This selection is taken from my commentary on the Gospel of Mark. This entire book is now published on the Realistic Living blog site for $10.

https://realisticliving.org/New/mark-commentary/

When he [Jesus] re-entered Capernaum some days later, a rumor spread that he was in somebody’s house. Such a large crowd collected that while he was giving them his message it was impossible even to get near the doorway. Meanwhile, a group of people arrived to see him, bringing with them a paralytic whom four of them were carrying. And when they found it was impossible to get near him because of the crowd, they removed the tiles from the roof over Jesus’ head and let down the paralytic’s bed through the opening. And when Jesus saw their faith, he said to the man on the bed, “My son, your sins are forgiven.”

But some of the scribes were sitting there silently asking themselves, “Why does this man talk such blasphemy? Who can possibly forgive sins but God?”

Jesus realized instantly what they were thinking, and said to them, “why must you argue like this in your minds? Which do you suppose is easier—to say to a paralyzed man, ‘Your sins are forgiven’, or ‘Get up, pick up your bed and walk’? But to prove to you that the Son of Man has full authority to forgive sins on earth, I say to you,”—and here he spoke to the paralytic—“Get up, pick up your bed and go home.”

At once the man sprang to his feet, picked up his bed and walked off in full view of them all. Everyone was amazed, praised God, and said, “We have never seen anything like this before.”

This man is paralyzed. He is down like dead. He is carried by four bearers. A hole is made and he is lowered down. Down in the bottom of the hole that they “make” in the roof of this house is Jesus, and Jesus says to this prone man, “Child, your sins are forgiven.” These allusions to death and resurrection are clearly intentional. Mark intends for us to “get it,”—to hear this Spirit lesson: “the spiritually dead are raised up through forgiveness.”

Mark has introduced a new theme: “forgiveness.” The religious scholars in Mark’s story take offense that a mere human being can declare forgiveness. “Only God,” they say, “can forgive.” But Jesus, sensing their rejection, clarifies that the son of Adam (that is, any authentic human being) has authority to forgive sins. But Jesus does not say to the man, “I forgive you.” He says “Your sins are forgiven” The meaning here is that Jesus is the Mouth of God speaking for God about a forgiveness that is extended to all of us. Mark further clarifies that accepting forgiveness and rising up from your paralysis are one and the same thing. The down-like-dead man, hearing that he is forgiven, gets up, picks up his mat, and goes home. Forgiveness is not an excuse for remaining dead. Forgiveness is a fresh start in being alive.

Some of the people standing around feel the Awe of this. They become ecstatic. They extol the Awesome Infinite Silence for confronting them with this possibility. They exclaim, “We’ve never seen the likes of this!”

Now what is Mark talking about with this story? What is going on here that could be so Awesome, so new, so important? Clearly, Mark is talking about more than the literal elements of the story. Honestly, who cares whether or not some paralyzed man who lived 2000 years ago got back on his feet? Mark is telling us that Jesus is the one who meets us, each of us, at the lowest point of our spirit condition–when we are indeed dead in our despair, unable even to walk our lives; when we are out flat, having to be carried by others. When despair has blocked all possibility of going on with our lives, at this point Jesus says to us: “Your despair is forgiven. Everything in your past or in your present life over which you are despairing is forgiven. You have, right now, a fresh start before you; arise and walk it.” When some despairing person actually accepts such forgiveness, all of us feel the Awe.

Every story in Mark’s narrative can be read as a parable about our spirit lives. This is not an imposition on the text. This is what Mark intended to happen to his readers. He is a trickster, tricking us into getting something clear in our own lives, not because Mark says so, but because it is SO. We can see this for ourselves, if we do the looking. Herein is the authority of Scripture, that it can reveal to us in our own experience what is SO about our lives. It is not because the church selected Mark as scripture. It is not that we have been taught that Mark was inspired. It is SO because we can see it is SO, if we have found our spirit eyes with which to see for ourselves. Mark uses the parable method of communication to forces us to use our own spirit resources to see what he is saying. And if we don’t see for ourselves the truth of scripture, we don’t see the truth of scripture. And we don’t see that it deserves to be scripture in this religion.

The post Spirit Parables first appeared on Realistic Living.

In these verses of Mark’s narrative about a Jewish peasant from Nazareth named “Jesus” rising from John’s washing from the corruptions of that era of history is prelude to the disciples of Jesus rising from their own deep-water dying experienced when their mentor was crucified. Mark is going lead us from this resurrection in the life of Jesus to the resurrection of Jesus’ life in the lives of the disciples.

If you want the read this whole commentary on the Gospel of Mark, it is published on the Realistic Living blog site for a mere $10 plus your name, your address, and your e-mail address. Just put those four things in the mail to Gene Marshall, 3578 N. State Highway 78, Bonham, TX 7418, and I will e-mail you the password that allows you to download as many copies of this commentary as you want to use for yourself or in your local ministries.

To see more clearly what this commentary contains, you can go to:

https://realisticliving.org/New/mark-commentary/

Following is an early part of that commentary:

For John came and began to baptize men in the desert, proclaiming baptism as the mark of a complete change of heart and of the forgiveness of sins. All the people of the Judaea countryside and everyone in Jerusalem went out to him in the desert and received his baptism in the river Jordan, publicly confessing their sins.

John himself was dressed in camel-hair, with a leather belt round his waist, and he lived on locusts and wild honey. The burden of his preaching was, “There is someone coming after me who is stronger than I—indeed I am not good enough to kneel down and undo his shoes. I have baptized you with water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.” Mark: 1: 4-8 J. B Phillips translation.

In these verses, Mark is indicating that the religious movement initiated by John, the Baptist is an important precursor to the topic of Mark’s good news. Mark implies that Jesus identified deeply with the movement initiated by John, the Baptist. Many New Testament scholars believe that this was true of the historical Jesus—that the man Jesus was not a Zealot or a Sadducee or a Pharisee or an Essene—that Jesus chose the radical movement of John, the Baptist instead of these other options for communal association. Decades later, Mark still felt that John’s movement was an important movement, as well as an important part of the story of Jesus. Mark does not give us any details of that movement or of Jesus’ biography in relation to it. But Mark did feel the need to clarify something about John’s movement.

Mark clearly felt that the movement Jesus initiated needed to be distinguished from John’s movement—that the addition that Jesus made to John’s movement was huge. John was a wild-hermit, eating and dressing like the ascetic Elijah, and calling people out to the edge of society to be washed of the evil that inflicted that entire wicked era of history. Individual people were volunteering for that washing, and John’s movement was also an address to the whole society—a critique of that society’s departure from the Mosaic norm, indeed a departure from the authenticity of being human. The historical Jesus likely concurred with that radical critique. According to Mark, Jesus accepted John’s warning that a radical historical judgement from Eternity of the entire human world was on the way, and would arrive soon.

Perhaps, we can also identify with John’s message, as we look realistically at our 21st century world order—refusing to deal fully with our ecological challenges, drifting backward toward authoritarian governments, racism, sexism, bigotries of every type. We too may be open to being “washed of our era”—joining a deep repentance, renouncing the estranged state of things, and rising up from such a washing into a new attitude toward the whole of human history. Jesus joined John at the river Jordan.

When have you wished to be washed of your era?

When have you felt that the world’s estrangements from realism were so great that a general catastrophe was surely on the way, and soon?

