To the extent that we are bound up with our own ego, we will also be without a long view. Even if our ego concerns seem to us better than Trump’s ego concerns, we can still be missing a long view—a view for something larger than our own selves or our own tiny concerns.

So Who Does Have a Long View?

The writers of the Old Testament had a long view. They reflected back hundreds of years and they reflected forward centuries as well—seeing their peoplehood as a servant body on behalf of all the nations of the world.

Jesus had a long view. In laying down his life for the people of Israel, he was laying down his life for the restoration of this servant people and thereby for the whole of humanity.

Paul had a long view. Augustine had a long view. Martin Luther had a long view, Paul Tillich had a long view. The priest and author, Thomas Berry, had a long view. He not only had a long view for Christianity, Berry promoted a next Christianity that has a long view for the whole of humanity. He viewed humanity as an integral part of the planet. He saw humanity as Earth’s champaign of deep awareness and joyous celebration on behalf of this wondrously unique planet that can sustain life, including human life.

The Battle of Two Regimes

We who comprise the progressive portion of the United States voters and activists need a simple and easy-to-teach narrative about where we are as a society and how the various types of Republicans and Democrats relate to some “big story” of our existing conditions and our possible futures.

Before the beginnings of the industrial revolution in about 1760, there was only one regime of governance headed by a King or perhaps by a Queen, or perhaps by a Royal Council. These high class members of the traditional caste system controlled both political and economic life. The rise of the industrial revolution assisted by colonialism enabled the accumulation of great pools of privately controlled wealth. This wealth-power had significance in both the economic and political governance over the course of events. The economist and author, Robert Heilbroner, called these pools of wealth “the regime of capital,” This second regime of governance initiated a tension with the regime of state —a fight between these two regimes of powerful governance.

As the regime of capital became more independent, the regime of royalty was weakened and social space was opened for the more democratic form of state initiated in the United States and elsewhere. The democratic state retained legal and coercive force, but the regime of capital with its powers of investments and conditions of employment also possessed a strong governing reality in the lives of people and in direct influences upon the decisions of the state.

These elemental dynamics of history are important for seeing clearly the historical options we face today in the United States and elsewhere. Here are five styles of governing that are being pursued in our world today:

option 1: This style of governing is illustrated by the Vladimir Putin type of control of both the regime of the state and the regime of capital—both regimes are in the hands of very wealthy oligarchs of which Putin is one as well as head of state. This is the option that Donald Trump and his cronies favored and still favor. They lie about their poorly hidden dictatorial direction for their governing. Lying, misinformation, and deception in order to assemble support is a characteristic of this option for governing. When taking this option, democracy becomes a social veneer that has no real power over the course of events. Option one policies seek support from the super wealthy and from the long-enduring forms of the caste system—racism, patriarchy, gender, and so on.

option 2: This style of governing is illustrated by those U.S. conservatives who are quite critical of various aspects of the reigning caste systems, but who insist that the regime of capital must manage the regime of the democratic state. The policies of this political constituency are crafted to benefit big business leaders and their corporations. They claim that “business friendly” policies benefit everyone with a “trickle down” of prosperity. Many anti-Trump Republicans hold this view. A number of Democratic Party leaders and thinkers also hold this view. The majority of the Democratic Party, however, now hold the view that the “trickle-down” of wealth is microscopic compared with the “siphon-off” going to the upper classes. Option 2 style governing persons are also typically uneasy about a “too powerful” democratic government regulating the regime of capital “too severely.” In the view of U.S. option 2 policy-makers, “small” government, which they favor in the regulations department, does not exclude, “large” outlays for the defense industry, or “large” tax give-aways to the fossil fuel industries, and other governmental perks to the existing economic powers.

option 3: This style of governing is illustrated by those who view the need for a strong regime of democratic governing that sets the rules and enforces fairly and strongly the rules that structure the economic playing field for the players of the regime of capital. Option 3 policy-makers expect the capital-owning forces to control the micro-economic choices, but they maintain that the macro-economic choices are to be made by a democratic government focused on serving all the people. The still valued regime of capital takes on a secondary role with regard to the basic ecological, economic, political, and cultural directions for the society. The regime of capital is expected to be obedient to these large-direction choices made by the representatives of a democratic government.

option 4: This style of governing is more aggressive than the option 3 style with regard to the role of democratic government in regulating the regime of capital. The option 4 style of governing applies especially to those portions of the society that are fundamental for everyone. Currently, these topics include healthcare, education, energy provision, water quality, soil quality, air quality, basic transportation, internet fairness, and the building of a whole new infrastructure designed to moderate the climate. Option 4 directions on such topics currently include specific policies like: Medicare for all, the Green New Deal projections, and the long-range energy polices that will compel oil companies to submit their business plans for how they are going to phase out their product from its current massive use to a mere trickle in the next three decades. According to option 4 voices, this huge, but necessary, energy transition cannot start someday; it must start now. Under this option, energy companies (such as oil, coal, and nuclear) would start now facing severe penalties if they do not assist rather than oppose these necessary directions of energy transition.

option 5: This style of governing is illustrated by those members of almost every society who support some form of the “dictatorship of the proletariat”—the style of governing that we now find manifest in China and Cuba. This option has a slim following in the United States, but we do find a significant amount of appreciation for the accomplishments of China and Cuba in their ecological policies and in their ability to sustain a solid social order that is not ruled by the regime of capital. The obvious downside of option 5 is the absence of an ever-deepening democracy. Concern for the working population does not make a dictatorship into a democracy. Even if we agree that a strong state government may have been required in China or Cuba to put a ruthless regime of capital in its subservient place and keep them there, option 5 still amounts to a revival of a strong economic caste system—a “new class” as some critics have spelled out, a new form of dictatorship that resists serious challenges to democratize.

Naming Some U.S. Names

Richard Nixon in the U.S. story might be viewed as a bridge person between options 1 and option 2 politics. While Nixon had a strong enough hold on democracy and on international affairs to remain an illustration of option 2 polices, he leaned into “the unitary executive” strongly enough to be a preview of Trump’s more thoroughgoing option 1 authoritarianism. Also, Nixon’s “southern strategy” was a move toward Trump’s more fully developed white-nationalist appeals. And, Nixon’s “tricky Dick” politics pre-stage Trump’s more incredible lack of respect for truthfulness and fair dealing.

Ronald Reagan is a good historical example of option 2 policy-making in U.S. politics. He consistently supported the regime of capital over the regime of the democratic state—viewing regulative government as a “problem” and democracy as a process that needs to be “managed” by big business experience and loyalties.

Option 3 policy-making has been given prominence by Barack and Michelle Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and in 2021 is being carried on by Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Whatever be the leanings that any of these competent persons have toward Option 4 policy making, Option 4 policy-making is better represented by Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Alexandria Ortega Cortez and an expanding “squad” of young women of color. Many other persons might be named as strong voices in one or the other of these two types of politics, but these well-known persons approximately define the trends of these two styles of policy-making.

Cooperations

Option 3 and 4 political styles can currently work together in their common love of a competent, strong, and thoroughgoing democracy—of, by, and for the people.
However passionate the differences between option 3 and 4 persons may be, they are currently able to cooperate on many measures of good government. They also cooperate well in their firm opposition to an option 1 autocracy laced with racism, patriarchy, or other forms of caste system.

The cooperation between option 1 and option 2 policy holders is much more strained than the cooperation between option 3 and option 4 policy holders. Indeed, following Trump‘s take-over of the Republican Party, those persons of option 2 leanings have become a much slimmer group of people. In fact, most option 2 Republicans are now conflicted between (1) their need for support from option 1 citizens in order to “manage democracy,” and (2) their reluctance to support option 3 and 4 lovers of a more aggressive democracy in their regulation of the regime of capital. Option 2 persons find themselves choosing between: (1) remaining a Republican voter in a Party that remains a Trump-ruled authoritarian body, and (2) choosing to become more strongly democratic, yet bringing some of their conservative leanings with them into the Democratic voting constituency.

If the cooperation between option 3 and option 4 remains strong enough to actually accomplish a large number of systemic changes, then a coalition of political power may come into being that remains in power for a very long time. However frightening large systemic changes may be to millions of people, not making these changes is becoming even more frightening to increasing millions of getting-wiser people. Also, realism in social affairs, however frightening, is also a source of joy and confidence—especially among the young, the oppressed, and the steady students of history. Reality in its Wholeness of Power is on the side of those who are living realistically. Though a tough taskmaster, Reality is producing our best case options. Fighting with Reality creates the maximization of our suffering, and realistic living, in spite of our setbacks, includes the benefits of more freedom and of simple joy.

Option 5 members within our U.S. society will, at least for now, tend to go along with options 3 and option 4 policies. But even for the long haul, I believe that the “dictatorship of the proletariat” will continue to be viewed by most U.S. citizens as a ditch of doom—an avoidable destiny almost as grim as the Trumpian ditch of doom. I do not believe that U.S. citizens will go along with or need to go along with the option 5 route.

