In this essay I am going to point out four of the most common forms of flight from our essential freedom and indicate with some poetry and stories how our essential freedom is being lived and\/or fled.<\/p>\n
We live in a Land of Mystery.
\nWe know nothing about it.
\nWe don\u2019t know where we have come from.
\nWe don\u2019t know where we are going.
\nWe don\u2019t know where we are.
\nWe are newborn babes.
\nWe have never been here before.
\nWe have never seen this before.
\nWe will never see it again.
\nThis moment is fresh,
\nUnexpected,
\nSurprising.
\nAs this moment moves into the past,
\nIt cannot be fully remembered.
\nAll memory is a creation of our minds.
\nAnd our minds cannot fathom the Land of Mystery,
\nmuch less remember it.
\nWe experience Mystery Now
\nAnd only Now.
\nAny previous Now is gone forever.
\nAny yet-to-be Now is not yet born.
\nWe live Now,
\nonly Now,
\nin a Land of Mystery.<\/p>\n
Denying the truth of this poem can be called \u201crationalism,\u201d the notion that the real is rational or that rational is the real.\u00a0 The above poem is an attempt to point out that the real is not rational.\u00a0 The very best of human reasoning is never anything more than an approximation of the real.\u00a0 This is another way to say that the real is a mystery.<\/p>\n
Fleeing in a personal way from our awareness of a permanent mysteriousness is the most common flight from our essential freedom.\u00a0 And to where do we flee?\u00a0 We flee to dogmas of the mind\u2014whether dogma of science or dogma of religion or dogma of some other kind.\u00a0 We can flee to current wisdom or obsolete foolishness\u2014any rational formation that can provide the true believer with a supposed certainty.\u00a0 Standing within the full awe or wonder of this All Powerful Land of Mystery, including its freedom, is a paradoxical sort of certainty.\u00a0 If we allow the uncertainty of our aware freedom to rule our living, we find that such perpetual uncertainty can be our \u201ccertainty\u201d and our openness.<\/p>\n
We need\u00a0 approximations of the real in order to navigate our lives within our natural and social environments.\u00a0 The culture in which we live is a webwork or weave of these \u201capproximate certainties.\u201d\u00a0 We grow up in a culture of particular approximate certainties that are being lived by us as if they were fully certain.<\/p>\n
The maturity acquired through open living includes discovering that these approximate certainties of our culture are uncertain.\u00a0 The life story of Albert Einstein is a story of awakening to uncertainties in his own inherited \u201cnormal\u201d science\u2014the science so deeply improved by Sir Isaac Newton.\u00a0 Though it is true that Einstein\u2019s wondrous imagination gave new vision to many of those older certainties, Einstein\u2019s life story, even in the realm of his physics, involved making one serious mistake after another.\u00a0 Along with the freedom and the creativity of other physicists, it was Einstein\u2019 own freedom and creativity that was demolishing his own older certainties.\u00a0 And while physics was never the same after Einstein got through with it, physics remains a set of approximate certainties that are still vulnerable to being overturned by better approximations of what is real.<\/p>\n
Here is another story of freedom from certainty\u2014this time from a religious luminary.\u00a0 There was a man, an accomplished thinker, a strongly religious man, a loyal Jew.\u00a0 He could read and write in both Hebrew and Greek; he traveled; he taught; he had a good reputation.\u00a0 Then it came to him that he was hiding from his true being in the thoughtfulness of these two cultures of learning.\u00a0 So he threw into the waste basket (symbolically speaking) all that accomplished education and religious thoughtfulness.\u00a0 And after a month or so living in a sort of nowhere\/nobody status, he took all that wisdom out of the waste basket and put it to work assisting others to participate in his deep discovery of that freedom is at the heart of Judaism\u2019s sense of absolute mysteriousness.\u00a0 His name was Saul. After his deep discovery, he changed his name. We remember him as Paul , a man who said that Christ had set us free.<\/p>\n
In a series of letters Paul gave witness to his deep encounter with an enduring Mystery that transcended his culture, both his cultures.\u00a0 We misuse his writings when we expect\u00a0 them to be rational dogmas.\u00a0 He established Christian theologizing as an ongoing probe into a Mystery than never goes away.\u00a0 His words can also be viewed as describing the life of a permanent outsider (neither Jew nor Greek).\u00a0 Here is my 21st century definition of \u201cthe pitfall into rationalism\u201d:<\/p>\n