Mark goes on to proclaim that Jesus will make a huge addition to the revolution launched by the remarkable John, the Baptist. This addition was so significant that John himself, according to Mark, knew that he, John, was not worthy to kneel down and undo the shoes of Jesus. John, Mark indicates, washed us of our evil era, but Jesus will wash us further with the hot fire of God’s own Spirit. What does all that mean? We will have to wait and see as Mark’s story moves along, but at this point we have Mark’s hint that the event of Jesus is a remarkable coming of a very radical revolution in human understanding of what it means to be a human being

It was in those days that Jesus arrived from the Galilean village of Nazareth and was baptized by John in the Jordan. All at once, as he came up out of the water, he saw the heavens split open, and the Spirit coming down upon him like a dove. A voice came out of Heaven, saying, “You are my dearly-beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased!” Mark: 1: 9-11 J. B Phillips

Almost every phrase that Mark includes in his story has some sort of secret meanings. “Up out the water” can pass unnoticed if we do not associate this immersion with dying to the evil era. If we do see the allusion to dying, then “up out of the water” is an allusion to resurrection. In this story Jesus is becoming the resurrected one.

“The heavens split open” is an even more cryptic piece of poetry to a modern person who does not know what to make of the word “heaven” and certainly finds it very odd to speak of seeing “the heavens split open.” Translating that phrase from its transcendence metaphorical imagination to an existential transparency type of poetry takes a bit of thoughtfulness. “Heaven” means the realm of Absolute Mystery, and Mark is picturing that dynamic as right above our heads. There is a sort of big punch bowl with stars on it and if that bowl were to split open we would see right into the Eternal heaven. I believe that Mark is thinking more metaphorically and less literally than that picture may sound. Seeing into the Eternal is the heart meaning of the text. As Jesus comes up out of the watery tomb in which John has dunked him, the punch bowl of Awesome Absolute Mystery splits open. What a story!

Next, this profound-eyed person Mark sees another signal of profoundness: “the Spirit coming down upon him like a dove.” Spirit, for Mark, is the Absolute Mystery itself manifesting as a state of our whole life sometimes called “Wonder” or “Awe.” But for someone who has the courage for such a dreadful, fascinating state of Awe, this happening is a gentle thing, like a dove settling on head and shoulder.

Finally, Mark gives us one more symbol for how this baptism was an outstanding event: “A voice came out of Heaven, saying, ‘You are my dearly-beloved Son.‘ “ We need not believe that a tape recorder would have heard this voice. Mark included this bit of poetic flair to complete his view of the significance of this baptism for this simple roof-repair man’s son from the nowhere of Nazareth. And what does “Son” mean here? It means that Jesus is having a new birth, not of a father from Nazareth, but of a Spirit from Eternity. This is Mark’s “virgin birth” narrative. Mark is implying a virgin birth for Jesus, a birth sired from heaven that was now taking over Jesus’ whole life from his biological birth in Nazareth.

The Awed One (Jesus) is filled with Awe (Spirit) sourced from the Awesome (Eternal Mystery.) This whole secret Trinity of Divinity (Awesome, Awed One, Awe) is happening among us, to us, to humanity in these opening pages of Mark’s story. For the rest of Mark’s strange narrative, Jesus is the washed one, the resurrected one, the beloved of Reality one. Jesus is virgin born among us to lead us into our own virgin birth of profound humanness. For the rest of Mark’s gospel we see in Jesus what this exemplar of resurrected humanity looks like—walking, talking, calling, teaching, healing, feeding, eating, celebrating, living, suffering, dying. Women coming to honor him in his tomb find nothing there, except their own resurrection into Jesus-hood profoundness.

So, what might this passage be saying to us today about the living of our own authentic lives and about the power of these Christian symbols for our own depth living? Perhaps we might give Christian symbols a second look. Perhaps we might view these long-preserved stories as being clues to our own most profound matters of living. Perhaps we might ask of Mark and other resurrected witnesses, what must we do to inherit this life abundant. Perhaps we are drawn to read further in Mark’s story to see where our own particular healing is required in order to be washed of our own grim era—washed in order for us to enter here and now into this communion of the saints, this Kingdom of God, this Reign of Reality, this commonwealth of profound realism of which Jesus speaks. Perhaps such an enigmatic interior baptism is our first step, our next step toward beginning a fresh walk with Jesus for the rest of our own life story.

Mark clearly sees Jesus’ baptism by John as a new birth in the consciousness of Jesus. If we were using Eastern language we might call it “enlightenment.” Using the language that Mark develops toward the end of his story, Jesus was experiencing in John’s baptism a death and a resurrection to profound humanness—to his spirit depth, to his authenticity in this ordinary human body..

The ordinary human ego of Jesus was not destroyed, but that ego ceased to be the identity of this person. Jesus was dead to the evils of his era to the extent that there was nothing left to his identity except his essential authenticity, his profound humanness that was created by Final Reality from the dawn of time. Jesus in this story is a symbol for that profound humanness that the Creator of everything gives to humans before their fall into their estrangements from Reality. Jesus is the “Offspring of God,” the new humanity—a humanity that Jesus’ healings are going to call forth in others. Perhaps in you. Perhaps in me.

To say all these extreme things about Jesus, at the very beginning of his narrative, means that Mark views Jesus as a human being who has already died to estrangement and been raised up to authentic life. As we will see, Jesus is not intimidated by the entire Roman world or by Israel’s hypocritical religious establishments of compromise, flight, or furious hatred toward it all. Jesus is not intimidated by the prospect of living such a profound life or dying such a profound life at the hands of those he servers.

Matthew and Luke expand on this topic of Jesus being an “Offspring of Final Reality” with stories about Jesus’ virgin birth. John’s gospel also talks about a second birth that is available to all of us who embrace Jesus’s message. But at this point in Mark’s gospel the meaning of this divine birthing is only hinted—it is still a secret that something very special has appeared in Jesus. In coming chapters we are going to watch what happens as this person lives out such profound humanity in real-world social engagement. We are going to see someone who lives the authentic life unto death.

According to the scholarship of Rudolf Bultmann, what baptism came to mean in the early church was threefold: (1) washed of the era of “sin,” (2) sealed within the body of Christ, and (3) filled with the Holy Spirit. All three of these meanings are descriptions of an event of rebirth—drowning our estrangements to death, opening us to our profound authenticity, and facing our future in this “Spirit of Wholeness.”

What experiences in your life seem to correspond with such a profound rebirth?

The post Deep River Washing first appeared on Realistic Living.

I now have copies in my house that I can mail to you or to your friends and relatives as Christmas gifts. Each book is $20, postage free in the US. I only have 17 copies left.

Or you can order this book from the Canadian publisher www.woodlakebooks.com. The price for one print copy is $19.95 plus $17 shipping to the US. For 7 or more books, shipping from Canada is free. If you live in Canada your best deal is to order your books directly from Wood Lake. If you want an e-book or kindle, you can order it from Wood Lake for $9.96.

Contact me, ( jgmarshall@cableone.net ), and I will put a $20 book on its way to the person whose address you send me. You can mail your check to Gene Marshall; 3578 N. State Highway; Bonham TX, 75418 You can also order this book on Amazon.com

Most important, please read the following and share it with others.

Chapter 2
What Is Spirit Sickness and How Is It Healed?

Spirit sickness is not the same as the dread we identified in the previous chapter. Dread in the midst of an oblivion experience is normal, healthy, spirit life. So is the dread we experience in resurgence periods – the dread in our struggles to build a new and unfamiliar life. Dread, fascination, and the courage to embrace these intensities are all factors of healthy spirit life.

“Despair” is the key concept for understanding the sickness of the spirit. For example, leaving childhood is an oblivion experience for an adolescent. Being in despair over leaving childhood, however, is something else. Despair would be the result of refusing to grow up. Despair is spirit sickness. The opposite of despair is trust in the goodness of one’s real situation – in this example, it means trusting in the goodness of leaving childhood. The adolescent might also despair over taking up the roles of adulthood. In this case, he or she would be despairing over a resurgence experience. Here, the opposite of despair would be trust in the goodness of growing up.