“Democracy rather than authoritarianism” has become our core political conflict, all across the planet. “Capitalism versus socialism” has become less severe. Everyone is a socialist now, in some ways. And everyone is a capitalist now, in some ways. All realistically thoughtful persons are drinking water from both of these fountains of economic and political discoveries and action policies. Option 5 members of our U.S. society will do well to join the consensus building going on between the option 3 and option 4 democracy lovers, and forget any dreams they may have for a working-class dictatorship.

Ecological Democracy

If ecological solutions are to be forged and carried out for the big ecological challenges, a fuller and fuller democracy is the key correction that must be made in each society on the planet. Climate moderation is the biggest of the big matters among these ecological challenges. Without a solution to the climate crisis, we face irresolvable difficulties afflicting progress in all our other challenges. We have already delayed solutions to the climate crisis so long that many catastrophes are now unavoidable. But if we are to bet our lives on the emergence of possibilities for the survival of our species, we must now put the climate crisis first on our list of challenges and see every other challenge in that context.

I understand writers and teachers who recommend that we turn our attention to accommodating to the inevitable collapse of our current societies before the impending climate impacts. But instead of any mere accommodation to the collapse of current societies, let us imagine investing trillions of dollars in the search for ways we cannot yet see to replace these collapsing societies with better ways of doing human socializing. Several years ago I began advocating “building Eco-Democracy societies.” In order to be successful, building Eco-Democracies must not wait until after the current societies finish collapsing. Rather, we can take charge now of our collapsing civilizations—transforming the energies of these societies into opportunities for designing and building societies that are substantially better.

The great transition from hunter/gather societies to civilized societies took thousands of years. The transition from agricultural societies to industrial societies took hundreds of years. We now face the opportunity, and the necessity of doing our great transition in a few decades. In the next three decades, we might get half way there. Two hundred years form now, we may still be finishing up some elements of this transition, unless, of course, we have missed the turn with our further delays. This is a “long emergency” as David Orr calls it in his book Dangerous Years. We are being challenged to exercise our freedom in the light of this living now—to form right now a long view about which we can continue to be more specific.

The post Freedom and the Long View first appeared on Realistic Living.

Imagine yourself an accomplished high school science student moving into the wonder of dating, of initiating for the first time a serious interpersonal relationship in addition to your family of origin. Your science excellences do not help you discern the challenges present in your consciousness meeting with the consciousness of another person and continuing in this tangle of relations between him or her and me.

Scientific research is about knowing the objective world. We can call science the I-it approach to truth in contrast to Buber’s I-Thou approach to truth. Another human being cannot be appropriately or fully related to as an “it”—a status friendship, a sexual conquest, or a cog in the machinery of some project of my devising. Another person is another consciousness, like myself. To relate to the encountered reality of another person as I relate to the encountered reality of an “it” is to suppress a full experience of that person and of myself.

The I-Thou approach to truth also differs from inquiry into my own being. My inquiry into the contents of my own consciousness may help me relate to others, and others may help me become more aware of the contents of my own consciousness. But the I-Thou relation itself is not simply personal inquiry. Another person is another consciousness, not my consciousness. However mature we may be in the practice of meditation or in some other method of contemplative inquiry, we enter a different world of truth when we are engaged in a realistic interpersonal relationship with another person, or group of persons.

So, what is it about an interpersonal relationship that brings us into such a different universe of truth than the universes of truth we explore with our scientific quests or our contemplative inquiries? A few times I have met a stranger whose eyes met my eyes in a way that I knew that this other human being saw me, perhaps as clearly as some of my long-time friends. Such meetings are not about physical admiration or intellectual stimulation, or romantic possibilities. Such moments have to do with my conscious person noticing another conscious person who is noticing me.

We humans are an extremely capable social species. Most of what we know has come to us through contact with other humans. A child raised by wolves or in some other way separated from other humans in early life can miss out on extremely crucial aspects of human development. We are seldom fully aware of how deep a role has been played in our development by being with other humans—honest talk, dancing, physical play, singing, creating music, touching, hugging, and so very much more.

The “I-Thou” approach to truth can also be distinguished from a fourth approach to truth that I will call the “We-They” approach to truth. This fourth approach to truth has to do with politics; with sustaining, repairing, and replacing economic systems; and with preserving and enriching the systems of knowledge, life styles, and the media of art, language, mathematics, and religious formation. I will discuss freedom in relation to these social commonality features of our lives in other essays. In this essay I will focus on how freedom interfaces with the interpersonal relations of the I-Thou.

Freedom and the Interpersonal

Freedom may be even more obviously present in interpersonal relations than in scientific research and contemplative inquiry. In our interpersonal relations we are constantly responding to the ongoing experiences of taking in these other persons. We are experiencing the need for raw creativity in each response. Habitual actions or rote words simply will not do for the pursuing of a realistic personal relationship.

Choice, freedom, invention, initiative, resonance, wildness, are words that describe an interpersonal relationship. If I reduce the full wonder of an interpersonal relationship into an object of empirical science, I have lost the full reality of what is taking place.

Similarly, if I reduce the full wonder of an interpersonal experience to being helped by another with my interior life, or with my helping another with their interior life, I have again lost the full reality of what is taking place. It is not that our interior lives are missing or do not add to an interpersonal experience, but an interpersonal relation is something more than an enhancement of our contemplative experiences. An interpersonal relationship is an on-going whole-body, whole-mind, whole-consciousness, whole being process that calls forth a challenge to our raw freedom that we may not notice so vividly in our scientific or contemplative quests for truth.

Response-ability for the Inter-personal

So we find ourselves engaged in a responsibility for our personal relations with other humans. We can enhance our wisdom for doing this by taking advantage of the many great books on interpersonal relations. But simply reading these resources is not good enough. We have to apply our interpersonal thoughtfulness to actual interpersonal relationships. Learning to experience our interpersonal freedom comes into play when we are actually living together with someone, working together with someone, spending time together with other human beings who are spending time with us.

There exist in our culture many therapies, workshops, and retreats that include interpersonal learning for people who want to learn these skills. It may be a responsible use of our freedom to get our body to one of these events. If you and one of your interpersonal peers are struggling with the processes of your relationship, it may be a responsible use of your freedom to get the two of you to one of these helpful events. The time and money to do this kind of interpersonal work can be well spent if the wisdom learned is actually worked into our ongoing living.

And when two or more of us are attempting to live together, we will need to set aside daily and weekly times together that are specifically directed toward our interpersonal practices. We may also find helpful a committed membership in a weekly meeting religious practice that takes interpersonal realities seriously.

A Weekly Meeting Christian Circle

Excellent theological study alone will not spawn a vital movement of Christian renewal. Nor will the addition of relevant social activism be enough. A necessary third of this particular trinity of practices is a weekly meeting circle that knows how to practice the I-Thou dynamics of interpersonal relations with a profound level of consciousness.

The sociological fabrics of such a circle consist of having no one leader, priest, guru, or any other such “holy one” in charge of the group. No one personality needs to dominate this practice. Everyone sits in a circle, and symbols of human authenticity are placed in the center of the circle. The only leader is the Christ exemplar (or whatever other model of true humanness holds for this group the essence of being human in this particular religious practice). Perhaps a coffee table has on it three candles that hold the symbolism of the Christ presence. However symbolized, our leader symbolically “sits” in the center of the circle, and every person in the group can reach into that center and embody for a moment or a period of time the overt leadership of the group.

However experienced in deep awareness any one person may be, that person’s leadership capacity is limited, and is balanced with the leadership of others. Every personality quality has limitations as well as gifts. Every self-image is an approximation of our real humanity. All states of being are passing realities. The permanent essential humanness that is potential within each human being sits in the center of the circle as our only complete leader. This complete ending of hierarchical relations, does not make everyone in a group equal in any specific way. We are just equal before God. And each person becomes more aware that each of us who is dedicated to a Christian life is continually faced with this possibility of reaching into that center of the meeting for our moments of approximate Christ leadership.

In this symbolism, I see a primary vision of the future practice of Christianity. I view all those who choose to join a weekly-meeting circle of freedom-loving Christian practices as thereby being washed with a new sort of baptism and being ordained to a new sort of priesthood. We become pastors to one another. We become a co-pastorate to the community or the bioregion where we live, and to the planet on which we dwell. Such an interpersonal intimacy of Christian “life together” is step one toward a viable and vital contemporary Christian practice of renewed religion.

The details of what any group of us do together in our Co-paster Circle can be important as an illustration, but these details should not become a prescribed pattern for all Circles. The patterns for each Circle are only correct when they are decided through a true consensus of those Circle members. And each Circle needs to design some stabilities—stabilities that nevertheless come up for review on a regular basis, perhaps quarterly.

In the circle to which I belong, we open the meeting by lighting three candles and singing a triune song to a secular tune. We end the meeting singing the same song. while extinguishing the three candles. This ritual has worked well for us. We have kept this bit of stability for many years.

The overall drama of the evening is flexible, and evaluated each quarter, but a broad pattern persists: confession, celebration, and dedication are ritual activities that are done in that order. This order of nurture is also has an “inner flow” of conscious states described by these words: humility, gratitude, and compassion.

The first hour of our two-hour meeting is devoted to various exercises that provide content to the above ritual framework. These ritual components include singing, dancing, confession, absolution, celebration, and a personally grounding conversation on a small portion of poetry or scripture.

