All posts by Gene Marshall

The Soul of Freedom

Progressive Christianity, ,

Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
If I should die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take.

This simple poetic prayer was taught to me as a pre-schooler. I prayed it at bed time. With my 88-year-old memory, I have forgotten many things, but I have not forgotten that prayer. It may be living in me unconsciously even now when I allow myself to sleep, trusting that all will be well.

It was not my college-professor parents who taught me this prayer. When my sister and I were preschoolers, we had a live-in maid. Mrs. Rush was a our caretaker most of the time. She was an avid Nazarene church member. She read us stories from Hurlburt’s Stories of the Bible. It must have been her who taught me that prayer..

In the religious culture of the Nazarene church, as well as the more liberal Methodist church that I attended, this little prayer existed within a master myth about soul and body— a sensory-rich mortal body substance and a ghostly, enigmatic immortal soul substance. As a modern adult, I no longer dwell within that two-substance way of describing my being. Nevertheless, this old prayer hangs around with meanings that do not presuppose that ancient worldview. I need a new view of soul

After much contemplative inquiry, “soul” now mean for me my enigmatic consciousness of awareness and freedom. This awareness is temporal: it is limited and changing, it rests during my sleeping, This freedom to met challenges, choose options, and make history is limited freedom within a limited awareness of an immense cosmos of mystery and surprises. So this soul of awareness and freedom is a temporal reality. that does not survive my death. Nevertheless, this enigmatic awareness and freedom is distinguishable from what I interiorly experience as “mind” or exteriorly experience as “brain” or nervous system. My consciousness or “soul” is an active agent that uses my mind for conducting my thoughtfulness, moving my body, accomplishing my purposes. I am guessing that somewhat less expanded form of consciousness (awareness and freedom) is a factor in the dynamics of aliveness in all animal life.

I am guessing that animal consciousness evolved as a survival benefit. The more conscious life forms became, the more adequately they could anticipate future events, avoid dangers, and engage in alternative outcomes to their benefit. As wondrous as this is, there is no need to believe that the souls of animals or humans are immortal. Consciousness or “living soul” can be viewed as one of the many strange forces in the cosmos—along with gravity, electromagnetic radiation, and others. Aliveness is one of those counter-currents to the massive processes of a cosmic running-down from heat to cold, from organized to disorganized. When death takes over a living body, every aspect of its organization begins to disorganize. Bones can last the longest, but even they will become powder over time.

Humans, with our capacity for art, language, and mathematics, are equipped with an intensity of consciousness that no cat, dog, or horse possesses. These other animals are obviously conscious with layers of consciousness that are similar to layers of my own consciousness. But I also possess in my art, language, and mathematics an enhanced layer of conscious with which no cat is troubled. I face options for living that no horse needs to confront. Not all my behaviors are a result of my aware choices, but these aware choices also take place, alongside all the determined factors in my overall operation. Some of my determined behaviors are also chosen. Some of my determined behaviors are restricted and altered by my choices. Choice-making is an aspect of my consciousness, and this consciousness, this awareness and freedom is my “soul.”

So in my currently operating vocabulary, the word “soul” indicates this ongoing process of being aware with an awareness that is an agent choice making, a freedom that is granted by Eternity, but whose responses to Eternity and all my temporal encounters are initiated by freedom itself. This “soul” of freedom and awareness is not a static substance but an ongoing process of change. “Who I am?” is never set in stone. I am a becoming. I am freedom. Awareness and freedom comprise my soul.

My childhood prayer about laying down my soul to sleep can now be viewed as laying done of my highly enriched human consciousness to rest from its controlling role in my living. Sleep is an out-of-control state similar to death. Sleep can be feared in the ways death can be feared, for we do not know if we shall wake from our sleep. Waking is like a fresh gift of consciousness—a starting over with a new short-time lease on living consciously.

So, in my pre-school existing, I probably used that simple prayer to opt for a trust in the Power that runs the cosmos of events to care for me and to awaken me again from this “little death” of sleep. Such simple trust in the Radical Allness that I confront is a description of a profound sort of living that can apply to child and adult. I need not entirely dismiss this little prayer simply because its surrounding mythology is now out of date for me. Rather, I can translate the existential meanings of this prayer into a fresh set of myth meanings and overall thoughtfulness that can govern my adult life in century 21. Let this be an analogy for dealing with Christian scripture.

Scripture Interpretation

Similar to interpreting this childhood prayer, my method of interpreting Christian scripture and other church traditions requires some translation from old to new form of thinking. The very old religious resources of the Christian Bible were created within a now obsolete mythology, but their existential intent and the capacities for lively meanings are as powerful today as they ever were. There is no recovery, however, of these resources for a viable and vital Christian practice without a mode of thought form translation. The fact that these writings were written by finite, time-bound persons living in a very different cultural settings is not a barrier, but a factor in doing accurate interpretation. Gone is the notions that these writings dropped down from some super-space into the passive temporal minds of the biblical writers. And these humanly created writings require a humanly created means of seeing their truth.

A helpful unraveling of Christian scripture meanings can begin with a translation for our century of these two Old Testament words for God: “Yahweh” and “Elohim.”