Rationalism:<\/strong>\u00a0 Hiding from Mystery in the thoughtfulness of our culture.<\/p>\n Here is my antidotal poem for the pitfall of moralism:<\/p>\n Within this Land of Mystery Dietrich Bonhoeffer read all of Paul\u2019s writings.\u00a0 He also studied intently those many years of interpretations of Paul\u2019s letters.\u00a0 He was especially conversant with Martin Luther\u2019s\u00a0 interpretations of Paul.\u00a0 In his early twenties, Dietrich\u00a0 became a prominent student and writer of edge Christian topics.\u00a0 A topic that captured him deeply was the radical nature of the freedom for which, according to both Paul and Luther, Christ has set us free.\u00a0 Dietrich saw that this essential freedom is our deep and given ability to respond. \u00a0 We can enact a response-ability to whatever is happening in the history of our society and of our personal life. \u00a0 In Dietrich\u2019s day, Adolf Hitler was conducting total war on the world for the sake of an exaggerated grandeur of German culture\u2014a type of nationalism that was also arising elsewhere, but seldom with Hitler\u2019s degree of fanatic zeal.\u00a0 Dietrich realized that he personally was free from Hitler\u2019s kind of self created certainty.\u00a0 In fact Dietrich could see that he was free from any kind of ethical certainty. \u00a0 In his free responsibility, Dietrich and some of his close friends employed their freedom in an attempt on Hitler\u2019s life.\u00a0 They almost succeeded.\u00a0 Dietrich did succeed in making a lasting cry for our essential freedom\u2014a freedom that can be manifest in the midst of any set of cultural certainties in any moment of time.<\/p>\n Morality is a social process in every society and a necessity for having a workable social functioning.\u00a0 Morality itself is not a pitfall for freedom.\u00a0 In freedom, however, we can obey, disobey, and also improve the morality of our society.\u00a0 Moralism is my name for a pitfall of freedom.\u00a0 Just as ending rationalism is not a dismissal of reason, so ending moralism is not a dismissal of morality.\u00a0 Moral order is the part of way that a society restrains the physical, emotional, and intellectual violences of the human being toward other human beings.\u00a0 Society\u2019s moral restraints are not moralism. Moralism means clinging absolutely or almost absolutely to some social law, norm, rule, or custom.\u00a0 Social morality has never dropped-down from some divine absolute or been sourced-up from some natural ground.\u00a0 Morality is invented by a social group.\u00a0 Our essential freedom includes the discovery of our response-ability to create morality.\u00a0 Here, then, is my 21st century definition of the \u201cmoralism\u201d pitfall for our essential freedom:<\/p>\n Moralism<\/strong>:\u00a0 Hiding from Freedom in the ethical certainties of our culture.<\/p>\n Here is my antidotal poem for the pitfall of determinism:<\/p>\n Within the Land of Mystery In 1952, when I first met Joe Mathews, he was a confrontational seminary professor who sometimes stood on his desk and reached for a sky hook to illustrate that we do not exist in a two-story universe, but rather live down-to-Earth in the here and now.\u00a0 And within this here and now destiny, he taught that human history is not set to go this way or that way. \u00a0 There is no automatic progress or automatic degeneration. We face options present to our freedom.\u00a0 Though there are trends for better and trends for worse, we humans face forks in the road of time where we must choose to determine the course of our own lives and how we are going to participate in bending the course of history.\u00a0 Joe himself found bending the course of history within the then fabrics of doing Christian seminary education to be too confining for him.\u00a0 So, he left a very successful seminary professorship to bend history within an innovative lay-theological study community for college students that was later expanded to also train the general laity and clergy.\u00a0 That structure of work also became too small for his imaginative spirit.\u00a0 He and others founded a religious order of families that grew to about 1100 adults and their children.\u00a0 With a group of these order colleagues, he moved into a Black neighborhood where this new religious order identified with the residents and assisted about two hundred of them with their reformulation of that neglected urban community.\u00a0 He next took these reformulation methods to India, and his colleagues took them to many other places.\u00a0 Along the way he did some extremely deep work on Christian theologizing and on religious practices, including some intense descriptions of profound states consciousness.\u00a0 He died in 1977, still bending history in directions both social and spiritual.