The second hour of our two-hour meeting is devoted to the study of a small portion of well-suited written material. We intend to become good students and teachers of one another, using methods that help each other become personally thoughtful about some of the best written resources that are accessible to non-specialists. Study of written material is our default pattern. Occasionally we see a video and hold a spirit discussion of it. Or we may conduct a workshop, hold a celebration, or do an evaluation of the quarter. If a video is the assignment of the evening, the screen sits in the circle with us. A guest from anywhere on the planet might visit us on that screen. Perhaps a film drama visits us. Perhaps a white board sits in the circle with us, and on that white board is a chart of the material we are studying or perhaps the brainstorming of some workshop.

The word “study” has a wide spectrum of meanings, but in our circle we require of each of us to be a good study facilitator who makes our study a spirit-deepening event or an ethical prioritizing event for the living of our specific lives. Good group processes are as important as good written content that is carefully selected for this purpose.

The details of this CoPastor Circle practice matter, but they do not matter ultimately. What matters ultimately is the quality of the interpersonal contact sought in each of these specific activities of these two-hour weekly meetings. This quality has to do with accessing our profound reality—our essential reality that is never absent, though we can be absent from our essential reality. Our aim for having a meeting at all is to occasion openings within our lives toward a return from our ditches of estrangement to our essential reality, and to learn how to live such realism in the temporal flow our lives.

The specific events of return to realism will differ for each person and will differ for the group each week of this practice. What endures is the basic aim of continuing openings within each of us to the call to becoming a Christian priesthood—assisting one another toward a deep realism. By choosing to attend this Circle, we are each allowing the ongoing process of becoming Christ-quality priests or pastors for one another and for our local community. We trust in our forgiveness and in the reality of our fresh starts upon this ever-opening journey into profound consciousness.

Conclusion

This description of the realism and freedom of these interpersonal meetings is only a sketch of this deep topic, but the freedom spoken about in this essay is understood to be an essential part of this interpersonal style of Christianity. Freedom means starting where we are in allowing that ever-deeper movement into where we Eternally are in order to be more creatively real where we temporally are.

These values can also apply to other-than-Christian religious practices.

The post Freedom and the Interpersonal first appeared on Realistic Living.

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.

One of the arks already proposed to the Congress of the US is a design plan colorfully labeled the “Green New Deal.” This plan has a lot of pieces, but the basic idea is a several trillion dollar government jobs program focused on the jobs needed for the transition away from fossil fuel burning. The idea is to get going on this needed change without dumping the costs for doing so on the working stiffs.

Unlike Noah’s time, this coming flood is not a secret to our establishment. Our establishment is lying about what they know to be true. The coming flood is being openly denied, the need for change is being misrepresented, and our Noah-type awarenesses are being drowned out a din of lies, paid for by the fossil industries and bowed to by greed-afflicted political puppets and by way too many apathetic fools for whom any big change is too disturbing to even think about.

In spite stories about rainbows, the sternness of Profound Realty is still intact.

My ark design may have different compartments than yours, but this ark cannot be built by one family.

Though the climate crisis our biggest emergency, we are also facing many lesser, more clearly seen floods, like the one called “Unaffordable Healthcare Insurance” for over half of the population of the United States. An ark design plan has already been drawn up for the US Congress called “Medicare for All.” This is a real solution to the real problem, with only one downside: needing to entirely eliminate the cause of the problem. We face a choice between continuing with current healthcare insurance establishment or launching an entirely new system for this nation. As long as the private insurance companies are part of the healthcare insurance system, we do not have an “Affordable Healthcare” solution. Medicare for all is an ark. All the other plans do not float, even if they tread water.

Obamacare was a step forward, and we do not want to undo that step. Obamacare plus a public option for Medicare would be another step forward, but it would not be an Affordable Healthcare solution. Only Medicare for All will cut in half the untenable costs of healthcare, and cut drug costs even more than that. No part-way measure does that. This is true because no part-way measure deals with the problem—namely that the present system that pays huge salaries to health-insurance CEOs, huge profits to health-insurance investors, huge amounts of needless administrative costs and super-complicated paperwork and advertising—all to provide an inferior product that provides a little coverage as possible for the highest cost as possible. As long as this old system is part of the next plan, we do not have an ark of affordable healthcare!

Government is the administrative payer for our highway system, our post office, and our fire departments, why not for our healthcare insurance system. There is no other way to actually make affordable health care a right to every citizen.

Do we really want to pay twice as much for a totally private sector run postal service. Do we want a privately administered park service, police department, or fire department. Some things are best administered by a good democratic government. Healthcare affordability is one of those things. If we want to call that socialism, then let’s have at least this much socialism.

Having some things administered by government does not exclude having other things ordered by a private sector competitive system. But even here a democratic government must provide the rules that make a private sector competitive system truly and fairly competitive.

The only time that government is the problem is when government is run by a few of largest corporations for the sake of their super-wealthy owners. Whether we like language like “radical capitalism” or “democratic socialism” is a matter of personal thought preference. The real stuff of political choice has to do with our Noah’s arks of real solutions for the floods that threaten us most.

Shall we talk about too many assault rifles on the streets? Government, exclusion, licensing and records keeping is an ark of solution for this dreadful flood.

Shall we talk about rampant run-way racism? Government crack down on hate groups and home-grown terrorism is an ark of solution for this dreadful flood.

Shall we talk about super-biased criminal justice administration by poorly hired, trained, and paid police forces. Government rules, training, and accountability is an ark of solution for this dreadful flood.

For all these floods and others, serious government programming is the ark we need.

Dear neighbors, we who live on this North American landform are already hip deep in the waters of chaos. We need some arks, and we need them now. Noah was a rather reluctant saint. That is what we need—millions of reluctant saints. We need them now. In our case, being Noah-like saints means draining government-offices that are swamped with reactionary greed-heads, plus putting our own Noah-hood in charge of the ark building.

This is called “love” for self and neighbor in the context of a love of the overall Profound Reality that urgently confronts us.

The post Some Do Ride Out the Floods first appeared on Realistic Living.

Radical Gifts: Living the Full Christian Life in Troubled Times.

In 1963, two years before his death, Paul Tillich gave three lectures on “The Irrelevance and Relevance of the Christian Message.” These lectures were published in 2007 in a book by that title. Tillich’s conclusions clarified our awareness that the Christian message can only be relevant when it is shaped for our times. This core challenge has remained all these years.

In 1984, I offered the initial version of Radical Gifts under the title A Primer on Radical Christianity. This update for Wood Lake Publishing now stands on the shoulders of not only the great 19th- and 20th-century Christian theologians, but also on the shoulders of Christian and secular writers in these early decades of century 21. In this 2018 publication, I continue the effort to envision for the general reader the radical gifts of the Christian revelation for the tasks of realistic living in our contemporary settings. This current book contains some updating, yet the core challenges for Christianity have endured.

We are living in the midst of a turning point in the history of Christianity that is more radical than the Reformation period, perhaps as radical as the birth of Christianity itself. This emerging form of Christianity is so new that it does not seem to be Christianity at all to many people.

Such a topic deserves an elaborate book, but this is a simple book written for you no matter who you are or what relationship you now have to a Christian practice. By “radical gifts” I mean both a recovery and a going forward. I intend a recovery of the full New Testament witness, and a moving beyond both the intellectual and social forms that have defined the term “Christian” for hundreds of years.

I see this work as a useful study book, but also as a condensed pull-together for Christians who are willing to continue, or to begin now to build new forms of Christian-life-together that both nurture Christians and reach out to challenge the spirit confusions that characterize our global societies. I see this as more than a theology book and more than an outline for action; it is a program for living our whole lives in relevant and vital interaction with the times in which we have shown up.

Having a fresh Christian practice is not the only way to make a deep difference, but I am sure it is one way. And it is a way to enter into the needed interreligious dialogue with something to say, and with something to do together with other faiths for the healing of persons and for the justice of societies within these interreligious times. We are all facing these same troubled times together. This book outlines the Christian gifts to these discussions and these actions.

The first six chapters of this book contain theological poetry that still speaks to our times. Chapter 7 on ethics is printed in its original form and updated in an appendix. Similarly, Chapter 8 on Christian community has been updated in another appendix.

Following is the table of contents and how order this book:

1. What is Spirit?

2. What is Spirit Sickness?
and How is it Healed?

3. What Does Spirit Health Include?

4. What Reality in Human Experience
Do We Point to with the Word, “God”?

5. What Does All This Have To Do
with Jesus Christ?

6. What is Commitment to God,
to Christ, to Holy Spirit?

7. What Consequences Does this Commitment
Have for Ethical Thinking?

8. What Will Be the Coming Social Shape
of the Community of the Committed?

Appendix A: Prayer and the
House Church Meeting

Appendix B: Reality, God, and
Liturgical Language

Appendix C: Immortality, Reincarnation
and the Spirit Self

Appendix D: A Chapter 7 Update on the
Commitment to Ethical Thinking

Appendix E: A Chapter 8 Update on the
Community of the Committed

You can order this book from www.woodlakebooks.com. A print copy is $15.96 plus shipping; e-book or kindle $9.96. Shipping costs to the United States for 1-6 books is $17. For 7 or more books, shipping is free. To Canada shipping costs for 1-6 books is $12. For 7 or more books shipping is free. Contact Gene Marshall for other options.( jgmarshall@cableone.net ).