“Yahweh” in the vocabulary of biblical writers may date back to at least 950 BCE and oral use of that name for an ultimate devotion may date back to the Exodus happening some claim took place around 1390 BCE. That would for 400 years before Yahweh was written down in book Genesis. When this long enduring community of writing was living in exile in Babylon 400 years after the beginnings of these Genesis texts , the name Yahweh was still in use. The Genesis story-teller we meet in Genesis 2 claims that Yahweh was the God of Abraham and Sarah, Jacob and Rachel, Joseph, and others long before the Exodus. The migrations from the Euphrates river city of Ur that Abraham is symbolizes took place as early as 1800 BCE. So Yahweh is supposed by the biblical writers to be a very enduring object of devotion.

Indeed, the biblical writers view Yahweh as that unchanging Mysteriousness, that Unknown Master Power that is always being met by humans in the past, present, and future. Yahweh is an ever-surprising Awesomeness that is experienced in both horror and glory, as the giver of both birth and death, the source of all gifts for living and their limitations. Yahweh is a symbol for that active Truth and Power that is other than and yet in or behind each and every event that happens to everybody and to every society in every era. Yahweh is the enigmatic All-in-All Oneness that we can also call “Profound Reality” present in all passing temporal realities. Yahweh can be absent from our consciousness, but is never absent from all the realities we experience.

The biblical word “Elohim” has many meanings, but in contrast to “Yahweh” the word “Elohim” had meanings in the direction of “a divine devotion.” We can speak of many Elohim, not just one. All the Canaanite Gods and Goddesses were Elohim—objects of devotion such as the temporal powers that we still worship today in both limited and ultimate ways: love, war, wisdom, sex, procreation, etc. So the statement. “Yahweh is my Elohim,” can mean, “The All-in-All Reality is my core devotion.”

This understanding may have been present in the name that was taken by the prophet Elijah. who was considered the grandfather of the great prophets. “Eli” means “my God” and “jah” is short for “Yahweh.” So it is likely the case that the prophet Elijah took for his name, “My God is Yahweh.”

However that ma be, this singular devotion to Yahweh is clearly present in Psalm 90. I am going to restate this Psalm with a few minor word changes to aid us in seeing more clearly the lasting human meanings that were meant in this old piece of poetry as well as in all the other Psalms:

Yahweh You have been our fortress
from generation to generation.
Before the mountains were raised up
or Earth and cosmos were born in travail,
from everlasting to everlasting You are the One Lasting Power.

You turn humans back into dust.
“Turn back” You command the offspring of Adam;
from Your perspective a thousand years are as yesterday;
a night watch passes and You have cut off each human being,
They are like a dream at daybreak,
they fade like grass that springs up in the morning
but when evening comes is parched and withered.

So we are each brought to an end by Your negating power.
In mid-speech, we are silenced by Your fury.
You lay bare our illusions in the full light of Your Presence.
Each day goes by under the shadow of Your furious realism.
Our years die away like a mummer.
Seventy years is the span of our life,
eighty if our strength holds;
the hurrying years are labor and sorrow,
so quickly they pass and are forgotten.

Who can feel the power of Your negations,
who can feel Your fury like those who are devoted to You?

So teach us to count our days,
that we may enter the gate of wisdom.

This same Yahweh was seen as the overarching historical actor in the events lived by Amos, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and 2nd Isaiah. And this is this same Yahweh is the One Jesus calls “abba” or papa. Jesus announces that papa Yahweh is bringing forth a restored humanity in Jesus’ own living presence, in Jesus’ aggressive ministry, and in lives of those who are responding to the living of his message. This fresh blossoming of our essential humanity is seen as a new Adam and Eve—the kingdom of Yahweh replacing the kingdom of Rome and the then sickened people of Israel.

With these clarifications about Yahweh, the whole Bible begins to come alive with the sort of truth that is still happening to us. Yahweh is still acting in history Exodus-wise, Exile-wise, return from Exile-wise, and Jesus-wise in our lives today, and will do so forevermore. The Bible, a human book, reveals the forevermore. Such a recovery of the Bible is essential for the continuation of a viable and vital next Christian practice.

For more on these topics I want to announce the release of my new book:

The Thinking Christian

Wipf and Stock has placed on Amazon.com the opening chapters of this book.
Simply go to Amazon.com, then books, and then search for:
The Thinking Christian by Gene W. Marshall.

Imprisoned in Personality

Progressive Christianity, ,

When I was in grade school, one of my favorite games was called “Pick-Up-Sticks.” This game was played with a cylinder-shaped container filled with slim 10-inch sticks. These sticks were dumped out into pile, and the game was to pick out one of the sticks without moving any other stick in the rest of the pile. The players took turns until one player made one of those other sticks move. He or she was then out of the game. The game proceeded until only one player remained, the winner.

While reading in one of A.H. Almaas’ books about the psychology of personality, I recalled those piles of Pick-Up-Sticks. According to that psychology, our personality is a complex of “object-relations.” In other words, our personality is a stack of habits, each tiny habit referred to as an “object relation.” Each object-relation is an ongoing dialogue between some object and the “I” of that person.

If I picture each object-relation as like one of those pick-up-sticks, I can view one end of each stick as a memory of another person or thing and the other end as a memory of a unique “I” in dialogue with that person or thing. Each of these sticks represents a habit of operation—one dialogue habit in a pile of habits that form my personality. Such object relations might be: I—nipple, I—mother, I—father, I—sister, I—best friend, and scores of ever-more complicated object relations laid in on the top of the earliest ones forming my unique, complex habit structure that define the meaning of the word “personality.”

