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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scripture Interpretation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Thinking Christian

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

The post The Soul of Freedom 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 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.

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.

Central within the Abraham and Sarah stories is a story about Abraham’s journey to the top of a mountain to sacrifice Isaac—his only son, the son miraculously given to him and Sarah in their advanced age. In this strange story, Abraham is giving back the gift of Isaac, who was Abraham’s only evidence for a promise made to Abraham by the Giver of Isaac—a promise to make the descendants of Abraham and Sarah as numerous as the sands on the sea shore.

Centuries after the Exodus from Egypt, when these stories were being widely told, written, and read, this promise to Abraham was still not realized. The Hebraic people who claimed Abraham as their forefather were not yet numerous. Today, we might assume that all the Jewish people, all the Christian people, and all the Islamic people are somehow descendants of Abraham. If so, then Abraham’s descendants are indeed in the billions. All these people are not biological descendants, but they are at least people who remember Abraham and Sarah and Hagar. Only a few of these billions, however, embody Abraham’s model of sainthood.

Why should we honor the Abraham stories or his model of sainthood? These stories are fiction after all, and rather gross fiction as well. And especially, why all the fuss over this strange story about human sacrifice? Why did a fully sane and renowned 19th century philosopher and theologian, Søren Kierkegaard, write a whole book about this story?

This essay will be much simpler than Kiekegaard’s book. I am going to reflect on one idea: “Giving back to Reality all that Reality has given to us.”

Human consciousness includes both taking-in Reality and intending changes in the course of Reality—not big changes in the whole cosmic process, but quite small changes in he course of Reality, as this Real Mysteriousness is relating to me or to you about our personal destiny over which we have some real but quite limited control. Our freedom to “bend history,” as we sometimes call it, is a very important part of what it means to be a humanly conscious being.

Also, time marches on relentlessly giving back our whole lives to the Reality that has given us our lives and is still giving us life as well as taking it back. Sometimes I am glad for time to march on. Sometimes I am clinging to times that I do not want to pass. Sometimes I am glad that periods of my life are over. And sometimes I would like to go back to one or more of these past times. But time marches on. We confront giving our lives back in ways that are in accord with our preferences and in ways that are not in accord with our preferences.

Giving back our lives to the Reality that gives our lives is not about preferences. We are discussing an intentional giving of whatever has been given to us. And we are discussing giving back what we have been given within the given circumstances of the neighboring realities that are being given to us as context for the giving back of our many or few gifts to those neighboring realities.

Like Abraham and Sarah, we may have been given a son or a daughter or several of one of both. As a Christian saint, I am asked to give my descendants back to the Reality that gave them to me. If I am clinging to my children as a means of enhancing my own status or pleasure or pride or even shame, I am destroying my children as well as my role as a responsible father, or mother. Indeed, when my children have become adults, Reality has already taken them back, whether I want to give them up or not. And that is the “natural” course for all our gifts—to be given back.

If I am clinging to my vocation simply as a means of holding on to some status or maintaining my survival, I do not yet have a saintly vocation in the Abrahamic sense. To have a saintly vocation, I must pursue my vocation as an expending (i.e. a giving) of my time and energy to values other than my own needs. This giving may include some attention to my own needs. As Jesus taught his disciples, “Serve the Reign of Reality with all your gifts, and you, the servant, will also be cared for as well.“ (I have paraphrased, but only slightly.) When Jesus sent out his disciples to take the Good News to Galilean villages, he instructed them, “Take only minimum stuff, eat what they offer you, sleep where they put you. Don’t shop around for a better bed. Just give and receive the gifts given to you to keep you going with your ongoing giving.” (Again, I paraphrase.)

Luke saw clearly that Mark and Matthew before him had drawn a picture of Jesus that was to be a model for Christian sainthood. So Luke surely had in mind sharing Jesus as his model of Christian sainthood when he pictured Jesus saying these last words on the cross, “Into Thy hands I commend my spirit.” We can receive this verse as a meaning for our own death and dying: “Into the power of the Giver of my life, I give back my consciousness.” In other words, I can let Reality have my consciousness, however profound or limited that consciousness may be. In so viewing my death, I give over my entire life to the Reality that gave me all that was given to me. Reality, without me, will carry on my giving, my bending of history.

Another famous saying also applies to this perspective, “To whom much is given, much shall be required.” This lesson is the opposite of the all too familiar monopoly-game sense of things, “To whom much is given, even more shall be taken from the losers who are too poor to compete with me.” Contrary to such narcissism, “Response—-ability to God” means day-by-day, year-by-year, giving back our gifts to the Giver of those gifts. We give to the Giver by way of giving our gifts to our neighboring realities, those humans and other beings whom God also loves. This is the Abrahamic faith.

For more on these profound topics, I recommend:

The Call of the Awe: Rediscovering Christian Profundity
in an Interreligious Era

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

The post Giving Back our Gifts first appeared on Realistic Living.