The post Radical Gifts first appeared on Realistic Living.

I have come that human beings may have life and may have it is all its fullness. I am the good shepherd; the good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. The hireling, when he sees the wolf coming, abandons the sheep and runs away, because he is no shepherd and the sheep are not his. John 10 :10-12

Those who give sermons on the good shepherd often assume that this ancient image applies to a contemporary pastor who tells his flock what they should believe and how they should act. Such a view also assumes that most people are sheep in the sense of being gullible, go-along, authority-addicted dumbbells.

I do not believe this was the meaning intended by the original author of these verses. The original shepherd image was grounded in the experience of noticing highly dedicated persons working on a hillside with a flock of sheep, providing them grass and water and protecting them from wolves. Being a follower of Jesus means being such a leader.

So where can we actually experience this Good Shepherd in our lives today? Let me answer this with a fictitious story—a story made out of my own experiences. In my story, Sally McGillicutty teaches an adult class in the Sunflower room of the Umpity Ump Christian Church. Sally trusts the Ultimate Message that the Infinite Silence we meet in every event of our lives loves Sally and every other person (and creature) on this planet or any other planet. Because of her trust in that Eternal Wholeness that is faced by Sally and by us, Sally is thereby an embodiment of the Ultimate Message from Eternity.

When Sally walks into the room, the Ultimate Message walks into the room. When Sally speaks, the Infinite Silence speaks the Ultimate Message. When Sally notices the despairing living going on her class, that despairing living knows itself noticed by the Infinite Silence, audited by the Infinite Silence, forgiven by the Infinite Silence, and called by the Infinite Silence to a free, trusting, compassionate, tranquil sort of living. Sally constantly confronts each member of her class with the option of living human life in victorious freedom. Sally is a person through whom the Infinite Silence speaks. She challenges her class to live their lives with courageous freedom—to live with compassionate freedom the same lives over which each of her class members quite commonly despair.

The men in her class who feel they have no feelings worth expressing learn from Sally to experience, to trust, and to express those feelings. They learn that every anger, every fear, every hostility, every compassion, every bodily desire, is part of the goodness of life. The women in her class (most of whom always thought that being nice was the one thing that a proper woman should do) learn from Sally that being firm and ruthlessly honest is the sort of aliveness approved by Eternity. The parents in her class (most of whom live in despondency with the thought that they are to blame for every failure or flaw in their offspring) learn from Sally to realize that each of their children is virgin born, an offspring of the Infinite Silence–that children are strange and mysterious beings who must do their own despairing, failures, depravities, as well as find their own buoyant living and astonishing novelties. “Parents,” Sally says, “who love, feed, and protect their children from injury, are doing their job.” “And loving them fully,” she says, “includes allowing them the freedom and the dignity of going astray in their own way.” “Maybe,” Sally says, “you might pray without ceasing that your children will find trust in the Infinite Silence, but if they don’t, it’s not your fault.” In these and many other ways, Sally is the Ultimate Message in human flesh. Sally is the Resurrected Jesus to this particular flock who come each week to probe with Sally into the secrets of living life in an ongoing trust of the Infinite Silence. Sally is the Good Shepherd. Before Abraham was born, this strange Sally IS.

Sally is not appreciated by every person who has attended her class. Some left in a huff and never returned. One particular official in the church sought to have her class disbanded. “A disgrace,” he called it. But Sally believes that such opposition is to be expected. She even uses this opposition to teach her point that we live in a world of darkness that opposes the light. As to her own inconvenience and grief over being opposed in these ways, Sally says, “The Good Shepherd lays down her life for her sheep. Therefore, a bit of grumpiness from the congregational establishment does not discourage me.”

Now my story might have taken place in some other environment than a church. Sally could be a teacher of secular wisdom in some university. Sally could a teacher of Buddhism. Or perhaps Sally is not a teacher at all, but a plumber who comes to fix your water faucets. Perhaps Sally is a political leader who knows how to take care of her staff. Perhaps Sally is as organizer of a revolutionary movement. The Jesus Christ-dynamic, since it is the Ultimate Message from the Infinite Silence, is not limited to the communication that might go on in the context of a Christian church. The communication of the Ultimate Message does not even require the context of Christian symbolism.

Any person who communicates in any way that we are loved by the Infinite Silence is a fleshly embodiment of the Ultimate Message. That person can be said to be “in Christ.” That person is living “in the name of Jesus, the Christ” Indeed, that person, insofar as he or she actually embodies the Ultimate Message, is the Resurrected Jesus Christ!

Those two words “Jesus Christ” do not only point to a first-century peasant teacher from Nazareth; they also point to a dynamic of healing that is built into the cosmos. Perhaps you have noticed the opening verses of John’s narrative that this dynamic, “The Communication of the Infinite Silence,” was present at the creation of everything. This was poetry, but poetry about the everywhere presence of this Word of healing.

There are many deep, profound, compassionate persons who do not call themselves by the name of “Jesus.” We who do revere Jesus in an ultimate way can, however, view any authentic spirit messenger as “Jesus Christ.” Why? Because these two words, deeply understood, speak of a dynamic that can happen anywhere. The true flock know their Shepherd wherever and whenever that Shepherd shows up. Yes, the Resurrection of Jesus really happens, happens indeed!

Every Good Shepherd is the second FACE of the triune experience of Divinity. Every Good Shepherd is the Beloved Offspring of the Infinite Silence, the Ultimate Message in human flesh, the New Adam or Eve who knows the Eternal as Love and in that context lives the full ambiguities of a human life. Perhaps you have met some Good Shepherds who have laid down part or all of their lives for some fragile sheep like, for example, you.

The post The Good Shepherd Lives first appeared on Realistic Living.

The Depth of Love

What Christianity brings to each social times is a depth of the meaning of the word “love” or “agape.” Such love, understood deeply, is indeed applicable to any and all times. This love is not a set of principles, but a raw attitude toward life and death. Agape love is the essence of the Christian saint. (This also applies to the Jewish and Islamic saint. Hindus, Buddhists, and others also have similar aspirations.) It is to a historically encountered Reality, that is our devotion as Christians. Reality gives us life and all the specific gifts and opportunities of our life. The Christian saint gives all those gifts back to Reality. Just as Abraham was prepared to give back Isaac who was his only son and all the evidence he had for his historical hope, so the Christian saint is prepared to give back all the gifts given to him or her. This giving back is the meaning of agape or Christian love. Everything is given back to Reality, our God. According to Luke’s’ gospel the last words of Jesus were, “Into Thy hands I commend my consciousness.” That is the meaning of death for the Christian saint: the final giving back.

The giving back of death and of our whole life does not take place only at the moment of our biological finality. As was the case with Jesus, the giving back of his whole life began in the gap between his baptism in the river Jordan (a washing or death to the whole evil era) and his vocation (continuing John the Baptist’s radical mission in Jesus’ own fresh radical way.) The 40 days Jesus is said to have spent in the desert was a time of praying through whether on not he would give back his whole being in carrying out the august calling that he saw set before him.

Giving back is the essence of love within whatever vocation in whatever era a Christian saint shows up. And “saint” here does not mean something super-duper special. A Christian saint is just some ordinary person who stops complaining about what he or she has been given and what he or she has not been given, and simply gives back to Reality everything he or she has been given by Reality. “Those to whom much has been given, much shall be required.” This old saying is a lesson about the nature of deep love.

A Christian Social Ethics for 2018

A Christian Social Ethics for 2018 begins with some deep understanding of these times. “These times” means this historical moment in its planet-wide and history-long contexts. Today, the terms “civilized,” “civil,” and “civilization” have come up for fresh definition—or perhaps we need new words altogether. Anthropologists have explored the transition from hunter-gatherer societies to civilizations as a passage through two intermediate stages: (1) Tribal societies of some complexity in agricultural or ocean-fishing abilities and (2) societies that can be characterized as chiefdoms. These two modes of being social are seen as something short of a full-blown civilization with a centralized state apparatus. The word “state” in this analysis means an elite selection of persons who politically rule the people living in a specific expanse of geography. Most of these ruled people are peasants or slaves with little political and economic power. These “underclasses” do choose from time to time which state establishment to serve or how an existing state establishment can be replaced with a “better for them” group of overlords. But until very recent times, not having overloads at all has been unthinkable within anything we have called “civilization.”

If such hierarchical order characterizes our standard definition of “civilization,” then the fairly recent developments in democracy must be seen as a type of dismantlement of civilization. What words do we use for that future post-civilization? “Eco-Democracy” has been suggested.