As adults, we might be in despair over having to leave the familiar patterns of declining aspects of our society. Or we might be in despair over having to learn new styles of social life. The opposite of despair would be a trust in the goodness of living in the midst of this awesome social change.

Another profound spirit issue is facing up to the possibility of the death of the human species and the destruction of the whole biosphere of this planet. When we are in despair over the reality of these grim possibilities, we usually refuse to admit them to our consciousness. We refuse to experience the horror of losing our living planet. Thus we are estranged from our care for the planet. We become numb, devoid of motivation to do anything constructive. This pattern of response is despair or spirit sickness.

Spirit health means a willingness to be realistic, a trust that openness to realism constitutes the good life.

Kierkegaard defines despair as an unwillingness to have my actual life. In despair, I am not willing to be myself. I am not willing to be the relationships that constitute who I am. Since I cannot get rid of myself, I am doomed to having to be what I am unwilling to be. Hence, I despair.

One can despair over anything. In high school, I despaired over being clumsy. I had accepted the common notion that there were four ways to be a real man: football, basketball, baseball, and track. I gave basketball an all-out effort. My senior year, my B-team coach said, “Marshall, you are as clumsy as a baby moose.” I despaired, not because of what he said, but because I did not want to be the person who was as awkward as I actually was.

One can despair over being 53 years old, over being a man, over being a woman. One can despair over particular weaknesses, or even over particular strengths. Despair is an unwillingness to be who I am within the here and now of my actual relationship to what is. The pain of despair becomes conscious as I see that there is no escape from what is. Despair is like being handcuffed to my worst enemy. I remember seeing a movie in which two men escaped from prison handcuffed to one another. One was black and the other white, and they hated each other. The movie played out the horror of being handcuffed to what you hate the most. That is a picture of despair. If being 53 is my worst enemy, I am handcuffed to my worst enemy. I am in despair, for there is no escape from being 53. If being in grief over some loss is my worst enemy, I am in despair because there is no escape from having that loss or from being in grief over it.

Many things in life can be an occasion for despair. Perhaps you are in despair over your fragile psychological condition. Even though we know that everyone is fragile, we may still find our particular fragility to be intolerable. Perhaps you are in despair over having never become the success you wanted to be. On the other hand, perhaps you made it to the top and found it meaningless and empty, so you are in despair over your empty success and over what to do now. Perhaps you are in despair over your marriage or over your inability to find a suitable mate to marry. If you have children, you will surely have opportunities to despair over them. Perhaps you are in despair over having to give up some unrealistic expectations. On the other hand, perhaps you are in despair over your lethargy to go out and realize your actual possibilities. You may be in despair over many of these things in combination. All such things are parts of your life; they are inescapable as realities to be dealt with. So, if you cannot tolerate them as parts of your life, you are in despair over them. You may even despair over the fact that you are weak enough to despair over any of them. When we are in despair over even one small imperfection, our whole life is affected. We often express our despair with some phrase like this: “My whole life is no damn good.”

Sometimes despair is not wholly conscious, but is hidden beneath the surface of a peaceful exterior. Despair may be so buried that there is no consciousness of it whatsoever. We travel along with fixed smiles totally oblivious to the sickness of spirit that robs us of our fuller life. At other times, despair appears in the foreground of our consciousness and paralyzes us with a sense of abject hopelessness. Or perhaps despair becomes an active program of rage and hatred toward life.

So how is despair healed?

Here is a summary of Paul Tillich’s answer to that question. Despair is conquered and thus life is transformed by a healing event, which Tillich calls “grace.” This event, when it happens, happens in three stages.

1.  You become aware of your despair.
2.  You experience the dawning of your acceptance.
3.  You choose to accept your acceptance.

Tillich has fleshed out the meaning of these three parts of the healing event in a remarkably intense sermon called “You Are Accepted.” Here is a quotation from the 12th paragraph of that sermon. I have broken it into three parts to illustrate the three stages of the healing event

Stage one

Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness. It strikes us when we walk through the dark valley of a meaningless and empty life. It strikes us when we feel that our separation is deeper than usual, because we have violated another life, a life that we loved, or from which we were estranged. It strikes us when our disgust for our own being, our indifference, our weakness, our hostility, and our lack of direction and composure have become intolerable to us. It strikes us when, year after year, the longed-for perfection of life does not appear, when the old compulsions reign within us as they have for decades, when despair destroys all joy and courage.

Stage two

Sometimes at that moment a wave of light breaks into our darkness, and it is as though a voice were saying: “You are accepted. You are accepted – accepted by that which is greater than you, and the name of which you do not know.”

Stage Three

Do not ask for the name now; perhaps you will find it later. Do not try to do anything now; perhaps later you will do much. Do not seek for anything; do not perform anything; do not intend anything. Simply accept the fact that you are accepted.

Paul Tillich, The Shaking of the Foundations (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1948), page 161.

Comments are made on these Tillich quotes in the rest of this chapter and in following chapters of Radical Gifts.

The post Spirit Sickness 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.

The Creator of Christianity
a commentary on the Gospel of Mark
by Gene W. Marshall

The entire book can be purchased for $10 on this site:

https://realisticliving.org/New/

While you are there, look around. We are also publishing the 8 spirit talks that Gene gave at the June 2018 Realistic Living Summer Program, plus a Study Outline for the above book, and Study Outlines for The Unbelievable Happiness of What Is by Jon Bernie, and Dangerous Years by David W. Orr. All this is in addition to the monthly Realistic Living Pointers.

Following is the second half of the Introduction to the Mark Commentary.

Interpreting Scripture Today

Today, Christian theologians, who want to go to the roots of the first century Christian “revelation,” face the reality that people in the first century used the now obsolete two-tier, story-telling metaphor. That old manner of talking about ultimate matters had been the way of talking about ultimate matters for as long as anyone could remember.
In spite of the fact that their way of talking is no longer adequate for us today, we cannot claim to be Christians if we fail to interpret our scriptures. Therefore, to do scriptural interpretation adequately, we must translate for our era of culture what those early writers meant in their own lives when they used that old form of metaphorical talk that is now basically meaningless to us. Throughout this commentary, I will be illustrating what such metaphorical translation looks like.

Christian theologians today also face a second challenge. Within our current culture we tend to overlook metaphorical meanings altogether. We tend to view all statements literally. We learned to be literal from the current prominence of the scientific mode of truth. In the scientific style of thinking, words mean something only if words point to something in the realm of facts, observable by the human senses. Influenced by this overemphasis on facts, both religious agnostics and religious literalists fail to see the poetic or contemplative type of truth that is contained in the wild stories of the Bible. The agnostics are right to see that many stories of the Bible are preposterous when viewed literally. And religious literalists, who think they are defending Biblical truth with their literalism, are actually ignoring the profound truth that is hidden in these wildly creative stories.

For example, Mark could tell a story about a 12-year-old Israelite girl being lifted from the dead, and his hearers could understand without qualms that this was a story about the 12 tribes of Israel being called back to life from a sleep-like-death. Listeners to such writing caught on to these metaphorical meanings without any need for help from a word like “metaphorical.” Why? Their minds were not yet characterized by an overemphasis on literal truth.

Fictitious stories still mean a great deal to most of us today. Thousands of youth and adults have enjoyed deeply the stories of Harry Potter. We know that these are fiction, that Harry’s magical ways are not to be taken literally. Yet we identify with him and his close friends in being magical persons who do not fit into the general society and who need to keep their true nature secret from most people. In other words, we can still see truth in fictitious stories, if we let ourselves do so.