Here is my guess:  An unusually aware, sensitive, and perhaps educated member of the Hebraic slave community was moved to lead a significant number of his Hebraic companions out of a severely hierarchical Egyptian society into the wilderness where a new vision of law-writing was established that was based on a vision that the Mysterious Realty allows free action to change the course of history.  This was a huge shift in life interpretation for these Egyptian enculturated slaves—so huge that it took Moses and others 40 years, so the story goes, to wash Egypt out of this people and prepare them to fight for a more promising place on Earth for their revelation and their emerging peoplehood.

A more personally rooted story-time rendering of this transformative event begins with how a man named Moses got so angry over a member of his people being mistreated by an Egyptian soldier that he killed that solder, and then had to flee to the out-back into a life in hiding.  Then one day, so the story goes, Moses came upon a bush that was blazing with a strange type of fire.  Temporal bushes burn up, but this bush was not being consumed.  It remained the same old bush in spite of this strange conflagration. This was surely a bit of Moses’ poetry for a very real inner happening to Moses himself.   His own “who-he-thought-he-was” was being burned up, yet he was not consumed.

According to the further elaboration of this poetry, Moses witnessed that the whole scene around that bush had became Awe-filling and that it spoke to him about rescuing his people from their slavery.   This was the last thing in the world Moses wanted to do.  He raised the fact that his speech-making talent was far inferior to his brother’s.  Take him then, said the bush, but be clear that I am speaking to you, not him.  You will have to do the speaking to your brother.  You are the one I am calling to this task.  Your brother is not here for this awakening in your being.  After a bit more excuse making, Moses set out to do this.

Now what had Moses encountered?  “The God of Abraham Isaac and Jacob,” the story says.  “The Mystery of History” is another clue to understanding this encounter.  Moses is looking into the black hole of the Eternal Abyss about which human beings know nothing.  And Moses is receiving a revelation concerning that essence of that  Still Lasting Mysteriousness.  What did Moses see?  What viewpoint on the Abyss did Moses learn from this conflagration of the temporal Moses that left him still alive, but in a whole new way?  Let’s just say this revelation had to do with the topic of historical possibilities.  The story continues.

When a series of cracks in the seams of Egyptian society offered an opportunity to slip out, Moses had already prepared the people to do so.  We do not need to factually believe the exaggerated story-telling that elaborated these events.  I don’t believe that Moses ever had an audience with the Pharaoh.  Perhaps in his dream life, Moses said to Pharaoh ,”Let my people go.”   I don’t doubt that plagues happened in Egypt.  Such things happen to every society.  I can also believe that this religious people already understood that every event emerges from that Mysterious Abyss served by Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

Anyhow, on one highly opportune day a fairly large group of slaves got underway before the Egyptian CIA noticed them, alerted the authorities, and got a detachment of fast-moving military chariots in pursuit.  I believe that the real historical miracle was more like the chariots bogging down in the mud of the Reed Sea rather than that there were walls of water as pictured in the Red Sea myth.  But however that was, the big happening was that this group, like many others, actually escaped.   It is likely that most of those other escaping groups did not find a way to survive in the challenging wilderness.  They did not have a Moses who could explain to them how Mysterious Reality was for them (Mose insisted that they remember the Exodus and how to remember it).

I can imagine Moses saying, “Let us view our freedom from slavery as an ongoing realism that applies to the current situations that are now at hand.  Here are five ways to not forget the Exodus and five more ways on how we need to treat one another if we  are to be true to what we have learned about Reality and about being free souls who can dare the impossible and win.

At Mount Sinai Moses was giving an elaboration of the burning bush revelation about how Mysterious Reality IS and how humans who are true to this truth will find their “better angels” in their own inner depths and live those profound states of living. This profound living includes embracing the freedom to bend the flow of history.

Elijah, Elisha, Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and others accessed the Moses-initiated vision into the Mysterious Abyss for their new situations and thereby expanded upon the relevance of the Exodus experience for all humankind.

John, the Baptist and Jesus also applied the Exodus experience to their situation,  John, the Baptist washed people of their evil era in the Jordan River.  And Jesus carried out his loyalty to the Mosaic revelation to such an extent that his followers called the result “a New Exodus.“  Jesus emphasized a positive “Exodus” from the entire Kingdom of Satan into the now available Kingdom of God on Earth.

What do these symbols mean?  They mean that we humans can exit our estrangements and find our authenticity in the living here and now of every event that comes our way.

This revelation, this viewpoint on the essence of the Mysterious Abyss, was also spelled out in the symbols of Cross and Resurrection.  When we allow our false expectations to be crucified, we can be raised up to the true and glorious life that is being given to us in this real-time moment.  “Hallelujah, the Body of Human Authenticity is Risen.”

The elaboration of this revelation about the essence of the Absolutely Mysterious Abyss continues.

The post The Revelation of Moses first appeared on Realistic Living.

“God“ is a relationship word—a word of devotion similar to sweetheart, lover, friend, rock, foundation, shepherd, mother, father, and other such words of devotion.  When  we call the Final Mystery “God,” we are making a religious confession.  If we are not making a religious confession, we do not need the word “God.”  We can get along without the word “God” or any word like it, unless we are a self-conscious Jew, Christian, Muslim, or a member of some other religious community that uses ”God” as a devotion word—as a relationship word for the Final Mystery.