As civilizations have developed in the industrial period, we have seen the appearance of larger and larger middle classes. Democracy in its earliest 18th century developments was the promotion of middle class people to greater influence over the upper echelons of society through voting and other institutions of governing. Underclasses, including slaves, remained. And while royalty was displaced, there remained and still remains a continuing presence of a very wealthy and influential upper echelon of society. A full democratization of a society means more than ending slavery and giving women the vote; it includes making every member of society middle class—both ending grueling poverty and doing away with a ruling class of excessively wealthy people. This need not mean a complete equality of wealth and power, but it does mean establishing an equity of a hither-to-fore absent extent.

Such a “classless” society has not yet happened. Even moderately democratic societies are deeply threatened by reactionary movements toward authoritarianism. In Putin’s Russia and Trump’s USA, we see the presence of a retreat from democracy into oligarchical rule, or even single-ego chiefdom rule. Such un-democracy is a trend of political aspiration throughout the planet. And moving forward toward full democracy is still seen as a radical aspiration, rather than seen as a necessity for peace, prosperity, and wellbeing for this species and the needed ecological sanity for the natural planet.

In this hour of history, Christian love for humanity and the planet means embracing this aspiration for a full democracy. Steps toward this aspiration can only begin from where we now are. And this means creating a united movement devoted to next steps that 51 to 80% of the population can understand and support. Here are some of those next steps that we as a population within the United States are now relatively open to take:

The Flowering of the Women’s Movement
Dismantling Institutionalized Racism
Moderating the Climate Catastrophe
Promoting Equity in Wealth Distribution
The Democratic Overthrow of Authoritarianism
Educating a Dumbed-down Citizenry

Of course these six imperatives might be stated better, and other statements might be added to them or included within them. Nevertheless, these are necessary social ethics imperatives for every awakening citizen of the United States in 2018. By “awakening” I mean awakening to the historical reality in which we dwell. These social imperatives are more than a bit of best-case thinking about realism; from the perspective of the agape quality of Christian love these imperatives are “commands of God.”

If the word “God” is understood as meaning a dynamic of devotion attached to the historical encounter with the “un-word” that we are pointed to with the word “Reality,” then “command of God” simply means the imperative for realistic living.

The prophet of God knows that all the words with which we point to Reality are pointing to a moving target. Reality talks back to us all the time. Reality is never entirely held in our mere words. Even our best current words become obsolete. But that does not bother the prophet of God: we prophets of God know that. We know that what we spoke yesterday and what we speak today may not be good enough for what we speak tomorrow. Such is the nature of our actualization of agape in our historical moments of response.

An ambiguous progression of relative certainties is our Christian calling to social response-ability.

For more on the topic of social ethics see our 2011 book:

The Road From Empire to Eco-Democracy

http://www.realisticliving.org/books.htm

The post The Depth of Christian Social Ethics first appeared on Realistic Living.

The Primal Merging with Freedom

When we have been blessed to see beyond our self images, personality structures, and social conditioning, we discover our intentionality, our initiative, our freedom to act beyond those self-inflicted boundaries. Too easily, we tell ourselves that we can’t do what we can do. The truth is we don’t know what we can do. We think we are determined where we are not. For example, if I am by habit a shy person, I can still discover my freedom to risk myself in gregarious contact with others. If I am by habit a boisterous person, I can still discover my freedom to calm down into being sensitive to others. Personality impulses exist, but so does freedom, unless we have squelched it.

Our essential freedom does not control the future—almost always he future comes to us as a surprise. Our freedom is not absolute control, but a participant in options. And this freedom is a gift—a gift that must to be received and enacted by us. Freedom is our profound initiative to make a difference in what the future turns out to be. Our free initiatives mingle with massive forces beyond our control to form a future that is both a surprise to us and a result of our initiatives.

These initiatives can be categorized as many types—here are four types of initiative that have characterized the Christian practice called “prayer”: (1) confessing our unrealism, (2) giving thanks for our life, our possibilities, and our forgiveness, (3) making requests of Reality for our own temporal being and for its further realization, (4) making requests of Reality for specific others and for the general social conditions that care for whole groups of people as well as for the circumstances of our home and planet. Such initiatives involve more than thoughts in the mind; they are acts of inner choice. These prayerful initiations are proposals for speech and for bodily movements of action in the world. These deep interior acts of Primal Merging with Freedom are intentions to engage in real life. True prayers are internal initiatives that change my actions and thereby change the course of history through the attitudes and actions that flow from such a life of prayer.

Such prayerful initiatives access the power of our true being—a power that is not an achievement or a possession of the ego or a quality of the personality. Such freedom is a capacity for initiative—a gift given to us by the Power that posits us in being. Our access of the power of freedom is not an accomplishment, but a merging, an allowing of our awareness to merge with the capacity of freedom that characterizes our deep being. This deep initiative is a capacity to create “out of nothing” responses that have no cause except our own initiative. It remains true that many of our responses are automatic actions that derive from our genetics or our social conditioning or our personality habits. We can be surprised by the extent to which an old childhood-developed habit imposes itself inappropriately into our present living. But along with all this past-determined behavior, something more exists in our now of living. We simply ARE a capacity for uncaused initiative that no psychological theory can explain.

From time to time, our experience of this profound freedom can break through our personality habits. This radical freedom is a permanent aspect of our true being. We have no excuse for not being our freedom. Our flight from freedom is our own doing. We use that freedom to choose no longer being free. And when we deny our freedom, we become stuck with an enslaved self.

The Inherent Purity of Being Freedom

Freedom is an Inherent Purity that includes living beyond the good and evil that our minds can forge. Freedom means living beyond the stories our superego holds—our oughts, duties, customs, and morals. Freedom means living beyond the approval of our parents, offspring, friends and other social peers. Freedom means living beyond all the libraries of ethical thought, and beyond all the definitions of our dictionaries. Dictionaries are past oriented. Freedom is openness to the future, including dictionary writing. This freedom also includes living beyond all the preferences of our own bodies, minds, and habits. Our pure freedom is an Inherent Purity because it is an obedience to the true state of affairs of our profound being.

Freedom is an audacious boldness that can use our personality gifts when appropriate, but will also contradict all personality habits and values without qualms. All impulses to be righteous in terms of superego conditioning are bypassed in the act of freedom; a new form of righteousness reigns: freedom itself. That we spend most of our lives squeezing freedom into some narrow box of morality or social acceptability does not contradict the fact that a deep audacious boldness is our true being. We insist upon being guilty before our social norms rather than alive in our inherent freedom. Nevertheless, living “beyond good and evil” characterizes the real “me.” In spite of the fact that our parents, our community, our friends, our enemies teach us good and evil, we are each an audacious boldness that uses these teachings and also leaps beyond these teaching as we deem appropriate to the situation.

When we understand this truth about our true being, we can understand the story of Adam and Eve who ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and thereby experienced a fall from their authenticity—which fall, the following Genesis stories imply, results in all the estrangements known to the human species. That so-called knowledge of good and evil promising to make us divine turns out to be a deadly illusion. The snake in this story lied. The knowledge of good and evil is not a step up toward divinity, but a fall down into human depravity. The knowledge of good and evil is a forbidden food—forbidden by Reality. Our essential being is and remains ignorance-of-good-and-evil—an ignorance that is also freedom.

All our actual decisions are ambiguous. Many standards of good and evil may bring thoughtfulness to our free decisions, but contradicting values and standards are always present. We are vulnerable without any known final justification for what we do. We are choosing all by ourselves from an abyss of freedom that frightens us as much as it may also fascinate us. We are making wild leaps into unknown futures. We are making choices that are determining our own future and the future of the world. If we can embrace our fear of this gift, we can also experience its glory, its courage, its flexibility, and its knowledge of forgiveness before, during, and after we act.

The Attuned Working of Freedom

Reality is not a fixed fate, automatically working itself out like a piece of recorded music. Rather, Reality is an “open-for-options” fluidity that can work out in a large number of different ways, many of which can seem impossible or miraculous to our self-contained personality and ego establishment. It is in this sense that “Attuned Working” means living beyond fate. It means giving up all fatalism. This does not mean that we create our own reality, as so many false teachers claim. We do indeed create the worlds that our minds believe to be true, but these creations, being human made, are therefore illusory in some or all of their components. The effects of these self-created mind-worlds on the actual course of history are unpredictable and typically tragic in some way or another. These self-created mind-worlds always involve some sort of neglect of Reality, and thereby yield disappointments so extreme that despair eventually overwhelms the so-called “reality creator.” Freedom is realism, but freedom does not “create reality.” Freedom only alters reality in accord with realism. Freedom is “Attuned Working”—an obedience to realism in the real situations that we are being given and within which real situations we are called to be free.

In other words, freedom is a response to the gift of a situation with the gift of freedom to respond. In John’s Gospel, Jesus is given to say, “My Father is working still, and I am working.” (John 5:17 Revised Standard Version) Attuned Working is such working in the context of “what-is-doing” in the overall course of things. Attuned Working pays attention to what is going on, and then is obedient to that “working,” not in some robotic fashion, but as a free being attuned to the real options. Such living can be very powerful; our tiny little actions can instigate an echo from the whole of Reality.