So at least for the purpose of this essay, let “personality” mean such a complex pile of habitual thoughts, feelings, memories, default operations and basic dramas built up over a unique life history. Some of these object-relations rehearse powerful dramas that have had big impacts upon the whole personality pile of habits. Perhaps an early relationship with father or mother still stirs up significant drama in the psyche. Perhaps some huge trauma plays this role. Perhaps some especially meaningful time plays a big role. Very early dramas often have a good deal of unconscious influence over more recent dramas.

No one is fully conscious of his or her entire personality pile of habits, but good therapies can help us become more aware of our personality fabric and thus more capable of being more intentional in our relations with our personality. Perhaps we can compensate for it, live somewhat beyond it, or discover a level of freedom we can have that is not simply a robotic acting out of our personality karma. We can discover that personality can be a prison in which we are unconsciously trapped.

Nevertheless, we would not want to be without our personality; it serves as the default pattern for large portions of our living. We would not want to learn all of those useful ways of relating afresh in every moment. Habits can be good. I am content for a lot of my personality to operate without my conscious attention. At the same time, I can become aware that some aspects of my personality produce difficulties that interfere with the optimal living of my current life. My life in this current here/now of conscious living can become more aware of these personality forces and, with that awareness, be more decisive in adding or subtracting from these largely automatic personality operations. With awareness comes more freedom.

Personality and Freedom

How does our grasp of such personality wisdom inform our spirit journey into our ever-deeper awareness and thereby into the full depths of our essential freedom? A personality can act as both an enabler of living and as a prison that restrains our essential freedom. A personality operates somewhat like a container in which I live. Like a prison cell, our personality container provides room within its boundaries for our essential freedom to move around. At the same time, the cell of personality has walls that restrain our freedom. And we may not even know that we are restrained until some challenge we are unable to handle brings our personality traps into awareness.

So how is it that I become free to move into that wider “space” of awareness and freedom that is my essential nature and my deeper potential? To move into wider spaces, we need to become aware of our traps. Here is the basic structure of a trap. You have come to think you know who you are. This view is built from your past experiences, but it is just a view that you have built. Perhaps you have heard yourself say, “Oh, I could never do that.” But then one day, you actually do what you said you could never do. Such moments let you see that you cling very strongly to who you think you are.

It may be deeply frightening to learn that you do not know who you are, and that you never will know who your are. You are always more than you think, and different than you think you are. You are a vast mystery, even to yourself. Your essential freedom means that you are not anything solid or stationary, but alway in process. In its full essence, freedom is raw creation—rendering acts that are caused by nothing other than freedom itself. Freedom is not an identity you can put to thought, but a process of choosing. We might say that freedom is a nothingness—a nothingness that creates somethings.

And while our personality was built of the genetic and social materials provided, our specific personality was built by our own mysterious radical freedom. Our genetic and social materials are just materials, not causes that explain this “living being” we are calling “personality.” My choices from infancy onward built this prison of habits that form my personality. I did not build my personality to be a prison; I built it to survive. And I did survive. I don’t want to be without my personality: it is my default pattern of operation. Yet as I become more aware of my freedom, I become aware that my personality is also functioning as a prison, a prison from which I can want to escape and from which I can move into a wider being of my being.

Continue reading Imprisoned in Personality →

Liberating Proclamation

Progressive Christianity, ,

The deep truth of forgiveness revealed in the prodigal son myth can be proclaimed to people in many other ways than reflections on this particular myth. The way such truth comes to us and is spread widely among humanity, I am going to call “proclamation.”
Proclamation is a religious practice. Proclamation is not only sermons and teachings, it is also poetry and songs, dramas and sacraments, like the eucharist.

The Proclamations of Jesus

Jesus was remembered as a proclaimer of good news, a teacher of healing truth, a new kind of rabbi with a new kind of authority. The core of Jesus’ proclamation ministry centered around the proclamation of the immediate coming of the Kingdom of God.

In his time and place, what did this proclamation of the coming Kingdom mean? It was a happening in the lives of real people, but we are missing much of the meaning of this happening if we view this Kingdom only with our psychological imagery. This was a sociological happening, first of all. This Kingdom of God was understood to be an alternative to the Kingdom of Rome. It was also understood to be an alternative to the first century state of the captive nation of Israel. It was understood as a restoration of the essence of being the “People of God”—a calling that had been lost during the period in which these people were so harshly enslaved within the Roman “Peace.”

“The People of God” was understood at that time as both a specific peoplehood already in history and also as a coming peoplehood in which not only Israel reaches its perfection, but also the entire world of nations are called to manifest this Kingdom. This passionate hope for a positive future was grounded in the understanding that this new sociological reign is being established by an all-powerful Profound Reality. Any revolts against this all-powerful “Reign of Reality” cannot last, because Reality always wins in the end. That is what Reality IS—what wins in the end, because Reality is Power without limit. Any losing to humanity on the part of Reality is being allowed by Reality.