\u00a0 His life illustrates for me what it looks like not to hide from our planetary responsibility in the fear of becoming guilty.<\/p>\n Living our essential freedom includes risking the guilt of doing wrong things, things we regret, mistakes we don\u2019t want to make again.\u00a0 The self-condemnation we feel for our serious guilt is a grief that activist humans will experience and will need to handle.\u00a0 But instead of handling guilt with an acceptance of Profound Reality\u2019s forgiveness and a fresh start in greater realism, human beings are easily tempted to handle guilt with some form of determinism. We can falsely theorize that\u00a0 we had to do whatever we did \u2014 that some natural or social force made us do it.\u00a0 Some have theorized that everything is determined and that we are just an observer of the flow of time, including our own behaviors.\u00a0 Here is my 21st century definition of that pitfall of falling from freedom into \u201cdeterminism\u201d:<\/p>\n Determinism<\/strong>:\u00a0 Hiding from the Guilt of our planetary response-ability<\/p>\n Here is my antidotal poem for the pitfall of sentimentality:<\/p>\n In the Land of Mystery Harriet Tubman was a Black women, a slave on a southern plantation before the Civil War.\u00a0 I was deeply moved by the courage and joy of her life as depicted in Harriet, a 2019 American biographical film directed by Kasi Lemmons.\u00a0 Harriet, while enacting a\u00a0 plan of escape from slavery with her already freed fianc\u00e9, found that the plan had been foiled.\u00a0 She chose to find her own way to the north alone, facing danger almost every step of the way.\u00a0 She became a member of the Underground Railroad and subsequently made some 13 missions to rescue approximately 70 enslaved people, including family and friends, using a network of antislavery activists and safe houses.\u00a0 During the American Civil War, she served as an armed scout and spy for the Union Army.\u00a0 In her later years, Tubman was an activist in the movement for women’s suffrage.\u00a0 Her magically intuitive and courageous daring never quit.\u00a0 This film drama of her life was as gripping a portrait as I have ever seen about how an ordinary human being might simply lay down her life of her own free will for the people she loved.\u00a0 She became simply uncanny about risking her life under the most threatening circumstances on behalf of rescuing others from their physical slavery as well as their spiritual bondage.\u00a0 She is my model, along with Jesus, of how joy can be found in overcoming the terror of our own death.<\/p>\n Here is my 21st century definition of of the pitfall for our freedom that I will call \u201csentimentality\u201d:<\/p>\n Sentimentality<\/strong>:\u00a0 Hiding from Joy in the terror of our own personal death<\/p>\n While the whole human race can seem to be trapped in one or more of these escapes from freedom, the gift of essential freedom that comes with a devotion to Profound Reality is stronger than these four traps.\u00a0 Our natural creation is a powerful righteousness that can accurately reveal the foolishness of all departures from realism.\u00a0 And the strength of our authenticity is greater than the strength of our despair over our real circumstances.<\/p>\n \u201cRationalism,\u201d \u201cmoralism.\u201d \u201cdeterminism,\u201d and \u201csentimentalism\u201d are words that we can use to indicate and summarize the millions of ways that human escape, hide, flee, or fight being our essential freedom.\u00a0 Anti-\u201crationalism\u201d does not\u00a0 mean a contempt for reason, but a resistance to being separated from realism by getting lost in the word-worlds of thinking.\u00a0 Anti-\u201cmoralism\u201d does not mean a contempt for the moral structuring of human society, but a resistance to confusing essential freedom with some specific moral righteousness.\u00a0 Anti-\u201cdeterminism\u201d does not mean a contempt for cause and effect science, but an affirmation of the essential truth of human capacities to bend history.\u00a0 Anti-\u201csentimentalism\u201d does not mean a contempt for feelings, but a refusal to replace our freedom-driven care with emotional fluff and the personal addictions that have captivated our sentiments.<\/p>\n The states of mystery, freedom, care, and tranquility summarized in the four poems above give elaboration to the Christian symbol \u201cHoly Spirit.\u201d \u00a0 The \u201choliness\u201d in this authentic \u201cesprit\u201d of realistic living manifests as an awe-filled resolve of our essential freedom to affirm the rightness of this Awesome Rightness that is powering our true lives.<\/p>\nMoralism<\/h3>\n
\nflows a River of Consciousness\u2014
\na flow of attention and freedom.
