Tag Archives: faith

Wisdom from Hamlet

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I’ve been awol for sometime!  Technical problems…and emotional problems ( i.e. writer’s block) have stymied me.  But here I am again….hopefully.  Technical problems are not completely resolved!

“We wage the war we are.”  These words from Auden continue to be a recurrent refrain for me.  It is tempting to surrender…but then there will be no more sunsets, or sun rising, or doggie lickings on the back of the leg in middle of the night, or sweet smiles from my lovely wife the next morning!

I think this pretty well sums it up!  As Hamlet’s mother put it, “Less art, more matter.”

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.

Sublimated Religious Violence

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An image that is indelibly imprinted in my mind from the past year or so vividly illustrates the violence that is present in the religious impulse. A Muslim terrorist in a Saudi Arabia casually walking down the aisle of a shopping mall, nonchalantly gunning down shoppers, but pausing periodically to kneel and pray. I prefer the violence in the religious experience I am familiar with when it has been sublimated into “simple” (cough, cough) manipulation, intimidating and terrorizing into “getting saved.” That is a very violent ritual but admittedly it cannot compare with what we see with today’s Muslim extremists.

Let me focus on the “getting saved” culture that I am familiar with, by experience and by research. I think that “getting saved” can be a meaningful religious ritual that can introduce one into the realm of spirituality. But in my experience I fear that often it only fulfills the “tribal function” of religion, bringing the young person into the tribe and fulfilling a very necessary human need to belong. But too often the value of the experience never goes beyond perfunctory compliance with the letter of the law, just as with many religious traditions.

But in the conservative, fundamentalist Christian denominations the children are often terrorized into “getting saved” with stories of excruciating death-bed conversions…or worse, death-bed failures to be converted and subsequent writhing for eons in the pits of hell. And the social pressure and intimidation is relentless as the young person is pressured into “asking Jesus into his life.” One blogging friend of mine recalled as a teen-ager gaggles of females besetting her and attempting to “gang save me.”! This procedure is intrinsically violent and it is interesting that many parents will subject their young children to this abuse even while the main focus of their faith are offenses like drug and alcohol abuse, sexual misconduct, abortion, and our “Kenyan President leading us down the path to Socialism.” Each of these issues, save the latter, is a legitimate concern. But how can a spiritually discerning adult allow their young children’s spirituality to be warped for the duration of their life while their spiritual fervor is directed on matters that might warrant attention but not as much as the mental, emotional, and spiritual welfare of their own children.  This is overt institutional child abuse that is clothed under the rubric  of “faith.”

Young children exposed to this terror are developmentally immature and the “neurological plasticity” of their brain means they are extremely susceptible to this kind of pressure and whatever they do to “adapt” to the stress, will likely follow them “en toto” to the end of their life. That often means their faith can never mature so that layers of meaning in the religious symbols can be appreciated. To let go of the subjective experiences of that moment of terror and broaden their worldview regarding spiritual life, would subject them to an adult version of the terror they felt as children. So the maistros who orchestrate this violence are creating a captive audience

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I blogged several months ago about “the unity of all things.” It probably will continue to be a recurrent theme in my life as I see…and feel…its truth in the whole of my life. And, with my heart being more open now, I have intuitive knowledge that I was intently conscious of this unity very early in my life, much longer than one should if he is going to “join the human race” on schedule. (That is a story for another time.)

This discovery in my adulthood can probably be attributed to my marriage in 1989 at the age of 37. I think marriage for both of us was the onset of an exploration of the phenomena of “otherness.” This exploration is a boundary issue, a daring pushing of boundaries in a new manner which has led to profound changes in my life, changes in the depths of my heart. The Universe offered me a little hint at what was coming in the Spring of 1990 when I plucked a lovely tulip in our front yard to take in and give to my wife. The thought immediately flashed through my mind as I plucked this tulip, so taken with its exquisite and intense and beauty, “I don’t know if I’m plucking or being plucked.”