The revolt from Reality by “Satan’s Reign” includes not just persons, but organizations of whole human kingdoms of estrangements from Reality—constructions that are doomed to collapse. This is so because that is what Profound Reality is—the undoing of all unreality, the defeat of Satan, the burning to ash of all estrangements from the Real.

Jesus’ proclamation was that this end-of-time expectation of rightness was now arriving in human life on Earth. Jesus was asking humans to look and see what is happening to the hearers of his proclamation. The sick of spirit are being healed, the poor are being lifted up from their despised status, the hypocrites are being put down, those who were blind to realism are seeing, the hungry for meaning are being fed, the outcasts are included, the crippled souls are walking their lives, and people with dead lives are living again.

Continue reading Liberating Proclamation →

Truth and Freedom

Progressive Christianity, ,

You shall know the Truth, and the Truth will set you free.    John 8:32 New English Bible

The meaning of “freedom” and the meaning of “truth” are closely related symbols in the Christian heritage. The “Truth” we are talking about here is “Truth” that yields the “freedom” we are also talking about here. And the “freedom” we are talking about here is a freedom that follows from taking on, for the living of our lives, the “Truth” that we are talking about here.

The Truth

The “Truth” indicated in the above scripture is a deeper sort of truth than the approximate truths we learn through our ever-moving scientific approach to truth. Yet, these approximate truths of science are probes into the same Mysterious Encounter with Truth of which our text are speaking. The truth we know through our contemplative approach to truth is also an approximate sort of truth. We can see truth with our own consciousness looking into our own subjectivity, but we see with a finite consciousness, and we tell about it with a finite mind. Truth is being approached by our contemplative inquiries, but the Eternal Truth of Mysterious Reality is never reached, only approximated in our contemplative inquiries. Furthermore, we approach truth through our interpersonal, I-Thou experiences—truth that we can never learn through the scientific and contemplative approaches to truth. And we all also participate, whether we know it or not, in a fourth approach to approximate truthfulness—an approach that arises through living within our sociological fabrics and changing those economic, political, and cultural manifestations of social workability.

All four of these approximations of Truth are valid guides for our living and none needs to be seen as inconsistent with the Eternal Truth. Yet they are only partial truths—truths that we change as life goes along, truths that get transformed through and through, truths that become obsolete or subsumed into more expanded truths. The Truth indicated in above scripture points to an Eternal quality of Truth, the Whole Truth of which these other approaches to truth are approximations.

Human consciousness can encounter Eternal Truth in the everyday experiences of our lives, but we cannot hold this quality of Truth in words, language, art, or mathematics. It takes paradox or parable—myths, icons, rituals, and other cryptic expressions—expressions that require shifts in our core consciousness in order to see the meanings that such religious tools were invented to help us to become aware of and to speak about to one another. We cannot hold Eternal Truth rationally with a finite human mind. We can only speak the secret of Eternal Truth to one another with religious symbols.

 

Freedom

I will illustrate the “freedom” that this Eternal Truth sets free with a story. I could use a story out of my own life, a fragment from a novel or movie, a story made up by me, or something else. I have decided to retell in my own words the story of Moses. I believe that there was in that dim past a person named “Moses,” but his story has become legend, myth, parable retold for centuries—retold because this story was about a dialogue with Eternity—a dance with Final Wholeness of Reality.

 

Moses

Moses, in my story, was a member of a slave community in one of the world’s most well developed multi-city civilizations in the 14th century before Christ. The life being lived by Moses and his companions was harsh. This immigrant population had come to Egypt during a famine and got stuck there as part of the bottom layer of that strict hierarchy. Moses was an unusually talented boy who benefited from both Hebraic and Egyptian brands of culture. In my story he worked as a slave during record keeping alongside the more severe hardships of brick-making. He knew the people of his culture and he knew the state of those people.

One day, Moses witnessed an Egyptian soldier mistreating one of Moses’ fellow Hebrew slaves to the horrific extent that Moses lost his cool and killed that soldier. This being a capital offense for a person of his standing, Moses fled to the outback to live with an uncle, married his daughter, made a life there, and was never found.

Being an unusually aware person, he kept up with the horror stories of the hierarchy. He and his Hebrew family had absorbed a religious history that remembered stories (perhaps similar to the later stories of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob). Moses also participated in dialogues of prayer with the “God” of those realism-loving ancestors.

One day while herding sheep out in the bush, a particular bush caught his attention. He reported to his fellow Hebrews that this bush burned without being consumed. Actually, we can surmise that Moses was seeing in his experience of this bush his own massive interior burning. His whole self was being burned away, yet the given particulars of his life were not being consumed. Everything about him was the same except that his entire selfhood was being burned away; nevertheless, nothing was lost. He was not being turning to ash, only an unreality was being consumed.

On this place that he called “holy ground,” he saw himself encountering the Profound Realty that was revered by his ancestors. And the message forming in his being within that “holy encounter” was, “Let my people go.” A number of other groups of slaves had attempted to escape to the wilderness. Most of them had been run down by the Egyptian chariots. Nothing was ever heard from those who made it into the wilderness. The whole idea of feeling called to do this sort of thing not only seemed preposterous and super dangerous to Moses, but doubts of all sorts rose in his mind about his own ability to lead such an extreme enterprise.