Honestly living within today’s culture, we find no heavenly realm of rational meanings that humans can access to make sense of the absurdity of a Big Bang Beginning, or of an evolution from the single-celled organisms that mysteriously arose on this minor planet of a marginal star in one of the hundred billion or so galaxies.  The sheer Mystery of this vast expanse and of the infinitesimal minuteness of  this physical cosmos is not made less Mysterious by presuming a First Cause or an Ongoing Creator of all this wonderment.  As a solution to scientific meaning or contemplative awareness, the word “God” is not needed for any rational solution.
If we call this Final Mysteriousness “God,” we are making an act of will, an act of devotion, an act of commitment, a leap of trust.  Trust of this Final Mysteriousness does not alter the fact that we still know absolutely nothing about this Mystery— nothing with our scientific research and nothing with our contemplative inquiry.  We know things, but all that we know is approximate and changing.

The famous Sufi Muslim poet, Rumi, captured the shock of calling the Final Mystery “God” with this provocative verse:  “Life and death are two wings on the same bird.”  For Rumi, the name of that “bird” is “the actions of God.”   Rumi uses the word “God” devotionally.  And the object of his God-devotion is Whatever this IS that is ISING what is ISED.

Some theologians are trying to say that God is changing.   It is true that our human uses of the word “God” can be said to change or evolve.   But “changing” is not something that can be said about this Final Mystery—this Mystery about which nothing can be said.  Similarly, “unchanging” cannot be said about the Absolute Mystery, unless “unchanging“ means that the extent of the Absolute Mystery is no less Mysterious today than it ever was or ever will be.

The human mind cannot speak about the Absolute Mystery itself, but only about our relationship with this Absolute Mystery.  Therefore, there can be no models of God, no images of God, no attributes of God.  Why?  Because Absolute Mystery cannot be thought by a human mind.  The much rehearsed God-talk found in our Bibles, Torah, Koran, and other theologizing is now seen to be story-talk about our human relationship with this Mystery.  The entire 3000 years of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim “God-talk” is story-talk about our human relationships with the Unspeakable Mystery, not about the Unspeakable Mystery that remains unspeakable in any human language.

We can indeed describe our experiences of our conscious relationships with this Indescribable Mystery.  We actually know a lot about our experiences of this Mystery.  We often call these experiences “Wonder” or “Awe”— where “Awe” means a shaking of our rational foundations resulting in a deep dread and fascination— experiences for which we need courage to sustain them as our conscious state.  Such courage is part of our faith, our trust-devotion that reveres this shattering Awe as good for us.  Strange as it can seem to our knowledge-hungry egos, we can revere our total ignorance before the Absolute Mystery as good for us.

Following Søren Kierkegaard’s insights, we only have two basic options for our relationship with this Absolute Mystery, (1) “Yes, this is my life, and it is good” or (2) “No, I will insist on having some other ‘reality’ or resign myself to consciously fleeing, fighting, and inwardly hating what IS.”  The word “God” fits into this awareness as a devotional name for the Absolute Mystery when “Yes” is being said.  In other words, the name “God” is a name that is expressing a positive relationship with the Absolute Mystery.  “God” is not about some rational understanding of this Mystery.  Similarly, Father, Mother, Friend, Rock, etc. are all words of story-time talk that describe a relationship of trust with the Mystery for which we have no description.

Relationship

What does it mean to have a relationship with any object or process?  Relationship includes an encounter of my consciousness with some otherness plus a response by my consciousness to that otherness.  We have all sorts of relationships with temporal entities and processes: parents, stars, planets, children, enemies, gravity, etc.  Some of these others can consciously respond back, some cannot.  We also have relationships with internal others, such as our own bodies, minds, feelings, and consciousness.  And we have an unavoidable relationship with that Absolute Mystery that is ISING every temporal isness and all our relationships with these temporal othernesses.

The argument that there is no otherness, that we humans are simply an inseparable aspect of an inescapable Oneness is only half the truth.  This Mystery is indeed an Everythingness in which we and all things exist.  But this Mystery is also a Nothingness, an otherness from which we and all things have come and to which we and all things return.  This paradox of Everythingness/Nothingness is simply an expression of the realization that we know nothing and will forever know nothing about this Absolute Mysteriousness.

Oneness

The Oneness of the Absolute Mysteriousness is part of our faith, our leap into the darkness of Mystery.  We who cherish a truly monotheistic faith do not believe that we face two powers—one that is for us and another that is against us.  Rather birth and death are two wings on our experience of the same Oneness.  The same “Love for us” is trusted in our death as in our birth.  In other words, our faith in Oneness is not about a description of the Unknown Mystery.  Rather, Oneness is about our relations with the Absolute Mystery.  Again, the Absolute Mystery is that about which nothing is known, including Oneness.

