Category Archives: conversion

“Shuffling Off This Mortal Coil” of Certainty

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In my last blog, yes, my “panties were in a wad.”  They often are now as some three decades ago I stated heeding the advice of King Lear, “Blunt not the heart, enrage it.” When my fervor involves my religious past in fundamentalist Christianity, I am often given pause lest any unfortunate soul from those days of my life venture into this “dark and vicious place.” (Also, Shakespeare)

In that expression of religion, there is the tradition of “asking Jesus into my life” as a means of spiritual conversion.  To any of the aforementioned unfortunate souls who ventured there in the last blog…or even this one…I would like to reassure them that I have no doubt about their conversion experience, or “asking Jesus into my life.”  In that tradition, those words will suffice for a relationship with their Source and those words will suffice as much as any words, any ritual, or any tradition.  The mistake I made in my youth was a matter of identity; like any child, I had an ego and at that age an ego is a very fragile “thingy,” designed to cloak itself in illusions that will allow it, that is will allow itself,  to find a footing in this world. Later, with “a little bit of luck and a strong tail wind,” one can start saying to oneself, regarding his most cherished assumptions or certainties, “Hmm. Maybe there is another way of looking at that?” Or as Shakespeare put it, find the courage to “shuffle off this mortal coil” of unquestioned assumptions.

Change Involves, “Mangled Guts Pretending.”

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How do people change?  I’ve always been curious about this issue for I knew very early in life that I needed to change.  Here are two pithy observations about this question, one from-13th century Persion mystic,Rumi and the other from a mere two decades by American playwright, Tony Kushner.

The Worm’s Waking

There is a worm addicted to eating grape leaves.

Suddenly, he wakes up,

call it Grace, whatever,

something wakes him, and he is no longer a worm.

He is the entire vineyard, and the orchard too,

the fruit, the trunks,

a growing wisdom and joy

that does not need to devour.

Kushner’s play “Angels in America offers a scene in which the internal tension of change is vividly put into words, presented here as a gut-wrenching experience involving a Divine encounter.  Fortunately, most of the time it is merely discomforting or stressful as people like myself do not have the brilliant, sensitive, artistic

temperament of people like Kushner.  Here is a quotation from one memorable scene:

Harper: In your experience of the world. How do people change?

Mormon Mother: Well it has something to do with God so it’s not very nice.

God splits the skin with a jagged thumbnail from throat to belly and then plunges a huge filthy hand in, he grabs hold of your bloody tubes and they slip to evade his grasp but he squeezes hard, he insists, he pulls and pulls till all your innards are yanked out and the pain! We can’t even talk about that. And then he stuffs them back, dirty, tangled and torn. It’s up to you to do the stitching. 

Harper: And then up you get. And walk around.

Mormon Mother: Just mangled guts pretending.

Harper: That’s how people change. 

December 10, 2020 Conservation

The socio/cultural/political morass which weighs down on us at this moment is very unnerving, even frightening matter; this is because it is a cosmic identity crosis, at least for one teeny-weeny little culture on this “Third Rock From the Sun.” It is teaching us so much about the ego, individually and collectively.

The development of our ego is a monumental event in our life. It is intrinsic to our ability to negotiate what the infant will discover as “reality”, a crisis in which twin poles of our Divinity war with each other. When our ego begins to come into existence, to come online, it struggles within its nascent existence as it loathes discovering its finitude. Only moments earlier, this very core of our being is enconsed in the womb of “no-thingsness” and is on the verge of making the decision to “fall” into this world of existants or remained in the comfortable, Edenic womb.

winnicott’s break down

“Tired of Speaking Sweetly” by Hafiz

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God is found at the boundaries of our life, in what I like to call a “liminal zone” where the distinctions between “me and thee” are nebulous; one might even say where all distinctions are nebulous.  When this experience comes to us…if it ever does…it comes as an intrusion or invasion of sorts which psychologist Carl Jung described as an “einfall.”  This phenomenon is usually conveyed with the image of a transcendent God toying with mankind…in some sense fiddling with him…until he breaks through his resistance and allows Him in.  John Donne wrote a beautiful sonnet in which he prayed, “Batter my heart, three-personed God” for otherwise his adamantine resistance would never be overcome.