When out of his deep awareness and honesty, Martin Luther nailed some discussion topics on a cathedral door, he could not have imagined the echo Reality would give to his action. It was as if the whole of European history turned on the pivot of this man’s persistent working. Some of Luther’s responses may not have been well tuned, but he nevertheless rang a bell of Freedom that enabled nobles and peasants to break with the stodgy traditions and the oppressive familiarities of that time and place. Many of the consequences of Luther’s actions were unintended and some may be judged tragic. Nevertheless, his attunement to what was so in his time joined with the existing trends and potentials, creating an avalanche of historical change. Luther’s Attuned Working, combined with the Attuned Working of others, set in motion a new era of human living that was less estranged from the deep truth of our true being. Freedom itself was set loose in the world.

In the lives of most of us, Attuned Working may not be Luther-level dramatic, but each of us has in our essential being this same potential for Attuned Working within the times of our lives. We are manifesting Attuned Working when we act out of our sense of how the cultural, political, and economic liberation of women is relevant for all of us in today’s world. We are manifesting Attuned Working when we act out of our sense of the relevance for all of us of the care of the Earth—its climate, its soils, its water ways, its diversity of species, and so forth. Freedom as Attuned Working means creatively living within the actual challenges of our times. Flight from these challenges is flight from Freedom; such flight is a cowardly compulsion, or a greedy obsession, or some other cop-out of estrangement from our real lives of courageous and free response within actual events.

Attuned Working can break through our personality habits as a state of being that happens to us from time to time. And we can also realize that Attuned Working is a permanent dynamic of our true being. This Freedom is given and supported by Reality; we never need to choose unfreedom. And if we do, we are dependent upon Reality to rescue us from our departure.

The post The Flight From Freedom first appeared on Realistic Living.

For example, it is certainly true that African American persons in the United States confront an up-hill slope compared to their white brothers and sisters. To even be a candidate for the office of president, Barack Obama had to be qualified way beyond the norm for this job. Though we might not support some of Obama’s policies, we had in him a superbly qualified person: a law scholar; a public speaker of Abraham Lincoln class (many of whose speeches will be remembered for centuries); a talented comedian seldom seen in public office; a person of self control, obvious sanity, and sincere intent to be a positive influence. Had he had any of the flaws or weaknesses of Donald Trump, he would never have been elected Senator, much less President. Can we imagine the response of voters, had Obama said things about women that Trump apparently got away with (at least with millions of voters)? A white man in our culture often avoids sufferings that a black person will almost certainly experience.

And this was only the beginning of the innocent suffering inflicted upon our first black president—falsely accused of not being a citizen, irrationally opposed by Republican leaders, assassination threats beyond the norm. And even all of Obama’s sufferings are less than the innocent suffering faced by every black inner city boy who is often instructed by his parents on how to avoid getting killed by the police or vigilantes walking home from school. “Black Lives Matter” is indeed a slogan that speaks to this innocent suffering.

There is no fault involved in being born black or brown or tan, so this is properly called “innocent suffering.” Women also face innocent suffering: their opportunities are still restricted compared with men of equal qualification; our culture also allows various dangers to their person (and life) that exceed those of most males. Innocent suffering is certainly endured by the poor: their pathway to success and prosperity is becoming more, not less, restricted. Gays, lesbians, and transgender citizens face innocent suffering of a most insidious form. Innocent suffering is likewise endured by the mentally ill. And we must not overlook the worshipers of a religion that is not typical in the general society. This list of innocent suffers goes on and on. Suffering of all sorts is unfairly distributed in every society, and this unfair distribution tells us much that we need to know in order to prioritize our fight for justice.

Yet, there is a problem with fully understanding the concept of “innocent suffering,” for all people suffer and no person is wholly innocent. If we view “innocence” from the perspective of not being estranged from our profound humanness, then in terms of this baseline, we are all guilty of being less than human. We are all on a journey either forward toward more authenticity of living, or on a journey backward toward more debauchery and other escapes of our essential being. “Innocent” is not the whole story about suffering.

Guilty of Despair

Innocent before some law can be fairly cut and dried. That is why we have courts and judges and juries—to figure out that sort of innocence or guilt. But on the more profound level of our being human, “guilt” means something far more basic than violation of a law. The deep refusal to live our real life is a guilt that we do not get away with, Reality catches up with us and casts us into some form of despair. We are all guilty of the suffering of despair.

Also, no one avoids the temporal sufferings of ordinary living. It is often true that suffering is about half of our lives. Pain and pleasure are both experienced by all of us. Success and frustration are both there in our lives. Both approval and disapproval come our way. Both beauty and ugliness happen to us. Our lives includes many “little deaths” to our living, as well as that final ending in total biological extinction.

And in addition to all these qualities of our temporality, we add suffering to our lives by our attitudes toward our temporal ups and downs. By clinging to these impermanent realities, we create a suffering that need not be. By hoping for things that can never happen, we create a suffering that need not haunt our lives. We can needlessly despair over anything, both our so-called “ups” as well as our so-called “downs.” Mostly we despair over our “downs”—over our loss of a mate we wanted but did not get, or had for a time and then lost—over a job we loved but cannot no longer perform—over a discovery about our own person of something we abhor. Despair is the most intolerable of all sufferings, yet most of us are trapped in some form of despair most of the time.

Despair is a suffering that Buddhist practices can assist us to heal—making us ready for the “accident” of liberation from our despair. Despair is a suffering that Christian practices also assist us to heal: this heritage calls this “accident of liberation” the “grace of God.” Grace is a happening that enables us to trust in Reality, a trust that leads to the consequences of freedom, hope, love, peace, and joy. These two religions and others have come into being because humans all face the need to heal from the sickness of despair. In spite of the fact that we all tend to avoid the whole topic of despair, we all need means of healing our despair — of getting loose from the trap of despair and finding release for our true human potentials.

And our despair is basically needless, for it is not built into the structure of the cosmos. Despair is an accomplishment of human beings. It is possible to give up hoping that our temporal lives will cease to be temporal and become lasting in the ways we wish to be “lasting.” However, that deep possibility of being reconciled with our real, authentic, essential lives is not so easy. Our despair is caused by attitudes that are deeply entrenched. If fact, most of the time we have no idea why we are in despair or what it might be that we are in despair over. Even when we do have some insight into the causes of our despair, we may still be strongly bound in clinging to whatever it is that is passing away. Such clinging makes us slaves, bound and groveling in some state of despair. And despair can be very dangerous, for it can seem to us so bad that we can choose not to live at all, rather that go on with the pain of our despair or even the humiliation of its admission and healing.

Most often we find ways of burying our feelings of despair in some form of drunkenness or debauchery or busyness. Even our most noble living may provide a way of escaping a full experience of our despair-dominated lives. But such escapes from despair do not last. Eventually we become exhausted, numb, burned-out, and thereby brought home to an even deeper awareness of our despair.

Most tragic of all, we are capable of taking on a very advanced attitude toward despair—the notion that despair is all there is to living a human life. We can simply resign ourselves to despair and thereby embody some sort of firm hatred toward human living that our despair reveals, making ourselves into a demonic force that lacks all genuine love for others or even love for ourselves—a spirit that hates the cosmos for being the cosmos, and that hates the cosmos for working in the ways the cosmos does in fact work. Such despair-sick lives take on a sort of purpose, the purpose of hating reality and evangelizing others to hate life along with us. This horrid state can endure as a sort of grim fun, until we get tired of it. We know that we can always kill ourselves when we want to quit this weird project of hate. We need not be so surprised when people actually do kill themselves and take a bunch of others with them.

Seeing clearly these consequences to which despair may lead, let us ask further about the possibility of healing despair. Paul Tillich has given us a formula for noticing this path of transformation. First, we look our despair in the face and acknowledge that we are the cause of it, that we are guilty of despair. Second, we notice that the cosmic truth of Final Reality is an acceptance of us—an acceptance of us just as we are, in spite of our self-inflicted despair. This cosmic acceptance offers to us a fresh start for our lives. And third, all we have to do right now is simply accept that fact that we are accepted. Transformation follows. However grim our despair has been, we can be and therefore act differently. We can be reconciled in our overall attitude toward everything.

“Everything” Includes
all Sorts of Suffering

There is suffering that is simply our finitude—the impermanence of every aspect of our lives—our bodies, our health, our peers, our thoughts, our feelings, our lives. This suffering of impermanence is neither innocent nor guilty: it just is. It is just part of our lives to which can be reconciled or needlessly fight against.

Policing Despair

The social role of policing might better be called protecting, for that is the positive meaning of police action, protecting us from the consequence of our despairing neighbors and protecting our neighbors from a despairing “me.” The Declaration of Independence referred to the task of policing with the poetry “domestic tranquility.” We have often developed antagonism toward policing, because we have experienced despairing police officers who are causing innocent suffering. Nevertheless, the true role of policing is to protect us, not cause us more suffering.

The laws of state power and their enforcement do not heal despair, but law enforcement can restrain the despairing from the consequences of their despair upon the rest of us. In love for ourselves and others, we can experience the call to restrain “evil,” where “evil” is defined by just law and by common-sense moral custom. We can restrain such defined “evil” along with promoting the accompanying works of love that have to do with assisting the despairing to be aware of their despair and to find the path of forgiveness that leads toward being healed of despair.