So as we read the Gospel of Mark, we need to keep in the forefront of our thinking that Mark is composing his “good news” in a hot-fiction mode of truth. We need to interpret Mark’s preposterous story telling in a contemplative manner. In our dialogue with Mark, we are challenged to notice how we have had or can have these same life experiences in our own lives today.

How has literal biblical interpretation been a factor in your life?

What biblical poetry still puzzles you today?

Cross and Resurrection

It is fair to say that the symbols of cross and resurrection are as central to an understanding of the Christian revelation as meditation and enlightenment are to an understanding of Buddhism. Yet both cross and resurrection seem cryptic, even weird, to many people today.

Members of our current scientific culture may be excused somewhat for having a weak understanding of resurrection. Most of us know, if we are honest, that belief in a literal return to life of a three-day-old corpse is superstition. Yet this meaning of resurrection has been paraded as Christian by many interpreters of the resurrection symbol. Mark did not see resurrection in this light. Or perhaps we might better say, “Mark did not see resurrection in this darkness,” for a literal return from the dead means nothing deeply religious to Mark or to you or me. If such an event were to happen today, it would be open to hundreds of speculative explanations, none of which would be profoundly or convincingly religious.

Mark’s understanding of the cross is equally opaque in our culture. Some modern authors even accuse Christianity of having a morbid preoccupation with death, suffering, and tragedy. The crucifix, or even a bare cross, is viewed by some as silly and grim—like hanging a guillotine on your wall or around your neck. But for Mark the horror of the cross is seen as priceless food for the soul. How can that be? Surely, we have some thoughtful exploration to do, if we are to grasp the Gospel (the good news) that Mark claims to be announcing.

I know of no better way to introduce the symbols of cross and resurrection to a contemporary explorer of Christianity than with a commentary of Mark’s Gospel. I will show in this commentary that Mark understands the resurrection as intimately connected with the cross and that both are about possible experiences that every human being can have. As characters in Mark’s Gospel, the disciples do not experience the fullness of resurrection until the very last chapter of Mark’s narrative. Until then resurrection for them is a secret. At the same time Jesus experiences resurrection in the first 13 verses of Mark’s commentary. For the rest of this narrative, Jesus is what a resurrected person looks like walking, talking, eating, sleeping, praying, healing others, and challenging the status quo. The character Jesus in Mark’s Gospel is an exemplar of living the resurrected life unto death

Meanwhile the disciples are what it looks like to be on a journey toward resurrection. They are dramatized as dumb dumbs on both cross and resurrection. So we can view Mark’s narrative as about two journeys that are both aspects of our own life journey: (1) the journey of spirit awakening that is taking place in the lives of the disciples and (2) the journey of the spirit-awake human—what that looks like in action—that is, how Jesus’ presence, words, and actions are dramatizing the qualities of the resurrected human and how such a presence among us is healing to others. The full meaning of the resurrection will remain Mark’s secret until chapter 16, but cross and resurrection are primary symbols in Mark’s narrative beginning in chapter one.

Again, both these journeys can go on in the lives of all of us: (1) we, like the disciples, can journey toward full enlightenment (death-and-resurrection living), and (2) we, like Jesus, can resolve to live our resurrection life (spirit enlightenment or profound humanness) in the real world, in the historical challenges of our time and place. As resurrected women and men, we, like Jesus can expend our new life of profound humanness for the healing and well-being of others. We are invited to identify with both Jesus and the disciples in Mark’s narrative.

In the first 13 verses of chapter one, Mark’s character “Jesus” has his own death and resurrection experience—in the same sense that you or I might have our own death and resurrection experience—in the living now of our own conscious lives. It is important to notice that Mark retains the complete humanness of Jesus by having him in these early verses undergo John’s baptism of spirit washing and Jesus’ own calling to spirit mission, a calling that any of us might also experience.

After those first 13 verses, Mark’s Jesus is on a different journey than the disciples. The disciples are on a spirit journey toward resurrection. Jesus depicts the journey of the resurrected human in action. He is what a human being looks like who has been resurrected to his or her profound humanness, after having died to his or her temporal relations as his or her primal devotion. I repeat, Mark’s Jesus-story is about the journey unto death of a human being after entry into the resurrected life.

In Luke’s second book, The Acts of the Apostles, we see more about what this second journey of living the life of resurrected humans looks like as the story of real-world historical persons other than Jesus. Peter, Paul and other men and women are presented by Luke as further “resurrection” exemplars. Luke wants us to get it that we who live “in Christ” are living the resurrection life. Indeed, we are to be the resurrection of Jesus. We are called to be the body that rose on Easter morning.

It is probably easier for most of us to identify with the disciples who are moving toward resurrection step-by-step through the course of Mark’s story. We can also identify with the crowds who are intrigued, but puzzled, by Jesus’ parables. We can even identify with those persons who reject Jesus.

Mark’s Jesus uses parables to trick the sleeping into noticing their sleepiness and into seeking more truth. Then to his more committed disciples, Mark’s Jesus explains his parables further, expecting them to catch on to their own profound humanness sooner than the crowds.

Mark is assuming that the readers of his Gospel will be carried along, like the disciples, toward the total unraveling of their egoism to an embodiment of the resurrected life that was walking and talking among them in the body of Jesus and later in the body of the church, that came to be referred to as “the body of Christ”—that is, the body of the resurrected one. So in Mark’s narrative, we are entitled to identify with Jesus ministering to his blind followers as well as with identifying with the blind followers to whom Jesus is ministering.

As we read Mark’s gospel, let us keep in mind the originality and imagination of this remarkable person we are calling “Mark.” We are dialoguing with Mark, not with Jesus. Jesus is a character is Mark’s story. We are in a conversation with Mark in the same way that reading a Harry Potter novel is a conversation with J. K. Rowling, rather than Harry Potter. Of course we can have a conversation with Harry Potter as one of Rowling’s characters. Similarly, we can have a conversation with Jesus as one of Mark’s characters.
In the following commentary, here is what I am going to do. I am going to quote in order the entire Markian text. After each section of Mark’s narrative, I will do a commentary on the quoted verses and follow that with a few discussion questions. I am assuming the best of New Testament historical scholarship, but I will be doing what I call “21st century theologizing for the ordinary reader.”

So what are you looking forward to in this study?

And what puzzles you most about this enigmatic document called “The Gospel of Mark”?

This entire commentary including every verse of Mark’s Gospel
can be purchased for $10 on this site:

https://realisticliving.org/New/

The post Interpreting Scripture first appeared on Realistic Living.

The Creator of Christianity
a commentary on the Gospel of Mark
by Gene W. Marshall

The entire book can be purchased for $10 on this site:

https://realisticliving.org/New/

While you are there, look around. We are also publishing the 8 spirit talks that Gene gave at the June 2018 Realistic Living Summer Program, plus Study Outlines for the above book, The Unbelievable Happiness of What Is by Jon Bernie, and Dangerous Years by David W. Orr. All this is in addition to the recent Realistic Living Pointers posts.

So here is the first part of the

Introduction

to the Mark Commentary.

Living in Aramaic-speaking Galilee twenty-one centuries ago, Jesus and his first companions constituted the event of revelation that birthed the Christian faith. But without Paul’s interpretation of the meaning of cross and resurrection for the Greek-speaking Hellenistic Jewish culture, we might never have heard of Christian faith.