When monotheistic faith seems to be in rejection of the many warring, quarreling, battling mysterious powers, this only means a rejection of  scatteredness in our human devotion, not a rejection of the many Awesome aspects of life.  To worship Venus as help for our love life and Mars as help for our conflict life is a scatteredness in our devotionality.  Of course both love and conflict are real powers in our human existing.  But worship is not about whether something exists, but about the quality of our devotion to what does exist.  Monotheistic faith is about an affirmation of the goodness of every Awe-filling aspect of the Overall Awesome Mysteriousness.  This quality of Oneness in our monotheistic God-talk is a confession of faith—a relational quality of trust in THAT WHOLENESS about which we know nothing with our mental faculties or with our emotional sensibilities.

Every Psalm in the Bible is a poem about a relationship of trust with the One Eternal Mystery.  Here is one of my favorite Psalms, plus a bit of substitute wording and some notations for reading it aloud, as I believe all Psalms are meant to be read.

Psalm 139

Eternal Mystery, my God, . . .
You see through me. . . .
You know everything, . . . when I sit down or rise up; . . .
You watch my thoughts. . . .
You have traced my journeys and my resting places. . . .
You are familiar with all my paths. . . . . .
There is not a word on my tongue that has missed your observation. . . .
You have kept a close watch in front of me, behind me, and over the top of me. . .
Your knowledge of me is beyond my understanding. . .
I cannot comprehend it. . . . .

Here there is a shift in tone of voice: it is louder now, more openly full of dread, a tone of satirical humor is added.

Where can I escape from Your presence? . .
Where can I flee from Your sight? . . .
If I travel out beyond the last galaxy, . . You are there. . . .
If I bury myself in the grave, . . You are there. . . .
If I flee to the east where morning begins,
or go west till the ocean ends,
even there You will find me . .
Your awesome actions will grasp me. . . .
If I say, “Surely darkness will cover me,
black night will hide me.” . .
No darkness is dark for You.
The night is as luminous as the day. . .
Dark and light are alike to You.

Now the voice tone shifts to sheer amazement.

It was You who fashioned my inward parts. . .
You stitched me together in my mother’s womb. . . .

I marvel at Your presence,
for You fill me with AWE.
You overwhelm me with WONDER,
And each specific entity You bring forth is full of WONDER. . . .

You see me through and through. . .
My private body is no mystery to you.
You saw as I was secretly shaped,
patterned in the depths of earthiness. . .
You saw me unformed in the womb.
You marked down in Your records each of my limbs,
as day by day they were formed.
Not one limb was late in growing! . . .

O trusted One, how deep is Your sense of things!
How inexhaustible the subjects of Your wisdom.
Can I count them? . .
They outnumber the grains of sand . .
To finish the count, my years would have to be as numerous as Yours. . . . .

Now the voice tone is loud and angry.

O trusted One, if only You would slay all those who oppose You.
If only those killers of Your truth would but leave me in peace–
those who challenge You with their deliberate falseness,
those who viciously rebel against You. . .
How I hate them, O Eternal One, those that hate You.
I am cut to the quick when they oppose You.
I hate them with undying hatred.
I hold them all as my enemies. . . . . .

Now the tone is more quiet, but with the intensity of humble confession and sober trust.

Examine me, O trusted One, . . . know my thoughts. . . .
Test me, . . see my ignorance. . . .
Watch me, . . lest I follow any road that departs from You. . .
Guide me, . . in Your primordial path. . . . . . . .

Theologizing

Theologizing is a confessional witness meant for a community of faith and for the building of that community.  Theologizing is a planet-wide address only in the sense that it is about the profound humanness that is possible for all human beings.  But as rational content, Christian theologizing is only one of many viewpoints on this quest for realism.   And Christian theologizing is a group process, rather than a merely individual opinion process.  If that group is a vital community of Christian faith, we theologizers in this group work together on a common theological project for our era.  We Christian theologizers serve each other, and we do so in obedience to a specific revelation of Final Reality, a revelation called “Christ/Jesus.”

When the best of Christian theology speaks of revelation, it speaks of an encounter that illuminates all encounters for those who join this revelation.  When the best of Christian theology speaks of faith, it speaks of a current human response to a current human encounter with specific events in the life of a living human being.  In faith, specific current events are viewed through the Christian revelation of the meaning of all events.  Christian theologizing is reflection on such revelations of the Christ Jesus revelation.

A similar theologizing is taking place among many members of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.  In what I view as the best of Jewish theologizing, we find an inquiry into a revelation about Final Reality given to us in the event of the Exodus and its accompanying new mode of law writing.
In what I view as the best of Christian theologizing, we find an inquiry into a revelation about Final Reality given to us in the “New Exodus” event of dying/resurrecting into the ongoing body of Christ Jesus.

In what I view as the best of Muslim theologizing, we find an inquiry into a revelation about Final Reality pulled into focus by events surrounding the life and teachings of Muhammad, who is also a devotee of the God of Abraham.

