where it sends us? And become who it asks us to be?

It would be like dying to be empty, quiet, and still, long enough to hear, would it not? To reflect on “the cave we most don’t want to enter” long enough for new realizations to arise? To look, and keep on looking, long enough to see?

Who has time for that? “Just tell us what to believe, Preacher, and make it short, I tee off at 12:15!” There’s no time for dying in that frame of mind!

An empty chair in the silent stillness can be the cave we most don’t want to enter. The Wall of Death has few takers. The Way waits for a traveler with what the journey requires: “Sit down, be quiet. Wait in the stillness to see what emerges, for as long as it takes.”

The Source and the Void

We have exactly the same access to the Source of Life and Being, to the presence of the sacred, to the Numen, as anyone ever.

They weren’t closer to the Source in the old days—they weren’t holier than we are, or wiser. Their only advantage over us was that they had fewer illusions/distractions/escapes with which to contend. They were more dependent upon their connection with the Source than we are. We have MasterCard, and 401-K’s, and all the other cushions we have created to protect us from the encroaching terrors. We have buffers standing between us and the Void. We have Global Positioning Systems to direct our steps. They only had what they knew of the numinous reality–for the mystery–that has always been called God.

There is much to be said for being stuck with only the Numen for a resource. It sharpens our intuitive powers, and heightens our feel for things. We can much better read the signs pointing out the way—we can much better sense the divine flow—we are much better oriented toward how things are, and how things truly ought to be—when we actually need to know those things, and don’t have anything else to divert our attention from the fact of our need for them, or offer competing directions or inauthentic pulls and pushes.

When we don’t have much in the way of personal resources, we don’t waste time trying to bring our will to bear upon the world of space and time, to have our way realized upon the earth. When we are helpless, and know we are helpless, we are much more likely to cooperate with what has need of us. The more power we think we have, the more our own needs and interests come into play, and we spend our time trying to effect our will for how we want things to be, and are not interested in a will that might be different from our own.

On the other hand, the percentage of those who were attuned to the presence and direction of the Source of Life and Being among the ancient population was probably no greater than the percentage of those so attuned among the present population. They had their own distractions, and their own ideas about how their life should be—and kept Shamans on hand to tell them what would please the invisible forces, and keep their food sources close at hand.

Whether then, or now, the proximity of the Source to both populations is exactly the same. The experience of the numinous reality that has always been called God is no farther from us now than it was then. The only thing that has ever been standing between us and the experience of that reality is ourselves. We only have to get out of the way, and we find the invisible world where it has always been: Right There!

It simplifies things if we understand there is only one thing about ourselves that we have to give up: Illusion. We have to hand over the illusion of power, the illusion of independence, the illusion of self-reliance, the illusion of control, the illusion of knowing where we are going, what we are doing.

No power, no control—that’s the reality. Here’s the illusion: I’m in charge. I’m in command. I’m the Master of my own fate, the Captain of my own destiny. The illusion is a tough one to hand over—it’s generally the last thing that goes, but, we aren’t going to know the Source until we know in our bones that apart from the Source there is nothing.

“Nothing” is another name for the Void. There is the world of normal, apparent reality. There is the reality of the invisible world—the experience of the numinous, the Numen, the sacred Source of Life and Being. And, there is the Void. That’s it. That is absolute, total, complete, final, real, ultimate reality. There is nothing between Us (That would be the visible world) and the Void, but the Source (That would be the invisible world).

This is the knowing that makes the Source, the invisible world, real in our lives. And, you can imagine, if you let yourself, how awful it is to come to the place of that knowing. To do that, we have to be stripped of all that we place between ourselves and the experience of the Void. The great mass of things we have gathered around us to protect us from the awareness of the Void is also what keeps us from the awareness of the Source. It’s what we depend on to make life grand—to make life fun, meaningful, enjoyable and worthwhile.

We see life-as-we-have-constructed-and-know-it as providing protection from the Void. We wrap it around us, we immerse ourselves in our relationships, achievements, possessions, acquisitions, and think, “Now we have it made! The Void can’t get us now!” Yet, it only takes one little something—say, the physicians telling us that our child has a month to live—for all of it to mean nothing. All that we place between ourselves and the Void is actually emptiness just waiting to be recognized. It doesn’t protect us from anything. It’s an extension of the Void. It’s the Void in disguise. It’s the Void setting us up to be totally devastated when it becomes apparent to us that there is nothing to any of it.

From one point of view, to say that there is nothing to any of it, suggests that the Void is everywhere and that it is hopeless, pointless, and makes no sense to go on. From another point of view, to say that there is nothing to any of it is to say that, nestled in the wonder of numinous reality, we know that the Void is there, and from the standpoint of our presence with the Presence, we know that, guess what, there is nothing to it. There is nothing to Nothing! That’s what we know in the presence of the Source of Life and Being. We have nothing to lose, and nothing to gain. We have it all, and can lose none of it, because it is all right here, wrapped up in being present with that which can be sensed, and known, but not said, and explained, or understood.

This isn’t to discount our losses. It isn’t to say they aren’t real, or that we shouldn’t do what we can to avoid tragedy, calamity, and hard rows to hoe. We should do everything we can to make things as good as they can be for ourselves and others, using the things at our disposal to do that. The ethical principle is to live as extensions of Numinous Presence in the world, using what we find there in the service of those ends.

We bring the values at the heart of life and being to life in the physical world. We live to express the amazing wonder of life within the world of space and time. And that means bearing the pain of the tension between worlds—between conflict and disparity between worlds—between what needs to happen in this world of space and time and what is actually possible here. This is the agony of God that we bring forth in our own life, much as Jeremiah did in his life (“O land, land, land! Hear the word of the Lord!”), and as Jesus did in his life (“How long am I to bear with you? How long must I put up with you and your hard-headed refusal to care or to understand?”). We live caught between what needs to be done, and what can be done, and do what we can.

Joseph Campbell summed up the Bhagavad-Gita as saying, “Get in there and do your thing, and don’t worry about the outcome!” This has to be our response to the clash between worlds—between realities. We get in there and do our thing, and let the outcome be the outcome!

We come into the world as a bundle of libido—life energy—dying to be expended before we die. Expended in the simple effort to meet our life straight on, and do our best with what confronts us in each day!

But, instead, we dodge all that can be dodged, and escape the rest, frittering life away on trivial pursuits, looking for smooth and easy, avoiding life’s pain and troubles (And denying what cannot be avoided), as libido waits, panics, seethes and schemes to find ways of expressing itself while there is yet time.

Time is life’s only hope. Time is all life has. If time isn’t spent living—in the fullest sense of the word—time is lost, never to be regained. The unpardonable sin is life un-lived.

Carl Jung said, “It is the sole purpose of the libido to strive forever forward—to lead a life that willingly accepts all dangers and ultimate decay” (or words to that effect).

If we refuse to cooperate with life’s purpose to be lived, if we hold back, hide from the terrors of the night, fail to sail into the heaving waves of the wine-dark sea, and have nothing to do with the dreaded responsibilities and duties incumbent upon those who would find their own way and pay the price—if we say no to life, life says no to us, and we die dreaming of a life we never lived, because we didn’t have the courage to meet the day’s demands, and take our lumps, and rack up our losses—laughing and loving it all, every bit, every day—life, just as it is!

Our place is to wake up to all of this and say, “We have done what we have done, and here we are.” We have to make our peace with that, and do what needs to be done in this moment, as well as we can make that out, and do it as well as we can do it, and let that be that—and go on doing what needs to be done in each moment, as well as we can make that out… For the rest of our life.

We live what remains of our life consciously, mindfully, as expressions of the values at the heart of life in the world of normal, apparent reality. In the world of normal, apparent, reality there is good and there is bad, there is gain and there is loss, there is advantage and there is disadvantage. In the physical world, our losses are real losses. We cannot discount them, or deny their impact by saying that in the invisible world there is nothing to be lost, and nothing to be gained. Here our losses are real, and must be mourned and grieved as such. Here our losses have to be feared and, to the extent possible, prevented. And here, perspective and orientation come into play.

We can live to insulate ourselves against the intrusion of the Void, or we can live to celebrate, experience, and express the reality of the presence of the sacred in the shadow of the Void, without being obsessed with the Void, or terrified by it. Living as expressions of sacred presence implicates us in the service of the good. We live to deepen the experience of the good in the lives of all people. This is fundamentally different from living to deny the reality of The Void, to avoid the experience of emptiness and loss, and to keep the truth of sorrow and suffering away.

To serve the good, and live as extensions of sacred presence, is to step into the heart of the Void with those whose life experience takes them there; it is to live with the Void as those who know there is nothing to it; as those who know it is not the ultimate reality that it pretends to be. It is to live as those who know that beyond the Void, at the heart of the Void, there is sacred presence, and goodness, and life.

It is to live in the world of physical reality as those who understand there is nothing to lose and nothing to gain—and as those who do not say that because of the ease with which that is misunderstood as discounting the reality of pain, suffering, loss and sorrow, which are very real in the Physical Realm and not to be denied. But, they are also not to be feared by those who know there is nothing to the Void, because the ultimate truth is the presence of the Source of Life and Being, where we find what we need to do what needs us to do it, moment-by-moment-by moment.

Ten Short Thoughts

1. The “Other World”

Primal peoples always believed that the visible world is grounded upon the invisible world. The invisible world is the world of the unconscious (because we are not conscious of it), and it is the source of consciousness and life. It is the spiritual world, and the ground of the physical world. Of course, I have no factual, rational, basis for alleging these things. I cannot prove it. Nothing we say about the invisible world can be ruled valid or invalid. We don’t know if such a world exists. It has always been thought to exist. But it is easy to start with the fact that the invisible world has always been thought to exist, and move into fantasy in an “if then, therefore” kind of way.

The unconscious world does not operate according to the laws of reason and logic, but we treat it as though it is just like this world of normal, apparent, reality. Motives that operate here, operate there. All of the emotions that hold sway here, hold sway there (God is a jealous God, you know, wrathful, angry and loving). We simply will not have a world we cannot see, hear, touch, taste, smell, understand or comprehend. We will make one up and say that’s it.

People talk about “extrasensory perception,” and say they talk regularly with the dead. Well, maybe. I know fooling ourselves is what we do best, and we can imagine the realest kinds of things. Whether anyone has ever actually talked with the dead, or had a legitimate out of the body experience—where they were able to read the title of a book, say, on a slip of paper placed on the top bookshelf by one of their friends—I don’t know. For all the reports of telepathy, and telekinesis, and teleportation, there are a greater number of studies debunking each one. As long as people have been claiming to have talked with the dead, they haven’t heard anything that has made much difference for the good in the way the world works, so we have to say, at the very least, that the dead aren’t much to talk to. They don’t appear to know any more than the rest of us, and if they do, they keep it to themselves.

If there is another world beyond this one, or another entire universe of worlds beyond this one, there is nothing in this world that would allow us to know anything about it. That hasn’t stopped us. We’ve been imagining worlds beyond this one for as long as we’ve been here. We generally populate those worlds, or that world, with supernatural beings, with gods, who have an unaccountably intense interest in this world—an irrepressibly compulsive stake in our lives—and who seem to be a lot like we are, only bigger, and, sometimes better, sometimes worse.

It may be supernatural, and God may be Omni-everything, but everything in that world seems to hinge on how things go in this world. God can’t be happy and at peace if we aren’t minding our P’s and Q’s. God’s mirth depends upon our obedient and faithful service. We may be little squirmy nothings, but we have the power to make God boil, seethe, and punish us with lakes of lava, and fire and brimstone everlasting—or reward us with blessings and glories beyond imagining in a world without end amen.

So go the stories.

Is there a bit of compensation going on here, in these stories we’ve made up about the other world, to console ourselves about the life that is forced on us by this world? Quite possibly. What we do know is that we have always told ourselves stories about the world, or worlds, beyond this one, and in those stories, we always play the central role. The gods revolve around us. They can’t get us out of their minds. We are the sole focus of their lives.

Which leads one to wonder, what would the other world be like without us, without this world? We are always looking to the other world as an escape from this world, but if this world is the primary concern of the powers that hold sway in the other world, what’s in the other world for us except more of this world? And, what exactly is it about this world that rankles us so? That warrants escape? That lends itself to fantasies about UFO’s, and the internal structure of the spiritual realm? From what are we trying to save ourselves? From what do we need to be delivered? What is so bad about this life in this world that we have to distract ourselves with imaginative speculations about life in the other world? What does thinking about that world keep us from thinking about in this world?

What do we not like about our lives in this world? Suffering and pain and things not going our way? Except for that, is everything fine? Life on terms not our own sends us right up the wall. You would think that we would be better adjusted to that by now. Better adjusted to the idea that this is it. Why hasn’t time developed a peace and tranquility gene? What’s the evolutionary advantage to maladjustment, to discontent? Could it be that Neanderthal had a knack for settling for the way things are, and lacked the internal dissatisfaction, the resistance, the “No!” that pushed Cro-Magnon out of the caves and into the high rises? Is a too-easy acceptance of “the facts,” death to the species? Is the curse of disgruntlement the secret to our success? We’ll probably never get to the bottom of it.

Suffice it to say that the other world has a remarkable degree of entertainment value for those of us eking out an existence in this world. We have no idea if any of the stories we have concocted have any correlation with what, if anything, lies beyond. But, if we are going to make up something, if we are going to believe something, it may as well be helpful. We may as well believe the other side is interested in helping us. We may as well believe that the idea, the organizing principle behind all of it, is something like integrity, or alignment-of-being, and that the interest of the other world, the investment of the other world, is in the expression of beauty, goodness, and truth in this world—that this world exists to give tangible existence to the intangible spiritual values of the other world, and that our cooperation is essential in that enterprise.

I don’t know if it’s true, of course, but it does no harm to think so, and it is a comfort to me to believe it—much more so than thinking that the other world is about revenge and vindictiveness. There is enough of that just down the road.

2. Help With Our Life

Where is chaos erupting in your life? Where has change become unmanageable? Where are the barriers protecting you against the forces of turbulence and upheaval beginning to crumble ? Not to worry. It’s nothing we haven’t seen before. It all starts with chaos, you know.