First of all, would other members of his culture even follow “meager me?” Yet here he was face-to-face in give-and-take relation with the Realty of Realities as perceived and adored by his sub-culture. His old images of himself were being burned up, and an unfamiliar Moses was being exposed to his consciousness.

His first response to this horrific calling was making excuses of all kinds. He tried to claim that his brother was a better speaker. But the answer that clarified for him about that excuse was, “Take your brother along, but you are the one being called here. You have to tell him what to say, when to say it, what to do, and when to do it. This whole adventure has to be your initiative.”

This was one hell of a jiggle in Moses’ inner being, and what was getting to him was the prospect of this jig, this dance that Moses would be volunteering to dance with the rest of his life. The adjective “awesome” only begins to describe the feel of this. The inner life forms of the previous Moses were evaporating, and the only symbol he found to tell his story was “a burning bush that was not consumed.”

As Moses begins to respond to this awesome calling contained in this history-making moment of his life, he is amazed with the results. People considered him charismatic. Some thought him crazy. But more found him and his story a sign of hope coming from their God. When the course of events opened up an opportunity to flee this slavery, hundreds of men, women, and children were ready to go. They picked up their belongings and babies and followed this dangerous call.

The actual escape before the onrushing chariots was seen as miraculous. When those chariots got stuck in the mud, the fleeing slaves were convinced that the Almighty Reality of all historical outcomes was able to offer openings for success to such bold intentionality. Moses was then determined to build upon the energy of this revelation of Almighty friendliness a culture of disciplines for these escapees—rules, religious practices, and laws based on a continuing trust in the friendliness of that Almighty Mysteriousness met in the outcomes of history. Within this hopeful set of convictions and communal disciplines, a spirit intensity was generated to follow Moses in solidifying a cultural revolution—working their Egyptian enculturation out of their lives and creating in its place a freedom-loving set of bold norms for living within this forbidding desert environment for another 40 years until Moses’ death. Other spirit leadership by then had emerged and they continued the core elements of this innovative heritage.

Later descendants of the Mosaic spirit clarified that not only had a temporal freedom from Egyptian slavery come about, but freedom of spirit itself had been discovered on behalf of the entire human race. They came to see that the freedom to risk death in order to break chains made of iron was the same freedom it took to risk security and selfhood in order to break cultural, institutional, and psychological chains. Indeed, if we in our time can be aware within our being of the raw freedom to use whatever power we have to bend the course of events, we can thank Moses for his assistance with this revelation.

The Truth of how Eternity deals with human beings was opened-wide through the Exodus experience. Finding the Final Reality we all meet in every moment of our lives trustworthy is a Truth that sets us free. Moses and his company enacted that trust and experienced that freedom.

 

A New Exodus

The crucifixion/resurrection revelation also awakened the Truth about the friendliness of Eternal Reality—theTruth that sets us free, the Truth that includes freedom. A New Exodus was made on behalf of humanity from the many estrangements of our species by this New Exodus community. But that is another story—another cryptic story exposing the Eternal Truth.

Here, once again, is how the writer of the Fourth Gospel put it:

You shall know the Truth, and the Truth will set you free.    John 8:32 New English Bible

A Return to Reality

Bible Interpretation, Contemporary Religion

If “God” is a devotional word for Profound Reality, then the word “God” adds no rational or irrational content to our experiences of Profound Reality. “God” adds only the very important meaning of our trust in the trustworthiness of Profound Reality. In that context, what does it mean for us to return to this holy trust in Profound Reality from our “distant places” of estrangement from Profound Reality?

First of all, we see the Presence of Profound Reality as an encounter we can and do experience and to which we can and do respond. Our enigmatic consciousness can “see” Profound Reality, but cannot describe Profound Reality or even talk about Profound Reality in our ordinary modes of truth. Neither our quest for scientific knowledge nor our contemplative inquiry into our our inner being can reveal anything about the essence of Profound Reality or about the relation of Profound Reality to us. In order to talk about this unavoidable relation with Profound Reality we need parables, koans, myths, and other cryptic means of communicating with one another about our Profound Reality experiences.

In order to illustrate what I mean by a “parable,” I am going to reflect upon the familiar parable typically named “the prodigal son” (Luke 15:12-32). This parable is about the essence of the relation that Profound Reality takes toward us, told about in a parable. For my purposes it does not matter whether this parable came from the very mouth of Jesus, or from the creativity of the early church. This parable clearly joined the Christian scriptures in a major way and implies a major truth about the revelation brought to humanity through the event of Jesus, understood as Messiah in the sense of having shown us the full living of our human lives.

So let us set aside any attempts to make some sort of moral or ethical sense out of this parable. This old story is not about moral advice for sons and fathers, or for employers and their employees, or for slave owners and their slaves, or any thing of that sort. Instead, let is examine how this parable is about a return to Profound Reality from our trips into our grim unrealities (that is estrangements from the Real).

Let us view the “father” in this story is an allusion to Profound Reality. And let us view the two “sons” as allusions to two alternative ways of being related to Profound Reality. Viewed in this way we can see this story speaking to us of a key religious issue that arises in every century of human life. I am going to quote this parable line-by-line and then comment on the radical nature of these somewhat cryptic verses.