Immediately I knew this flashing thought was “interesting” and revealing. I thought, “Oh, wow! This is psychotic” for my knowledge of psychology had given me the awareness that this was an experience that could be the onset of a psychotic break. But, at the same time I was not alarmed in the least for I knew that I wasn’t psychotic but that this experience merely reflected that my boundaries were beginning to become fluid, that the rigid distinction between “me and thee”, between “me” and the object world was becoming less pronounced. I also knew enough about linguistics to quip later, “My signifier is beginning to float!” My life since then has been a steady but mercifully slow story of my “signifier” learning to float and my learning to adapt to the resulting duress of a new view and experience of the world.

Just last week I was having coffee with a new friend of mine who has had a similar experience in her life.. She is a retired corporate “uppity up”, highly intelligent and accomplished, and with a keen spiritual intuition. We were talking about this phenomena of boundary subtlety and the complicated nuances of having this awareness. I shared with her my tulip anecdote and some other similar “adventures” and she shared similar anecdotes, all in the context of a discussion of spirituality. Suddenly, I abruptly noted, “You realize that someone listening in on this conversation would say that we are psychotic?” She paused briefly and then noted, “Yes, but there are layers to reality but when I experience the unity of myself and a tree….for example…I simultaneously know that this is not how the rest of the world experiences it and also know that if I went around announcing it everywhere I went I would get myself into a lot of trouble.” Our discussion then ventured into the multiple dimensions of reality and how that “common-sense reality” allows only one, one that can be summed up as that of time and space, a linear and thus sequential world.

Reality is multi-dimensional. Yes, my experience with the tulip was a valid and meaningful experience but it is fortunate…and a sign of mental health…that I had the immediate understanding that there were other ways of looking at my experience. There are always “other ways of looking at my experiences” and learning this has helped me to be a little more open-minded and more tolerant of difference, or “otherness.”

To summarize, a tulip spoke to me! Now if I ever feel that a tulip literally speaks to me and perhaps communicates to me, “Don’t pluck me! Don’t pluck me,” I’m gonna be alarmed! In fact, I will go down to “Wal Marts” and buy me an hypodermic of industrial strength Haldol just in case! But the tulip did “speak to me” in a powerful way, a message that has reverberated through my life to this very day.

And each day the whole of the world speaks to each of us, every bit of this beautiful world offers a word to us–flora, fauna, fellow man/woman. All we have to do is listen but to listen we have to first realize that we have a deep-seated inclination to not listen, to pay attention only to the self-serving whisperings of our own unconscious needs. We have “ears to hear but hear not, eyes to see but see not.” And truly understanding this wisdom of Jesus is something we just don’t like to acknowledge, even we Christians who love to quote it!

One caveat here. Now suddenly if the whole world opens up to us and speaks to us, if it suddenly cascades in upon us, all at the same time, you might want one of those aforementioned hypodermic needles! This could be a psychotic break. We merely need to be aware of the need to listen and to observe and at specific moments we will have the opportunity to listen to and see the subtleties of our world. The rest of the time we will dutifully go about our day to day life keeping this dog-and-pony (linear) show afloat.

 

NOTES:

Here is a link to a BBC story in which the interconnectedness of the forest is explained, illustrating one dimension of “the unity of all things.” http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20141111-plants-have-a-hidden-internet

For further explanation of “floating-signifier,” you might see the following link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating_signifier

Here is a beautiful description of the sense world collapsing in upon the ego, and the ego being saved from catastrophe (psychosis) by poetry:

bewildered with the broken tongue

of wakened angels in our sleep

then, lost the music that was sung

and lost the light time cannot keep

 

there is a moment when we lie

bewildered, wakened out of sleep

when light and sound and all reply

the moment time must tame and keep

 

that moment, like a flight of birds

flung from the branches where they sleep

the poet with a beat of words

flings into time for time to keep

 

words in time by archibald macleish

Be a Voice, not an Echo!