Carl Jung said, “There is no coming to consciousness without pain.” We do not grow up in a life that is exactly like we want it to be. The path through “the heaving waves of the wine-dark sea” is laid out nicely for us in all of the myths and legends of the ages.

All of the old creation stories begin with a chaotic, unstructured, unformed, swirl. None of them start with nothing. “Creation out of nothing” was a uniquely Christian, and late, formulation. The Bible never says there was nothing. Nothingness was not a concept the ancient ones could entertain. “In the beginning, the earth was without form, and void, and darkness covered the face of the deep.” That’s the way the Bible describes it. There is always something. And, it’s a mess.

The creative act is not bringing something out of nothing. The creative act is bringing order to chaos. The creative act is structuring the mess. It is what every newborn has to do upon entering the world. We meet chaos, and have to make sense of it, have to order it. We are greeted by a terrifying swirl of colors and sounds. It’s up to us to do something with it. We have to find the patterns, impose structure, separate foreground from background, create order, and discover ways of making our experience meaningful. That remains the task of life throughout life.

We are always coming upon something that throws everything out of kilter. The harmonious pulsation of the womb is shattered by lights, action, cameras, nurses, blankets and someone saying, “I’m your mommy.” Home is gone forever, and we have to make our peace with that—and find our way in a new world that we hate, and want nothing to do with. About the time we get comfortable there, it happens all over again. “This” is snatched away, and “that” is handed to us. Chaos is always “right there,” ready to break into our lives and destroy everything, laughing.

To make it bearable, we structure our lives in ways to keep chaos at bay. We develop systems, rituals, and routines so we don’t have to wake up every morning and start the day with what we are going to do to maintain life that day. Of course, this only gives chaos something else to play with, and “like that,” a hurricane, earthquake, or tsunami comes along to destroy our routines and regimen—and, we are lost, undone, traumatized and disoriented, and have to reorder our lives, again.

“The whole catastrophe,” to quote Zorba the Greek, amounts to intrusions into our ordered universe. Tornadoes, death, marriage, divorce, disease, job loss, the baby going to kindergarten, or graduating from college, or marrying and moving away from home, or divorcing and moving back home, are all places where it seems as though “the rug has been yanked from under our lives.” Some of us never recover.

Recovery is a matter of coming to terms emotionally with our loss, and finding the wherewithal to impose new patterns on our lives. In order to regain our stability, we have to regroup, revive our sense of purpose, reorient our lives, and reorder our world. The creative act of structuring chaos is ongoing and unending. We live, you might say, to create small islands of stability and sanity within a great sea of rolling madness—and the work is never done.

When the dike that is holding back the chaotic forces begins to leak, and the turbulence becomes unbearable, and the forces of upheaval and destruction sweep over the landscape, where do you go to breathe, regain your composure and your perspective, and map out a plan, in order to step back into the action? What are your resources for dealing with the turmoil? What do you rely on when you have nowhere to turn?

In order to tackle chaos, it helps to have a community of the right kind of people—people who understand—or, at least, understand that they don’t understand—and care about each other. Creation is a team sport. Artists talk with fellow artists. Poets have coffee with other poets. Inventors call up inventors. Scientists hang out with scientists. Composers have lunch with composers. We cannot manage our lives alone. People who are working to be awake, aware and alive have to spend time in conversation with people who are working to be awake, aware and alive—about the things that are essential to their work.

We need a community of like-minded people who recognize and embrace the importance of listening one another to the truth of who each is. We need a community that makes understanding each other the core of their life together—in the belief that being understood is all we need to understand ourselves, know who we are, and live in ways that align us with ourselves and put us in accord with our life, in service to our life.

We need a community for dialogue, for conversation, that comes out of an affiliation for, and time spent regularly and routinely with the right kind of emptiness, stillness and silence. The noisiest place in the world is where we are sitting quietly, and all the noise is in our heads! The right kind of emptiness, stillness and silence empties all the noise out, and is empty even of the desire to be empty.

When we clear out the noise and reduce the complexity, we open ourselves to the presence of the resources of the unconscious world, which is the source of all of out dreams and visions, and is that “very present help in time of trouble” upon which we all depend, whether we know it or not.

3. Blurring the Line Between Ourselves and God

Jesus had a unique perspective of God which stood apart from the quid pro quo, tit for tat, “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours,” way of thinking about God that was the prevailing view among the people and the religious authorities of his day—and is quite the rage in our own day. Before the Babylonian Captivity (when the army of Israel was defeated and all of the people who mattered were led along their “trail of tears” to Babylon, where they lived for about 70 years), the popular view was that of God as Champion and Deliverer who rescued Israel from oppression in Egypt, and established them in an everlasting covenant as the Chosen People of God in the never to be repossessed Land of Promise.

Babylon put an end to that happy fantasy, and the people and priests had to re-think some very fundamental matters. After their release from captivity, and in the process of rebuilding the destroyed temple in Jerusalem, an old text containing the Law of Moses was discovered (Or planted, and “discovered”), and an “Aha! Moment” occurred. “Of course!” they said, “That’s it! Now we see!”

What they saw was that they hadn’t properly kept the Law all those years, and Babylon was the result of their failure to walk the straight and narrow! Their idea of God then evolved to allow God’s Covenant with Israel to be contingent upon their faithful obedience to the divine commandments and ordinances! In order to get something from God, they had to give something to God. If they wanted God to protect and defend them, they had to be really, really good. From Babylon on, God becomes Watcher and Judge, and the people have to live carefully pleasing lives, in every respect, or else.

Jesus stepped into this framework and trashed it. He healed on the Sabbath, associated with the disenfranchised, the outcast, and the unclean. He presumed to speak for God, but said the most outlandish things, and greatly offended the religious sensibilities of practically everyone who mattered. His behavior was seen as a threat to the people. If they didn’t deal quickly with him, God would surely be incensed. How they responded to Jesus’ blasphemy and irreverence was a test of their own faith. If they didn’t shut Jesus up the whole nation would be obliterated: “It’s better for one man to die than for the whole nation to be destroyed!” said the High Priest, as they consulted one another about the “Jesus Problem.”

Jesus’ crucifixion was nothing personal. The Jewish authorities were simply acting out their idea of God—in accordance with their deeply held beliefs about God, and what it took to please God. They were certain that if they didn’t keep God Very Happy with them, a repeat of Babylon, or worse, would follow. Even in Christian circles, in the Book of Revelation, Rome was considered to be the modern—for those times—equivalent of Babylon. The Jews knew they had to be ever so careful.

Jesus, of course, didn’t see it that way, and that is the reason for his death. Jesus saw God, not as a vengeful, revengeful, Killer God, but as compassionate as the prodigal’s father, or a kind Samaritan. God, from Jesus’ viewpoint, was gracious, generous, and very present for good in the lives of the people, all people, no matter what. Jesus saw himself as an extension of the qualities of God in his own relationships, and lived with the people as God would live in his place. Jesus reflected his idea of God—his understanding of God—to the people, and said, boldly enough, “The Father and I are one,” and “If you have seen me, you have seen the Father.”

That’s what we all should be saying, “The Father and I are one.” We all should be living so that the line between God and us is blurred—so that no one can be sure where we stop and God starts. It isn’t a morally pure kind of life that blurs the line, but a compassionate life, a kind life, a gracious life, a generously loving life that sees into the heart of things, and offers exactly what is needed to each moment as it unfolds. This is the Categorical Imperative: If we have what is needed in the situation as it arises, we must offer it, no matter what, or, to put it a bit differently: Those who can help must help, and whose who need help must be helped!

Our lives have a way of asking for exactly what we have to give. What is needed is always the gift—the genius, the art—that is latent within us waiting for an opportunity to come forth and grace the world. It is our place to offer ourselves to the moment, to the time of our living, to each other, to the situation as it arises—when and where our gift, and the need of that here and now, meet.

It’s easier to hide out in the Law and the Prophets than to put ourselves on the line in each moment, bringing forth what is ours to give for the good of the moment. We can do that only out of an orientation of heart and soul that cares about other people, and the world in which we live, as God would in our place, so that it could be said of each of us: “The Father and I are one.”

4. The Quest for God

The quest for God requires specific things of us. We don’t just roll over, and there’s God. Well, actually, we do just roll over, and there’s God, but in order to recognize God when we roll over, we have to be at the place of readiness to recognize God. Readiness comes about mostly through our handing over (or having stripped away) our ideas about how life should be, and who God is. This reflects another of the 10,000 Spiritual Laws: “The only thing standing between us and God is us.”

Our ideas about how life should be, and who God is, keep us from perceiving God. We cannot know the God Who Is as long as we are attached to Who We Think God Ought To Be. One of the functions of the cross in the lives of the disciples (And in our own lives, if we could step away from everything we’ve ever heard about the cross, and confront in it the vulnerability and helplessness of God) was to separate them from their idea of God and of the Messiah. This is the “scandal of the cross.” The Coming One is not supposed to die at the hands of his enemies! What kind of sense does that make? None whatsoever. And, that’s exactly the point.

The God Who Is makes no sense. It’s utter nonsense to think God is the way God is. God, by our definition, is bigger, better, finer than anything we can imagine, but somehow always manages to be exactly what we imagine. God is Almighty, Omnipotent, Omniscient, Thoroughly In Charge, and Completely In Control. We will not have it any other way! We must have a universe in which everything that happens, happens for a reason—happens because God makes it happen, or, because God allows it to happen as a part of the Plan. Our God has a Plan, and a fine Plan it will prove to be! We are convinced of it. We believe more in the Plan than in the Planner.

This is the idea of God, or one of them, that we have to hand over (or have stripped away), if we are going to perceive God, apprehend God, know God. Our idea of God disintegrates in one of two ways. Life can take it from us by exposing its inadequacy, or we can recognize its shortcomings by thinking about it until it becomes absurd. I recommend thinking about it.

Thinking about our idea of God immediately places some distance between God and our idea of God. Once we recognize that everything we hear about God, including what I’m suggesting here and now, is just someone’s idea of God, and not God, we put a bit of space between what is said about God, and God. Or, to come at this another way, we might say that everyone knows what they are supposed to think about God, and everyone knows what they do, in fact, think about God, but, not everyone knows what to do with the discrepancy. It is when we think about the discrepancy that new ideas of God come into being. Among those new ideas is the idea that the ideas are only ideas—they have nothing to do with the God beyond all ideas of God.

At the point of knowing that God is beyond knowing, we enter a level of openness to the paradoxical nature of truth, which includes what is true to our experience, and what is also true to our experience (which might contradict what is true to our experience), and what is beyond our experience. This reflects another of the 10,000 Spiritual Laws: “Truth is found between the hands,” that is, “On the one hand, this, and, on the other hand, that and on some other hand that over there!”

This openness to the paradoxical nature of truth lends itself to a state of mindfulness, and playfulness, that is more intuitive than rational—that knows without knowing how it knows—without being able to articulate what it knows. Sheldon Kopp said, “Some things can be experienced, but not understood; and some things can be understood, but not explained.”

God is everywhere. There is no distinction between sacred and secular, between holy and profane, between God and Not-God. God is all, and in all, and through all, and beyond all. God simply IS. Everything is a doorway into God, an avenue to God, a path to God. Or, can be if approached in the proper frame of mind. That which is Not-God can lead to God. So, there is a sense in which Not-God is God.

But. Even though God is everywhere, it takes a unique perspective to see God anywhere—a peculiar openness, a radically present presence. We have to be God to see God, or on our way to being God. We cannot sit back, looking for God at a distance, through binoculars and telescopes, concepts, doctrines and discussions. We know God by living Godly lives. And, we are back to the fundamental spiritual law, “In order to know God, we have to live in certain ways.”

We cannot know God if we do not live compassionately. Association with God, awareness of God, leads to, is exhibited in, is expressed by, and flows from, a life which radiates the high (or deep) values, such as love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, gentleness, mercy, justice, hospitality, grace, etc. Association with God does not lead to careless, reckless, dispassionate living. God is everywhere, yet, the only life that leads to God is lived toward goodness, love, kindness and peace—toward the best we can imagine. We cannot expect to find our way to God by living just any life at all—The wedding guest is cast out of the banquet because he wasn’t dressed appropriately, and the “Evil doers” are turned away because “In as much as you did, or did not do, it to one of the least of my brothers and sisters, you did it, or did not do it, unto me.”

The way we live is of God, or not. The quest for God that finds God is the life of God. We have to be what we seek. The life of godliness, of goodness, of compassion and peace cultivates godliness, goodness, compassion and peace. It enhances life, deepens our connection with God, and honors the reality of God within us and all people. Joseph Campbell said, “The influence of a vital person vitalizes.”

We honor the reality of God when we exhibit the high/deep values, treating one another, and all people, with honor and respect—loving one another, and all people, for who we/they are—and creating a community of presence, the membership of which is not based upon agreement, or conformity, or mutual allegiance to a common creed, or system of beliefs, but upon mutual esteem and reverence for the person of the other, for the perspective of the other, for the aspects of God that are hidden in, and revealed by, the other.

We create the God we seek in the way we live while seeking. And Zen is like a man sitting on his ox, looking for his ox—like a woman holding her car keys, looking for her car keys. And heaven is where we laugh at all of the things we thought were important that kept us from seeing and doing what was important.

5. God is the Stream of Life

The most recent old idea of God has carried us as far as it can. We are at the point—and have been for some time—of re-imagining God, of understanding “God” in a way that squares with all that we know about the physical universe, and what we can intuit of the spiritual/invisible/unconscious (Because we are not conscious of it) universe. We can take up the process of re-imagining God from within the Bible itself, and carry it forward in ways that are compatible with what else we can know, and intuit.

In the Bible, we find a wonderful old hint about the nature of God in a text that is lost in the mass of texts with a different, more Godly view of God in mind. In that ancient passage, the Israelites are making good progress in their conquest of the Promised Land, when they come upon a group of Philistines who have chariots and horsemen. The text (in Judges 1:19) reads, “The Lord was with Judah, and he took possession of the hill country, but (he) could not drive out the inhabitants of the plain, because they had chariots of iron.”