Mark, whoever he was, lived during the lifetime of Paul and was deeply influenced by Paul. In about 70 CE, Mark, like Paul, was a major turning point in the development of the Christian religion. Mark invented the literary form we know as “the Gospel.” This remarkable literary form was then copied and elaborated by the authors Matthew and Luke, and then revolutionized by John. These four writings, not Paul’s letters, are the opening books of the New Testament that Christians count as their Bible (along with the Old Testament). “Gospel” (Good News) has become a name for the whole Christian revelation.

We might say that Mark was the theologian who gave us the Christianity that has survived in history. The Markian shift in Christian imagination was important enough that we might even claim that Mark, rather than Paul or Jesus, was the founder of Christianity. However that may be, Mark’s gospel is a very important piece of writing. And this writing is more profound and wondrous than is commonly appreciated.

Of first importance for understanding my viewpoint in the following commentary is this: I see the figure of “Jesus” in Mark’s narrative as a fictitious character—based, I firmly believe, on a real historical figure. I do not want to confuse Mark’s “Jesus” with what we can know through our best recent scientific research about the historical Jesus of Nazareth. For our best understanding of Mark, we need to view Mark’s “Jesus” with the same fun and sensibility we have toward Harry Potter when we read J. K. Rowling’s novels about this unusual character.

In other words, Mark is the theologian that we are reading in the Gospel of Mark, not Jesus or Paul, and not Luke or Matthew or John. Mark is himself an unusually clever writer and a profound theologian. This truth is fundamental for understanding this commentary.

What do you think about Mark being the creator of Christianity?

How is it important to you that the historical Jesus of modern scholarship differs significantly from the Jesus of Mark’s narrative?

What is Theology?

Not all religions have a theology, but Judaism, Christianity, and Islam do. Buddhism has Dharma sutras and many Dharma talks that are still being given today. These thoughtful efforts of the Buddhist religion are something like a theology. It is fair to say that all religions have a “theoretics”—something that its members do to reflect upon the core topics that characterize that religion’s ongoing community of thoughtfulness about their life together, their message, their mission, as well as their religious practices and ethical guidelines.

Christian theology begins its thoughtfulness with reflections upon a specific event (a specific complex of happenings in history). The happenings that constitute this “event” are understood to reveal the profound essence of every event in human history. That event has been given the name “Jesus Christ.” An ordinary first century man named “Jesus,” understood to be the “Messiah,” was viewed as a revelation about living in an ultimate devotion to the Ultimate Reality that we encounter in every event of our personal lives, and in every event of our social history.

Judaism does something similar in its theologizing, but in this case the core revelatory event is “The Exodus from Egypt of a collection of slaves plus their revolution in law-writing.” Islam also treasures a revelatory event—in this case, “the Advent of Mohammad as a Messenger of the One Ultimate Creator of all things and events.” Obviously, in each of these religious groupings, there is good theology and bad theology, depending on whether those theological reflections appropriately reflect what their revelatory event revealed about the essence of living a human life. Good theology also depends upon whether a particular bit of theological thoughtfulness has resonance with living people in their contemporary settings.

This commentary on the Gospel of Mark intends to be “theology” in the sense just defined. I prefer the word “theologizing,” for I see Christian theology as an ongoing process of a community of people. My contribution to the ongoing process of Christian theologizing may be minor or large, but that is not entirely up to me. The community of those who are grounded in the Christ Jesus revelation will value or not value, preserve or not preserve, my contributions to the ongoing theologizing process of those who are captivated by the Christ Jesus revelation.

I see myself doing a radical form Christian theologizing. It is “radical” because this thoughtfulness is my attempt to return to the “roots” of the Christian revelation from the perspective of a radically contemporary understanding of the nature and role of religion in human society.

“Religion,” as I now understand that word, is not a set of stable doctrines and moralities allied with a once-and-for-all finished set of solitary and communal practices. The only stability that a religion has is its radical root. Religious doctrines and moralities, as well as religious practices are all in flux. Today, that flux is huge for every religion on Earth. The sort of Buddhism that is sweeping the North American continent is not stuck in the ruts of previous centuries. It is a fresh, creative accessing of ancient roots. In Christianity we are seeing something similar. I count this commentary part of that fresh effort to see the Christian revelation with new eyes and to hear this “good news” with new ears.

How in your life have you participated in Christian theologizing?

Whose theologizing has helped you most with your own?

The Death of a Metaphor

Some members of the Christian community speak of “the death of God” or even “the end of theology.” In this commentary (and in all my theologizing), I take the view that “the death of God” does not refer to an end of all use of the word “God,” I choose to understand “the death-of-God discussion” as pointing to the end of something temporal—namely, the obsolescence of an ancient metaphor of religious thinking held in the word “transcendence.” For 2000 years Christian theologizing has used this familiar metaphorical narrative: a vivid story-time imagination about a transcendent realm in which God, angels, devils, gods, goddesses, and other story-time characters are living in an other-than-ordinary “realm” and “coming” from that “realm” to “act” within our ordinary human space and time. That is metaphorical talk. Being metaphorical, however, is not the problem. The problem for us today is the obsolete quality of that double-deck metaphor.

I am using an alternative metaphorical system of religious reflection in my mode of Biblical interpretation. I view our ordinary lives as well as our profound lives as participants in “One” realm of being. This “One Reality” has a depth that is invisible to both human eye and mind. I am using the capitalization of “Realty” to mean something different than our mind’s sense of realty. Reality is a “Land of Mystery” that the human mind cannot fathom. This profound depth of Reality shines through the passing realities of time that are visible to eye and mind. This Invisible Eternity can be said to “shine-through” temporal events. An ordinary bush can indeed burn with Eternity. An ordinary human being can indeed glow with the Presence of Eternity. But this Eternity is a not another space that is separate from our ordinary space/time of living. Furthermore, this fresh view of Eternity does not imply a contempt for the temporal realm. Rather, it implies a fulfillment for each and every ordinary temporal event of our lives. Each temporal event has an Eternal depth or glow or burn. Eyes and ears alone cannot grasp our profound humanness and its Eternal connection. Only our enigmatic consciousness can “see” the Eternal, and this “seeing” is an internal experience that is “seen” in absolute solitude.

In this fresh context the words “ordinary” and “extraordinary” are viewed as mere categories of human perception. We live in One, and only One, realm of Reality with many temporally viewed aspects. Among these many aspects, we can speak of this basic polarity: the impermanent and the permanent—the temporal and the Eternal. This polarity is not in Reality itself, but in our human consciousness of Reality. Temporal and Eternal are both aspects of our one experience of one invisible One-ness that our minds cannot comprehend.

And this One-ness is not seen by eye or mind. We do not “see” One-ness directly. One-ness is a devotional category that means that we are devoted to serve all aspects of our Real experience, rather than viewing the Real as part friendly and part enemy. From this One-ness point of view, the only enemy is our own and other humans’ estrangement from the One Reality within which our own persons and all other persons dwell.

This One-ness viewpoint within Christian faith is not a denial of the diversity of our experiences of the Eternal or of the temporal. Differentiation and multiplicity obviously characterize our temporal lives. Multiplicity also characterizes much of our God-talk. In the God-talk of the Bible, there are many angels or servants of the One that express and carry out the actions of the One. But this One-ness is maintained in spite of the many-ness that is understood to be aspects of the Eternal, sourced from this One-ness. In the opening verses of the Bible, the One God says to some angels, “Let there be light!” and this was done by the One’s many servant forces. Such poetry was intended to preserve the One-ness of Reality, not to fragment the One-ness of Reality that is fundamentally worshiped in the life of Christian faith.

How has it been hard or liberating for you to give up the old double-deck metaphor?