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I recently saw a quip on Facebook that grabbed me, “Be a voice, not an echo.” I feel I have spent most of my life merely echoing what I have been taught and what I have been rewarded for thinking and believing. I have dutifully mirrored back what “they” have wanted in the interest of the approbation that is always promised for this behavior.

But, due to my own internal “non-sense,” I realized I wasn’t feeling the approbation in the first place. And I saw that I had been guilty of this spiritual “offense” and am finding that I live less in an echo chamber now.  But notice I said “less.” We can never think with perfect clarity…unless we achieve deity; and if I ever have intimations of having done that I hope someone is nearby with a hypodermic of industrial strength Haldol!  We always live and think in a context and we always have a human tendency to interpret things to fit with our old-brain, ego-template of the world. When this understanding comes to us, we can back off more readily with our “certainties” and allow some doubt to filter in, making room for others. I love that line from T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets about the need to “live in the breakage, in the collapse of what was believed in as most certain and therefore the fittest for renunciation.”

 

Glen Beck and Neurophysiology

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Glenn Beck is one of the arch villains for we American liberals, a daily font of conservative blather of the darkest vein. But two days ago on his tv show he tearfully acknowledged that he has been battling for years a serious neurological illness that will shut him down in only a few years.

I guess in the deepest recesses of the fatally ill “literallew” there was a want to go “tee-hee” and I fear there will be a lot of that brutal, heartless immaturity from other of my liberal brothers and cisterns….I mean sisters. But I’m deeply sorry for this brother of ours….for we are all brothers and sisters regardless of our different perspectives on life—we are all made from the same “stuff,” we are all the “quintessence of dust” as Shakespeare understood so well.

However, I do think that the vitriolic blather of Glen Beck and others does have a neurological sub-strata. But, alas and alack, I also feel strongly that this “enlightened” perspective you are now reading has a “neurological sub-strata” and coming to understand this years ago has helped me to take myself less seriously than I have done for most of my life. Modern neurological science has taught us so much about ourselves that if we would humble ourselves and pay attention we eventually find ourselves overwhelmed with the simple but profound mystery of life, including the mystery of our very being.

In the past three years plus some of your have witnessed my “tippy-toeing” into this mystery as my awareness of it began to blossom. Awareness of this mystery…cognitively and emotionally…always evokes a feeling of finitude and frailty and at times is overwhelming. It is an humbling experience. It always brings to my mind the image that Shakespeare offered with King Lear, out on the heath of the kingdom he had forfeited, “pelted by a pitiless storm,” bereft of all the accouterments of his power, “naked as a jay-bird”, noting of an animal nearby, “we are all but poor, bare forked creatures as thou art.”

This “nakedness” that Shakespeare so eloquently grasped in his plays is what Glenn Beck is now feeling. It is what I am now feeling. And according to the teachings of Jesus…and countless other spiritual teachers over the eons…this nakedness is something we can experience any time in our life and can therein find redemption. This nakedness is “death” and out of it can come “life.” This nakedness is death of the ego, a relaxing of its tenacious grip on our consciousness allowing us to see that our life and the whole of life is much more than we can comprehend, an incomprehensible mystery before which we can only “glory, bow, and tremble.” (Poet, Edgar Simmons)

 

Epictetus had Faith!!!!

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I just stumbled across Epictetus, a Greek philosopher from the first century A.D., and discovered that his grasp of spirituality was profound. I shared a thought of his on Face Book and then quipped, “I didn’t know this guy was Christian.”

 

But the wisdom in this quote…which I will share shortly…offers tremendous spiritual wisdom which I feel arose from the same Source as did the wisdom of Jesus. And I think all spiritual traditions are an effort to offer us eternal wisdom, an avenue through which our life can have meaning, but it is human to glom onto that wisdom…take it literally…and miss its point. I can’t speak for others but I can’t speak for myself and can attest that I erred with my Judeo-Christian tradition and took it literally for most of my life, only now realizing that I did so not for “eternal life” but to escape and avoid “eternal life.” For “eternal life” is a quality of life which involves living fully in our body and soul in our brief sojourn here, trusting that what comes next is wholly in the hands of the Universe, the Cosmos, our Source….or as I am so lamely wont to say, “God.”

