the wilderness and constructs

God's Ways

I often think of the hijacking of Isaiah 55:8 “My thoughts are not like your thoughts, says the Lord...” All of my life this phrase has been used to explain away the unloving actions of “our god.” In response to any difficult question regarding the conflicting nature of the Christ and a wrathful god.

Why would god create people just to send them to everlasting torment? “His ways are not our ways.”

According to this false gospel, human beings were given weak hearts that if allowed to be possessing of the true image of god they would not quiver at the suffering of a fellow person. Is that really what Isaiah meant?

Absolutely not.

Isaiah 55 continues “For as heaven is higher than earth, my ways are higher than your ways.” God provides rain to water the seeds which grow trees to bare fruit. That fruit is free, it is available to the poor and rich alike. Denying any one person the bounty of God's provision is exactly the opposite of God's ways. This is the way of man, the false god of our time, food is only provided for the wealthy, those who have worked hard and earned it, those who have the false god's blessing.

Isaiah's god, the God of the wilderness gives unceasingly. God provides to the pure and wicked alike, despite the wicked's attempt to control the methods.

When a human being finds their true nature, God anoints them with oil! When a human being shares a loaf of bread, God provides endless yeast! When a human being loves to the fullest of their ability, God loves even more!

The Magic Mirror Gate

There is a gate in The Neverending Story which stops many adventures, the Magic Mirror Gate. Anyone who wants to pass the gate must face their true selves. “Kind men must face that they are cruel, brave men discover they are really cowards... most men run away screaming.”

I have been thinking a lot about this gate and what I might see there. It is the thing that hides deep in my psyche, firmly protected by ego, in a casing of denial and avoidance. For me it is my weakness, myself as weak, and even though I can speak it, the true nature has remained illusive. I can face this mirror but my eyes continue to see a lie so I cannot continue on my journey.

The stories of Jesus often reflect the revelation of true self. No one is free of sin. A leper is healed, a blind man can see. And death is really just a pathway to life. There is one particular representation containing the symbol of the magic mirror gate that I am interested in exploring, it is the story of the rich young ruler.

The rich man comes to Jesus, he wants to face the gate, find out if he is worthy. He has done everything commanded, held up all the teachings with high regard. He is good and he wants to gaze at the goodness of the Christ fully expecting to see a reflection smiling back at him.

Jesus saw something else.

He saw the rich man as he truly was. Poor. Jesus asked him to see it too, but the man ran away screaming. It was not so much that the man was greedy and wanted to hold onto his material wealth but that he could not bare the sight of his true self. In the eyes of Christ he was shown naked and weak, begging for just a drink of wine and bite of bread. Jesus saw this man and he loved him, all of him, but the man couldn't accept that love because his denial of true self was all consuming.

We are given the illusion of sight, the illusion of self-awareness, but the magic mirror gate is always there. It quietly waits for us to shed the scales from our eyes and take a look.

Going Wild

One my favorite children's illustrated books is called Mr. Tiger Goes Wild. It tells the story of Mr. Tiger who gets tired of the orderly and civil society where he lives. The animals of his town stand on two legs, wear suits, and are very polite. Mr. Tiger starts to reject these norms he finds stifling; he begins to walk on all fours, climb buildings, and (gasp) strip naked. The village animals banish him out into the wild where Mr. Tiger happily runs, climbs, and roars as he pleases. Eventually Mr. Tiger gets lonely and misses his friends, he goes back to the village and is surprised to be greeted warmly with a peace offering, a Hawaiian shirt. The last image of the village shows all the animals happily a mix between civil and wild each seems free to chose.

I feel like Mr. Tiger right now. Except I don't know if I have the claws, teeth, and fur to survive in the complete wilderness. I want to skip to the end of the story, the freedom to be wild and civil as I please, yet here I am, trapped in civility with a roaring animal inside of me.

On Sunday I attended my parent's church, the church I grew up in. This church has changed quite a bit over the past few years. It is in a very wealthy area and has a huge congregation. I knew the service would be grandiose and it basically went how I expected until the pastor did a curious thing in his message. I was only half paying attention, I knew that the overall theme was how Jesus was not the savior people had expected. The pastor was picking stories from the gospel where Jesus subverts expectations or offends his audience. The pastor began telling the story from Mark 10 of a man who approached Jesus asking how to get into heaven. The pastor commented on how Jesus asked “Why do you call me good, no one but God is good” and how the man “walked away sad.” The man wanted to be good but Jesus said no one was good so his expectations were subverted. It took me a moment to realize that the pastor completely omitted the commands that Jesus gave the young man and even that the man was rich at all and was sad because he didn't want to sell all his possessions as Jesus had commanded. This enraged me. That story could hold a lot of different meaning, wealth aside, but the omission felt so purposeful coming from a man how stood in a multi-million dollar building with an audience of mainly white, affluent Americans. It was Easter Sunday after all, he probably did not want to drive away seekers. The pastor didn't want to offend the audience with Jesus's words. The level of hypocrisy seems comical to me now but it lit a fire in my heart as I sat in that audience. I have never felt so bound by the rules of civility in our society until that moment. I looked around at the crowd, at the balcony, at the man on the stage and every inch of me wanted to stand and shout the verses he had removed. I pictured the ugly looks I would get, I pictured the shame in my family's eyes and I remained in my cage.

