One human being’s efforts may matter very little in the broad sweep of historical consequences. But large groups of humans, activated by significant inspiration, can matter very much. This is true both when our human “mattering” means great benefit to key human values and when our “mattering” means huge and tragic consequences. We are now experiencing an era of human history in which we experience many matters of “big time’ mattering. We see a climate crisis so immense that we can barely stand to face it. We see a drift toward authoritarian government that threatens to undo all that as been done toward a viable and vital democracy. We see much to be done in solidarity with women’s efforts to deliver themselves from second-class oppression and and to deliver all of us from patriarchy. We also see racial and cultural minorities treated with practices of suppression, contempt, and cruelty that shock our sensitivities to the very quick.

Indeed, the consequences rendered by deeds of the human species have become enormous. We live in an era of human life that some now call the “Anthropocene.” This name takes note of the fact that the once tiny human species has become a key planetary force—melting arctic ice, raising sea levels, reshaping the climate, multiplying extinctions, polluting air-water&soils, as well as uprooting the distribution fabrics of our societies. Our everyday historical experience is challenging us to do a better job with our now vast history-bending capacities.

Lessons from Biblical History

The prophet Ezekiel was called upon to do history-bending within a seemingly hopeless situation. He was a religious leader of the Mosaic-heritage people exiled in the land of Babylon—a strongly influential culture in contrast with the tiny and compromised kingdom of Judea in which Ezekiel and others lived before their exile. Many exiled groups simply melted into this creative Babylonian culture. Speaking in the voice of Yahweh (understood as the power of history itself), here are some of the “power words” of this wildly imaginative poet:

I will seek the lost, and I will bring back the strayed, and I will bind up the crippled, and I will strengthen the weak, and the fat and the strong I will watch over; I will feed them on justice. (11:16)

These words went into the bending of history. These words not only participated in preserving the Yahwist faith during forty-seven years of Babylonian exile, they prepared the way for the rise of another prominent prophet. We now refer to this figure as Second Isaiah—a prophet whose gripping poetry spoke of leaving exile and returning home to rebuild an independent national expression of the Yahwist heritage. The Persian empire was then conquering the Babylon empire and was instituting new polices for exiled people. This unnamed prophet, whose writings appear in the last part of the scroll of Isaiah, saw the Persian emperor as a servant of Yahweh come to deliver Israel. Second Isaiah also saw these historical developments as Yahweh’s call to leave exile, return to the wreckage of the old Palestinian geography, and build a new society rooted in the long memories of this people. Here is “the voice of Yahweh” according to the poetry of Second Isaiah.

Speak tenderly to Jerusalem and tell her this:
that she has fulfilled her term of bondage,
that her penalty is paid. . . .

Prepare a road for Yahweh through the wilderness,
clear a highway across the desert for our God.
Every valley shall be lifted up;
every mountain and hill brought down;
rough places shall be made smooth;
and mountain ranges become a plane.

Thus shall the glory of Yahweh be revealed,
and all humankind together shall see it,
for Yahweh has spoken. (40:2-5)

Bending history takes place when we use our essential freedom to do for others a Second-Isaiah-type of inspiration—to do such powerful visioning through our words, our deeds, and our presence. Let us also remain aware that historical results can be achieved by ourselves and by other humans who willfully crowd out essential freedom and act from a place of inner bondage. Adolf Hitler and company bent history, even though their dreadful acts derived from a terrible bondage of soul. Hitler’s living is judged” evil” from the perspective of the realism revealed in the Jesus, the Christ revelation, the Moses of the Exodus revelation, the Buddha of awakenment revelation, the Mohammedan Qur’an revelation, and so on. These “revelations” of Profound Reality quality realism provide us with depictions of a faithfulness that allow us to see values that are given to us by realism rather than values that are simply made up to advance our egoism or preferences.

The Pit of Evil

Adolf Hitler was an intelligent and capable man who went over to the “dark side,” as we Star Was fans might call it. His extermination spasm toward the Jewish people of Europe and his invention of a mode of “total war” that he thought could not be defeated dug a horrific ditch of evil. He showed us our human capacity for evil with a vividness toward which we still close our eyes.