Here is Epictetus:

Are these the only works of Providence within us? What words suffice to praise or set them forth? Had we but understanding, should we ever cease hymning and blessing the Divine Power, both openly and in secret, and telling of His gracious gifts? Whether digging or ploughing or eating, should we not sing the hymn to God:– Great is God, for that He hath given us such instruments to till the ground withal: Great is God, for that He hath given us hands and the power of swallowing and digesting; of unconsciously growing and breathing while we sleep! Thus should we ever have sung; yea and this, the grandest and divinest hymn of all:– Great is God, for that He hath given us a mind to apprehend these things, and duly to use them! What then! seeing that most of you are blinded, should there not be some one to fill this place, and sing the hymn to God on behalf of all men? What else can I that am old and lame do but sing to God? Were I a nightingale, I should do after the manner of a nightingale. Were I a swan, I should do after the manner of a swan. But now, since I am a reasonable being, I must sing to God: that is my work: I do it, nor will I desert this my post, as long as it is granted me to hold it; and upon you too I call to join in this self-same hymn.

 

The Unity of All Things

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The earth is dying.  Having lost any connection with “an external point of reference,” we are doing as Shakespeare said we would do and “feeding even on the pith of life.”  The following story from Truthout.org reports that in the past fifty years half of the mammals on our planet have died out because of our failure to exercise good stewardship of little home.  http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/26536-why-the-web-of-life-is-dying

The problem is our failure to see the unity of all things.  For example, I was brought up in the Judeo-Christian tradition and quickly imbibed the assumption that “God” was “out there” and thus was separate and distinct from myself and this world.  I now see that this was a false paradigm arising from the biases of my culture, precisely that we are not part of nature but are Lords of the universe, destined to rule over our planet and exploit its resources.

But I admit that shifting paradigms from obstinate individualism to seeing the unity of all things is really frightening.  Boundaries have to loosen up and as they do so it often feels as if they are disappearing all together.  The resulting distress always induces an impulse to “hunker down” with preconceptions and biases, the “well-worn words and ready phrases that build comfortable walls against the wilderness.”  (Conrad Aiken)

However, the human soul has an intrinsic integrity that can handle the duress of wrenching existential transition.  We do have a center that can hold during the tumult but our ego always resists letting go and trusting that center, belying the deep distrust that we have in ourselves, in the world, and in God.  And this distrust is just the tip of the ice burg; for beneath its surface lurks profound darkness through which we can find the glimmer of light.

Listen to the hope offered recently by Anne Lamott, “Faith includes the mess, the emptiness and discomfort, and letting it be there until some light returns.”  And do note that she said “some” light not “Light” as the best we can ever do is to “see through a glass darkly” which is contrary to our human nature which wants to see things with certainty.

 

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Jesus is “Speaking” to Me!

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Now, He does not “literally” speak to me.  I don’t hear voices or anything like that.  If it should happen I would refill my prescription of industrial-strength Haldol quickly! But my imagination, so long dormant or even imprisoned within tyrannical linear thought is finally coming out to play and from time to time I like to interpret a few things I’m learning in the realm of spirituality with the following refrain, “Jesus said unto me….”

For example, in the mid eighties when I was knee deep in my “great depression” and was walking past a large Baptist church to get my favorite comfort food, ice cream, and I just noticed that for the first time in my life I had no tinge of guilt for not being there in that moribund house of worship, for disobeying the biblical injunction to “forsake not the assembling together as  the manner of some is,”  And this tid-bit of freedom has been burgeoning through my life since then, slowly working away on that deep-seated core of guilt and shame that had kept me in Christian bondage. And there on that street that summer night, Jesus told me, “Hey Louie, its ok!  You don’t have to do that anymore!  You are free, my son!  You’ve done your time, done your penance…a penance you never did have to do in the first place; for, after all, that’s what I was about.  Remember?  Remember?  Remember?”