As the story plays out, God comes up with something, and sends the rain which creates the mud, which mires the wheels of the chariots, removing them from the equation and making victory possible. But, the opening has been created. God can be, at least, temporarily, stumped. Even God has to find a way. God cannot merely will iron chariots out of existence. But. What kind of God is that?

We are always having to come up with a God we can believe in.

The destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BCE by the Babylonians, and the deportation of a large portion of the Jewish population to Babylon, resulted in a theological crisis typical of all encounters with a devastating reality: What can we believe now that our beliefs have been invalidated, and our God has let us down? The religious leaders of the Jews in Babylon put together an idea of God that took the defeat of the nation into account, and saved the religion by giving it a foundation that could withstand any shock.

They said, in essence, that the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Moses was not defeated by the army of Babylon, but used Babylon to punish the people of God who had been shamefully faithless and disobedient. If the nation repented, good things would come its way again. But, if it persisted in its pattern of behavior, it would be lost forever.

The idea of God as “a very present help in time of trouble” that was operative prior to the fall of Jerusalem, had to be re-imagined by those whose task was to give the people a God they could believe in—and they gave them the God we are at the point of re-imagining today.

The God who came out of the Babylonian Captivity, was very different from the God who went into Captivity. The spin doctors took the experience of God’s failure to be the God the people believed God to be, and said, “God is Almighty, Omnipotent and Stupendously Awesome Beyond Measure, but. Only in the service of those who are utterly obedient in every way.

This is the same theory of God that resurfaces following the crucifixion of Jesus to declare that Jesus lives, and that God blesses those who believe it with life that will never die. God, it was said, used the Romans and the Jewish authorities as pawns in the Almighty’s Plan of Salvation, so that Jesus could die as a sacrifice acceptable to God, and all the world could be saved if it repents and believes. If it doesn’t, then, just like the theorists in Babylon suggested, there is going to be hell to pay—and the Book of Revelation emphasizes just how terrible hell will be.

Missing both in Babylon, and in the aftermath of Jesus’ death, is the idea that God is as vulnerable and helpless as a stream on parched ground. The text in Judges hints at this possibility, and the birth and death of Jesus shout it from the housetops.

The Messiah, the Coming One, the Christ, the Anointed One, is born in a stable, wrapped in swaddling cloths, and laid in a manger. God, we are told, comes to us as a baby in a manger and dies as a man on a cross. The Babylonian theorists would have been appalled at this turn of events, but, in Jesus, we get an image of God that is quite compatible with that of the God who is confounded by iron chariots.

In Jesus, God is impotent, powerless, “up against it,” and dependent upon us for sustenance and support. God is not powerfully apart from us, but one-with-us, one-of-us, in the work toward the good. God is a partner with us in doing what needs to be done—and needs our total participation and collaboration in effecting God’s will upon the earth. It is a full partnership, a joint effort, a coalition of mutual support from start to finish.

God is the Stream of Life flowing through us, around us, within us, calling us to wake up, and live in accord with the Stream of Life.

God is the Stream of Life flowing downhill, dealing with beaver dams, landslides, fallen trees and droughts—finding a way to deal with everything that comes its way—flowing on, drying up, and flowing on again, without ever losing its “stream-ness,” giving up or forgetting its purpose.

God is the Stream of Life, as helpless and vulnerable, yet as unrelenting and eternal, as water flowing downhill in its search for a way to the sea.

The Stream finds a way. The Stream is one with us, one of us, in the mutually dependent dance of life with life. The Stream needs our willing participation, cooperation and collaboration to deal with iron chariots, crosses, and the harsh facts of life in the world of physical reality.

The Stream flows through us and with us to help us imagine the way forward—to encourage us and sustain us in the work of preparing its way in the wilderness, in the work of serving and establishing the high values of Life upon the earth, and is the expression and exhibition of the art of life, living and being alive.

6. Good Faith Is the Best Kind of Faith

You have heard this already, and, you are likely to hear it again: Truth is found between the hands. On the one hand, it’s like this. On the other hand, it’s like that. Socrates said at his trial, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” That is certainly true as far as it goes. Sheldon Kopp said, “The unlived life is not worth examining.” The circle is complete. There is the way things are. And there is the way things also are. And that’s the way things are. This is symbolized neatly in the yin/yang of Taoism. Yin is the way things are. Yang is the way things also are. And the circle containing them is the way things are. Reality, you might say, is one in its duality, in its polarity.

William Blake put it beautifully: “Without Contraries, is no progression” (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell). This means our work is “working it out.” We are always and forever “working it out.” We integrate the opposites, reconcile the contradictions, live between the polarities, and maintain the tension between disparate truths. We go too far in one direction, and have to be reeled in, called back, by the forces contained in the opposite direction. This is “finding the center” or “walking the straight and narrow.” We live on the boundary—on “the razor’s edge”—between yin and yang. We have to be “rounded out” by the opposition in order to “square ourselves with” that which is true, and that which is also true. We find our way forward in a conversation with the contraries within and without. The opposites do not cancel each other out, but open each other—and ourselves—up to worlds, to possibilities, we could not imagine, or enter on the strength of one point of view alone.

This opening is enabled by the right kind of conversation with the opposites, between the opposites, among the opposites. The right kind of conversation enlarges, deepens, transforms, integrates, reconciles, unites, makes whole. The right kind of conversation is the way to the Way, individually and collectively. The kind of community that is required for living properly aligned with Inner and Outer Reality, centered, in sync, and on the Path, is a community of opposites, of polarities, where all persons take each other seriously, treat each other with the deepest respect, honor each other’s perspective, and allow conversation with one another to expand, deepen, and enlarge one’s own sense of how things are, and what needs to be done in response.

In this kind of community there is not one way of seeing, thinking, believing and doing. There is no sense of “our way” being the Right Way and “their way” being the Wrong Way. The right kind of community is not “one big happy family” in firm agreement about what to think, feel, believe and do. It is a community that values contrary views, and finds the way to the Way by taking all pertinent perspectives into account, and allowing them to inform, and guide, the development of each participant in the community, and each participant is responsible for determining, and doing what she, what he, thinks needs to be done in each situation as it arises.

The heart of the kind of community that is necessary for the development of individuals who are living lives aligned with the Way, and who are bringing forth their gifts in ways that serve and save the world is, what Rumi calls, “good faith.” He says, “If you are not here with us in good faith, you are doing terrible damage.” Good faith is the key to our life together.

“Good faith” describes our commitment, our covenant, to each other to do right by one another, to be with one another in ways that are good for the other, to offer the right kind of help in the right kind of way, and to help others help us by not being too needy or too dependent ourselves. It also recognizes the old truism that “good fences make good neighbors,” and carefully observes the Old Testament commandment (One that did not make—but should have made—the Top Ten): “Thou shalt not remove thy neighbor’s landmark!”

We do not do violence to our neighbors’ boundaries by offering them the wrong kind of help in the wrong kind of way, and we trust our neighbors to do right by us, as much as they trust us to do right by them. And we live to not let each other down.

7. The Doctrine of The Two Ways

The Doctrine of the Two Ways—the Right Way and the Wrong Way—has been the central religious view in the Near East and the West for thousands of years, and is the predominant religious outlook today. We are seeped in the Doctrine of the Two Ways. We believe deeply that the way we believe (and think, and do) is the Right Way to believe (and think, and do) and that all other ways of believing (and thinking, and doing) are the Wrong Way to believe (and think, and do).

It gets worse. We believe that if we believe the Right Beliefs, we will go to heaven when we die, and that if we believe the Wrong Beliefs, we will burn in the everlasting fires of Hell. The idea of heaven as a reward for Right Belief, and hell as a punishment for Wrong Belief is the fundamental religious curse that people carry with them throughout their life—and with which they infect all who come their way.

Because we cannot risk being wrong, and going to hell, we cannot question what we have received as Right Belief, and have to believe what has been believed unquestioned through the ages. In so doing, we create a hell on earth populated by the walking dead—empty-eyed and soulless—talking about the joys of Eternal Life as compensation for the life they are not living, and never have lived, thanks to the Doctrine of the Two Ways.

Darkness and Light, Good and Evil, Right and Wrong, Truth and Error, the Way of Life and the Way of Death, etc. are set out before us, and the wise among us choose well, and the foolish, or evil, among us choose poorly. Believers are urged to pray, therefore, that they will choose well in order to be ushered into the Kingdom of Goodness and Light with the accolade: “Well done, good and faithful servants!”

There is, of course, a different way of looking at things—if you dare!

Good, at some point, goes over into evil. Evil, at some point, goes over into good. Not only that, but from some point of view, good is evil and evil is good. Floods, for example, that destroy homes, lives and livelihoods, also fertilize the land to produce the crops that feed the people. Are floods good or evil? Both! What’s good for the fox is evil for the hen, which raises the question: Whose good is the good we call good? And, “How good id the good we call good?” As the old saying goes, “There is so much good in the worst of us, and so much bad in the best of us, it doesn’t behoove any of us to talk about the rest of us.” Absolute Good, and Absolute Evil, are theoretical concepts without precedent in the lived experience of human beings. Given the truth of the relative nature of the options set before us in the Two Ways, we can’t long avoid the realization that it is not as simple as we have been led to believe. It is nothing at all like we have been led to believe.

Think not of living a morally pure and upright life, and deserving heaven when we die. Think instead of living aligned with the Way of Life, and living the life that is our destiny–our life to live—of being properly engaged with inner and outer reality, and offering what is needed out of what is ours to give to each situation as it unfolds. It is not a matter of matching our behavior up to some ancient standard, or code, but of responding appropriately to the moment, in each moment of our life, doing what is needed there, never mind what our parents, or preachers, declare ought to be done.

If we are wrong about what needs to be done? Shake it off! Get up! Get ready! Get back in the game! The next moment is on the way!

The beauty of The Doctrine of More Than Two Ways is that getting it wrong is just a step on the way to getting it right. The meandering of the river is no threat to the sea. The roots of tomorrow’s Right are firmly grounded in yesterday’s Wrong.

Learn from your mistakes. Learn from your successes. Learn from everything. Living is the lesson and life is the teacher. We have a lifetime in which to learn what being alive is all about. Wake up! Pay attention! Be alert! Take a chance, and another one after that! There is life to be lived! We are not dead yet, and we must not live as though we are! Do not die before you are dead! Live with all that is within you for as long as life is possible no mater what! That’s the way that is the Way of Life for us all! Step into your life with your eyes open, and see where it goes! Moment-by-moment-by-moment! What’s hard about that?

8. Destiny

Destiny is not the same as fate. Our fate consists of the givens present in our life situation—the time and place of our living, our genetic make-up, who our parents were, what is available for us to work with, how things are with us across the board, around the table. Our fate is also what becomes of us, what happens to us—what we are left with—if we reject, deny, or ignore our destiny. We either embrace, and serve, our destiny, or we succumb to our fate. There is no third option.

Our destiny is what/who we are called to become within the time and place, the context and circumstances, of our living. Destiny is what we do with our fate, what we construct with the materials that are available for us to work with, who we show ourselves to be through the process of living our life. We are called to a particular destiny in exhibiting the gifts that are—the genius that is—uniquely ours within the circumstances of life, which are generally the same for a large number of our contemporaries, though our destinies are quite different.

You can think of destiny as “God’s will for our lives,” or “the way of Tao.” What is called “the will of God,” or “the way of Tao,” is the same way. It is the same as the destiny that is ours to live out within the fate that is ours to deal with.

When we live aligned with our destiny, and live to bring ourselves forth, we also bring what has always been thought of as God, or the Tao, forth in our life and into the world of normal, concrete, apparent reality.

Here’s the problem: We are conflicted at the core. Our heart’s true desire is to be one with its destiny and we have eyes for a life of our own, with lights, glamor and action. The work of maturity is connecting with, and living aligned with, our heart—and dying to our idea of what is important. We embrace our heart’s idea, our soul’s idea, of what is important, and let our idea go. This is the conscious ego becoming conscious of its role, and playing it out, exactly as it needs to be played out: “Thy will, not mine, be done!” “Those who would be my disciple must pick up their cross daily and follow me.” The conscious ego submits to a will and a Way greater than its own. Our cross is the difference between our soul’s idea of what is important and our conscious ego’s idea of what is important. Our cross the price we pay for doing what is ours to do within the context and circumstances of our life.

The heart knows its true joy/love–its destiny–and it is our place to align ourselves with the drift of heart/soul toward its sense of where it belongs, and what it needs to be about. This is going with the flow in the deepest, truest sense of the term—and going against the gain of our own idea of how things need to be.

In living this way, Jesus is the “first born of all creation,” calling everyone with his “come follow me!” and his “No one comes to the Father but by me—no one comes to the Father but by dying like me!” We have missed the point of these sayings, thinking that Jesus was talking about himself. Jesus was talking about his perspective, his orientation, his attitude, his point of view, his focus on living out his destiny within the context and circumstances of his life, his refusal to let anything deter him, untrack him, in the work to bring forth his genius, his gift, in doing what was called for by the situation as it arose before him. This is bearing our cross. This is what he calls us to do in our own life.

This is the work that always been called salvific. Salvation is restoration, being restored to, being aligned with, that which is our destiny, our true life. It is the work recognition, realization, awareness, understanding, enlightenment. It is the work of maturity—and of grace. Maturity because no one can do this work who is not growing up, and grace because no one can claim any credit for the growing up that we do.

Our life’s work is awakening to our heart’s true joy—its love for, and affiliation with, its destiny—and letting that become our life. We are here to live the life that is ours to live in serving our destiny within the context and circumstances of our life (Our fate). As we do that, we become who Jesus was, who God is, and live at one with ourselves, and with the Source of Life and Being.

9. Directing Our Lives

As things currently stand in the culture, getting, having, owning, possessing, consuming, controlling, amassing, achieving, accomplishing, succeeding, winning, defeating, conquering, and the like direct our living. We live to get these things done. We do what we do with these things in mind. Our living is governed by things outside of us which we hope to get, have, own, possess, etc., and what we do is determined by what we want our doing to do for us. We live to have our way done on the earth. Ours is a getting, owning, acquiring, having, etc., culture. We live to get what we want, and have it made, and bask in the wonder of having done it. Everything serves that end.