At least some of the theologizing within each of these vast religious communities can be seen to grapple with the implications for living the total round of life in the light of a unique revelation about the meaning for humans for living every event.

We can discern a great deal of overlap among the deepest theologies of these three monotheistic religions.  There is also considerable uniquenesses in each of these three religious points of view concerning how Final Reality is to be viewed and trusted.  In spite of these differences, all three of these Arabian-originated religions emphasize “eventfulness” and history and living that history in the light of a specific revelatory vision.

Buddhists, in their theoretics about Final Reality, make little or no use of the word “God” or “eventfulness,” so their theoretics need not be called “theologizing.”  But Buddhists also revere a type of revelatory event found in the life and teachings of the one called “Buddha.”  Christians talk of participating in dying with Christ Jesus in order to be resurrected with him to newness of life.  Similarly, Buddhists talk of participating in the enlightenment of this historical Buddha.  As actual experiences of the depths of human living, resurrection and enlightenment have overlapping meanings.  Clearly each of these four religions have enrichments to share with each of the others.  All revelation is a unique viewpoint on the Absolute Mystery of Final Reality—unknown to everyone.

The above summary is a bare-bones picture of what a confessional theology or a confessional religious theoretics looks like.  “Theologizing” is reflective thoughtfulness about an event of  revelation concerning what we are encountering in every event.  Each event of revelation includes the response of a primal choice of trust toward living that revelation—a response often called “faith.”   In other words, revelation only becomes revelation when it is revelation to someone making the choice of faith to allow their lives to be so revealed.

For more on the philosophy of religions that undergirds this mode of theologizing see:

http://www.realisticliving.org/books.htm
The Enigma of Consciousness
A Philosophy of Profound Humanness and Religion

The post Uses of the Word “God” first appeared on Realistic Living.

The original Christmas rituals wrapped the darkest day of the year with the birth of a tiny light in this very dark season of Advent judgement—a single candle, a new star in the midnight sky, a tiny babe born in extreme poverty, an intrusion of something dangerous to the dark powers of degraded government. Even this inconspicuous tiny beginning of hope, the powers of darkness sought to kill.

The good-news narrative of Matthew envisioned the true wisdom of the world coming to visit this birth. And the good-news narrative of Luke envisioned poor nighttime sheep keepers joining the party.

This has been an especially dark Advent season for me. The biggest, richest, greediest corporations on the surface of the planet are doing cartwheels of delight over the president-elect of my nation, a man who claims that the climate crisis is a hoax. But I groan in grief that adequate action to moderate the most horrific crisis humanity has ever faced may be still further delayed. In addition, I see the prospects for relieving poverty and low wages being neglected and billionaires. further empowered I also see backward motion on finishing the overthrow of our unacknowledged and unconfessed minority enslavements and patriarchal oppressions.

I even groan over the unconsciousness of the population of my own Texas county, of my own mostly good-hearted neighbors, 1 out of 2 of whom did not even vote, and of those who did vote, 4 out of 5 voted for the dark side. Such are my surroundings as I light my Christmas candle on the darkest day of the annual calendar,

All rituals are, of course, sort of silly. It is only the darkest day in the northern hemisphere, and those Medieval ritual makers missed December 21st by four days. But silly rituals can sometimes point beyond themselves to the dynamics of life that matter most. So what is this tiny Christmas hope all about?

Our first good-news narrative, accredited to someone named “Mark,” did not tell of a baby’s virgin birth, but of a “heavenly” second birth of a poor roof-repair man being doused by a wild man in the waters of the river Jordan. Both John and Jesus apparently gave this ritual the meaning of washing away the cruel darkness of grim estrangements gripping that out-of-the-way religious people of ancient origins. When in Mark’s story, Jesus came up out of that washing, the very heavens announced him as another real threat to the evil powers of the world. Being such a hope for the downtrodden and such a peril to the establishment hypocrites drove Jesus to undergo a long fast, in which he grappled with his possible vocations. In the wilderness, alone, with only wild nature and enigmatic angels to comfort him, Jesus decided to take on his dangerous vocation. This was Mark’s new birth of hope. The rest of Mark’s narrative reveals the “secret” of this new hope. And here it is. When we die to our clinging to all our temporal devotions, we are left with the resurrection of our authenticity.

The fourth good-news narrative, accredited to someone named “John,” told of a “virgin birth” that can happen to any of us who choose to join Jesus in his mode of living.

What then is this “virgin birth” that anyone can share? Well, it turns out that it is simply this: When we die to our clinging to all our temporal devotions, we are left with the resurrection of our authenticity. When that has taken place, we are born of Final Realty—freed from our parental upbringing and open for the real future we face. This is the virgin birth. This is the hope of Christmas. This is the core healing of the dark powers of the world, and the dawn of the Final Commonwealth of Ultimate Realism.

How is this so? If by this “virgin birth” we are freed from the powers of the past and open for the future, whatever that future may be, we are participating in the solution to any and every cruel problem that needs to be solved.