What has been your struggle with devotion to One Ultimate Reality?

The post The Creator of Christianity first appeared on Realistic Living.

It is interesting to note that when Siddhartha realized that he was the Awake One (the Buddha), he continued his meditation practices for the rest of his life. He apparently assumed that these practices assisted him in being the Awake One and further exploring the full realization what that meant.

It seems to me that those of us who are willing to view ourselves are already “in Christ” also need to do our solitary practices, our Bible reading, our group practices, and our history-bending engagements in order to manifest our “in Christ” essence and to further explore the full realization what that means.

My understanding of doing religious practices was enriched deeply by this story I heard about the student who asked his Buddhist teacher if meditation caused enlightenment. His teacher answered, “No, enlightenment is an accident, but meditation makes you more accident prone.”

That reminds me of Paul Tillich’s Christian teaching about grace—that “grace is a happening that happens or it does not happen.” That implies that grace is also an accident, and that our Christian practices only make us more accident prone to the grace that heals our lives. That also implies that our “in Christ” awakenment is not a human achievement, but our true nature or essence breaking through our human achievements.

I believe that this trend of thought applies to all religious practices. Such practices are only a means of assisting us to be more accident prone to experiencing our essential profound humanness—a human essence that all of us already are, but that all of us have clouded with falsifying overlays.

Over the years I have studied and practiced all sort of religious practices, and I have recently constructed this list of secular categories for all the religious practices I have ever heard about:

Profound Dialogue
Foundational Meditation
Persistent Intentions
Full-Body Exformation
Historical Engagement
Devotional Singularity
Holistic Detachment
Boundless Inquiry
Visionary Trance

In this spin I am not going to spell out all these sets of religious practices. I am going to focus on Historical Engagement. We don’t often thinking of historical engagement as a religious practice, but for Moses, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Jesus, Mohammed, and many more, I believe it was for them a religious practice—and that it has been for me.

In 1963 I went to Jackson, Mississippi to march with Martin Luther King Jr. I stayed in the house of one of my friends, Bob Kochtitsky, whose house had been bombed a few months back by people who did not like the leadership he was taking in the civil right revolution. As I was marching down that Jackson, Mississippi street seeing people on their porches and policemen standing around, I did not think of this as a religious practice. But reflecting on it later (as well as now), I am viewing it as an example of what I mean by “Historical Engagement as a religious practice.”

My brief Jackson-Miss engagement was not a religious practice because I was walking in a group with Martin King. It was not a religious practice because it was a little bit dangerous. It was a religious practice because I was in this small way participating in the bending of history toward justice. Doing such a thing was making me more accident prone for accessing my profound humanness.

So what does this say about having a true religious practice? A good religious practice is anything that makes us more accident prone to the accident of accessing our profound essence of being human. A true religious practice can be done alone, or with a group of like-minded practitioners, or with a large group of people of many backgrounds,

Good religion is whatever practices assist us toward the accident of being “a Buddha” or being “in Christ,” or being “in” the meaning of whatever “vocabulary” points to our profound humanness. Certainly, no practice has the right to be called the exclusive good religious practice.

It is also true that religious heritages that have served human beings for thousands of years have something that can be and need to be recovered for our times. I personally feel called to build a next Christianity that is relevant and vital for our emerging era. I believe that such a next Christianity will learn from contemporary and ancient Buddhists, perhaps sit Native American sweat lodges, do Sufi dancing, and join with many types of spirit explorers in forming together the spirit care for our wide diversity of humans. This next Christianity will also realize what it means to be “resurrected in Christ Jesus.”

For further probing of these boundless topics, I recommend my book:

The Love of History and the Future of Christianity?
Toward a Manifesto for a Next Christianity

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

The post Being Buddha first appeared on Realistic Living.

But the “total obedience” I want to describe is a devotion to the mysterious all-powerful encounter that includes everything that happens to us in every event we face. Such realism means taking in what is actually happening to each of us and to us as societies. This includes possibilities as well as limitations. It includes the consequences of human choices as well as the processes of nature over which humans have no control. It includes the horrific as well as the glorious. In addition to our everyday content, the Reality we actually face includes the Abyss of No-thing-ness from which each thing, including our own lives, have come and to which each thing, including our own lives,will return. Reality also includes the Every-thing-ness of that Expansive Sea of Mystery within which each identifiable thing exists for now. Reality includes the Awesome Otherness that we encounter as well as the Awe that the Awesome occasions in our inner being.

The Word “God” is a devotional word that is attached to this inclusive view of Reality. The Word “God” adds no reality to Reality: this holy word is but a human expression of obedience to Reality—a devotion to realism. the word “God” adds only trust in the trustworthiness of Reality. The word “God” renders Reality, all of it, “holy.”

The rational content we have about Reality is created by human beings and is, therefor, a limited knowledge of Reality. Reality in its wholeness is an enduring mystery. As every realistic research scientist knows, science is a progressive movement of thought that approaches Reality with ever-greater correspondences with Reality, but science never reaches the final fullness of comprehending Reality. In truth, the perceptive scientist knows that the more we know about the nature of things the more we know we don’t know. Our vision of the Mystery of Reality grows greater the more we know about Reality.

The same dynamic of “never fully arriving” also applies to our contemplative approaches to Reality. Our years of meditation upon our inner beings never exhausts what can be learned about our own consciousness and what it means to be conscious of anything including consciousness itself. All the fine arts are contemplations about Reality. Great music is expressing our deepest inner awarenesses. Note that composing music never ends. We never get “there” with a “final” symphony.

Back to the troublesome word “God” As used by the monotheistic religions, “God” binds all the parts of the “One Whole” of Reality into a single devotion to the entirety of Reality. The God-devotion to Reality promotes our learning about Reality, even though our learning never reaches an end point of final truth. The-God devotion affirms both the search for Reality and the endless nature of that search. In other words, the God devotion affirms our always being ignorant in spite of however vast our wisdom becomes.

Humans are indeed avid in creating an overall “sense of reality” based on our physical senses and our inner experiences, but our “sense of reality” never corresponds entirely with Reality. Looking back over our lives we can notice that our “sense of reality” has changed many times. But the Reality I am pointing to with this capitalized word is not our changing sensibilities, but the continually Encountered Power of Mysteriousness that is occasioning in us these perpetual changes and is always revealing our ignorance. Wisdom is indeed an awareness of our perpetual ignorance. The word “God” makes our ignorance “holy.”

Further, Reality is like an active power that is always asserting itself. Reality operates like a blood hound that chases us down and bites our “sense of reality” with some “sense of truth” we have been escaping or have never considered before. Our obedience to this blood-hound Reality is a freedom from our illusions, and compulsions. Reality roots us out of our slavery to illusion. It is in that sense that Reality sets us free.

Here is a simple example with which anyone in their 80s, like me, can identify. As a teenager and into my 70s, I was pushing the edges of exhaustion in my running, my basketball, my study, my teaching, my organizing, and more. This long-practiced pattern of living now has life-threatening consequences in my eighties. Reality is requiring of me a different sort of obedience. This requirement is, however, freedom, for it requires me to give up slavery to my old push-push life style and make choices that fit the reality of my current being and the environments I now face.

Here is a sociological example of Reality opening freedom: Many oil executives and politicians who thrive on oil-industry wealth are making up an alternative reality to the “inconvenient truth” of an already present climate crisis. The truth of the climate crisis is supported by 97% of the climate scientists. We cannot honestly deny that fossil-fuel burning has changed and is changing the atmosphere with devastating consequences. The Reality we confront in the climate-crises requires humanity to leave about six trillion dollars worth of already discovered fossil fuel wealth in the ground. Such is the obedience required for plain realism.