Hafiz, aka Khwāja Shams-ud-Dīn Muḥammad Ḥāfeẓ-e Shīrāzī, was a 14th century Persian poet who wrote a beautiful poem about this process of einfall.  This very human experience, so very human that it merits the description Divine, is often gut-wrenchingly painful as the Donne sonnet conveys and as Hafiz conveys here in a more light-hearted fashion.

TIRED OF SPEAKING SWEETLY (aka “God’s Drop Kick”) by Hafiz

Love wants to reach out and manhandle us,
Break all our teacup talk of God.

If you had the courage and
Could give the Beloved His choice, some nights,
He would just drag you around the room
By your hair,
Ripping from your grip all those toys in the world
That bring you no joy.

Love sometimes get tired of speaking sweetly
And wants to rip to shreds
All your erroneous notions of truth

That make you fight within yourself, dear one,
And with others,

Causing the world to weep
On too many fine days.

God wants to manhandle us,
Lock us inside of a tiny room with Himself
And practice His dropkick.

The Beloved sometimes wants
To do us a great favor:

Hold us upside down
And shake all the nonsense out.

But when we hear
He is in such a “playful drunken mood”
Most everyone I know
Quickly packs their bags and hightails it
Out of town.

Basic Premis of “Getting Saved” Culture

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The problem of “getting saved” culture is not on the surface but in the depths of the heart, in the premises. A fundamental primis of this mind-set is that the world is seen as separate and distinct from humankind. The “unity of all things” dimension of human experience is not recognized. Their world is bifurcated into “saved” vs. “unsaved” which is merely another version of the “us vs. them” paradigm, the need to see themselves as separate and distinct from other people and from the world. It goes hand in hand with the notion that this earth is something to exploit.

Someone steeped in this “getting saved” culture sees the world “out there” reflecting the over emphasis of God’s transcendence, God always being “out there,” sitting on a throne wielding judgment and pulling strings bringing about his will. This is a projection of the human heart, reflecting the abdication of his/her own power onto a sterile image. This perspective gives only lip-service to the immanence of God which in favor of His transcendence. The subtlety of Spirituality is not seen as God is, yes, “out there” in some sense (though not in terms of time and space) but simultaneously he is “in here” (though again, not in terms of time and space.) “God” is a merely a word that we have used in an effort to capture this incredible Mystery of the human experience, an experience which is actually intrinsically divine. That Ground of our Being cannot be reduced to a mere word or concepts, nor to elaborate theological veins of thought.

And this is what Jesus was telling us that “the Kingdom is within” and that “he who was afar off, has been brought nigh by the blood of the Cross.” The Old Testament Jahweh, “way out there” in the heavens had reached a new level of development and it was time for humanity to recognize it was no longer necessary to attempt to appease him with the “blood of bulls and goats.” Jesus was saying, “You can give that stuff a rest” as that which you worshipped has become enfleshed, I am He, you and I are one, you too are God.”

But acknowledging and embracing our deity, which Jesus taught that we have, requires handling the awkwardness of thinking of ourselves as “God.” It requires a spiritual subtlety that permits an individual to handle mutual contradictory notions at one and the same time; such as, “I am God” as well as “No, I’m not.” It requires recognition, not just intellectually, but intuitively that I am not what I imagine myself to be, that I am more and even less than I “think” that I am.

But when this notion begins to seep into consciousness, it is scary, even “scary as hell.” For this notion invites us to recognize another dimension of life that lies beyond the pale of our conscious mind but is always vibrating within that conscious mind.

Okay, I’m running out of steam and the not quite dormant “literallew” is raising his juvenile hand, reminding me of just how crazy this line of thought is. Yes, it is “crazy “ to a linear mind trapped in the time-space continuum. This is the “Mystery” that even Einstein noted lay at the root of his explorations in the realm of science. But this same “Mystery” with Christians…and most religions…is immediately “bronzed o’er with the dull cast of thought” when we encounter it and we fall in love with the concept. If we would look carefully, this concept, this “idea” that we love is merely our own ego-self wrapped in religious trappings. That is what Jesus was trying to tell the “Christians” of his day, those who were ensconced in the “Pharisee” denomination of that time.