And Jesus continued to speak to me and to tell me, “Hey, that whole Christian thingy.  You don’t have to do that any longer.  I paid the price for your freedom from all bondage, even the bondage to “me”….which by the way I never had in mind!”  I began to explore this vein of thought and realized that in the way I had been taught in my youth, I was no longer a Christian and Jesus was telling me it was ok.

So I wondered in that wilderness for years, knowing that I was not an atheist or even agnostic even with this radical vein of thought coming to me from Jesus, of all people.  For, yes I had lost my religion, I had lost my family, I had lost my childhood friends, I had given up professional employment and was living on a meager income, barricaded in the basement of an office building.  I had “lost” everything.  But, I then realized that Jesus and the Christian tradition was still there even though “it” had lost its grip on me.  I no longer “had” to be Christian but realized that I still believed fully that Jesus walked the face of this earth and trotted out a lot of marvelous ideas….and lived them, embodied them!  Now it is true, dealing with “loss” of this type…and speaking now as a clinician…can lead to radical loss which is known in my trade as psychosis.  But I knew that history was still present for my scrutiny and that Jesus had been here in history in some shape, form, or fashion and though we know little about Him, we can surmise that he was a powerful spiritual teacher and I found that his teachings had great value for me, greater value for me than ever before.  And I realized that this meant that I was a Christian and always had been and this “loss” I had experienced was the “loss” of the letter of the law which in the subsequent decades has allowed the “spirit of the law” to begin to flow in my heart and life.

 And since then, Jesus has said occasionally, “Hey Louie!  You are beginning to get it!  You find me only when you lose me, you find me only when you lose the “idea” of me and discover me deeply in the inner depths of your own heart, discovering that the Kingdom is within.  And, Louie, this “loss” you experienced is an ongoing experience but this is only the loss of your ego self which is what I had in mind when I taught that you can find yourself only when you are willing to lose yourself.

 Since then I’ve come to realize why most Christians hyper-ventilate with the Mel Gibson “Passion of Christ” stuff for with that imagery they can allow the story of Jesus, his death, burial, and resurrection to remain…in their mind…an historical “fact” and miss the point that he was “the lamb slain before the foundation of the world.”  This allows them to keep Him and the whole story a mere conceptual narrative which has nothing in the least to do with the depths of their heart where the real “death, burial, and resurrection” must take place.  They cling tenaciously to the “idea” of Jesus just as they cling to the “idea” of their own identity for to let go of the “idea” and embrace the experience would mean letting the ego die, it would mean following the advice of W. H. Auden who encouraged us to, “climb the rugged cross of the moment and let our illusions die.”

 

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But with this vein of thought, I always am brought to the realization that I have just condemned them all to hell!  By that I mean, in the old-brain mind-set of “literallew” they do not believe the “right way” and therefore are “lost as a goose in a hail storm.”  But the marvel of the Jesus story is that…as the old evangelical hymn puts it, “Jesus paid it all.”  Sure, they don’t get it “right” but guess who else does not get it “right”?  C’est moi?  None of us get it “right” but the message of Jesus is that we are forgiven nevertheless!  And as far as getting it “right”, please define right for me?  “Right” will always be a rational construction, a formulation arising from the depths of the heart which always has a deep-seated need to legitimate its preconceptions.  And that is why Christianity has often been a laughing-stock, easy fodder for late-night comedians such as Bill Maher who see readily through the non-sense and confront them with reality.  But, being confronted with reality, most Christians have a built-in escape, captured by W. H. Auden with this note, “When Truth met him, and held out his hand, he clung in panic to his tall belief and shrank away like an ill-treated child.”