That such obedience would be freedom is an insight not squarely faced by wealth-addicted fossil-fuel executives. Giving up a fossil-fuel powered society opens in us the freedom to build a society powered by the sun, the wind, and falling water. Such a response of freedom builds a society that has no pollution, abundant power falling on ever part of the Earth, human societies that is more decentralized and stable, a prosperity that can extend to the last village on this planet, and much needed aid for ending tyranny and oppression thus providing more democratic power to the currently poor. We have all these advantages simply by giving up an energy source that makes the rich richer, the poor poorer, and the Earth devastated. This fossil-fuel hierarchy is also destroying democracy, wrecking honest education, and enslaving the working classes. Obeying Reality in this instance is as Exodus from an Egypt of slavery. Such obedience means an expansion of freedom for humanity as a whole.

This very real freedom I am identifying here is not an indulgence in our druthers, ambitions, desires, emotional feelings, wealth, and status. The profound freedom that results from obedience to Reality is an intentional spontaneity of our profound being, an actual dance of living from our profound awareness. Such obedience is a holy facing of the following truth: We humans with our own creativity invent all our values and principles with which we make our decisions. Our choices are ambiguous with regard to all of these value inventions. It takes courage to embrace our freedom over good- and-evil values, but this courage is also an experience of our primal strength and joy.

Our profound freedom is also the opposite of fatalism. The oil, gas, and coal establishments tend to argue that we cannot get along without fossil fuels, that the sun does not always shine, that the wind does not always blow, and that falling water is never enough to power a viable and just society. But such talk is a failure of imagination. Freedom is our capacity for embracing the imagination that can create a way through the problems we face. Freedom cuts through the logic of the past and creates whatever new logic is needed to do the job that is called for.

For example, a problem that comes up when we actually face doing away with fossil fuels is storing the sun and wind energy. Fossil fuel is already easily stored and transported. Fossil fuel is already stored sunshine. It takes imagination to invent ways to store sunshine on the scale that fossil fuels already store. Freedom means finding the way to do that. A very promising way already found is to use our almost unlimited amount of sunshine to split water molecules into oxygen and hydrogen. Then we turn the oxygen loose to make up for what the disappearing forests are failing to provide and put the hydrogen gas in liquified hydrogen tanks that can fly airplanes cheaper and safer that jet fuel. (These claims are made by the hydrogen expert David Scott). Following such creative imagination is what profound freedom looks like in its relations with the climate crisis.

Here is another example of how obedience to Reality can lead to freedom. A fight has gone on in Christian circles in relation to the topic of evolution. Christian thinking for many people has been locked up in a bondage to a literalistic understandings of the Bible. This view not only prompts a rejection of evolution in favor of an authoritarian creationism, it also blocks a true understanding of most biblical texts. For example, Genesis One is poetry, a story-time literary gem about the goodness of the natural world. This crucial meaning is lost when that opening chapter of the Bible is viewed as scientific statements about a literal creation of the cosmos in 7 days.

Also, the poetic nature of all speech using the word “God” is lost by this literalism. In Genesis One, God is a character in a story. This fictitious character “God” is speaking to his fictitious angles, “Let there be Light” etc. This is a poetic story about Reality and the demand for human realism. Such realism is lost when we insist that “God” is a literal being in a heavenly realm. In Genesis, “God” is Reality—Reality colored with a God-devotion to be realistic—that is, to be obedient to a good and trustworthy Reality. Genesis One is telling us that everything that Reality does is good for humans, and that includes our death and our suffering as well as our birth and our pleasure. It includes the consequences of our deluded living as well as our realistic living. This goodness also includes our evolution from the yet unexplained appearance of those enclosed cells of livingness on this well-positioned planet.

The famous Sufi poet, Rumi, expresses the core issue of our literalism with this short poem: “Life and death are two wings on the same bird.” Only living beings die. And death is part of the life story of anything living. When we humans insist on a devotion to birth, but not death, we are in rebellion from the God-devotion to Reality in the first chapter of the Bible. We reject thereby the holiness of death and suffering. The God of Genesis One is the source of all things, including our evolution from simpler forms of conscious being, and including our return to the dust from which we come as the 90th Psalm spells out.

Why do some find it humiliating that we humans have emerged from a common ancestor who grand-mothered two other chimpanzee species: the pigmy chimpanzees, and the larger chimpanzees. The human species (every race of it) is remarkably close in DNA with these other two primate companions. We can be viewed as a third species of chimpanzee. To reject this very well documented “theory of evolution” because it is inconsistent with a very poor means of Biblical interpretation is a fight with Reality that cannot be won. Obedience to Reality requires the freedom of abandoning any view of the Biblical heritage that in any way contradicts the still evolving theory of evolution.

If trusting God means obeying Reality then a God-devotion means submission to the absolute power of Reality that cannot be defeated or avoided. We are driven to despair by each attempt to fight or flee Reality. A God-devotion to Reality means nothing more nor less than openness to being realistic. And being realistic turns out to be a manifestation of the very deepest experience of human freedom.

Our openness to be being realistic also includes our openness to the contemplative discoveries of Reality as well as to the scientific discoveries of Reality. In terms of the consciousness capacities of our species, we are gifted with a capacity for language, art, intimacy, social forms, and thoughtful reflections that the other two species of chimpanzee cannot match, however much we attempt to train one of them in our form of awareness. The process of evolution took a turn in creating us that we need to notice.

Let us return to how obeying Reality is perfect freedom. It might seem that obeying Reality would restrain our freedom. Perhaps we ask, “Why can’t I believe whatever I want to believe or what my peers believe, or what my ego finds more pleasant to believe?” “Why is obedience to Reality perfect freedom?

The second story in the book of Genesis is about this obedient freedom and the tragedy of its loss. Eric Fromm, a renowned psychologist and writer, interpreted the Garden of Eden story as an example of authoritarian religion. God in this story does seem like a authoritarian Pope. God in this story forbids humanity “the knowledge of good and evil.” Fromm sees all religion as either authoritarian or humanistic, the later of which he favors. So he sees the Eden story as authoritarian. But let us examine how the Adam and Eve story is not authoritarian or humanistic. Let us note how this story is a witness to what is real for all of us in every generation. Reality does indeed forbids to humans a knowledge of good and evil. Every decision we make requires some reflection on values, but our decisions are still ambiguous. Our values conflict; our principles do not always apply; our thinking only brings us to the raw cliff of making a choice—to leap into the dark of the impending future and the unknown consequences of our decisions. We do this every day without the benefit of an absolute knowledge of good and evil. We eat from the forbidden tree when we assume this ignorance is not so.

Fromm, like many others, misunderstand this story-time tree to be about knowledge or the quest for knowledge. But “knowledge” is not the name of this tree. The ongoing quest for knowledge is a way of loving Reality. Knowledge of Reality is not what Reality is forbidding in this story. This tree has to do with value—the knowledge of good and evil, not the knowledge of Reality.

Reality requires realism. An obedience to realism includes human freedom, for this profound human freedom is part of realism. Our freedom is a limited freedom in terms of controlling outcomes, but our freedom is also real in the sense that our free acts do participate in bending the course of history—doing so in tension with many other forces. In the interior sense, perfect freedom is creating our responses out of nothing but freedom. Freedom is our real lives, even though we flee from freedom. Perfect freedom is our human essence, our authenticity, our realism, our holiness if “holy” means obedience to Reality.