Education is not about knowing, thinking, comprehending, feeling, intuiting, expressing or understanding, but about positioning ourselves to succeed, basically, by being gainfully employed. A good job has nothing to do with the goodness of the job, but everything to do with how much money we are paid for doing it. Ask any child or adolescent what they want to be when they grow up, and see how many of them say “kind,” or “compassionate,” or “generous,” or even “honest.” They might say “rich,” or “independently wealthy,” but they would most likely talk about the kind of job they hope to have. The want to be doctors, lawyers, teachers, nurses, firefighters, engineers, accountants, or astronauts. They already know that what counts is “out there,” and that what really counts is how much of it we can get before we die.

A spiritual orientation calls this cultural assumption into question, and places us on a different track, a different path, than the one the culture would have us walk. Spirituality is counter-cultural. It is a radical departure from the way we think we are supposed to be. We cannot be spiritual without raising questions about the way life is being lived around us.

Jacob Bronowski said, “If you want to know the truth, you have to live in certain ways.” He said that we don’t find truth the way we find the checkbook, or Yankee Stadium. We don’t get directions to truth, or receive instructions. We don’t knock on the door of the wisest person in the neighborhood, with a pad and pencil in hand, ask questions, and take notes. We do not think our way to truth, or believe our way there. We live our way there. Knowing the truth is a matter of direct, personal experience.

You eat an apple, and you know the truth of that particular apple. The truth of a Granny Smith apple is somewhat different from the truth of a York apple, or a Red Delicious apple. There is a wide variation of apple truth, which has to take into account ripe apples, green (in both senses of the word) apples, and rotten apples. All of which you have to experience firsthand in order to have anything like a working knowledge of the truth of apples. As it is with apples, so it is with love, money and life. We live our way into the truth of all these things. How we live determines the truth we perceive, the truth we understand, the truth we know. “If you want to know the truth, you have to live in certain ways.”

We have to live with our eyes open. We have to live with our mind open. We have to live open to the experience of our life. We have to live with a little of that Missouri “show me” spirit in hand. We have to ask questions, and ask questions generated by the answers to our questions, and wonder what the questions are we haven’t asked. We have to poke, prod, investigate, wonder, imagine and explore, and we cannot ever, under any circumstances, take anyone’s word for it without asking what makes them think that they know what they are talking about. We have to know what we know, think what we think, feel what we feel, see what we see, hear what we hear, and sense what we sense—without buying into what anyone may tell us about the right way to do any of these things. We have to know what we know to be so because we have lived it, experienced it, and not because someone else told us it was so.

Got it? Then, here’s one for you: What do you know to be true about God that no one told you? That you didn’t get from the Bible? How long is your list? Live to lengthen it!

We have to understand that what we do, and how we do it, are properly directed by our being, by who we are, by who we are endeavoring to be, and not by our having or getting, or by what we are endeavoring to have or get. The question “What do you want to be when you grow up?” has to be understood in light of the qualities and characteristics we want to exhibit—in light of the life that we want to have lived—not because we expect it to pay off in some way, but because these ends are simply good in themselves.

When we fail to act in ways that are commensurate with this vision, we have to realize it, and take a deep breath, and place ourselves back into the practice of being the kind of person we want to be. Michael Jordan at his best would let himself down on the basketball court, and he would have to go back to practicing, working, striving to be the kind of basketball player he had it in him to be.

What do we want to be when we grow up? We have the rest of our lives to answer that question. We begin living toward the answer by having a vision of the kind of person we would like to become before we die—practicing every day to incarnate the vision, and become the person.

10. The What and the How

Distractions abound. I am continually amazed at, and dumbfounded by, how little it takes to switch me from the main track into the trackless wasteland. We have to be mindful of the distractions swirling around us, avoid those that can be avoided, wake up quickly to those that blindside us, and bring ourselves back to the task at hand: Being who we are, doing what we are about—what is ours to do—in the time and place of our living.

We work with the day everyday. In each day, we have to remember what is important, what we are doing, as we step into the day, and allow the day to bring us forth in meeting the day while remaining true to ourselves. The day brings us into focus. The day clarifies for us the things we need to be clear about: What are the gifts and characteristics—the qualities of heart and soul—that we are working to bring to life in our lives? The day enables us to see how we are doing, and where improvements and alterations need to be made.

The day provides a steady stream of encounters and information that we can use in making mid-course adjustments on the path to wholeness. The day shows us where we are in relation to where we have been, and where we need to be. It may start with oversleeping, or with the dog throwing up on the carpet. We come into focus in the smallest details of living.

The spiritual life is lived between the What and the How. We feel our way to What, we think our way to How. The What is about what is happening and what needs to be done about it. If we miss the bus, we may have to find a taxi. The “Now what?” brings the present moment into sharp focus, demanding that we assess the situation, and come up with a plan of action for dealing successfully with it—using, relying on, the gifts, preferences, interests, enthusiasms, aptitudes, talents, etc., that come with us into the world.

The stream feels the sea and has to think its way around the obstacles in its path, but it knows where it is going, and trusts itself to think what to do to get the job done.

We are born as a bundle of latent abilities. As we grow up, the hope is that we will gravitate toward what we do best, and that our lives will be proving grounds—where we experiment with who we are, and develop an increasingly clear notion of what is “us” and what is “not us.” We aren’t born knowing what that is, but there is a homing device, of sorts, within us, and we know “when we are on the beam, and when we are off of it,” when we are on track with our lives, and when we are off track, where we belong, and where we have no business being. We feel our way to all of these things.

Writing has always been “it” for me, and I have fought my way through a lot of internal resistance, and a pronounced lack of external encouragement, to write no matter what. I can say now, after all these years, that writing is one of my “things.” I couldn’t have said that at twenty, or thirty, or forty. I certainly couldn’t have said that at fifteen, or eighteen. I did not grow up in one of those loving, attentive spaces without answers. There was not much in the way of listening beneath the surface in my experience, of inviting to the table what else is there. If you were a boy in the deep south, you did the things boys in the deep south were supposed to do. And, you pretended to like it, because there would be something wrong with you, if you didn’t do it and like it.

So, it’s been a long and curious route that has brought me to the place of writing no matter what. The process could have been assisted, and shortened, with the proper mentors, coaches, advocates, listeners, encouragers, and friends, but the process was going to unfurl somehow, some way, over time no matter what.

Carl Jung said, “We are who we always have been, and who we will be.” Who we are born to be is always a part of who we are, and will be, and is waiting to be seen, recognized, received and loved into being. It takes a lot to block the process of our growing into the person we are to be in the world. That process is life itself. It’s the dandelion growing through the asphalt. Our lives are about being who we are no matter what. If we live long enough, we will get there. It only takes living to figure it out. We all learn to listen over time.

The What also requires us to know what behavior is being asked for in each situation that arises. “Here we are, now what?” What is called for here and now? Anger? Grace? Kindness? Willful insistence? We feel our way to the answers.

What kind of spirit, attitude, demeanor are we being asked to exhibit in doing what we do? The manner, the shape and form, the style and tone, etc., that we exhibit in doing what we do are all feeling questions–we feel our way to the answers.

We think our way to the airport, to the motel, and to home. Logistics and directions are good thinking questions. How do we treat a sprained ankle? How do we mix a proper ratio of rubbing alcohol to water in making an ice pack in a plastic freezer bag? These are thinking questions.

What now? is about the qualities and characteristics of heart and soul, and the sense of what needs to happen in the moment of our living. What here? deals with generosity and compassion; grace, mercy and peace; awareness, and mindfulness, and attention; love, joy, hospitality, kindness, gentleness, and a propensity for justice and doing what’s right, to mention a few, are essential requirements of the spiritual life–and timing is essential for all of them. We feel our way into “What here? What now?”

The work of doing what is called for in each situation as it arises requires us to go against the grain; to swim against the current; to do what’s hard; to be generous when it would be easier to be greedy and self-centered; to be compassionate when we want to tell them a thing or two. The spiritual journey is a walk toward who we are called to be. The Promised Land is a metaphor for what we are here to do, and the spirit with which we are to do it. We live toward that every day of our lives. The days are filled with opportunities to assess how well we are doing, and places to practice doing it as we work to get it down.

The Six Statements

There are six statements, which cannot be denied, yet cannot be affirmed without transforming Christianity as we know it. They are:

  1. Our Idea of God Is Not God.

This is as self-evidently obvious as any statement ever. I don’t know of anyone who would dispute it. It flows from the Bible. “My thoughts are not your thoughts,” says the Lord in Isaiah 55:8,9 “Nor are your ways my ways. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so far are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.” And, Paul joins in with: “O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways! For who has known the mind of the Lord?” (Romans 11:33-34A).

Ah, but. What we don’t know, and cannot know, has never kept us from acting as though we know.

The church is always speaking as though it knows as much as God knows, as though it is the spokesperson for God, as though its ideas of God are God. Some church condemns homosexuality in the name of God. Some church proclaims the value of Creationism in the name of God. Some church declares this, and denounces that, and tells all comers that if they don’t do it the way that church tells them to do it they are going to hell, all in the name of God, in the place of God. It is as though the church is God. Certainly, it is as though the church’s idea of God is God.

Although the church’s actions belie its confessional stance, the church can, and does, proclaim in principle that God is beyond all concepts of God, that our idea of God is not God. However, the church will not entertain any new ideas about God. No fresh ideas about God have been allowed into the church since the Protestant Reformation. There have been a number of fresh ideas—Process Theology, Liberation Theology, and Feminist Theology, to mention three—but they haven’t found denominational sanction.

If you are going to think, and talk, about God in the church, you are going to have to stick with the concepts of the Westminster Confession of Faith, and the Apostles’ Creed—nothing more recent than that is permitted. Our idea of God may not be God, but it’s the only idea you’ll hear anything about in the church. If the church actually lived out of the realization that our idea of God is not God a number of things would change dramatically, instantly.

  1. The Church Was Before the Bible.

Abraham was before the Bible. Moses was before the Bible. The prophets were before the Bible. Jesus was before the Bible. The Apostles were before the Bible. The early Christian Church was before the Bible—and produced the Bible. The books that are not in the Bible are not in the Bible because the church decided that they should not be in the Bible. The books that are in the Bible are in the Bible because the church decided that they should be in the Bible. The Bible is what it is because the church decided that’s what it should be. The church created the Bible. The Bible did not create the church.

The Bible reflects the theology of the church—the thinking of the church—at the time the canon was closed (More on that in Statement 3). The Bible says what the church of that day thought the Bible should say. The church calls the Bible “the Word of God,” but the Bible is the word the church says God says. The church filtered the words of the Bible, and only the agreeable ones passed through. When you read the Bible, you read what the church of the fourth century wanted you to read. What the church did not, and does not, want you to read is called heretical, but that is the church’s idea, just like the Bible is the church’s idea.

The Bible is the product of the church. Without the church, there would be no Bible. We think of it in reverse. The Bible gets the credit for the church. The fact is that the church had decided how it thought things should be before it came up with the Bible. It helps to keep these things in their proper order. First the church, then the Bible.

Understanding the Bible as the creation of the church takes it out of the arena of Unquestionable Holiness and makes it accessible to our questions, our imagination and our creativity—which is exactly where it came from! And now, we can acknowledge that, examine its path through history, and come up with an entirely different assessment of the process from the one we have been handed and told to embrace.

The church writes the Bible, and what it says reflects the church’s ideas of what God would say if God were speaking. We can follow the evolution of the idea of God over the course of the 66 books that compose the Protestant Bible. Different Gods peer out at us from different parts of the Bible. We can’t square the Parable of the Prodigal, for instance, with the idea of a bloodthirsty God who requires our belief in the atoning death of Jesus before we can be received into the eternal habitations. Which way is it? The problem disappears once we understand the Bible as representative of different perspectives within the church that produced the Bible.

Understanding the Bible as the product of the church also provides us with the freedom—and offers us the invitation—to place our present-day understanding of God alongside the understandings of God that are presented in the Bible. The idea of God continues to evolve! All that can be known about God is not known! We are capable of perceiving God in ways that Paul, for instance, could not have imagined. We have a holy obligation to envision God as clearly as we are capable of envisioning God, and to live toward that vision, as we pass along the tradition of probing the Mystery of God to coming generations.

Understanding that the church was before the Bible shifts the foundation of authority from God to us. We are the authority who determines what we will believe and do! From this standpoint, when the church says, “The Bible says,” we can understand that to mean, “The church says that the Bible says.” Of course, the church will say that God was using the church to select what was to be in the Bible, just as Paul can say that God gives us the government, so we shouldn’t complain about the way we are ruled. Neither argument bears scrutiny. Crooked politicians aren’t given to us by God, and the church served its own interests in composing the Bible.

Now, when we hear, “The Bible says,” we can ask in all seriousness, “But what should the Bible say? What would the Bible say if it were being written today?” Because people much like us put the Bible together, we are fully capable of reevaluating the Bible in light of all that is known now that wasn’t known then, and choose, much like the fishermen in the parable of the net of fishes, what is to be kept and carried forward, and what is to be tossed aside and left behind. Of course, to talk like this is to dive deep into the waters of heresy, and that being the case, let’s go for a swim in the next Statement:

  1. Every Step Forward Is a Step into Heresy.

Every doctrine that we embrace with such fervor, espouse with such rhetoric, and believe with such conviction was, at one point in the history of religion, rank heresy. Jesus was called a blasphemer and a heretic by the religious authorities of his day. The Apostles, and followers of Jesus, were persecuted by the Jews in Jerusalem for continuing, and deepening, the heresy of Jesus. Rome considered early Christianity to be heretical and dangerous. The Roman Catholic Church saw the Protestant Reformation as blasphemous and heretical (and Protestantism returned the favor). Heresy is our heritage—and our hope.