The Adventure of Life

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“Life is an adventure,” so they say.  It is a commonplace that is almost banal, ranking right up there with “Today is the first day of the rest of your life.”  But, I find it really is an adventure which takes place when one begins to venture beyond the narrow confines of the way one was taught to see…and feel…the world.  But the real challenge lies in the very difficult task of becoming aware of this narrow prism through which one views the world, how the tyranny of assumptions shapes our fundamental perceptions of the world.  And to ask one to see these premises that shapes this world view is like asking a fish to see water.

It must be noted by those of us who swim in the aether of cerebral thought that most people in the world cannot ever make this meta-cognitive leap; and for them to do so would be catastrophic for human culture.  The day-to-day grind of reality depends on people who “mindlessly” go through the motions of their daily life without questioning the “basic assumptions” that I am putting on the table here.  And furthermore, for me to use the term “mindless” here merits caution as I do have a contempt gene which is too often near the surface!

We are tribal creatures and the tribal rituals are easily analyzed by people like myself who have lived their whole life “off the grid” in some fashion.  (I think one term for people like me is “pointy-headed pseudo-intellectuals” or perhaps more accurately “alienated.”)   But we are a tribe, a global tribe composed of smaller tribes who must somehow find a way to live together with a modicum of harmony.  But each tribe has an innate tendency to not see beyond the safe confines of its basic assumptions and each member of that tribe learns to drink the same “kool-aid.”  That is what makes it a tribe.

But the adventure of life starts when we realize that we have “drank the kool-aid” in some fashion and are shaped by basic assumptions given to us by our culture.  Then we can begin to find a bit of freedom and can begin to play with reality.  Yes, we can even begin to “play with our self” (wink, wink) and with the beautiful human and natural world that we find ourselves in, a beautiful “Garden of Eden” in some sense.

However, it is scary!  We are hard-wired to live within those “safe confines” and to suddenly realize we are “off the reservation” can easily be a Pyrrhic victory.  To take a quantum leap here, it will ultimately bring us to the Shakespearean issue of “to be, or not to be” and can even bring one to the point of suicide.  For it is gut-wrenchingly painful to realize that one does not belong to the tribe, to be deprived of that “fig-leaf,” and to stand there on that heath like King Lear, pelted by that pitiless storm, naked as a jay-bird.

This is where faith comes in for me.  But the temptation here is to take one’s tribal faith, make a fanatical investment or re-investment in it, and hold on “come hell or high water.”  And all fanaticism (i.e., “addiction) has its roots with this deep-seated existential loneliness.  The tribal religion that my culture offered me was the Judeo-Christian tradition and I have certainly allowed it to be in my life the “opiate” that Karl Marx described.  But opiate does not work for me anymore…or at least that one does not! (I do drink too much!)  I find that my “tribal religion” offers symbols, stories, traditions that are very valuable as I stand here on this heath with King Lear and others and find that there is hope and even purpose.  This “adventure” I am discovering now beyond those aforementioned “confines” involves death, for pushing limits always involves a death-wish of some sort but the Christian tradition teaches that death and live are intertwined and that to “die” is to “live.”  To put it succinctly, there is no “life” without “death.”  Oh yes, there is existence but there is no experience of human-ness, being a live body and soul for this brief moment we have in this time-space continuum.  This is what Jesus meant when he told his disciples who wanted to delay going with him for to help with a burial party, “Let the dead bury the dead.”

However, here is an important point that I’ve already touched on.  It is easy to interpret that quip from Jesus to mean that everyone else in the world who did not follow him was “dead” and therefore would “burn in hell one day.”  That is how I was taught!  But I don’t think so.  Jesus was playing with words, telling his disciples that they needed to follow him and let the burial party take care of its business, that it did not need them.  Jesus was saying that the rest of the world was okay and “dead” was only a metaphor to say they were not amenable to his teachings, that their role in life was to see things differently and to live different lives within “safe confines.”  Jesus realized that the “adventure” I’ve described here was not for everybody but that their life also was “ok”.