For example, here is the virgin-birth contribution to the moderation of the climate crisis—dying to the need for fossil fuels and open for a future with only sunshine to power the lives of the many billions. This will include more dying and openness that goes along with the climate crisis. We will need to die to having billionaires and grueling poverty, and be open for an economic justice that includes everybody—blacks, whites, browns, yellows, reds, greens, women, men, and any other color or gender or culture.

It may seem strange that all this begins with a few million virgin births, but that is just the way it is. Without these virgin births the same old karma carries us into the abyss of disintegration and total despair. But when the millions and billions share in the virgin birth, anything is possible. When the virgin born say, “Move!” to our mountains of wrong, those mountains simply move. The demons will cry out in wild backlashes, but they are on the wrong side of realism. Reality always wins in the end. The virgin born get to choose how they would like for Reality to win. The cosmic power that the virgin born breathe and live, can enable these surprising but ordinary folk to claim the victories that they are willing to live and die for.

Sure, the future will be a surprise, for many other forces are at play than the historical forces of the virgin born; nevertheless, the future will be very different because the virgin born live their lives and do their doing.

For more 21st Century theologizing on these core topics, I recommend the following essay on the controversial topic of “God” and Part One of my revised commentary on the Gospel of Mark:

The “Death of God” Conversation

http://www.realisticliving.org/PDF/0NextChristianity/1GodDeathResurrection.pdf

Mark Commentary: Part One
Cross and Resurrection

a commentary on the last three chapters
of the Gospel of Mark

http://www.realisticliving.org/PDF/MarkCrossResurrection.pdf

The post The Darkest Day of the Year and the Virgin Birth first appeared on Realistic Living.

So, we don’t know where we have been, or where we are, or where we are going. We do have images and perhaps careful thought and plans about all of that, but none of those rational products provide certainty. The sheer MYSTERY of it all is our only complete certainty.

Christian faith includes trusting that very MYSTERY that anyone and everyone can know about and have certainty about if they will only admit their ignorance and stop assuming total certainty for their models of thought with which they express and exclude aspects of that MYSTERY. This strange certainty that there is no complete certainty graspable by a human mind is, paradoxically, a type of certainty that we can absolutely count upon.

Trusting that this MYSTERY is friendly toward us is an additional type of certainty. It is a risk into the unknown for which we have no rational proof. But we have no rational proof that this MYSTERY is not trustworthy. Of course, we do find it true that the MYSTERY is not trustworthy to operate entirely in accord with our preferences, hopes, neuroses, plans, moralities, social conditioning, personality constructions, loves, hates, passions, intuitions, fears, anxieties, despairs, horrors, or any other aspect of our temporal modes of evaluation. Trusting the MYSTERY means surrendering all of our temporal modes of evaluation. This surrender is experienced as a kind of certainty.

Such paradoxical certainty is the key to understanding properly the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Innocence. They ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil of which Absolute Realism forbid them to eat. Our healing, rescue, or redemption from the Adam and Eve fall from innocence entails vomiting up that fruit of the knowledge of good and evil. Trusting the MYSTERY means a return to full and complete ignorance about good and evil. All our choices become ambiguous. We never know if we are doing the right thing, No law is absolute. No teaching is absolute. No social conditioning is absolute. No fabric of consciousness is absolute. No intuition is absolute. No body-wisdom is absolute. Nothing! We have nothing but total ignorance on the topic of good and evil. According to Christian witnessing the Holy Name for this state of being is called “Freedom.”

Trust and Freedom are two aspects of the same Holy Spirit,
the same authentic humanity, the same primal innocence.

And a third aspect of Holy Spirit also exists as part of that Trust/Freedom state-of-being human. The name of this third aspect of Holy Spirit is “Love”—Spirit Love, Love of the MYSTERY, Love of the neighboring beings as we love our own beings, compassion to be with the joys and horrors of our own life, as well as with the joys and horrors of other people’s lives. Such Spirit Love is a deep experience, and it is a profound commandment to actually live our essential humanity. The Holy Spirit is a gift of our “creation” and Holy Spirit is a gift of our redemption or restoration to that essential humanity. Holy Spirit is simply our essential being. This Holy Spirit is simply there when all our escapes from the simply there have ceased to hide this essence. After the restoration of this gift, this Trust/Love/Freedom demands to be lived by the ones to whom this restoration has happened. Not living this gift of Holy Spirit means a return to slavery and mistrust, as well as malice, envy, avarice, greed, sloth, arrogance, pride, and every other deadliness of un-love, mistrust, and non-freedom.