We cannot think a new thought about God without thinking a heretical thought about God. We cannot deepen our understanding of God, expand our vision of God, or grow in our knowledge of God without changing how we see God—without seeing God differently. Seeing God differently is heresy. Spiritual formation and faith development are possible only for those who can be heretical, who can stand apart from the way God has always been seen, and see something different—perhaps something that calls into question everything that has been seen, as in a God who would have us love our enemies, and heal on the Sabbath, and honor the least of those who live at the margins of society.

Heresy is essential to the process of aligning our life with the Stream of Life and Being, and it was outlawed by those who committed the greatest heresy in the book of heresies when they closed the canon. The canonization of the scriptures froze the idea of God that prevailed at the time. It would be very helpful if the Bible had moved on, and included the reaction of the people to their idea of God, and the experience of their lives, at the time of the collapse of Rome, and the Crusades, and the discovery of the New World, and the World Wars, and the Holocaust, and landing on the Moon… The idea of God that was sacrosanct through all those events was the idea of God that was operative at the time of Jesus’ death. That is the idea we still have of God, two thousand years later.

But, there are a lot of us who don’t share that idea. Just as the people moved past, moved beyond, the idea of God liking the pleasing odor of the sacrifice of bulls and goats, or of God needing a Temple in order to be properly worshipped, so some of us have moved beyond first century ideas about the end of time, and angels and principalities, and God being in complete charge, and tight control, of everything that happens—just to highlight the tip of the ice berg.

Yet, where do the people who have an idea of God that is different from the popular idea go to be recognized as having the right to think the way they think of God? We cannot think differently of God without being relegated to the trash heap of religious oddity. The orthodox tradition does not permit thinking differently about God, but—to the chagrin of traditional, orthodox Christianity—the heresies will not die. The heresies persist, with modification—which is the hallmark of evolution—and that suggests to me that there is something to them. The fact that they are still with us suggests the church has been, and continues to be, remiss in dismissing heresy as without value, and a threat to true belief.

The idea of God will continue to evolve despite the church’s best effort to squelch it, kill it, stuff it, and hang it on a wall, or put it behind glass, for all to worship and adore. The heretical is not the creation of the heretics. The heretical did not burn at the stake. The heretical will not die. It represents the continuing evolution of the idea of God, and lives outside the camp, in the wilderness, ahead of the church, preparing the way of the Lord, as light in the darkness, leaven in the dough, salt in the soup—in the fine tradition of the Heretic of the Ages, Jesus of Nazareth.

  1. The Garden of Eden Did Not Have Latitude and Longitude.

The Garden of Eden was not an historic, literal, actual fact. There was no time of perfect obedience, of perfect innocence, of moral perfection. There was no before and after. There was no primordial Paradise from which we were expelled for disobeying God—and hence no Original Sin which requires the atoning death of God’s only Son Jesus Christ our Lord to patch things up with God, and get us back into God’s good graces if we confess, repent, and believe. There was no Fall. There was nothing to fall from. It’s been a mess from the start.

Even as a metaphor, the story of the Garden of Eden overstates its case. The implication in the story is that Adam and Eve are representative of men and women everywhere throughout history, and that everyone would do as Adam and Eve did, and sin by disobeying God, and eating the forbidden fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. I have two objections to this presentation. In the first place, I don’t think everyone would make that choice. Elijah wouldn’t have done it. Jesus wouldn’t have done it. The Buddha wouldn’t have done it. Gandhi wouldn’t have done it. The Dali Lama wouldn’t have done it. And my Aunt Lois most certainly would not have done it. I think a large number of us would not have done it.

In the second place, the metaphor declares that it is evil to know the difference between good and evil. That it is evil to be in position to make up our own mind; to decide for ourselves, what is good and what is evil, what is right and what is wrong. That it is better just to take God’s word for it. Better, how? Whose idea of The Good is mindless innocence, unthinkingly following instructions, and blithely taking somebody else’s word for what should be done and left undone? Eternal childhood, with no cares, no responsibilities beyond being obedient, no questions, no conflicts—who thinks that is Good? Always being cared for and taken care of, without having to choose our own course, make up our own mind, decide for ourselves, and suffer the consequences—who says that is Good? It sounds to me as though the story was crafted by someone who wanted to be taken care of, or by someone who wanted to be obeyed, as if to say, “If you people would only listen to me, and do what I tell you, things would be fine!”

Once we remove Original Sin from the picture, we remove the necessity of the atoning death of God’s only Son, and have to rethink who Jesus was, and what the meaning is for us of his death and resurrection appearances. Everything changes when our idea of Original Sin changes.

  1. We Are the Ones Who Say So.

We decide. We choose. We say. We believe what we believe because we believe what we believe is worth believing. How do we know? We take it on faith. Why do we take what we take on faith and not something else instead? We just do. We decide. We choose. We say.

We say, “The Bible is the Word of God, and the absolute authority in faith and practice.” Who says so? We do. We say so. We are the authorities who declare the Bible to be authoritative. How do we know? We take it on faith. Why do we take that on faith and not something else in stead? We just do. We decide. We choose. We say. We believe what we believe because we believe what we believe is worth believing.

That being the case, you would think that we would believe things that help, not hinder, us along the way. You would think that we would believe things that create community, deepen connections, foster compassion and justice, make for understanding and peace, and bring into being a better world. We certainly have that option. We would be wise to choose it.

And, that being the case, we are certainly free to choose it! Free to make up our own minds—or bound to! Free, or bound, to come to our own tentative conclusions about how to live our life, and free, or bound, to revise them in light of our lived experience, and come up with different tentative conclusions to carry us forward into the unfolding wonder of our life.

This approach would give us a different kind of church—one that would be able to equip us for the task of listening to ourselves, and divining the path from among all of the paths that open before us along the way from where we have been to wherever it is we are going. A community like that would be a good thing to have around!

  1. Ants Find the Picnic, Flowers Turn to the Light.

We think that without some external standard of moral rectitude we would be lost in a morass of decadence, depravity and abomination—that without being made to be good, we would be evil—never minding the fact that Christianity launched the Crusades, justified slavery, burned the heretics at the stake, drowned witches, and committed all manner of atrocity on its way through the world. We believe without hell it all goes to hell. We believe we cannot do what is good without being threatened, cajoled, and coerced into doing it.

Yet, we are perfectly capable of doing what ought to be done because it ought to be done. We only have to see the need to meet the need. Perceiving the evil, we produce the good. Perceiving the good, we serve the good. The awareness of how things truly are is the foundation of transformation. Seeing into the heart of things, we act out of our heart for the good of all.

Eyes to see, ears to hear, and hearts that understand are not the result of indoctrination, and do not flow from keeping the rules. Seeing, hearing, and understanding lead to lives that are well-lived in the fullest sense of the term. The task is not to obey without question, but to see, and hear, and understand—and live lives aligned with the deepest, truest, and best that we can perceive and imagine.

That’s it. We cannot embrace these six principles without transforming the church of our experience into the church as it ought to be. The ninety-five theses need be only six—which leaves us at the place of wondering, “What now?” When we throw six hundred years of orthodox, Protestant theology out the window—what shall we put in its place? Part of our work is discovering what shape our idea of God will take, and how our lives will develop around that idea.

The Evolution of the Idea of God

One of the 10,000 Spiritual Laws states, “Our idea of God is not God.” The Bible can be seen as the history of the evolution of the idea of God. If you read the Bible carefully noting inconsistencies, contradictions, incompatibilities, discrepancies and divergent views, you will come across a number of different ways of thinking about God—many of which are mutually exclusive, and can be squared with each other only after several rounds of single malt whiskey straight from the bottle.

Old Testament scholars have long talked about the JEDP threads in the first five books of the Bible (which is referred to as “the Documentary Hypothesis”) as a way of explaining the early differing views of God, but without squaring any of them. They are simply different ways the people of biblical times thought about God.

“J” is for the writers or compilers, who used the consonants “YHWH” (Hebrew has no vowels) for the name of God, and is called the “Yahwist” (“J” is derived from the German spelling—Jahwe—of the divine name). “E” is for the writers or compilers, who used the word “Elohim” for the name of God. “D” is for the “Deuteronomic” writers or compilers, who thought keeping the law, and living righteously, were the heart of what is pleasing to God. And, “P” is for the Priestly writers or compilers, who put stories together from a priestly perspective with the liturgy, proper worship, and right sacrifice constituting the core of what is pleasing to God.

In addition to these groups, the Prophets had their own (often divergent) views of what is pleasing to God, and called the people to look beyond the law, and beyond proper sacrifice, and to honor the idea of social justice—which includes all people, even foreigners, and widows, and those “outside the camp,” and requires everyone to live “from the heart” in “letting justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream”—as the essential foundation of relationship with God.

The Wisdom writers had their idea of what is pleasing to God, and offer a practical, down-to-earth, early version of a “self-help” orientation to achieving divine sanction. The Psalmists had their ideas (often divergent) of what is pleasing to God. In the New Testament, the Jesus Movement offered still another view of what is pleasing to God, saying, basically, “Love one another,” and “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” meaning, “all others,” in the prophetic tradition.

In the first century church, views of God were as different as the “Christianities” that espoused them. Things began to narrow things down with heresy trials and burnings at the stake—nothing like a few burnings at the stake to secure widespread agreement about the nature of God.

The New Testament was written and compiled by those who were either of Gentile origin, or by Jews who were sympathetic to Gentiles. These writers/compilers did not include in the New Testament writings that may have been more Jewish in scope and direction. However, for about two generations after the death of Jesus, the followers of Jesus, and the new converts to the Movement, would have gathered regularly together with worshiping Jews in the synagogues to worship—in addition to house gatherings for prayer and discussion. It is only after it became unpopular—and unwise—to associate with Jews, because of the Jewish rebellion against Rome, that Christians separated themselves from Jewish worship practices, and began to consider Christianity as a separate religion.

Jesus did not intend separation, or see himself as creating a new religion. Jesus was not the first Christian, and it is not clear that he would be a Christian today. His intent was to reform Judaism by modifying the institutional idea of God that was popular among the Jewish people of his day.

The idea of God in the mind of the people of God has continued to be modified through the centuries following the creation of the Christian Church. God’s position on war, conscientious objection, slavery, women, abortion, birth control, alcohol, science, medicine, etc. has been carefully plotted and re-plotted by the theologians and leaders of the Church. Disagreements over the idea of God has created a proliferation of churches, with each new denomination professing to possess true belief, claiming to own the Right Idea of God, and accusing all other denominations of being deluded in the service of a false gospel, or Wrong Idea about God.

Today, religious pluralism has become a dominant force in the construction of the people’s idea of God, and the prevailing trend is the “honey bee approach” to spiritual development, where individuals “visit” different “flowers,” taking what they need from each religion, or denomination, and formulating a view of God that is consistent with their own sense of what is good, true and beautiful. The questions “Who is God?” and “How can we know?” are increasingly answered with the Taoist teaching, “The Tao that can be said is not the eternal Tao.” That being the case, the question then becomes, “What can we know of God with any degree of assurance or certainty?” And, the answer seems to be, “Live toward as much as you think you know of God, and allow the path to open up before you”—with “for better or worse,” unstated but implied.

Of course, this approach is much too vague to be comfortable for large numbers of people who want to know exactly what to believe, and how to live, and what the payoff will be. Thus, religious fundamentalism is increasing in popularity, and the return to orthodoxy is experienced in all the major religions of the world. “Just tell us what to believe, and don’t ask us what we think!” is the rallying cry of those who have had their fill of options and choices, with too many brands of shampoo, orange juice, and everything else on the market—who are “decided out” by the end of the week, and simply want to sink into the blessed assurance of age-old certainty, reassurance and conviction on Sunday morning.

What this all means is that the idea of God is continuing to expand, deepen, develop, and evolve. People coalesce around an idea, or perspective, that makes sense to them. God, then, is as much a reflection of our own need and imaginative capacity as an objective other “out there,” who can be known in the way we might know a Bentwood Rocker, or a vintage T-Bird, or a humpback whale.

The God we embrace, believe in, and serve is the God we find to be embraceable, believable, serve-able. We are the doorkeepers of our brand of religion, letting in the God we approve and find to be acceptable, and worshipping that God, until we grow into another view, another version, of God. As our idea of God expands, the God we worship changes, and we find ourselves, even in fundamentalist and orthodox circles, worshipping a God Abraham, Isaac and Jacob—or Peter and Paul—would not recognize, or approve.

As we move away from the traditional, orthodox, fundamentalist view of God as a living being apart, a Person, a Thou of cosmic proportions, the Wholly Other, to a more nebulous and inconceivable Ground of Being, or Essence of Life, or Heart of the Universe, or, my fave, The Source of Life and Being, we will need to clarify for ourselves, if not for others, our understanding of the difference between Non-Theism and Atheism. If we don’t believe in a God who stands apart from us, who sits on a Heavenly Throne, and has a specific Plan, and Will, and is working God’s “purpose out as year succeeds to year,” through all the events and occurrences of historical time, do we believe in a God at all? And if we do, how do we conceive of the God we believe in? What is our particular idea of God? It is easy enough for us to talk about the God we don’t believe in. What shall we say about the God we do believe in?

The best I can come up with is to say Atheism posits no God, and Non-Theism posits an unknowable God. And the difference between God-as-such and “What has always been called ‘God’,” is impossible to pin down, or pen up. God is beyond knowing and beyond talking about. The most we can say about God is “We cannot say anything about God.” God-as-such transcends thought and is beyond experience, like a sound at too high or too low a pitch and cannot be heard.

We can posit a source for life, but there is no reason to think life has to have a source. If God can be without a beginning, life itself can be without a beginning. Life as eternal energy seeking a physical form/expression/existence, seeking consciousness, particularly self-consciousness, is a perfectly good God-alternative as far as I am concerned, and that kind of life seeking expression would not have to send anyone to hell, but would just keep recycling everyone, like a cosmic green power.

Virtues and values could be a spin-off of self-consciousness, with intelligence creating its own design for itself and brains adding levels of complexity to life over time with soulfulness and wisdom working their way into the matrix of our development and evolution taking on a life of its own, and we get an idea of soma and spirit, of body and soul, of physical and spiritual, of the material universe and the Psyche/Soul, where the boundary line is blurred and no one knows where physical ends and spiritual begins, or what may lie beyond the two. And, beyond this, the Mystery!