Once there was a man who had two sons. The younger one said to his father, “Father give me my share of the property that will come to me.” So he divided up his property between the two of them. Before very long, the younger son collected all his belongings and went off to a foreign land, where he squandered all his wealth in the wildest extravagance. J. B. Phillips translation

To a human father what could be more disappointing than that happening. Not only is this an affront to the father, but it is a pitiful failure on the part of this son’s character, good sense, and outright indulgence. As a parable with regard to our own Profound Reality parentage, this story refers to going away from a home in realism into a far land of unreality.

And when he had run through all his money, a terrible famine arose in that country, and he began to feel the pinch. Then he went and hired himself out to one of the citizens of that country who sent him into he fields to feed the pigs. He got to the point of longing to stuff himself with the food that the pigs were eating, and not a soul gave him anything.

This is a strong picture of the state of desperation that can ensue from fleeing Reality. We see how this state often comes to pass for an extreme drug addict. This story also applies to the state of persons who sell out to wealth and power at the expense of their integrity and common sense. Any flight from Profound Reality places us in a tension with the inescapable forces of Reality. Attempting to win a fight with Profound Reality or to flee from Profound Reality is a hopeless life project. When such flight continues to its conclusion, we end up in a state of hellish despair penetrating our whole lives.

Then he came to his senses and cried out aloud, “Why, dozens of my father’s hired men have more food than they can eat, and here I am dying of hunger. I will get up and go back to my father, and I will say to him, “Father, I have done wrong in the sight of Heaven and in your eyes. I don’t deserve to be called your son anymore. Please take me on as one of your hired men.”

A shift toward an honest facing of this intense guilt is taking place. So intense is this remorse that being a true son of Reality is too much to even hope for. Just a hired-hand status and some clean grub will do.

So he got up and went to his father. But while he was still some distance off, his father saw him, and his heart went out to him. And he ran and fell on his neck and kissed him.

In this part of Luke’s story, Jesus is playing with his listeners at a very deep level. Reality is being pictured as treating our return to Reality with remarkable enthusiasm. This son does not yet get the thoroughgoing nature of this forgiveness.

But the son said, “Father, I have done wrong in the sight of Heaven and in your eyes. I don’t deserve to be called your son anymore . . .” “Hurry!” called out his father to the servants, “fetch the best clothes and put them on him! Put a ring on his finger and shoes on his feet, and get that calf we have fattened and kill it, and we shall have a feast and a celebration! For this is my son—I thought he was dead, and he is alive again. I thought I had lost him, and he is found!” And they began to get the festivities going.

In telling this parable, what Jesus is saying about the essence of Profound Reality in relation to our crazy-making unrealism can seem completely preposterous. These sentences are like clubs beading down the last bits of human moralism. Returning to the mercy of Profound Reality means a fresh start in full sonship, or full daughter-ship, or full innocence, or full saint potential. No period of punishment is required. No apprenticeship is prescribed. Complete restoration is immediately granted by the Authority beyond all authority—Profound Reality “herself.”

The prodigal is being given far more than is being asked for by that prodigal bring. And if these sentences are not enough to get our attention, Jesus goes on to describe the offense of the elder son to this father’s response to this wayward son. Each of us may feel in our own being the feelings of this eldest son. And as we read the following words, let us keep in mind that in this is a parable in which the “father” alludes to Profound Reality.

But the elder son was out in the fields, and as he came near the house, he heard music and dancing. So he called one of the servants across to him and enquired what was the meaning of it all. “Your brother has arrived, and your father has killed the calf we fattened, because he has got him home again safe and sound.” was the reply. But he was furious and refused to go inside the house. So his father came outside and called him. Then he burst out, “Look, how many years have I slaved for you and never disobeyed a single order of yours, and yet you have never given me so much as a young goat, so that I could give my friends a dinner. But when that son of yours arrives, who has spent all your money on prostitutes, for him you kill the calf we fattened!” But the father replied, “My dear son, you have been with me all the time and everything I have is yours. But we had to celebrate and show our joy. For this is your brother; I thought he was dead—and he’s alive. I thought he was lost—and he is found!”

The seeming unfairness of this thoroughgoing forgiveness of Profound Reality is rooted a deep moralism that can be found in us all. We expect Reality to be fair—fair by whatever rules of fairness are embedded in our own psyche. The extravagant mercy of Profound Reality rips our moralism to shreds.

The truth about forgiveness, as revealed in this parable, is essential for the full healing of the forgiven one. If Reality is not totally welcoming of us back to realism, then no such transformations are possible. We would all be stuck in an ever-descending spiral of guilt. But this is not actually true. Healing happens. The possibilities for redemption are real.

Profound Reality, according to this parable, cares nothing for being fair by the standards of any human morality—the only focus in this parable is that a truly guilty person can be restored to a fresh start in innocence. Reality is outlandishly happy that a guilty one who is self-condemned to some deadly despair is being restored to aliveness. Herein is the Eternal truth that this parable was created to reveal to individual persons and to communities of persons.

This parable does not support the notion that there is no guilt—that there is no primal human freedom that can go off the track of our Profound-Reality-supported realism. And this parable does not support the notion that everything is determined to work out just as it does, and that no one is to blame for anything. Rather, the revelation about Reality that can be seen in this parable fully acknowledges that guilt is real—that our experience of a valid self-condemnation unto despair is real, and that the experience of despair is a terrible sicknesses.

