Category Archives: Bible Interpretation

Freedom and Aloneness

Bible Interpretation, Progressive Christianity, Realistic Pointers 2021

Jesus walked this lonesome valley, he had to walk it by himself.
Oh, nobody else could walk it for him, he had to walk it by himself.

We must walk this lonesome valley, we have to walk it by ourselves.
Oh, nobody else can walk it for us, we have to walk it by ourselves.

Somewhere in Luther’s table talk, he mentioned that each of us have to do our own faith-ing, just as each of us have to do our own dying. Whatever Luther said, this will be my introduction to what I will call “aloneness,” and I will extend that word to mean “the intentional living of our solitary contemplative inquiries.”

“Contemplative inquiry” is the conscious viewing of the contents of our own consciousness. No one else can do this for us. “Contemplative inquiry” is also our thoughtfulness about these inward contents. This is essentially a solitary practice even though it can go on in group settings led by experienced persons.

For example, a contemporary Vipassana Buddhist retreat focuses strongly on a personally practiced meditation. This solitary practice entails getting used to a vibrant type of aloneness. This is quite different from a self-absorbed U.S. president rising at three in the morning to rage in his current defendedness and write tweets castigating his critics.

A Vipassana meditation practice focusses on the seemingly boring practice of carefully watching our own breathing—in-breath, pause, out-breath, pause for 45 minutes or more at a time, perhaps followed by a period of solitary walking, focusing on each step. What is going on here is an inquiry into the reality of our actual lives beyond the workings of our busy minds and beyond the always present impulses to think and do our established habits of living. This practice can be understood to be religious in the sense that it seeks to allow the happening of a realistic type of enlightenment of what it actually means to be a conscious human being. The interest that sources this practice is human authenticity. In doing this practice, we are not defending our current sense of self, we are watching those defenses come up and thereby preparing ourselves to be aware of the real me as something wondrously opposed to the self I think I am, wish I was, or hope to be.

We don’t have to invent or produce the reality of our own authenticity. Authenticity is simply Reality being Reality. It takes no effort to be authentic. It takes a sort of willing surrender not to be false. Meditation is a discipline of surrender that allows our authenticity to emerge into awareness from where it has been hidden among the replacements for authenticity that we have invented, defended, clung on to, and presented to the world.

Jesus practiced another solitary practice he called “prayer.” In Mark’s portrait of Jesus we see him going apart for hours of solitary prayer. This intense need for solitude dramatizes Jesus’ humanity, as well as our own.

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Science and Freedom

Bible Interpretation, Progressive Christianity, Realistic Pointers 2020

The conflict between science and religion with which we are most familiar has to do with scientific results like evolution and a literal interpretation of Genesis One. The resolution to that conflict is now quite simple—a better form of biblical interpretation—namely, a recognition that biblical truth is not about the ancient science of the biblical writers. The Bible is about something far more profound. The contents of the Biblical symbols are capable of evoking deep truth about our own human existence.

For example, we can view the first chapter of Genesis as about the goodness of nature and about the goodness of the essence of our human nature, rather than about how many days it took for the cosmos to arrive at its present state. Similarly, the virgin birth of Jesus as not about his literal biological origins, but about the quality of his relation with the Final Originator of all things, a type of “birth” that is possible for you and me as well as Jesus. As John’s gospel so clearly points out, those who can receive the truth that Jesus presents are also virgin born.

In this essay I am going to deal with a more difficult issue: what do we say to people who misunderstand the nature of science as support for their conviction that the cause-and-effect thoughtfulness so prominent in our sciences supports the notion that there is no freedom for which we could be set free by any means—by Christ, by psychology, or by the meditation practices of the Buddha?

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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!”

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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Response-Able

Bible Interpretation, Progressive Christianity, Realistic Pointers 2019

When we flub up, do something odd, make a serious duff, or perhaps find ourselves being uncharacteristically mean, we somethings excuse such behavior with this familiar explanation, “Shit happens.” But shit never just happens. There was always some degree of Response-Ability involved in our behavior.

It is always true that our access of our Response-Ability is capable of much improvement—that is, much expansion in our ability to respond. Nevertheless, until we are dead, there is always some degree of Response Ability in play.

Simply paying closer attention to our shit is an improvement in Response-Ability. Yes, it is true that the personality patterns we constructed for our lives by age five, are still doing its original survival patterns. But we can now as adults pay closer attention to our personality’s actions. We also have a degree of power to moderate that old tool for our survival. Our personality is a friend as well as an enemy. Our personality got us here. We did survive. Our personality still has some survival potentials. But times have changed since age five. Our personality is ill adapted for many, if not most, of our contemporary challenges. And fortunately, we still have some ability to respond beyond the boundaries of our very own personality.