I don't want to be in that cage but I also don't want to hurt people. Is there any way to live in both worlds? I am increasingly torn between these two worlds and the role my ego plays in both. I want to jump to the end but I know that each step is important. Perhaps becoming wild takes baby steps, one wild act at a time just like the story of Mr. Tiger.

If anyone would like to do this with me please let me know... maybe together it won't feel so lonely or so confusing.

Expensive Perfume

I drove past the Episcopal church I have been attending today and it is a grand building. A beautiful stone structure with marvelous stained glass and a spire which reaches above all its neighboring structures. There really is no other building like it in the city. For a moment I thought, what a waste, that opulence should be brought down and the wealth used to aide the poor.

Does this sound familiar?

“Why this waste? This perfume could have been sold at a high price and the money given to the poor.”

The alabaster jar was broken so that the perfume could flow out, anointing a lover. It was reckless, it was a wild, and to many, it was a waste. We all think this way at times, as if we can make some sort of morally superior stance on the uses of the materials of this world.

Jesus's response has made me angry and challenged me over the past years as I have struggled with a lack of resources. Constantly being on the verge of losing house or losing food creates pretty furious emotions about the injustice in our world. “The poor will always be with you” is a phrase that has haunted the church and its relationship with politics. Like somehow Jesus's statement made it alright to throw up our hands and say “What can we do? The poor will just be poor. I will just make sure I am right with Jesus.” This story, emptied of the reckless love and the wilderness that acts like a fragrant perfume, leaves a heart calloused and cold.

The story with that love. With the wilderness. Makes the pouring out of expensive perfume all consuming. It is losing your life. It is breaking the alabaster jar. It is absolute freedom. Freedom to love and be loved in return.

The church building with its opulence may just be an alabaster jar but it contains the perfume. It pulls me in and lets me out so that I may remember that life is not about the right or wrong uses of our resources but the full embrace of reckless love. There are so few places left in our constructs that hold the space for that reminder. Being raised in a church with empty walls, commercial carpet, and a balanced budget was practical. The church of my youth taught me to be reasonable, to understand the proper way to construct myself and to construct my world around a perceived nature of the divine which can be found through study and obedience. It was a partial truth or even a twisted truth. It has left me tangled and confused. I have had to pull myself to pieces to understand it and to find the fuller truth.

The injustice of the world still hurts. I still grieve for the lost, the oppressed, and the exploited. But instead of making charts and graphs, weighing pros and cons, I want to love in complete freedom. I want to carry the wild perfume with me so that I never forget it and can anoint anyone who walks on this path with me.

Jesus's challenge to me now sounds more like this: The wealthy will always be with you but the I AM that is me, my relationship to this place and with the wilderness and to you (to the I AM that is you) will not always be.

I want to enjoy the places I can find beauty and the places I can smell the perfume and carry the perfume without a calculator for a brain. I want to love the wild, have the wild consume me.

Love recklessly.

My Turmoil with Touch and The Fear of Darkness

I did not like to be held close as a kid. I am not completely sure of the reason, maybe I just wanted to see everything. Perhaps I embraced the light so fully that to close it off from me felt like a cruelty. This would make sense in my deep fear of the dark. The dark haunted me as a child, the monsters who lurked there were unquenchable. Even though most of the time I was fully aware those monster were in my mind, that fact didn’t change the way they made me feel.

I ran to my parents' bedroom almost every night when I woke up from a nightmare. I knew they didn’t like it. I was full of shame when I would tap my mom on the arm or when I tried to just gently add my body to their bed. The more I did this the more they made me feel I was a nuisance, childish, and disobedient. I increasingly would lie in my bed praying the monsters would settle and I could just fall back asleep. Sometimes after an hour or so this would work and I could reluctantly drift back to an uneasy sleep, but more often I would slowly work up the courage to head to my parents’ room.

One night, the night that solidified one of my core messages (the feelings of helplessness and being at the mercy of the monsters), my parents just locked their door. I screamed and cried and yelled at the doorway. I don’t know how that story ended because I don’t remember but I don’t think my parents ever came and unlocked that door. If they did, the fear and pain was already solidified – this world is scary and I was alone in dealing with the fear.