We recognize “The Holy” as a manifestation of heart/soul. The holy people among us are the people who have heart/soul, who live with heart/soul, and from heart/soul–and they have vitality, life. They are alive. They are much more than 98.6 and breathing, and their spirit is infectious. They bring to life those about them. They live lovingly on the earth. They know what they love, and they love it, they do it, with all their heart, mind, soul and strength. Those people exhibit the essence, and the presence, and the realness of The Holy, The Divine, and what that is, is the Mystery!

Influencing What Can Be Influenced

One of the things I like most about life is that we never know what’s coming. The universe is full of surprises. Who knows what tomorrow—or the next five minutes—will bring? Turn a corner, and life changes forever. We can’t count on anything. We spend all our time getting our ducks in a row, and they fly south for the winter. We build the Great Wall of China, and the Empire still collapses. What a world. You can’t beat it anywhere. I love it. I’m being completely serious. I love the whole show. I love not knowing from one minute to the next what will be waiting on us when we get there—what we will have to deal with—how we will deal with it—where it’s going.

Fran Tarkenton, a former NFL quarterback with the Minnesota Vikings and New York Giants said, in an interview with ESPN, that he missed everything about his career in football. The sacks, the completions, the scrambling for first downs and touchdowns, the hits, the fumbles, the rain and mud, the snow, the wins and losses. “I loved it all, and miss it so.” There you are. We have to be able to say that about our life: “We loved everything about it, and miss it so.”

Two things are true, and wonderful: “You never know what’s going to happen,” and, “The response determines (or at least, strongly influences) what follows.” The future hinges on—and flows from—how we respond to what happens in each present moment. Yet, nothing we do will control any outcome, or guarantee any result. We have no control, but we exercise considerable influence, and we don’t know where things are going, or what will happen next. Now, that is worth getting out of bed for every morning!

This is the kind of thing we go to the movies to watch: The day has a mind of its own and we can influence the day! The day has a life of its own and we can bring to life in each day things that would not be alive without us. We work with what the day gives us to guide the day toward the best we can imagine within this context, these circumstances. And, we do it again tomorrow, and the day after that, every day for as long as there are days. This is as much of a long-range plan as we can hope for! If you want a more specific plan than this for your life, the days are going to collapse in a gasping heap, laughing.

The best we can do is to be relatively clear about the best we can do. What is the best we can imagine? What do we wish for ourselves, those we love, all living beings, the entire planet, and the cosmos as a whole? What is worth our life? What would we go to hell for? Toward what are we living? These are the questions we must be answering with our lives. We cannot be too clear about them. And, we cannot arrive at clarity without thinking about, and talking about, what is happening, and what we are doing about it. We don’t engage enough in that kind of conversation.

Dialogue that enables/demands reflection is largely missing from our lives. We spend our time talking about news/weather/sports and other people. If we talk about ourselves, it is to complain about the 10,000 things. When is the last time you talked to someone about your last night’s dream? When is the last time you talked to someone about your work to find your life and live it? When has anyone ever talked to you about those things?

When do we explore together our experience of our experience and its impact on our life? When do we say where we find meaning in our life and how we live to serve it?

We all need a sounding board–NOT someone to tell us what to do, but someone to listen as we talk about what is happening in our life and what we are doing about it, and what we can imagine doing about it, and where we might find the resources for doing it. We need someone to listen us to the truth of our life, of our lived experience–not to tell us anything!

The days come at us too fast to allow reflection. We don’t have time to think about what we are doing. We’re too busy dodging, ducking and jumping out of the way to worry about anything beyond survival. The only thing we are clear about is that we need a break. We need to tag out of this round. We need help. We need someone to talk to. Who will listen us to the truth of what we have to say. And, thereby, enable us to hear it ourselves.

The bad news is it isn’t going to get easier. We only have the time between now and the next thing—which is no time at all—to “recover from the past and store up for the future,” decide what we are going to do about the future when it arrives, think about where we are going with our lives, and what we think ought to happen, and how we ought to assist its happening, and evaluate what we are doing while we are doing it.

James Hollis, the Jungian analyst and author, says his high school football experience taught him that no matter what happened on the last play, he had to get up and get ready for the next play. That’s life for you. Here it comes, ready or not. We’ll have to invent our response on the run. We don’t have time to sit for days, weighing our options.

But, we get all the practice anyone could possibly want! Our lives are proving grounds, which produce, over time, the kind of life that life is all about—if we pay attention! If we are aware! If we are awake! The good news is that we don’t have to know what we are doing. We don’t have to have it figured out. We don’t have to be clear about anything. Our lives are self-correcting, self-guided, self-propelled, learning environments. All we have to do is keep our eyes open in order to figure it out. We only have to live with our eyes open—and bear the pain!

We cannot live with our eyes open without bearing the pain. The pain is the pain of seeing how it is and also is—knowing, feeling, experiencing how it is and also is. To be aware is to be aware of the contradictions and conflicts—to be aware of living in the tension between how things are and how things ought to be, and how we wish things were. This is not easy. The more aware we are, the more we will have to manage the pain of being alive.

The human predicament is that we can imagine a better world than the world we live in. We have to bear the pain of the discrepancy between the world of our dreams and the world we wake up in every day—between the world as it could be and the world as it is—between the way things are and the way we want things to be. It is an agonizing discrepancy. We bear the pain of realization, of enlightenment. And, we do that best in the company of those who are doing it themselves.

We cannot grow toward how things ought to be without coming to terms with how things are, and how things have been, and how things can be. How things are, and how things have been, provide us with the corrective insight required to live toward how things can be. But, that means bearing the pain of knowing how things are, and how things have been, and how things can be–which includes how things cannot be!

Part of our work is to live with our eyes open, and bear the pain of living with the awareness of how things are, how things have been and can be/cannot be. Part of that pain is the pain of what has been done to us. Part of that pain is the pain of what we have done. Part of that pain is the pain of what has happened to those about us. We cannot live with our eyes open without knowing that things are not what they might be—what they should be.

The church of our experience has attempted to handle the discrepancy between how things are and how things ought to be by dismissing, discounting, denying or ignoring it. Or by saying that it’s all our fault, and that if we weren’t sinful our lives would be grand. Or by saying that it isn’t really all that bad, and it all happens for a reason, and all we have to do is have faith and everything will be fine. We can do better than any of this.

We can start by saying that our pain is real, and that it must be witnessed. We cannot bear unacknowledged pain. We can’t even be aware of it. Pain has to be recognized in order to be borne. We have to say what is true to those who can listen with understanding, acceptance and compassion to all we have to say, and we have a lot to say. What we say has to be heard, understood, received, accepted, witnessed. That’s the first thing.

The second is that we have to grieve what is to be grieved, mourn what is to be mourned, feel what is to be felt, object stoutly to what is to be stoutly objected to, and do what can be done in response to what has happened/is happening, and allow the intensity of our agony to diminish over time. If we have objected properly our agony will diminish, and it is our place to permit that. We are not here to agonize endlessly over the discrepancy between the world we can imagine, and the world we can live in, but to step into this world, and live as well as life can be lived within the context and circumstances—within the possibilities and necessities—of life as it is.

The third thing is that we have to realize that things are not right with this world, and that’s just the way it is. That is where we come in. The question is, what can we do about that—how can we work with it. We have to bear the pain of life, and do what can be done about it. And when nothing can be done about it, we have to acknowledge it, mourn it, and allow it to diminish over time. We have to bear it over time in the company of the right kind of people.

Bearing our pain in this way enables us to live with our eyes open, and practice the art of living toward the best we can imagine no matter what. What is the best we can imagine? What do we wish for ourselves, and those we love, and all living beings, and the entire planet, and the cosmos as a whole? What is worth our life? Toward what are we living? We practice answering these questions with our eyes open, living with the idea of making things more like they ought to be than they are, and making things as good as they can be for ourselves and those about us. The trick is to remember what we are about, so that we can practice being about it, and influence the world toward the good of all.

One way of thinking about the work that is before us is to call up the image of Jacob wrestling through the night by the stream called Jabbok with “the angel of the Lord.” You’ll remember that the angel had to depart before dawn, and Jacob wouldn’t let the angel go, even though the angel had dislocated Jacob’s hip, until the angel had given him a blessing.

Rachel Remem says that the trick is to take what comes as graciously as possible, and refuse to let go until we mine it for whatever good may come attached. The angel of the Lord dislocated Jacob’s hip; Jacob held on, demanding the blessing.

You know how you are rocking along, things are fine, all is well, you’re on cruise control, clicking off those personal goals and objectives, realizing those lofty ambitions, with the world on a string, sitting on a rainbow, smiling like a Cheshire cat in the cat bird’s seat, saying “Ain’t life grand,” when you hit the wall? You know how out of nowhere comes the news about the blockage, or the malignancy, or the job loss, or the divorce, or fill in the blank from your own life experience. You know how it is to be smashed between the eyes by life at its harshest and worst. You know how we can’t run far enough fast enough, and we just try to bury it, get busy, refocus, and refuse to think about the awful thing. That’s what it is like when chaos comes for a visit.

Life gives us things we don’t want, and we try our best to give them back, to give them away, to get rid of them any way we can through denial, diversion, distraction, evasion, escape, avoidance, addiction. We R-U-N-N-O-F-T any way we can, every way we can, every time we can. And we miss the blessing. Every time life whacks us a good one right in the chops, or plants a big, juicy wet one right on the kisser, the potential for a blessing exists, and we let it go because we are so busy trying to get back to normal, so busy trying to find the life we once had, so busy trying to bless ourselves by getting rid of the dreadful thing, whatever it is, and give ourselves what we want instead. It doesn’t work that way.

We aren’t in control. We don’t drive this thing called life. It’s immune to our directives, ignores our orders, and whacks us a good one ( or a big juicy wet one) from time to time, right in the chops (or the kisser). When that happens, we have to remind ourselves of Jacob, and grab the thing, whatever it is, right back, and grind our face right into its face, look it squarely in its ugly red eye, and say something on the order of, “I’ve got you now you stinking angel of the Lord! And, I’m not letting you leave without the blessing!”

Sometimes, we have to work for our blessings. Sometimes we have to wade right into what looks to be completely devoid of blessings of any variety, and slog around in the slime, until we are sure we have extracted every bit of the good that is to be found there, and come away with the blessing it brings, after what may seem to be an endless struggle through the dark night of the soul.

And, this kind of work in the service of the blessing is made possible by being in the company of the right kind of others. We come to life in the company of those who are coming to life themselves.

What Works?

We are here to grow up. This is the essence of the Spiritual Journey. It is the work of a true human being. And we grow up against our will all along the way.

Growing up is squaring up to how things are, and what is called for in response. It is facing up to the conflicts, contradictions, dichotomies, discordances, polarities and opposition that go to the very heart of life and being. We cannot do this without bearing the pain of being alive.

There is no growing up without bearing the pain of that growth, of the realization of how things are and of the way that clashes with the way we want things to be. We bear the pain of our conflicts and contradictions—and of the trials and tribulations produced by our conflicts and contradictions.

We put ourselves in accord with how things are and what that means for us, and what we need to do about it. We step into the conflicts and contradictions and all that this implies, reconciling what can be reconciled and living consciously within the tension of polarities that defy reconciliation, and must simply be borne throughout forever. We do this in each situation as it arises all our life long.

What works in one situation may not work in any other situation. What works now may not work then. What works here may not work there. The shoe that fits today may pinch in a month. We live in each situation by walking two paths at the same time. For instance, there is what we do to pay the bills and there is what we pay the bills to do. We have to live the life that is ours to live within the life we are living. How we work this out is the essence of the Spiritual Journey. Working things out, integrating opposites, bearing the pain, in the service of balance and harmony IS the Spiritual Journey!

The spiritual journey is the search for what works. For how we should live what remains of our lives. For what is important, and how we might align ourselves with it. We are looking for ways of realizing that which is truly good in our lives—both in terms of perceiving it, and in terms of embracing and expressing it. We are looking for the Good. We are seeking to serve the Good, the Good of all sentient beings, the Good of all there is.

And someone’s good is someone else’s bad. What works to make peace in the family may not work to make peace in our soul. What works in any situation will not satisfy/please everyone in the situation. We decide what “works” means in each particular situation, and do that. “Sacrifice and acquiesce, Kid. Sacrifice and acquiesce.”

We work out what works in each situation as it arises, with no eternal, absolute principles, and no abiding policies. What works is as temporary as every here and now. What works here and now may never work anywhere else. Being right about what needs to be done, and paying the price to do it is bearing the cross Jesus told us to pick up and follow him.

It seems to be a law that when something is working on one level, something is not working on another level. Conscious awareness has to recognize and reconcile the conflict—or bear consciously the agony of a conflict that cannot be reconciled. Recognizing, reconciling, conflicts and integrating opposites and working things out is not our preferred thing to do. We deny, escape, and pretend our life away. Diversion and distraction work to free us from the burden of deciding what to do about what and how, even though they do not work for anyone’s good over time.

We are seeking to serve the good of all sentient beings, the Good of all there is, but how good is the good we call good? The prime requirement of the Spiritual Journey, and the life of a true human being, is that of living transparent to ourselves and “transparent to transcendence” (Joseph Campbell). We live to be mindfully aware of what we are doing to express, or conceal, who we are at all times.

So, what is good and how do we know? We don’t know. We live by hunches, nudges and guesses—and change our mind in view of the evidence uncovered by living in light of what we determine to be good. We can be wrong. And when we are wrong, we have to realize that and make amends, “turn the light around” (A Taoist phrase) and make another choice.

Our life is a process of changing our mind about what is important. We grow in our ability to take an increasing number of things into account in discerning and doing what is important, what is good, in the time and place of our living. If we live long enough, we see things differently over time. How many life times would it take to see—and be right about—the good in every situation and circumstance? We grow in our ability to see what we look at. We cannot assume that the way we see things is the way things are.

“How do you know what is important?” I asked a friend as we walked for a bite to eat. She stopped, leaned down, and pointed to a daffodil growing by the sidewalk. “It’s like this,” she said. “You can look at this flower and either see it or not see it.”