This terrible sickness can be treated, not by denying our real guilt, but by the divine treatment of total forgiveness for that all too real guilt. Forgiveness includes a defeat of unrealism and a fresh start in realism. Forgiveness does not excuse guilt; freedom transforms the meaning of guilt into a done deal in our past. Our guilt becomes a lesson in realism for our future choices. Forgiveness moves the healing person from the community of becoming ever more unreal to the community of becoming ever more real.

Our unreal state of living is a feed on the notion that our self-constructed ego gets to choose what is real and what is not real. Profound Realty alone determines what is real. This Totally Mysterious Truth is the judge of every humanly conceived truth as to whether it is true or not and to what extent it is true.

Finally, this parable does not support the notion that this total forgiveness is a type of sentimental indulgence of we untrustworthy persons—of we people who are inclined to take advantage of every leniency to be even more rebellious from Reality. Rather, Profound Reality is only forgiving of those to whom that same Profound Reality has already driven into despair—into despair over our foolish, self-inflicted flights from, and fights with, and outright rejections of Profound Reality.

Accepting forgiveness means surrendering to the rightness of our having been pushed into despair-ridden states of living. Only within a state of humiliating surrender of our commitments to unreality can we also become aware that Profound Realty has no need for revenge toward us or toward anyone. In accepting this forgiveness, life moves forward in the Here/Now of living to a fresh start in which all guilt is simply past memory. The karma of evil is broken. Freedom is restored. Aliveness is restored to full swing.

Profound Reality is stern only because Reality has to be Reality. When we return to Reality, Reality can be said to be nothing but glad, excessively glad beyond all proportion—joyous in the extreme. Such is the raw truth about Profound Reality that is revealed in this parable.

“Hurry!” called out his father to the servants, “fetch the best clothes and put them on him! Put a ring on his finger and shoes on his feet, and get that calf we have fattened and kill it, and we shall have a feast and a celebration! For this is my son—I thought he was dead, and he is alive again. I thought I had lost him, and he is found!”

Commitment to Freedom

Contemporary Religion, Progressive Christianity

If you cannot commit to freedom, you cannot commit to anything, for freedom is that part of your being that commits. In this assertion, “freedom” means a choice based on no reason or impulse except choice itself. If you cannot commit to freedom, you cannot commit to a mate. You cannot commit to a religion. You cannot commit to a cause. You are just a bystander. You may stand close by many good causes, people, or insights, but if you do not leap into doing free actions that intend to bend the course of time, you are not committed to freedom. Rather, you are merely standing by, waiting for some messiah of certainty to lead you by the hand or perhaps kick your butt.

The “you” in the above paragraph is a universal “you.” This “you” also means a universal “we” that includes every “me.” We humans are all tempted to deny our freedom, to flee from our ability to respond to our encounters. In many ways, we typically flee our ability to make free choices of response. We are all already guilty of such flight from freedom.

This freedom of which I speak is not license; it is an obedience to the way life truly is. Yet freedom is not an accomplishment. It is a gift of Profound Reality. To embrace this gift is primal sort of obedience to take on the gift of freedom. And living in obedience to this radical freedom is in its own way more demanding than obedience to any law, norm, or custom.

Lack of freedom is our accomplishment. It is we who have used our freedom to sell our own freedom into slavery, into some addiction, into some fight with our encounters with Reality—that is, we flee from our response-ability to freely respond. To the extent we have fled freedom, we are trapped in a form of slavery to that unreality. We no longer have the freedom to be free. Whenever we stand aside from making serious commitments, we may also be standing aside from accepting our freedom to do so.

Embracing our freedom means risking uncertain commitments. No mate is perfect. No religion is the last word. No cause is more important that many other causes. Any finite value requires a leap of choice. As the baseball philosopher Yogi Berra once put it, “If you came to a Y in the road, take it.” We are always at some Y in the road, some set of roads, all of which cannot be taken. I had enough mathematical talent to be a mathematician, but I did not take that road. I may of had enough musical sensibility to be a professional musician, but I did not take that road. I will never know for sure if those intuitions are true, for I did not risk those roads. I took other roads.

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The Choices of Horses

Contemporary Religion, Progressive Christianity,

Thomas Berry suggested to me that pre-horses became horses through the choices by many generations of pre-horses for the love of galloping. Pre-bison meanwhile became bison through the choices by many generations of pre-bison for the love of butting.
These two types of species evolved from similar gene pools in similar grasslands. Both set of choices worked in handling adequate survival probabilities of escaping extinction from the work of large predators.

Evolution is more complicated than cause or chance explanations can fathom. Choice is another human explanation that must take its place alongside cause and chance explanations. The myth that cause and effect can be the whole explanation for the doings of nature is incomplete. The myth that probability explanations can completely fill the gaps that cause explanations cannot handle is also incomplete. The human explanation called “choice” is also required to handle our experience of this ever-more mysterious actuality we call “nature,” or perhaps “Final Reality.”

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Cats, Humans, and Religion

Contemporary Religion, Realistic Pointers 2019

Our cat and I communicate fine without benefit of language, mathematics, or art. If he is already in the house when I get up in the morning, he will typically rub his black and white sides against my leg to indicate that he wants me to dish his breakfast. If I am delayed, he will try staring at me and making one short squeak. In this non-verbal way we carry out many communications. We use signs not symbols. If I use words, they are only signs to him. These signs don’t stand for things, they just indicate potential situations.