Such healing and such restraint of evil do not contradict each other: these two forms of love support each other. Healing the despairing provides society with persons who do the tasks of justice. And the application of justice can be a tutor to the despairing about their despair, which is the first step toward healing their despair.

Such a balanced understanding of the works of love protects us from seeing ourselves as guiltless avengers at war with the guilty criminals. We all despair. And we all need just applications of law to restrain us. A police officer confronts the delicate task of restraining the consequences of despair, while also noticing the humanity of the people they restrain, a humanity that always includes a potential for humanness, no matter how evil and dangerous that human may still be.

It is not a contradiction that we need to restrain criminal persons as well as treat them with the respect they deserve. Criminals deserve respect in line with the simple fact of their being born into the common life we share with them. The suffering that policing must cause a criminal is a suffering that is needed because of the sickness of despair in that criminal. No permission need be granted to the police to heap innocent suffering on the criminals they care for and protect the rest of us from.

Police work is an honest and needed profession—no less so than nurse or teacher. Each profession has its characteristic temptations. Our police need to be trained to watch out for their own need to be powerful over others, or to hate those it is safe in this culture to hate. This need for a seeming softness of spirit in our police does not contradict the need for our police to be clear, careful, and firm with the destructive consequences of the despairing. We can be thankful for our police as well as for our therapeutic and religious ministries that are aimed at making us ready for the healing of our despair.

For more reflections on these and other slippery topics see our web site:

http://www.realisticliving.org/

The post Innocent Suffering first appeared on Realistic Living.

Contemplative Time

When we look within our own conscious being, we see ourselves living in an ongoing quality we call “now.” Time seems to flow through this now. The past is just a memory taking place now as content in our memory banks. And the future is only an anticipation, taking place now in our guesses about future nows that have yet to “happen.” In our experiences of contemplation or art participation or solitary brooding, “now” continues to be our core experience of time

Being conscious of this now and its here-and-now flow of content is a state we often call “presence.” Presence is a mysterious state of being that we can attempt to describe from both inside the conscious experience of presence and from the outside as an observation of a walking-talking or not walking or talking human being’s manifestations of presence. Presence is not measurable. Now is not measurable. Time as the flow of events through this living now is not measured. In order to measure time we have to move out of our subjectivity into an “objective” observation of a clock or perhaps the sun, moon, stars, days, seasons, and other moving parts of the natural world.

This strange mystery of time flowing through our now of consciousness is first of all a matter of active attention. We conscious beings watch time move; we watch the flow of futures coming into now and going into the past. Watching, however, is not the whole story of what we see using the contemplative approach to truth. We also see deciding among the alternatives confronting us. This deciding has an effect upon the future nows we will confront. We are like baseball players watching a ball coming at us, who at some point swing our bat to meet that ball in hope of some sort of “favorable” result. Results in the real world of time are not wholly caused by us. The actions produced by our free choices are only one of the “causes” of future outcomes. Our limited freedom operates within a larger “reality” that resists and augments the outcomes of our choices. As we choose out of that deep nothingness of personal freedom, we become one, but only one, of the causes of the future. We live in an environment of reality within which many other causes, both outside and inside our being, are contributing to the outcome of our choices. Nevertheless, we humans, using our essential freedom, are also cause agents.

Some have argued that none of our choices are free, that even our choices are caused by some other force of nature; but this is not true. We humans and other living beings make choices that are uncaused causes that join many other causes in determining the future. We might say that we are determined to be free as one of the many determining forces of nature. The apostle Paul put it this way: “For Freedom Christ and set us free.” He is talking about being set free from our bondages of illusion, addiction, compulsion, etc. He is not denying that such bondages exist. He is claiming, however, that freedom can also exist as a state of our being. In fact, freedom is our true being, from which our states of bondage are an estrangement.

Some have argued that all outcomes are predetermined, but this is also an exaggeration. Still others have argued that we are absolute masters of our own lives, that our will is always free from bondages to our various illusions, habits, conditioning, etc. That is also not true. Still others have argued that we have no effects on the future, that we are simply watchers of unfolding events. This is also a half truth at best. The raw nature of consciousness is not only watching, but also choosing. Consciousness is both attentionality and intentionality.

Seen from the contemplative approach to truth, the truth of living shows us to be in dialogue with other powers that are coming at us. Our choices do matter; yet our choices do not matter as much as we might like or guess or hope. We act for some purpose, but that purpose is restrained and/or augmented by forces beyond our understanding or control. These other forces than our own freedom continue to surprise us with next opportunities to respond with our freedom. We continually make further contributions to this ongoing dialogue with other forces in this medium of enigmatic time. For good or for evil we are benders of the course of time. We are responsible beings. Those who deny this are not facing the whole truth.

In a deep understanding of Christian faith (as well as Jewish and Islamic faith), we trust that all the very many opposing dialogue partners have a singular meaning for us: A Grand Oneness of Power operating within time—demolishing the past now, sustaining the present now, and presenting us with a yet-to-be-determined future now whose coming is challenging us to participate in shaping that future now. If we call this Overall Oneness of Power “Thou” or “God” or “Yahweh” or “Allah” or some other devotional word of commitment, we are choosing to affirm our membership in this ongoing dialogue within time. In such a vision, “faith” means a leap of choice—an act of our freedom into openly being this dialogue. Such faith includes accepting our freedom from the passing past (that is, renouncing our clinging to the familiar) and opening ourselves for the impending future that will surely include surprises to our familiar patterns of understanding and living. The coming future can kill our falseness, but the future can also raise us up to newness of life, a life that is more realistic.

The theologian Rudolf Bultmann defines Christian faith as trust in this Grand Oneness of Power that is manifest in the flow of time. Faith, therefore, is quite simply freedom from the past and openness to the future. Living within such an “obedience of faith,” we can count on having our current self images and familiar behavior patterns audited, demolished, changed, challenged, and more. We discover that whoever we now think-we-are will be revealed to be less or more than who we really are. So who-we-think-we-are is alway open to the “crucifixion experience,” that is also a “resurrection experience” toward being more real than we have known before. These grand symbols point to the life-adventure for which we are volunteering when we face the Final Oneness of Power meeting us in the flow of time, and give that Power the devotional obedience indicated by the phrase: “our God.”

Measurable Time

When the scientific approach to truth is taken, time is a measurable dimension of our thinking and predicting and practical living. Where would we be without our wrist watches and other clocks, sundials, calendars, etc.? The speedometers in our cars are measures of miles per hour of time. Acceleration from one speed to another is measured in changes of velocity per unit of time. The whole of our physical knowledge is based on measuring time. Without such knowledge of reality, our lives would be unmanageable.

Sir Isaac Newton and others clarified for us how we scientific thinkers view time as a line severed into two parts by a contentless point called now. According to Newton, this line-of-time extends endlessly into the past and endlessly into the future. The point of now has no measurable length. It is nothing. The scientific “now” is just an abstraction— a point on the abstract line-of-time. At that abstract point of now, we imagine an abstract scientific observer observing from that space/time coordinate. This whole line—past-now-future—is just a picture in our rational heads. In our conscious experience of living, now does not mean an imaginary point. Yet using our contemplative approach to truth, we know that now is everything. The past is gone, the future is yet to be. Our lives are now and only now.

Though this scientific line-of-time is an abstraction, it is a very useful abstraction. We could not get along with it. In the scientific method of seeking truth, we pay attention to the facts being observed, not to the observer. Though we scientific thinkers are never allowed to forget that observers are involved, the scientific method of truth seeking is not searching our inner experience; it is searching our outer collectively observable experience for rational orderings that make temporal events more understandable, ordered, and predictable.

Science is hugely useful to us. We often take our scientific knowledge for granted without even noticing how useful it is, and how useful it has been for our species far into the distant past. At the same time, we seldom notice how abstract this universe of measurable time is from our inwardly experienced reality of time as a flow through an ever-present now.

Nevertheless, this abstract time-line in our heads is absolutely necessary in order for we humans to create our scientific storehouse of operational wisdom. But this line with that contentless dot of now is not our actual experience of time. Our actual experience of time is living in an ongoing something we call “now.” Reality flows through our now from future nows to past nows. We live only now. We know that we lie, when we try to live in the past or in the future.

The above discussion means that the whole of our physical knowledge is a world of abstractions, not the world into which we are physically born. Some try to argue that it is our inner world that is the illusion and that our scientifically perceived world is the reality. Nevertheless, we know with our consciousness that the opposite is true. Our inner experience is Real, however irrational it may clearly be. The scientifically perceived world is an abstraction of the Real. This abstraction is a useful approximation of the Real—an approximation that good enough for now, but due to be improved in the future.

It is true that our rational views of our inner experience are likewise approximate understandings of our inner reality, but this inner reality about which we have approximate knowledge is real with the same force that our outward reality is real. The dynamics we point to with the words like “consciousness” and “freedom” are real dynamics however poorly or well we describe or understand them. We humans create our descriptions and give our artistic expressions to consciousness and freedom, and these inner realities are not just ideas: they persisting realities quite beyond our abilities to create approximate rational models of them. Our rational models and artistic expressions of our inner realities are useful for our living, even though we know that all these models and art forms are approximations of an inner truth that is always more mysterious that we know.