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Some Do Ride Out the Floods

Bible Interpretation, Existential Ethics, Realistic Pointers 2019

The story of Cain and Abel is followed by an overlapping set of stories about a mammoth flood that only a boatload of the old ecology lived through. The story begins with tales of such extreme estrangements from Profound Reality that Profound Reality, poetically speaking, is said to have become sorry to have created the human species.

However, one family and its leader, Noah, had continued to love realism just enough to get Reality’s attention. So Reality shared with this small group a secret: prepare a big boat, for a flood of chaos is arriving to wash away the whole landscape as you know it. So Noah, the original outsider, built a boat on dry land to the consternation (even scorn) of all his peers.

This is a symbolic story. We don’t need to go looking for a fragment of the true ark. This is a parable about the operation of history itself—our own history as well as happenings long ago. Profound Reality eventually floods unreality with a washing that is only anticipated by our various dunkings in our own personal River Jordans. Sometimes, our unrealistic living stores up geography-wide cultural establishments of estrangement from Profound Reality that are so great that they reach serious reckonings. Noah and family is a symbol of the truth that we are still “here” in spite of all those historical downers.

For example, looking toward our own future in 2019, we can already see forerunners of the impending consequences of our huge fossil-fuel burning. A Reality-baed reckoning is coming our way. Ark building is the realistic command, if we love having a viable planet for our and many other species.

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Forgiveness

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

There is One Truth:
Forgiveness.

And Truth is One:
Forgiveness.

The righteous and the wicked
both vanish into one
overall humiliation:
Forgiveness.

The friend and the enemy
both melt into one
all encompassing affirmation:
Forgiveness.

The best and the worst
play their roles
in one grand drama:
Forgiveness.

Blaming someone,
blaming one’s self,
blaming something,
blaming everything,
is not the Truth.

There is one Truth:
Forgiveness.

When the Truth of forgiveness dawns
all life philosophies crumble
like a tall building
into a heap of dust.

The Truth of forgiveness
is a scandal to the moralist
and sheer foolishness to the thinker.

But whoever steps off the cliff
of moral and intellectual certitude
into trusting the Truth of forgiveness
becomes mighty and golden,
becomes both servant leader
and wise follower,
seeing the whole picture
with compassion for all.

Forgiveness is not too hard to understand, but it is surprisingly easy to misunderstand.

Forgiveness is not something you have to accomplish or deserve. Forgiveness is always present. It is part of the cosmic face that each Real moment offers each of us—a fresh start. It is always true no matter what has happened, is happening, or might happen. An option for fresh start is being offered to you and me and everyone in this living moment.

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Religion and Culture

Bible Interpretation, Progressive Christianity, Realistic Pointers 2019

Does your religious practice assist you to transcend your culture? Do we even want such a religious practice? Do we know that Christianity in its early centuries understood membership is the Kingdom of God to mean washing the Kingdom of Rome out of your hair, your thinking, your loyalties?

These first Christians understood themselves to be “called out” of this world in order to be send back to this same world as transformers of this world. At first their focus was on transforming individual lives, but as soon as their numbers were great enough, they also took on transforming the social structures of this world as well.

Some current forms of Christian practice have been nothing more than support groups for living within the status quo of the existing culture. True religion, Christian or otherwise, assists us to leave our culture and move into our deep awareness—not just our minds, but into some essential realizations about being human. In order for this to happen we inwardly wash away our culture, sit a while in Eternity, and then come back to our same location in the history of human culture, as a transformer of culture. Such an inward trip is somewhat like taking an outward trip from Kansas to India and then returning to Kansas. Such trips have living consequences.

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Wilderness Abel and Canaanite Cain

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

The Genesis story about Cain and Abel has often been interpreted as a story about sibling jealousy and questionable parenting, but the actual biblical text is about the conflict of two modes of relating to Reality—Reality with a capital “R”—that absolutely Mysterious All-Powerfulness that meets us in every event of our lives.

Every Abel and every Cain is closer to this Mysterious Reality than to his or her own breathing. The truth that Reality is infinitely beyond us does not change the truth that Reality is also infinitely close to us. This is true for women as well men. Abel and Cain are two different relationships with Reality for any he or she.

Abel’s mode of worship is a symbol of that obedience to the Moses style of realism that was carved out in 40 years of wilderness practices. After this Moses-trained, One-Reality-loving community of people conquered a place for themselves in that more fertile land of promise, a deep religions conflict took place between the Moses monotheism and the Canaanite diversity of devotions that celebrated the many different powers of being human.

In this story, Cain’s mode of worship was a devotion to these many aspects of human life. His many gods and goddesses represent different aspects of our humanity. These were and still are real powers in our lives, worthy of some access and care, but no one of these devotions, nor all of them together, is a devotion to that One Reality that creates and destroys all aspects of our humanity. So the Canaanite relationship with that One Reality was a flight from that One Reality into a devotion to the various aspects of being human. This put Canaanite humanism in severe conflict with a devotion to that One Truth of that One Awesome Reality of Moses.

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