As it is with the daffodil, so it is with our lives. We can look at life and either see it, or not see it. We can look at what is important, and either see it or not see it. Our assumptions about life, about living, about what is important, about what is good, can keep us from seeing these things. We have to see our assumptions about the thing as well as the thing. We have to see what we don’t see—what else there is to see—if we hope to see at all.

Deena Metzger says, “The response determines everything that follows.” Well. It certainly influences some of the things that follow. If we always see the same things in the same ways, our response will always be predictable, routine. A predictable, routine life is not worth living.

We have to live as Jesus did. Jesus didn’t do anything that was expected of him. He didn’t do anything by the book—or the same way he did it last week. And, what has the church done in the aftermath of Jesus? Worshiped the book! Jesus threw the book away—we enshrined it. We covered it in leather and highlighted the words of Jesus’ in red. Everybody in the church does it the way it is supposed to be done—predictably, routinely. The church is a dysfunctional family with everyone playing the part assigned to her, to him, saying only the things that are supposed to be said.

No four letter words, please. And, if one slips out, make sure it is of the mild variety, like hell, or damn, and then be quick to say, “Pardon my French,” and twitter a bit. And, no questions allowed, certainly none questioning authority—and authority in the church is not usually the minister or the governing board. It’s often a Sunday School class, or a women’s group, or those who are thought to contribute the most money.

You can’t be honest in the church. You can’t say how you feel if it isn’t the way you are supposed to feel. You can’t say what you think if it isn’t the way you are supposed to think. You can’t say what you believe if it isn’t the way you are supposed to believe. The church may say, “All are welcome,” but it has a way of making you feel as though you don’t belong if you don’t do the things that are supposed to be done the way you are supposed to do them. You can be excommunicated overnight, by common consent, with no one making a motion or leading a discussion, or taking a vote.

There is a very narrow range of acceptable responses in church, as in any dysfunctional system. “The response determines everything that follows,” but when you can only respond in certain predetermined ways, everything stays nicely in place, “as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be.”

That’s exactly the situation Jesus stepped into. And he stirred things up, made waves, rocked the boat, turned over apple carts (and the tables of the money changers), radically offended everyone who could be offended, lived out of accord with every Book of Order of his day, and said what was on his mind. That’s the way to do it. We have to destabilize dysfunctional systems if there is to be any hope of things changing. We have to respond in ways that are not expected. We have to do things that have never been done. We have to shock and appall. We cannot come in on cue and read the lines as they are written in the script that is handed to us and expect things to change, ever.

Ah but. You know what is going to happen if we live like this. Drop a fully-functioning person into a dysfunctional situation, and it all goes to hell. That is what happened with Jesus. Jesus said things that weren’t supposed to be said. He did things that weren’t supposed to be done. He thought things that weren’t supposed to be thought. And, the Keepers of the Traditions did everything they could think of to get him in line. When he refused to cooperate, when he would not play the game the way the game was supposed to be played, they killed him, decently and in order.

When we live out of our heart, with as much compassion as we can muster for the way life is being lived around us, things change. They change in unpredictable ways, in ways that are out of our control, but they change. “The response determines everything that follows” in the sense that things will not be what they would have been with a different, more predictable, response. But, the response does not control anything that follows. We cannot be so smart as to live in this moment in a way that controls what happens in the moments following this one. We can influence all the other moments, but we cannot manipulate them. We cannot have life unfold according to our blueprint and design. Neither can God. Influence, not control, is the watchword of heaven. It is to be our own mantra as we fashion our responses to the events and circumstances of our lives in each situation as it arises.

We would be wise to evaluate our response before we release it onto the world. This is much better than just counting to ten. What compels us toward our initial, impulsive, reaction? Is that the best we can do? How are we seeing the situation that compels us toward this reaction and not that one? How else might we see the situation? How else might we respond to it? In light of what are we living? Toward what are we living? Whose good is served by the good we call good? Can we imagine a better Good even though it might not be good for us?

What works? “Experience and reflection, Kid. Experience and reflection.” Do something you call good. It will have an impact. Something will happen in response. See what happens. Respond to it as you think it needs to be responded to. After several rounds of this, step back and consider what has been going on. Think about it. Reflect on your experience. Sit in the silence and see what arises, emerges, “of its own accord.”

Joseph Campbell said, “Reflection on experience produces new realizations.” New ideas of the good come to light when we think about our ideas of the good in light of our experience. We see things differently with time—if we keep looking, evaluating, reflecting, experiencing. It takes a lot of looking to be able to see. And nothing shuts seeing down as quickly as thinking we see.

You have heard me talk about doing what needs to be done in each situation as it arises with the gifts of your original nature that you have to work with. You have not heard me talk about doing what is good there. The good is philosophical ideal that is rarely an option– a possibility–in our actual life, because the good is not an Absolute to be realized anywhere in the cosmos. The good is always good in relation to something that is bad. It is always better than something else. Not good forever in and of itself.

The good is always good for some things, and not so good for other things. A 747 is good for transporting you across the country, but it is not so good for mowing your lawn. And what is good for the lion is not so good for the antelope, and vice-versa.  In some situations, there are no good options. In those situations, we say “We are damned if we do and damned if we don’t.” The choice there is to be damned and be done with it, by flipping a coin, perhaps, and dealing with the outcome.

We do not get to choose our choices, and when there are no good choices to choose from, only variations of bad choices, with unwanted, or unlivable, results, we are left with going with what we consider the best of the bad, and making the best of the fallout from that choice.

In all of this, we bear the pain of being unable to do better than bad. We may bear it forever. We bear it knowing that any other choice would have been bad as well—and we look for ways of redeeming what can be redeemed by living to make all the good choices we are capable of making from that point on.

We live toward the good in every situation even though that may not be possible in all situations. This is called “living anyway, nevertheless, even so” toward the best we are capable of being and doing throughout what remains of the time left for living–even as we bear consciously the pain of being unable to do better in numerous times and places in a world where too often what we get isn’t worth having.

Prayer

I.

Prayer is where we articulate the truth of how it is with us, sometimes with “sighs too deep for words.” We rob prayer of its vitality, and of its capacity to heal and restore our souls, bind up, make well and encourage us for the task at hand when we reduce it to a list of needs and blessings. The spiritual task is to wake up, grow up, square up to the truth of how it is with us, get up and take up the work of bringing ourselves—our gift, our genius, our daemon, our art—forth in doing what needs to be done in the present moment of our living.

We do not pray to get. We pray to be. To be who we need to be, doing what needs to be done the way only we can do it, where, when and how it needs to be done, in each situation as it arises. All our life long.

Prayer puts us in sync with ourselves and our life by articulating what is important and providing us with the emptiness, stillness and silence required to pray in a manner “too deep for words,” in order to know what’s what and what needs to be done about it in each here/now of our life.

We do not pray best with words. We have ceased to pray when we translate prayer into statements. We make a mockery of the entire experience. Prayer IS experience! Is our response to experience! Is the experience of life, living, being alive to the time and place of our living!

II

We hear “pray without ceasing,” and we think, “How in the world would we do that?” We have to do our taxes, pay the bills, get the cat to the vet, water the lawn, change the diapers, do all the things that need to be done in a day! We have a life to live with all the responsibilities that come with it! We have to fit prayer in as we are able!

But. If we hear, “Live without ceasing!” We would think, “Yeah, sure. What do you think I do?” We would have no problem with that. We don’t cease living until we are dead. Except, of course, we do cease living long before we are dead. We go through the motions of life without being alive to what we are doing. We live out our lives without being alive anywhere along the way.

Prayer is life lived as it should be lived—life lived the right way—alive to what is happening and what is called for in response in each moment of every situation, all our life long–in tune with yin and yang (Pronounced “Yong”), the “right order,” doing the right thing at the right time in the right way. Life is prayer when it is lived this way, in alignment with the Tao, with ma’at, with the flow of life and being.

A life well-lived is a life lived in this way and is prayer without ceasing. Is being here, now, to integrate opposites and dance with the contradictions, balance Yin and Yang. Harmonize Mythos (Instinct/intuition/imagination/creativity) and Logos (Reason/Logic/Intellect/Analytics). And do what needs to be done all the way along The Way. To live like this is to pray without ceasing!

III.

Prayer is what we feel and how we respond to that—not what we say. Prayer is beyond words, a felt communion with experience, with life.

Prayer is integrity. Sincerity. Spontaneity.

Prayer is a way of being, a way of being in the world, a way of being at-one with the world, of recognizing and acknowledging our oneness with the world, with all that is in the world, living with “Namaste” to the world!

Prayer is recognizing and acknowledging our helplessness, vulnerability, gratitude, thanksgiving, dependence, pathos, sadness, joy, sorrow… On a feeling level, with no words involved.

Prayer is knowing what we know and responding appropriately to what is called for. Prayer is an attitude, a perspective, a way of being in the world, with the world. Prayer is a frame of mind—a good faith connection with all living things. Prayer is the spirit with which we go about being alive.

We pray with “Sighs too deep for words.” When we try to put that into words, we break the spell, and cannot get it back, with an entire dictionary/thesaurus in hand.

Prayer is what we feel, not what we think, but. Our experience has to be made conscious, for there is more to us than with the spiders and flying squirrels, squid and bison. Our place is to be lights in the darkness of being (In the words of Carl Jung and Jesus of Nazareth), to make the unconscious conscious, to think about what we feel, to live with a foot in two worlds—the unconscious and invisible world and the conscious visible world—and make the connection between worlds–by articulating what we “apprehend that cannot be comprehended” (Abraham Heschel).

We think with words. We talk about experience. We reflect on experience. We interpret experience. We create new realizations and imagine new possibilities and transform the world we experience through experiencing the world we experience.

Experiencing our experience is our gift to the world and it is the greatest gift the world has ever known. Experiencing our experience is the way of deepening, expanding, enlarging our experience to take more than our experience into account. When we think about our experience, we bring contrary experiences to mind, and see how disparate experiences are similar, related, and not so different after all—and how seemingly identical experiences are nothing at all alike.

Thinking about our experience opens up worlds upon worlds of additional experiences, and, like that, we are onto something never thought of, never realized, never known—and that leads to something else, and creation leaps forward, evolving as it goes, and the world is transformed overnight, day-by-day, all because we think about our experience. And this, too, is prayer.

Prayer is where we articulate the truth of how it is with us—the truth of how things are—and where we realize what that means, and what that calls for, and what we are being asked to do in response. As we “pray without ceasing,” we live prayerfully/truthfully, and make all things new by the way we respond to the experience of being alive.

IV.

The work prayer requires of us is to wake up, grow up, square up to the truth of how things are, get up and take up the call to bring forth our gifts, our nature and our virtues, our art, our daemon, our genius in doing what needs to be done in each situation as it arises.

Prayer is at the heart of the work to be awake, aware, and alive. The work of self-realization, of  individuation, to use Carl Jung’s term, which is the work of articulation—of prayer—saying who we are and also are, how it is with us, what is important to us, and what we need in order to do what is ours to do within the context and circumstances of our lives. We pray ourselves into being. The word of creation is a prayerful word, a truthful word. Prayer is as truthful as it gets.

Prayer is a form of hermeneutics, which is concerned with seeing, and saying, the truth, even as it evolves, changes, transforms in relationship with its circumstances and our perception of them.

Hermes was the messenger of the Gods in the Greek Pantheon, the master of eloquence, interpretation, translation, explanation, right-seeing-and-saying/right-saying-and-seeing. It is from the word “Hermes” that we get “hermeneutics,” interpreting and making plain the truth. It is worth noting that the Roman name for Hermes is Mercury, which is also known as Quicksilver, something that shifts, moves, changes quickly, such as the interpretation, understanding of truth—and even, truth itself. Now it’s this, now it’s that. Look quickly if you want to see it. It is on the way to becoming something else, perhaps its opposite–because truth is not a steady state of being, but a reflection of our perception of what’s what and how things are, which is constantly shifting and impossible to pin down, or pen up!

We do not think of truth as something that is changeable. We want “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth!” The implication being that truth will always, and forever, be just what it is. We think Absolute Truth, like God, is “Eternal, Unchangeable, Immutable.” However, this is not the case with either truth or God (And so Meister Eckhart could say, “The final leave taking is leaving God for God”).

Truth is not static, but dynamic, changing, shape-shifting, evolving, emerging, unfolding, becoming. We have to be as quick as truth, as God is if we would keep up, and know in this moment what is trying to be known here, now. “You don’t keep new wine in old wineskins,” said Jesus, because new wine is still fermenting, and will burst the old wineskins that have lost their elasticity and cannot expand to incorporate the new ways of understanding the world, life, ourselves.

Truth evolves. The movement of truth is everlasting and everywhere. “It’s a new world, Golda,” said Tevya. We have to be ready to receive well the world that is changing before our eyes. The way we have thought is not the way to think! Wake up! Wake up!

Things are not what we think they are. This is the nature of truth, which is like quicksilver, turning, changing, becoming more than we ever imagined, something other than we would ever guess. The nature of truth is reflected in the polarities that define existence: This is the way things are and this is the way things also are. But which way is it really? we ask. Both ways! At the same time.

V.

The second greatest commandment is “Love your neighbor as you love yourself.” In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus espouses the Golden Rule (which was not original with Jesus by a long stretch): “In everything, do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” You think that’s clear don’t you? Well, square these two texts with the parable about the Wise and Foolish Bridesmaids (Matthew 25:1-13). Sometimes we love our neighbor as we love ourselves, and sometimes we say, “Who made me your caretaker?” (cf. Luke 12:14). Sometimes, we do it this way, and sometimes, we do it that way. And, how do we know when to do what? We take our chances and learn from our mistakes.

The polarities are evident throughout the Sermon on the Mount. After the Beatitudes, which themselves are polarities in opposition to the apocalyptic and messianic expectations of Jesus’ day, Jesus says, “Don’t think I have come to abolish the Law and the Prophets! I have not come to abolish, but to fulfill” (Matthew 5:17), then he spends the rest of the Sermon on the Mount setting aside the popular thinking about the Law and the Prophets. “You have heard it said,” he says time and again, “but I say unto you!” (For instance, “You have heard it said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,’ But I say unto you, ‘Do not resist an evildoer, but if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also, and if anyone wants to sue you to take your coat, give your cloak as well, and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile.’”)