Eventually, when my child brain was moving out and the adolescent one was moving in, I had a dream which ended my nightmares. My ego took my hand and taught me how to fight the monsters. My nightmares dwindled after that moment.

I could handle whatever emotion came at me, whatever fears I had could be rationalized away or simply avoided. I no longer had to burden any one else because I knew it was too much for anyone else to handle and anyone who would try to help would eventually let me down.

This is a very useful way for me to hold my heart as I was growing up. I may not have been outwardly confident but my inner self was full of pride. Eventually I would teach myself how to let that out and any morsel of power I could get my hands on meant that I could make sure no one got hurt.... and if that didn’t work than at least I wouldn’t get hurt. Relationships were easy to let go of as soon as they got too dangerous and if I held the reins then I knew where the ship was going.

The thing about always holding the reins and always retaining the power in relationships is that no person could ever really give back to me. I could give myself physically and emotionally at will but receiving from others was often met with cynicism and mistrust, when it didn't turn into an unquenchable thirst.

As I said, I did not like to be held close as a child and even refused to breastfeed. I needed something, some sense that could not be found in a close grasp. But if being held close was like torture, not being touched at all was hell and that is what you get when you reject hugs as a kid, isolation. My strongest positive memories of touch from my childhood was when my mom would scratch my back. I loved getting a back-scratch, my whole body would crumble and I never wanted her to stop. I don’t know if it was just the rarity of what I would consider a positive touch or just the exact thing I needed but to this day there is no better touch for me than a back-scratch.

The thing I wonder now is that maybe I needed touch so badly as a kid that being held close was overwhelming. It was like a surge of energy I wasn’t yet ready to handle. But as I have so often realized in most aspects of my life, if I reject something or react too strongly emotionally, people back off.... they really back off... and there I am, alone.

I don’t blame people. This whole thing really confuses me too. It has taken me over 30 years to even get close to the proper explanation of my love/hate relationship with physical touch.

Touch demands so much of me and I often receive nothing back from a touch I have given. All I seem to have are demanding touches at this point in my life. I don’t know how to start asking or looking for the type of touch that could restore me.

This story does not have a happy conclusion today, just grief.

Catholic Persecution

Just compare the “Anti-Catholicism” Wikipedia page to the “Anti-Protestantism” Wikipedia page and the reality that Catholics are a persecuted religious group really sinks in. I am ashamed that I did not question the stories I was told growing up, even in my public high school history class the language was tame and Protestantism was praised. There of course have been issues in the Catholic church, just the same as any other institution but they are beaten and bruised lot and I was taught it was the other way around. I am still working and still learning but I am also terribly sorry for my ignorance. The state wanted Catholic land and Protestant occupation was much more kind toward state power. Land theft is the first step of oppression and persecution, and this theft wasn't of the robin hood kind. For anyone else that this is new information to you, I would encourage you to start with the Wikipedia pages. It isn't enough information I am sure, but I don't think I can look away from it all now.

The persecution of Catholics, the power of Protestants.

A Cathedral on Fire

The burning and desecration of sacred symbols and artifacts is tragic, I do not want to add a “but” on grief and anguish caused by the burning of the Notre Dome Cathedral. I would like to talk about what happens when what is sacred burns. I think there is no greater metaphor than that of the desecration of a body. I believe we are both our body and not our body, it is complicated yes but we cannot escape the notion of longing to escape our bodies. So we often treat our bodies like they are not a part of us: fill it with food that pleases but does not nourish, drink until we are numb, or hate it and curse it. When we recognize our bodies are us and a part of us and that we are good, we look at our bodies differently. There may still be pain and anguish held in our limbs, some things may not function the way we want them to or the way society requires them to function, but they are us and we are good.

There are many institutions, structures, and artifacts that can exhibit the same tendencies. They may seem separate from us, they may exhibit characteristics that we find distasteful, out of date, or corrupt. But if we approach them with hate, malice, and torches what have we done? We have not taken time to look within ourselves and our history. To understand why the destruction of something seen as sacred has such a profoundly powerful affect on those who weep and those who rejoice we have to understand deep human connection.

When we rejoice in the burning away of something with deep meaning and significance we will always loose something. The west has an incredible way of demanding the destruction of roots and the ripping up of culture, is that what we want to be a part of?

The truth is that there are indeed things that need to burn and people who need to die, but those same structures and bodies are part of us. We need surgeons more than executioners. If we pull apart a corrupt building but save the materials with respect, we can make something new and keep the connections which are sacred, sacred because they are human. We can destroy religion, the patriarchy, and capitalism but some of all of that lives within us and if we don’t acknowledge that and unearth those roots we might just burn up with the things we are trying to destroy.