Therefore, eating from the deadly tree means some sort of bondage or slavery to a set of values, rules, or principles made up by human beings. Any obedience to our own creations, our own desires, our own status, our own public brand, our favorite peer group, etc. is eating from the deadly tree. Obedience to Reality includes living beyond all those “good and evil” human creations. This total freedom is freedom from every self-created good-and-evil set of values, acquired from whatever source we learned those values. Total freedom is the essence of the radical monotheistic God-devotion. Any time we suppose that we have a final ultimate knowledge of good and evil, we are in a fight with Reality—we are employing an illusion, created by us or by some other human being, who has eaten from the forbidden tree. Freedom is our real life. Any other program of living is an enslavement.

“Plant your feet firmly, therefore, within the freedom that Christ has won for us, and do not let yourselves be caught again in the shackles of slavery.” Paul (Galatians 5.1 J. B. Phillips translation)

The post When Total Obedience is Perfect Freedom first appeared on Realistic Living.

Nevertheless, power-over is not in itself evil. Parents have power-over their children. This benefits the children, if such power is well used. Our political leaders (however they are selected) are granted power-over a wide scope of citizen life. Such political power can also be used in service of the citizenry, and such power can be misused very badly.

Power is an important factor in all social actions. As Paul Tillich spelled out in one of his most creative books, there is no Justice without Power and there is no Justice building Power or empowered Justice without Love (Tillich, Paul; Love, Power, and Justice).

Defining Power

The very word “power” includes the meaning of power-over something as well as the power to do something. The sun has gravitational power-over the Earth. The Earth has gravitational power-over our bodies. Inclusive Reality has power-over every partial reality. If we designate Inclusive Reality with a devotional terms like “God” or “Creator,” then it is clear that this Creator has power-over us and over all other creations. God is, therefore, appropriately symbolized as “Almighty.” Picturing this Almighty Creator as a character in a story or myth is poetic talk about Inclusive Reality. Such symbolic talk means that this Almighty Power of Inclusive Reality is the “God” that we have chosen to trust.

In Christian faith, the Almighty Power of Reality is trusted to be for us humans. That is what it means to say that “God is Love.” The Power we always face is for us. Realistic living is our best case option for the living of our lives. Making up a reality we like better is courting disaster. By “trust” we mean that we are willing to be submissive to being realistic rather than creating our own fabrication of Reality that we like better. Trusting in God means being realistic in our living before the All-Powerful Giver of our past, present, and future. That we humans are given a certain amount of limited power over our future does not in the least subtract from the fact that the outcomes of our acts (freely rendered or otherwise) are ultimately out of our hands.

Speaking poetically, we offer up our acts of freedom as prayers to a Power-Over us that will or will not answer our prayers of freedom in exactly the way we ask. All religious talk of an intimate dialogue with a trusted Inclusive Reality is poetry, but it is meaningful poetry about the essence of realistic living. Realistic living is an obedience to Realty—both the realism of facing our limits and the realism of engaging in our possibilities. Obedience to Reality includes accepting the gift of freedom and using that freedom in a realistic or responsible manner. And “responsibility” means something deeper than obedience to social law. It may mean creating better laws. It may mean enforcing current laws. It may mean disobeying laws when that is realistically appropriate.

Such realistic living acknowledges that our freedom is a limited power provided by the Absolute Power over which we have no control other than the limited freedom being granted to us by this Absolute Power-Over us.

Using Our Power-To Serve

Our lives are a gift of power to use in many different ways. With or without our consent, our lives are being expended day by day. Conscious living means taking in the power to expend, and then intentionally expending that power. That is, consciousness includes knowing our power, being our power, and doing our power. Like breathing we take in all the powers of our lives, and then we expend the powers we have taken in. Taking in our being born is the first taking in of our lives. Dying is the final expending of our lives. Taking in and expending is living in agreement with the truth of Reality. Our lives are given without our control. And our lives are expended with or without our intentions. Obedience to Reality includes expending our lives. We have named this intentional expending of our lives “love,” when we are willing to expend our lives for causes other than our own status, pleasure, honor, and foolish attempts at immortality.

In Luke’s Gospel Jesus is pictured as saying these last words, “Into Thy Hands I commend my spirit.” This can be interpreted to mean that the realistic person lives their whole life in the following style, “I give back all my gifts to the Giver of all my gifts—my life, my powers, my consciousness, my contributions and hopes for the future.” This giving back to the Giver of my gifts from the Giver can be seen as the basic essence of agape love, of Christian sainthood, of servant leadership in the use of my powers of life.

Such sainthood is not a stoic resignation or a fatalistic submission, but a practice of freedom—a creative, intelligent, freely selected life of service to whatever I choose to serve with my gifts in my personal, social, and historical situations of living. We can speak of being called, and we need to notice that we have always chosen our callings.

Political Power

Political power is often sought as an indulgence in pleasure, as a trophy of status, as a hope for unlimited control, as an opportunity to promote bigotry, or even as an excuse for debauchery. But it is equally possible for political power to be sought as a means of service, as a hope for having influence for good to the causes that call us. We see both of these political styles in the history of the world, often in the same person.

Political power is power-over other people and over institutions of governing, systems of economics, and modes of culture. One of the key issues that humans now face is about using well the political power that is granted to the citizenry and about granting adequate power to each and every citizen. Democracy means that political power is granted to representatives by the consent of the governed, rather than bought with money, inherited from a family, rewarded by an oligarchy, or conquered by violence? Democracy is a social process that favors consent of the governed. If democracy is truly practiced, then power is being delegated to power figures by the people who are then governed by that delegated power-over us. This citizen origin of social power has the immense advantage that citizens can insist that the power-over us is in the hands of servant leaders who serve the people who bestow upon them their political power. When these conditions are adequately met, leaders can be held accountable. If leaders fail to serve us, we replace them. And if it is big money rather than the citizens that is making the leadership choices, then we do not have democracy.

This democratic ideal is open to becoming a mere veneer on the surface of an undemocratic mode of governing. For example a particular so-called democracy can be limited to white-skinned property owners. Wars have been fought and power movements waged to extend in the U.S. political participation to people of color, women, and others. This means that democracy is always a work in process. Full democracy is always a future state. And the democracy we already have is always a fragile reality that the citizens of that democracy need to continually defend from the forces of tyranny that are constantly working to undo the democratic gains already established.

The deep reason why a fuller democracy is so threatening to some people, is that democracy means an undoing of at least 5000 years of kingly developments and practices. Similarly, fully honoring women and the feminine aspects of human consciousness is undoing at least 5000 years of patriarchal lordship over our feminine aspects. Democracy and feminism are two entangled revolutions in social practice that will not be completed in the lifetimes of anyone now living.

Sorting out the good from the tyrannical in our currently existing civilizations is a critical part of the complex social revolution that agape-care is calling upon us to support, invent, create, and finish.

Building political power-over the “maladies” of our continuing civilizations is a central factor in this planetary revolution. If we love this planet and its humans, we cannot reject embracing power-over the “wrong” directions of our societies. Rather, we must capture power-over the existing political fabrics on behalf of democracy, feminine liberation, and a long list of other malady corrections including many ecological emergencies—especially the urgent climate crisis being created by the massive burning of fossil fuels.

Building political power-over the powerful forces of reactionary revolt is the work of love. It takes love operating with power-over to create justice. We the democratically committed citizenry must hold accountable every institution of political power-over citizens—insisting upon servant leadership that serves the citizenry. Surely by now, our awakening citizens are fed up with hypocritical political non-servants who care only for their own egos and the wealth that public office can channel. We the citizens of our emerging democracies are being called to use our power-to-serve to build power-over these forces of injustice toward ever “more perfect” democracies on planet Earth.

The post Power 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.