Our cat and I are both skilled at using signs. We share this very old mode of consciousness. Signs, as I distinguish them from symbols, are expressive of an inner multi-sensory-rerun form of mental products composed of memories of whole body sensory experiences. All animal life has this level of intelligence. You and I also run a large portion of our lives with this multi-sensory-rerun form of intelligence.

Cats

Our cat is clearly a conscious being who joins me is sharing this muti-sensory-rerun form of consciousness. I, however, also spend many hours of my life fully engaged in my symbol-using art, language, and mathematics. A cat does not have the biological supports for that level of consciousness. We humans do share with cats the drive for survival that ancient India called charka one—a swirl of consciousness they located at the base of the human spin. Slightly further up the spine they located a swirl of consciousness they associated with pain and pleasure, including sex. All we animals share that swirl of consciousness as well. Near the belly or solar-plexus, they located a swirl of consciousness that has to do with the capacity for purpose and planning that I introduced above as the multi-sensory-rerun form of intelligence. Animal life also shares that form of consciousness.

The above are conclusions that are easily made with our interior sensibilities as we watch the behaviors of cats, dogs, horses, turtles, even grasshoppers. In addition to those first three swirls of consciousness, we mammals share an emotional intelligence that is only minimally present in the reptiles and birds. India located that fourth swirl of human consciousness in the heart or chest area.

Humans

In the throat or speech area of the human body, India located the symbol-using swirl of consciousness. That swirl, chakra five, is only present among living species in the human. This intensity of human consciousness uses art, language, and mathematics to construct our amazing detachments and engagements in living. A few other primates can be taught by humans possible fragments of this intelligence, but a three-year old child has a facility with symbol-using consciousness that no other species can match.

This fifth mode of consciousness is so prominent in human life that we often identify the word “consciousness” with this mode of consciousness and call “instincts” those first four modes of consciousness that we share with the other animals. This limited view of consciousness can result in a demeaning of our emotional consciousness and our multi-sensory-rerun-using consciousness, both of which are very important for our best thinking and living. We may also hold our pain-and-pleasure consciousness in contempt. Even our survival-affirming consciousness can lose its appropriate power in our lives when we attempt to make art, language, and mathematics the whole scope of our conscious aliveness. The first four chakras of consciousness are foundational for our symbol-using human consciousness. Our fifth chakra thinking is weakened when we hold these first four aspects of being conscious in weak regard.

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God and Nature

Bible Interpretation, Contemporary Religion, Progressive Christianity, Realistic Pointers 2019

I will start this meditation with a slight rephrasing of the New English translation of part of Psalm 139—verses 13-18.

It was You who fashioned my inward parts;
You knitted me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise You, because You fill me with Awe.
You are wonder-full, and so are Your works.
You know me, through and through;
my body is no mystery to You,
or how I was secretly kneaded into shape
and patterned in the depths of the Earth.
You saw my limbs yet unformed in the womb
and in Your records they were all recorded,
day-by-day they were fashioned,
not one limb was late in growing.
How deep I find Your thoughtfulness, O my God!
How inexhaustible are Your topics!
Can I count them? They outnumber the grains of sand!
To finish the count my years would have to equal Yours!

This poem gives us a sense of how it is can be true that our relation with the nature of our own bodies can also be a relation with the Unconditional Reality that conditions all things that have conditions, such as our bodies. The Unconditional can only be spoken of in poetry or religions symbols. “You” (we sometimes say “Thou”) in the above poem is such a religious symbol. This symbol includes the meaning that we can relate to the Unconditional in a personal manner, as we might relate to parents, friends, lovers, spouses, children, and yes to our own body.

I recently noticed an often ignored feature of my own body. I found myself saying, “How fortunate that is. How glad I am to have it that way. I wonder how many million years of animal lives and deaths it took to evolve that.” Such awareness of our bodily nature, according to this Psalm, is also an awareness of God.

So is nature God?
Or is our God nature?

Unraveling such questions depends upon how we understand the word “nature” and how we understand the word “God.” Here are two ways that “God” is commonly misunderstood.
God is an object or process within nature.
God is a process or a being in some non-temporal realm, implying a minimizing of the temporal/material realm of nature.

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Yes or No

Bible Interpretation, Progressive Christianity, Realistic Pointers 2019

Jesus said, “Let your speech be Yes or No.” Matthew 5:37

Saying “Yes” without resentment, and saying “No” without regret is what Christian freedom looks like. Such freedom is beyond the law, as Paul and Luther so clearly point out. In other words, when we are acting from love, there is no law we must feel regret for breaking. And when we are acting from love, there is no law we need to feel resentment for obeying. In truth we need not moderate our “Yes” or “No” in order to fit in or not fit in—or in order to play it safe or not play it safe. All real options are permitted to Christian freedom.

Of course the laws are guidelines, often reflecting centuries of wisdom, but for your or my personal responses in each moment of our 21st century living, we have no absolute obligation to obey any law. We need to feel no resentment for obeying any law, or have regret in not obeying any law. We can be open to our essential freedom.

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