Similarly, the abstract nature of our scientific knowledge does not make scientific knowledge any less useful. We avid fans of contemplative truth must not suppose that we know all we know through our contemplative excellences. Our scientific approach to truth is an actual approach to truth, and we would be helpless without it. Without the scientific approach to truth, we would know nothing of the weather, baseball, history, dinosaurs, galaxies, planets, suns, cultures, societies, education, and much, much more.

Yet the whole of scientific knowledge is just an array of mind-orderings in our heads that help us understand the real environment we confront personally. Good science corresponds to a significant extent with our actual experience of the environment. We honor the facts of our objective experience even though we may also know that those facts are themselves constructions of our minds that we must often improve as more information is taken in by our senses. We live in between these two seemingly contradictory truths: (1) that our scientific knowledge is truth that we need to honor, and yet (2) scientific knowledge is never the Truth with a capital “T,” for it will surely be replaced later by a more inclusive truth that is still not the Truth with a capital “T.”

Here is an illustration of this paradox from physics itself. Newton viewed the line of time as independent from the three dimensions (3 infinite lines) of space. These abstractions served the advance of science quite well for 200 years, and we can still get by in many areas of our living with these Newton abstractions. But the general community of physics has now faced up to facts coming to their attention that have firmly established that space and time are not independent from one another. We can now better see ourselves living in space/time, rather than in space and time. Further, space/time is an interacting fabric of reality with warps and curves and that strongly influences every event. Space/time is not a straight-line emptiness in which all “things” simply happen. Space/time is itself a participant in the universe of events.

We experience the fabric of space-time every time our car accelerates. When we speed up, we are thrown against the seat. When we slow down rapidly we are thrown forward. When we swerve to the left we are thrown to the right. These results are understood in post-Einstein physics as experiencing the resistance of the structure of space/time. We are at-rest-with the pattern of space/time when we are moving with a steady velocity (including stillness). Whenever we are accelerating (faster or slower or turning), we are feeling the surrounding space/time.

Even more astonishing to our Newtonian familiarities, we are moving in accord with the surrounding space/time medium when we are free-falling toward the center of the Earth. In the midst of such falling we feel no gravity. We feel gravity only when we are resisting the warped fabrics of space/time in the vicinity of the Earth, or some other large body of mass. When we are being pressed downward toward the center of the Earth, we are experiencing the structure of space/time rather than as Newton supposed being mysteriously pulled by some distant force. This space/time fabric of the cosmos is a better abstraction than the Newtonian abstractions for understanding and predicting many of the events of the natural world. In viewing this massive shift in scientific abstractions we get to notice that all of science is just abstractions that have more or less correspondence with our sensory experience of the natural world.

Ethical Time

Ethics is a part of the discipline of learning we call “philosophy.” A comprehensive or inclusive philosophical vision must draw from both scientific truth and contemplative truth—combining them into useful fabrics of understanding that can guide our current culture in meeting its historical challenges. In the context of a responsibility ethics, time is a mixture of measurable time and the inner experience of time accessed through contemplating our now of paying attention and our now of making history-bending decisions.

As we mix these visions of time, we err when we overemphasize the abstractions of science into some sort of deterministic ethics that does not adequately honor the decisional power of human beings. And we also err if we overemphasize the contemplative components of truth toward some sort of exclusion of the importance of science in the making of informed decisions.

In such an understanding of ethical time, the contradiction between the scientific and the contemplative visions of time is handled—not resolved with a rational overview of the nature of time, but united through a willingness to have our lives be as mysterious as our lives actually are. This deep humbling of our human intelligence is not a temporary condition. This will always be the case. No genius will ever resolve the scientific and contemplative approaches to truth into some sort of rational oneness. How do we know this is true? What we know about the nature of scientific truth and what we know about the nature of contemplative truth prove this to be the case. There is no rational consilience between scientific and contemplative truth. Life is a Mystery PERIOD. This we can count on.

Our responsibility ethics can usefully integrate these two approaches to truth into workable patterns of action for our culture in its historical setting with its historical challenges. This ethical necessity for integrating these two very different modes of truth amounts to a third approach to truth—the truth-of-workability for our personal lives, and for the common challenges of our society. Our ethics includes asking questions like: “What combination of scientific and contemplative truth will best inform our culture in this moment of our historical time?”

For more exploration of truth, time, and related topics,
consider the following book:

The Enigma of Consciousness
a philosophy of profound humanness and religion

http://www.realisticliving.org/books.htm

The post Time? first appeared on Realistic Living.

In the four years preceding 2011, five unknown visionaries, Ben Ball, Marsha Buck, Ken Kreutziger, Alan Richard, and myself, wrote a book entitled “The Road from Empire to Eco-Democracy.” This book named ten positive trends toward a viable and promising future for humanity on planet Earth. Trumpism manifests the opposite of all ten of these trends. If there were a Trumpite book on such topics, it might be titled “The Retreat from Eco-Democracy to Anthropocentric Empire.”

I am going to name those ten trends examined in The Road and give names to Trumpism’s ten retreats that are reversing those positive trends.

1. The Primacy of the Ecological Crisis
& The Denial of Earth Emergencies

2. The Energizing of Full Democracy
& The Undermining of Democracy

3 . The Replacement of the Fossil-Fuel Economy
& The Clinging to Fossil-Fuel Profiteering

4. The Reversal of the Population Explosion
& The Neglect of the Population Plight

5. The Liberation of Women and Girls
& The Continuation of the Drag of Patriarchy

6. The Completion of the Racial Revolution
& The Normalizing of the Curse of Racism

7. The Death Throes of Theocracy
& The Pampering of Religious Bigotry

8. The Obsolescence of War
& The Expansion of Military Industrialism

9. The Regulation of the Banking Crisis
& The Tyranny of Phantom Wealth

10. The Ending of the Horror of Poverty
& The Enrichment of the Outlandishly Rich

Trump and his hypocritical fellow travelers do not admit to these horrific retreats from these summaries of common sense and social sanity, but this deep conflict is what we see when we see the vision of Eco-Democracy. In this fresh view of the world, we see ourselves existing in a time of huge conflict in basic directions and values. This current condition of our history makes impossible the so-called bipartisanship of the earlier post-Roosevelt Era in the United States. We live in a new sort of “civil war”—waged not with rifles and cannons, but with words and protests and votes. We can also wage many decisive battles with fresh viable economic innovations, with local community organizing of activist energies, with court cases, with demonstrations, with innovative press coverages, with educational programs, with e-matter campaigns, with imaginative nonprofit agencies, and with more such available openings in the cracks of this crumbling world.

Primary to all of this is being very clear about the deadliness of lying, and the futility of being unclear with our words. For example, the words “capitalism” and “socialism” are so corroded with hate, exaggerations, misinformation, and down-right lying that these words have become almost useless. Trump’s actual cabinet of executives, in spite of their “capitalist” overemphasis, support “government give-a-ways” for the very rich with a very big government on their behalf. Reagan’s phrase “government is the problem, not the solution” may be the most misleading slogan ever uttered. Without government rules and regulations, there is no free market, no functional capitalism or socialism or any other economic pattern we might imagine. Government of the people, by the people, and for the people is indeed a huge part of the solution to every one of the problems we are confronting. Such solutions do not mean turning over our freedom to the government, but turning over our government to our freedom as citizens. We the citizens are the government of a full democracy. To speak of government as “they” rather than “we” is a violation of the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and yes even the flawed-but-gifted Constitution of the United States. Government becomes “they” when “we” stop being democratic citizens and expect strongmen oligarchs like the wealthy Donald T to resolve our issues.

Yes, we can be understanding of how frustrated working people can be when our so-called democratic institutions manage to neglect the crucial issues that commoners face, while also pampering the moneyed few with ever-expanding power, wealth, status, and contempt for the needlessly hurting citizens. Socialism is not the reason for this. Capitalism is not the reason for this. The reason for this is citizen apathy, foolishness, and gullibility to the lying, thieving, corruptions that we the citizens have tolerated for way, way too long.

We the citizens need to admit that we are too dumb for this job, that we have been dumbed-down by very, very clever oligarchs of the propaganda world. We have to start our revolution within our own minds, eliminating all the crap that has been infused into us. We are capable beings with capable minds, and the intelligence to use these resources of our amazing biology to shape a viable new world.

And if we want to even pretend to be servants of God in the Jewish, Christian, or Muslim sense, we have to become thoughtful about what is the truth that comes to us from that Final Reality we face, rather than from the liars that we must learn to defeat.

The Global Warming Climate Catastrophe is not a hoax PERIOD. That sentence expresses the sort of God-serving, Truth-telling citizenry we need to become—become NOW through simply surrendering all our foolishness and letting the truth flow into us.

To all you true atheists reading this spin, I want you to understand that I agree with not believing in the gods that you do not believe. I am attempting to describe what it means to trust in THAT Final Reality that none of us can escape.

For more information on The Road from Empire to Eco-Democracy, visit:

http://www.realisticliving.org/books.htm

The post The Road and the Retreat first appeared on Realistic Living.