So what does all this have to do with “God,” as that word is used in Christian theologizing? One of the faces of “God,” in the Christian view of God, is this Holy Spirit that we can access within our own beings. Another face of “God” is that MYSTERY we pointed to above. To call that MYSTERY by the name “God” means that we trust that MYSTERY as our ultimate devotion. It does not mean that there is a Big Person sitting back there in a second realm of things. That double-deck thinking is simply story-book talk that works somewhat for the childhood of our upbringing. As true adults, we can now be absolutely atheistic about any supposed need to believe in a second realm of Gods, Goddesses, angels, devils, and all other such supposed populations. In a true understanding of the biblical texts, “God” is simply that MYSTERY that we all face and that can be, according to the Christian good news, be understood as being for us in everything that happens to us—including our death, suffering, limitations, opportunities, joys, and our horrific as well as glorious possibilities and challenges. For Christian faith, nothing more need be said about that MYSTERY than its trustworthiness. And this trust in the trustworthiness of the MYSTERY is what Martin Luther was pointed to with his assertions that “redemption” happens not by achievements of good works but “by faith alone.” To be redeemed, nothing needs to be done by us, except trusting the trustworthiness of the Mystery.

So how is Jesus as the Christ (Messiah) also a face of “God” in the Christian elaboration of this devotional word “God.” Let us look at the literary story of Jesus (as portrayed in the fictional narratives of Mark, Matthew, Luke and John). These minimally historical narratives were composed not as biography, but simply to tell us what it looks like to live in that Trust, Love, and Freedom that results from of our trusting obedience to the MYSTERY. In these narratives we see the 12 disciples and an uncounted group of women followers becoming excited, confused, and eventually horrified by following this spirited Jesus. In the end, having experienced compete despair over what they thought they were following, they found themselves moving beyond the hell of this despair into a life that they called “resurrection”—resurrection from the dead, resurrection from the horrific estrangements of the devilish world of which they were members, resurrection form their temporal hopes (that were also temporal fears) to a new quality of hope that cannot disappoint because it is a hope for that MYSTERY to remain a MYSTERY that forgives us, supports us, and loves us completely. This basic message of good news is said to reveal the nature of the MYSTERY—that is, that this MYSTERY can be our ultimate devotion—our “God.”

In the event of encountering Jesus we meet the MYSTERY that loves us. Jesus, seen as the final coming of our essential humanity, is also a face of our ultimate devotion. Jesus Christ is a face of “God,” a never absent part of the dynamic of our ultimate devotion to the MYSTERY and to how that MYSTERY is love for us and therefore can be loved by us in return.

This ordinary, fully human, fully temporal, suffering, dying Jesus is, in spite of all of that temporal humiliation (as well as because of all of that down-to-Earth humanness), a revelation of the MYSTERY’s love for us. In that sense, Jesus showed us that the MYSTERY was God for us. In the face of Jesus these healed ones saw their God. Whoever truly sees Jesus sees God—sees the nature of the MYSTERY. This is the claim. And now on the other side of this death and this resurrection, the essence of Jesus walks among us, eats fish, feeds us fish, lives on among us as a member of our group of trusters. And get this full paradox, this trusted Jesus also lives in a “right elbow” association with the trusted MYSTERY. In other words, the Jesus-presence-among-us is understood as fully human and, you may not believe this, fully God. In so far as we share in this presence of authentic humanity depicted in Jesus as Christ, we are also, you may not believe this either, both fully human and fully God. That is, anyone who has eyes to see any one of us as a trusting person sees the trustworthiness of the MYSTERY. This human/God paradox is an essential part of the Christian revelation and an essential part of our ongoing theologizing about that revelation.

This very quick outline about “God” in the Christian sense of that word, is introductory to a project of theologizing that can fill thousands and thousands of books and centuries and centuries of living. For a further elaboration of a core part of this theologizing, see the following essay.:

Redemption From What to What?

http://www.realisticliving.org/PDF/Redemption.pdf

The post Certainty first appeared on Realistic Living.

In the opening verses of the 11th chapter of Luke’s Gospel, we find the disciples noticing that Jesus spends much time in prayer. One day, after he finishes praying, they ask him to teach them to pray. Jesus, according to Luke, gives his disciples a brief set of terse sentences we call “the Lord’s Prayer.” Then Luke continues the subject of prayer with Jesus teling his disciples a story about a man who goes to his friend in the middle of the night to get three loaves of bread for his suprise guests. The friend is already in bed and won’t get up. Jesus says that if this man persists, his friend will get up and give him everything he needs.

Jesus applies this story to the subject of prayer, “And so I tell you, ask and it will be given you, search and you will find, knock and the door will be opened to you. The one who asks will always receive; the one who is searching will always find, and the door is opened to the person who knocks.” (Luke 11:9,10) These verses seem to contradict about half of what we experience in our real lives. We have all asked for things we never received. We have all done some passionate seeking without finding. And we have all done some knocking on doors that never opened.

Some interpreters of these verses have suggested that our problem is poor praying. If we were to pray correctly, we would receive what we are praying for. But such interpreters have never satisfied me; nor have they convinced me that this is what Jesus really meant. In the 14th chapter of Mark, we see Jesus himself praying all night not to have to drink the cup of crucifixion. As part of his prayer, he notes that all things are possible to God. Yet he apparently knew that God might not give him his request, for he concludes his prayer, “Yet it is not what I want, but what you want.” (Mark 14:36)

So what does it mean to say that the person who asks always receives? An answer to this question can be found in the verses that follow the verses about always receiving:

“Some of you are parents, and if your child asks you for some fish, would you give that child a snake instead, or if the child asks for you for an egg, would you give that child the present of a scorpion? So if you, for all your evil, know how to give good things to your children, how much more likely is it that your Heavenly (Parent) will give The Holy Spirit to those who ask (Him/Her)!” (Luke 11:11-13)

God gives the Holy Spirit! What a curious thing to say. The verse seem to imply that if we ask God for some fish or an egg, God will give us The Holy Spirit! And this gift is a “good thing.” The Holy Spirit is a better gift than fish or egg or whatever specific things we asked for.