\nConsciousness is an enigma in this Land of Mystery.
\nConsciousness flows through body and mind like a river\u2014
\na moisture in the desert of things.
\nConsciousness is not our pain, pleasure, or rest;
\nnot our desire, emotion, stillness, or passion.
\nThese are like the rocks in the River of Consciousness
\nConsciousness is a flow through the body and with the body.
\nConsciousness is an alertness that is also
\na freedom to intend and a will to do.
\nThe mind is a tool of consciousness,
\nproviding consciousness with the ability
\nto reflect upon itself.
\nBut consciousness cannot be contained
\nwithin the images and symbols of the mind.
\nIt is an enigma that mind
\ncannot comprehend \u2013 even noticing consciousness
\nis an act of consciousness using the mind and
\nflowing like a River in the Land of Mystery.<\/p>\nDeterminism<\/h3>\n
\nrises a Mountain of Care \u2013
\ncare for self, care for others,
\ncare for Earth, care for the cosmos,
\ncare that we exist, care that we suffer
\ncare that we may find rest and fulfillment,
\ncare that we may experience our caring
\nand not grow numb and dead.
\nIt takes no effort to care.
\nIt takes effort not to care.
\nCare is given with the Land of Mystery.
\nCare is part of the Mystery of Being.
\nWe care, we just care, we are made of care.
\nCare is a Mountain because care is so huge,
\nso challenging to embrace, to climb, to live.
\nCare is a demand upon us that is more humbling,
\nmore consuming, more humiliating,
\nthan all the authorities, laws, and obligations
\nof our social existence.
\nCare is a forced march into the dangers
\nand the hard work of constructing a life that
\nis not a passive vegetable growth
\nnor a wildly aggressive obsession.
\nCare is an inescapable given, simply there,
\nyet care is also an assertion of our very being.
\nIt is compassion, devotion, love for all that is given
\nand for all parts of each given thing, each being.
\nLike Atlas, we lift the planet day-by-day,
\nyear-by-year, love without end,
\nin the Land of Mystery.<\/p>\nSentimentality<\/h3>\n
\nthere is a Sea of Tranquility,
\na place of Rest amidst the wild waters of life.
\nThe waves may be high, our small boat tossed about,
\nbut there we are with a courageous heart.
\nIt is our heart that is courageous.
\nWe are born with this heart.
\nWe do not achieve it.
\nWe can simply rest within our own living heart,
\nour own courageous heart that opens vulnerably
\nto every person and all aspects of that person,
\nto our own self and every aspect of that self,
\nto life as a whole with all its terrors and joys.
\nThis is a strange Rest, for no storm can end it,
\nno challenge of life defeat it,
\nNo loss, no death, no horror of being, no fear
\ncan touch our courageous heart.
\nWe live, if we allow ourselves to truly live
\non this wild Sea of Everything in the Tranquility
\nof our own indestructible courageous heart.
\nTo manifest and fully experience this Tranquility,
\nwe only have to give up the creations of our mind
\nthat we have substituted for this ever-present Peace.
\nWe have only to open to the Land of Mystery
\nflowing with a River of Consciousness
\nand containing a Mountain of Care.
\nHere and here alone do we find the Sea of Tranquility.
\nHere in the Land of Mystery that our mind
\ncannot comprehend, create, or control,
\nhere beyond our deepest depth or control
\nis a Sea of Tranquility
\nin the Land of Mystery<\/p>\nThese Four Pitfalls Can be Healed<\/h3>\n
Holy Spirit<\/h3>\n