All of which is to say that the truth is expanded, enlarged, deepened by what is also true, and that we who want things spelled out, and made plain, have to understand the nature of truth, and the task of hermeneutics, interpretation, explanation. We are dealing with quicksilver here, as slippery a substance as there is in the entire Periodic Chart of substances.

Truth will not be nailed down, codified, defined, locked up, walled in, roped, thrown, tied and branded. Truth is this AND that. Sometimes it’s like this, and sometimes it’s like that. “I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.” “Peace I leave with you, my peace I give to you.” Which way IS it? Both ways at the same time And we live within the polarities, between the opposites, laughing at the very idea of saying how it is really without saying how it also is really. If we strive for consistency and constancy and one-way-only-ness (the RIGHT way, of course), we only show that we don’t have a clue.

Prayer is truth. Truth is contrary. Prayer is the struggle to say what is and also is, to live on the boundary between Yin and Yang, in the tension of opposite truths: This is the way things are and the way things also are and that’s the way things are! Prayer is waking up, squaring up to the difference between how it is and how we wish it were, bearing the pain of that contradiction, and bringing forth who we are as a blessing within the context and circumstances of our lives. That’s what prayer will do for you. It doesn’t end there.

VI.

We feel better when we pray, when we understand prayer as being present with what is present with us. Prayer “works” to calm the spirit, soothe the soul by enabling us to be aware of what’s what and what can be done about it with the gifts of our original nature and the innate virtues/characteristics which come with us from the womb. Prayer renews us for the task at hand. It’s therapeutic to pray, to lay it out, to see and say what’s what, to articulate what is happening, and what we can do about it, and where we need help with it. Just saying, “Help!” helps.

Prayer does not rearrange the universe to our liking. Cemeteries are filled with people for whom prayer did not work. So are mental wards, prisons, nursing homes, and battlefields. We wouldn’t need dentists if prayer worked. Or hospitals. Or carpenters. Or Prozac. It would wreck the economy, if prayer worked. But, we wouldn’t need an economy if prayer worked. The fact that prayer does not rearrange the external world to suit our liking will not stop us from praying. We pray because being here/now is the prerogative of prayer. To not pray is to not be here/now. To not be engaged in doing what is called for here/now.

About those who say they do not pray, I say, they don’t understand prayer as the opening of the spirit, of the self, to that which is beyond us, to more than meets the eye, to that which has been called, among other things, “God.” Prayer is casting ourselves into the Presence, the Mystery, the Wonder of the Mystery, of the Sacred Source of Life and Being—that Numinous Reality which primal peoples experienced and referred to as “God.”

We might think of prayer as communion with the Mystery, the Sacred Source of Life and Being. It is not thought so much as experienced, felt. Prayer is an awareness like the experience of compassion. We don’t think, “Okay. I’m going to be compassionate now.” We don’t say, “Let us bow for a moment of compassion.” We are compassionate, spontaneously, automatically, naturally. That is how we pray.

We are built for prayer, for seeking help, companionship, connection, communion with whatever we envision as being beyond us, yet within us, and capable of helping us, by receiving us, accompanying us, connecting with us. Where do we turn when we have nowhere to turn? Before we reason things out? That would be the unmovable spot, “the still point of the turning world” (W.B. Yeats), the axis mundi, the world axis, that grounds each of us, anchors each of us in the truth of our own being. Prayer is the connection with the source of life and being–with who we are–stabilizing us, restoring our balance and harmony, and positioning us to do what needs to be done in each situation as it arises.

Prayer is also a mirror reflecting how it is with us on the spiritual level. Prayer reveals what is important to us. Prayer discloses what we want, what we fear, and the extent to which we consciously “turn to prayer,” or fervently reject it, exposes our understanding of the nature of the universe and the character of God, and indicates our tendency toward hope or despair. Prayer is a litmus test for our spiritual health, a barometer indicating the degree and quality of spirit within. It is a contradiction in terms to consider ourselves spiritual if we do not pray. It’s like a fish claiming to be a fish without swimming. We pray like a fish swims. It is what we do in response to the circumstances of our life.

And, if we don’t do it, if we are ashamed of it, if we view prayer as superstitious and childish and an obvious waste of time because we tried praying once and our parents divorced, or our spouse died, or any one of ten million other things didn’t go our way, and that just proves that prayer doesn’t work, I’m here to remind you that we don’t pray because prayer works. Prayer is not like a child before a candy counter pleading with her parent for a package of peppermint. We don’t pray to get what we want, or to avoid what we don’t want. We pray like a fish swims. It is what we do in response to the circumstances of our life.

VII.

Formulating verbal prayers, articulating what is important to us in each moment of life, saying what is true and what is also true in the here and now of existence, makes conscious what needs to be made conscious, enables us to see what needs to be done, squares us with what can, and cannot, be done, and helps us make what can be made of things within the context and circumstances of our lives.

Ah but, this is such a hard sell in the western world. We don’t do anything in the culture of the west that doesn’t pay off. We run a cost/benefit analysis before brushing our teeth. If we cannot calculate the results of a potential endeavor in a way that is obviously profitable in a quantifiable kind of way, we don’t fool with it. We don’t do anything that doesn’t “do any good.” And, it is obvious to us that prayer is one of those things.

For some time now, we have been of the opinion that we are on our own in this world. The Holocaust seems to have been the turning point for a number of us. If that is the best God can do, we reason, then we are just as well off praying to the Void, or not praying at all. We gave up on the idea of a God who can deliver a worthy future for the asking, and began to look to ourselves as the responsible agents of creation. We talked of “the courage to be,” and stepped alone into our future as those who knew that what happened there was up to us.

The posture of the Stoic Existentialist (Or the Rugged Individualist) doing what must be done with a granite face and a grim disposition, is not the posture of prayer. It is not a posture that lends itself to warmth, and good humor, and resiliency, or, even, likeability. People who do not allow themselves the privilege of praying from the heart—regardless of whether it is pointless, useless, and a waste of time—seal themselves off from one of the soul’s true joys, and increasingly become less joyful themselves.

I don’t think we can be alive, in the fullest, truest, sense of the word, without praying. And, the point of prayer is not getting anything done, it is praying! We don’t pray because it works, and is an effective way to alter the world of external, physical, apparent reality. We pray because we must, because we can’t help it, because its as natural as breathing, and because to not pray is to be hyper-vigilant and always on guard in order to keep ourselves from relapsing into the superstitious practices of our ancestors—and to become a cold, calculating, heartless, soul-less stone instead of a vibrant human being.

We pray without theology, or belief in God. Prayer is the environment in which the soul thrives, the air the soul breathes. When we consciously open ourselves to, and participate in, the experience of prayer, we nourish that which nourishes us on a level beyond rational comprehension. We pray because prayer grounds us, encourages us, sustains us, and enables us to face what must be faced and do what needs to be done about it throughout the time left for living.

How the Church Changes It’s Mind

The process by which the church forms it’s beliefs can be symbolized by a tent. Isaiah sings a new song in a foreign land: “Enlarge the site of your tent, and let the curtains of your habitations be stretched out; do not hold back; lengthen your cords and strengthen your stakes” (Isaiah 54:2). Our tent is too small.

When Abraham received the holy nudge to leave Haran, and walked away from his country, his kindred and his father’s house—setting forth for the land of Canaan, he was beginning the construction of a new way of thinking about God. He was writing a new theology. He pitched his tent in the hill country of Canaan, with Bethel on the west and Ai on the east, and there, the text says, he built an altar to the Lord, and invoked the name of the Lord. And then, he journeyed on by stages toward the Negeb, which was a tract of land in southern Judah, so that the word “Negeb,” came to mean simply “south.”

The early development of the people’s idea of God took place on the move. The process by which we came to think of God was a living, breathing, dynamic, evolving, unfolding, chaotic, and mobile process. I cannot underscore how important it is to understand that we did not learn to think about God from the place of a rigid, static, isolated, unchanging, stultifying, provincial, narrow, single point in history, or geography. We learned to think about God “on the fly,” over a long period of time, and large expanses of land. We did not think the same thing about God through all that time, over all those regions. We had a larger tent in the early years. Today, our tent is too small.

In the early years, our thinking about God was expanded by our experience. We encountered different peoples with different ways of thinking about God. Their ideas deepened our own. We were broadened by our contact with other lands, cultures and people. We spent long years in conversation with the most unimaginable kinds of concepts, stories, speculations and conclusions. The thinking of the people we encountered influenced ours. The Garden of Eden is a composite story compiled from our journeys through the eons. The Story of the Flood was a popular campfire legend that we told until we thought it was something we thought of, and took credit for.

The conception of the God we came to think about as ours was shaped and formed through the ages of our sojourn as we came into additional contact with other conceptions, other views, other ways of thinking about gods and goddesses. We would walk through a land, hear an idea, and walk on through another land and hear other ideas, and on our journey, we would reflect on what we had heard—without having to embrace any of it. The journey allowed us the freedom of rumination, reflection, contemplation and realization. It was a long, ongoing, walk-a-bout. We could turn ideas over in our mind without being forced to accept any of them, without being told there were things we had to think, and other things that we couldn’t think at all. We could form our own ideas of God, out in the desert, out in the wilderness, with none to condemn or condone, free from the burden of orthodoxy, tenets, books of doctrine, and conventional standards of belief and practice.

In the desert, beyond the jurisdiction of the priestly castes in the city-states, we could see the absurdity of child sacrifice, and decide that any God worthy of our allegiance would be just as happy with a nice fat goat. In the desert, thinking about our contact with such a wide variety of ideas and notions about God, we could connect the similarities among the different ways people thought of God, and could begin to think of ourselves as the connecting tissue, so to speak, with God using us as “a blessing to the nations,” to “draw all people to God,” and to help all the nations see that God is more than any of us can “ask, or think, say or imagine.” In the desert, our tent was expansive, inclusive. Today, our tent is too small.

Our thinking about God narrowed and became restrictive when the politicians won the day, named a king, built a temple, institutionalized religion, codified beliefs, required everyone to think the same way or else. But there were always those who had a different take on things. The Prophets kept the tent flap open, kept moving the stakes, kept loosening the ropes, kept saying: “We have to enlarge the tent! We have to remember where we came from. We have to know that God is not bound by, or limited to, our ideas of God, and that there is more to know of God than is known, or can be known!”

The Prophets were wanderers—mentally, if not physically. They imagined the God beyond the concepts, beyond the theology, beyond the doctrines of the day, any day. And, they called us to expand our thinking, to enlarge our tent, in order to make room for the unheard of, the scandalous, the heretical and profane, as God acted to shake the foundations, and transform our notions about who God is and what God will do.

God is not bound by our views of God, they told us. God is not restricted to what has been thought of God. “The spirit is like the wind that blows where it will.” And God is free to live beyond the concepts of God in order to create an Eternally New God, a God who has never been conceived. About whom Meister Eckhart said, “The final leave-taking is leaving God for God.”

As if to prove their point, “Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. And just as he was coming out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. And a voice came from heaven, ‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.’ And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness” (Mark 1:9-12).

The wilderness is the birthplace of God. At the very least, it is the birthplace of new ideas about God. As we wander through the wilderness, through the emptiness of the desert, through the silence of the deserted places, things begin to stir. The process comes alive. Thought evolves, unfolds, and one’s tent expands. Jesus was a wanderer. Jesus’ thinking about God was not bound to how he was supposed to think of God. Jesus’ thinking about God was not restricted to what had been thought of God. “You have heard it said,” he said, “but I say unto you…” Jesus thought differently about God. Jesus’ tent was larger than theirs, or ours. Our tent is too small.

The Resurrection experiences ratified Jesus’ expansive approach to theology. There is more to God than meets the eye. Revelation continues. There is more to know than is known. We do not have the last word, or even the next to last word. We cannot freeze the frame and say, “This is it. This is all there is. This is all we need to know.” We cannot stop ideas from evolving, unfolding, expanding. We cannot kill ideas. Ideas will rise from the dead. God will not be entombed in the constructs of the past.

The angel told the women at the tomb, “I know you are looking for Jesus who was crucified. He is not here. He has been raised. Come see the place where he lay, then go quickly and tell his disciples, ‘He has been raised from the dead, and he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him’” (Matthew 28:5-7). As it was with those who were disciples then, so it is with those who are disciples now. Jesus is ahead of us. If we want to see him, we are going to have to go where he is. Want to guess what that means?

It means leaving what we have become accustomed to, and wandering amid the possibilities. It means leaving our parents’ house (with all the connotations that phrase suggests) and enlarging our tent. We cannot think the resurrection is real without understanding that Jesus has gone before us into Galilee and beyond, into all the world. Jesus is “out there” (with all the connotations that phrase suggests) ahead of us, calling us to follow him. We fold our tents, and step into the world after Jesus, wandering, wondering, evolving.

The process by which the church forms its beliefs, and changes its mind, is symbolized by a tent. Tents are appropriate because thinking about God is a living, breathing, dynamic, unfolding, evolving, chaotic and mobile process. In living out of a tent, we avoid the tendency to lock ourselves into an unchanging concept of God, and open ourselves to new ideas, and new ways of thinking, after Isaiah’s summons to “Enlarge the site of your tent, and let the curtains of your habitations be stretched out; do not hold back; lengthen your cords and strengthen your stakes.”

To say that Jesus is raised from the dead is to say that thinking about God cannot be confined to the concepts of the past—cannot be codified—cannot be frozen in place, unchanging, and unchangeable, forever. The world that stretches out before us is nothing like the world our ancestors knew. We cannot hope to do it the way they did it, and find our way. If we are going to take seriously the possibility of a spiritual journey, we are going to have to wing it into Galilee, and into all the world, in the spirit of the disciples, not knowing what we will find there, or what will be asked of us, or how we will respond, but trusting ourselves to the spirit that is like the wind blowing where it will, and to the path that opens before us as we step into the Mystery and all that lies Beyond.