Is this the way that prayer works? No matter what we ask for, God gives something better. God sends the Holy Spirit! Let me stretch this metaphor out a bit: The divine prayer-answering order-house works very simply: it only has one product, all packaged and ready to go. No matter what you order, you get this same package, the Holy Spirit. This makes things easy for the prayer-answering order house. You pray for a new car. God sends the Holy Spirit. You pray for better health. God sends the Holy Spirit. You pray for a lover. God sends the Holy Spirit. You pray for a workable, planetary social order. God sends the Holy Spirit.

So what is this Holy Spirit? And why is it so wonderful that it can be the answer to every prayer?

First of all, the Holy Spirit is freedom. This is the way Paul describes it. The Holy Spirit is liberation from sin, liberation from the fear of death, liberation from the law, liberation to creatively affirm the life possibilities coming toward you. Here is certainly one aspect of the way life works: If you pray for health to the liberating God of the Bible, this God sends you the freedom to take care of yourself, the freedom to read up on health matters, the freedom to give up your addictive eating, the freedom to exercise your body, the freedom to find tranquility in sickness and in health. God sends more than you ask for. God sends freedom. God sends the Holy Spirit.

If you pray for a new love relationship in your life, God sends you the freedom to look around you at the real possibilities you may have been overlooking. God sends you the freedom to improve your shy and halfhearted efforts to interest some appropriate person in a relationship with you. God sends you the freedom to find tranquility in being alone or in being mated. God sends more than you ask for. God sends freedom. God sends the Holy Spirit.

Perhaps I need to say a few words about the phrase “God sends.” This is metaphorical language. We must be careful not to fall back into thinking literally about a big being beyond the sky. “God sends” means “The Wholeness of Being issues forth to us.” We are talking about a real experience, not about a transaction in the sky, not about a Supreme Being in heaven stooping down to do something here on Earth.

Whenever you, in your freedom, persist in asking for something from that Final Reality which you confront, you will receive a response from that Final Reality. You will receive the Holy Spirit. You will receive freedom. No magic here. This is just the way life works. Persist in prayer and you will receive the freedom to live toward what you are praying for. You will receive the openness to have what you are praying for, if and when it happens. You will receive the liberty to do without it if what you are praying for does not happen.

Whatever you pray for, God sends you freedom, the freedom to go for it, the freedom to enjoy it, the freedom to do without it. God always sends you more than you ask for.

You can’t ask for too much, as long as you are willing to recieve a Holy Spirit answer. Ask for the moon, you will always get more than that. If you pray for everlasting life, God sends you the Holy Spirit. And the Holy Spirit is not just freedom, but also trust, compassion, and bliss, poured out on you here and now. These gifts of the Spirit do not end. They are everlasting realities. Indeed, God always sends you more than you ask for. God sends the Holy Spirit.

These insights give us a deeper grasp of the nature of true prayer. Prayer is not some sort of magic by which I persuade some Supreme Being to get me something I want, though praying might issue in getting what I want. Prayer is an exercise. Prayer is an exercise in two ways: (1) Prayer is a rehearsal of your freedom in preparation for the performance of your freedom in the wide world. And (2), prayer is exercise that builds up your freedom muscles, strengthening yourself for freedom living in the wide world. The more you persist in using your freedom to ask, to seek, to knock, the more freedom you receive. This is the divine economy. There is just one currency: freedom. The more you spend freedom, the more freedom you get to spend.

So let me invite you to pray with me for a planetary human society more in tune with nature, more just, and more sane. Our long hours of persistent prayer will be answered with the Holy Spirit welling up within us. We will receive freedom, the freedom to create winning strategies, the freedom to compose for ourselves effective vocations of action. God always sends more than we ask for. God always sends the Holy Spirit.

The Holy Spirit is also compassion or spirit love; trust or faith, and tranquility, peace, joy, or bliss. But I will save these vast subjects for another time. For now, let us simply meditate on using our profound spirit freedom to ask, and on receiving more freedom to persist in asking, and on using that freedom to ask some more. For, “the one who asks will always receive; the one who is searching will always find, and the door is opened to the person who knocks.”

If you are interested in more on the topic of “Spirit Freedom,” I suggest the following essay:

http://www.realisticliving.org/UR4/4AweFreedom.pdf

A still longer exposition of related topics can be found in the book The Love of History and the Future of Religion: Toward a Manifesto for a Next Christianity.

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

The post Prayer Always Works first appeared on Realistic Living.