Nevertheless, we remain vulnerable to enchantment by leaders who are skilled in calling forth our own rebellion against living in the real world. How has it happened in Russia that a leader can get away with poisoning his political opponents? How has it happened in the United States that a president and his cronies can get away with undermining elections, selling out to foreign interests, tearing up democratic institutions, misusing the military against peaceful protesters, and sowing confusion by lying daily as if that were an acceptable way of life. And this list of “bad doings” does not include a long list of omissions and failures to face and handle a significant list of emergencies.

Perhaps the sheer foolishness of neglecting a clear scientific way of minimizing the impact of Covid-19 pandemic will discredit this administration for all time. We have experienced a US president too inept to be compared with Hitler. We might better compare him with Senator Joseph McCarthy, who has been portrayed as the most evil U.S politician until now. We can be thankful that McCarthy was never allowed to be president. And perhaps we can also be thankful for President Trump’s gross ineptitude—even as we stand in horror of how far toward fascism someone as sociologically ignorant as Trump can take our government and a significant portion of our population.

In 1851, a century before Hitler, Herman Melville wrote a novel, Moby-Dick, that gave us a classic picture of the strange charisma of a defiantly evil human being. In this novel, the evil and “charismatic” person is Captain Ahab, a ship captain who has captivated the crewmen of a whaling vessel. “Evil” in this story is symbolized by the passion of this ship captain’s murderous hatred toward a huge white whale who had taken one of his legs in a previous encounter, making him, as he called it, “half a man.” The strength of this intentional fight with the white whale fascinates the other shipmates, who are, perhaps, open to follow him based on their own fights with whatever they aren’t able to control.

The huge white whale turns out to be a symbol for that Profound Reality that never loses. In this mythic story all but one crew member follows Ahab into his fight with an unbeatable power of nature—symbolically with our own fight with the Profound Reality we may also call “God.”

Symbolized in this story is something more inclusive even than the extreme aberration of a Hitler. In this story we see the whole of industrial society in a winless fight against the vast ocean of nature. Such an enchantment with human arrogance toward the natural planet precedes the futility of Hitler’s “total war” against all human societies. We can view the Jewish people playing the role of that white whale of personal humiliation in Hitler’s imagination. A similar role is being played today in the imagination our US white nationalist authoritarians by people of color and immigrants who might vote for democracy against the white nationalism that we see tending toward its fascist fulfillment.

This essay is about being delivered from these gloomy dead ends of human living. This delivery will require a vast bending of history in some different directions through the agency of our own essential freedom.

In addition to lawless authoritarianism, we also face a new kind of total war from our current fossil-fuel companies who are waging their un-winnable fight with the atmosphere of the planet. History is always presenting us with fresh challenges, some extremely large, some quite small.

Perhaps the reality of our true nature supports the quest for justice, but justice is a gift that must be asked for with our lives. Getting justice and keeping it requires foot movements, finger movements, telephoning, organizing, e-mails, speeches, money, voting, teaching, running for office, and this list is much longer. Social justice is a contact sport, so put on your shoulder pads, your shin guards, and come to the meetings, events, or protests with your wits about you.

True justice must be defined and brought into being by those who are accessing their profound consciousness and thereby becoming the early few who use their essential freedom to bring thought and action for justice to this time, this place, and this course of events. Each doable step can bring into play the action of an ever-larger force for some massive bending of time.

Obedient Freedom Changing History

Many Christian theologians have spoken of the origin of the cosmos as a “creation out of nothing” by that totally-free, all-powerful mysteriousness, that was anciently personalized with the name “Yahweh.” The word “God” in the phrase “Yahweh is my God” means our devotion to this all-powerfulness—that is, our loyalty, commitment, dedication, and obedience. This obedience is the obedience of freedom—the obedience of being our essential freedom and the freedom to be obedient in facing the actual response-able options available to us in our time and place.

The actions done by our essential freedom in response to Yahweh our God are also “creations out of nothing” in that these choices are not being caused by any force other than our essential freedom itself. Other forces are always playing a role in our behavior, but essential freedom is one of those forces. And this essential freedom is free indeed—no moralism or dogmatic rigidity can stand in the way of the essential creativity of this freedom.

The essential freedom of the human being differs from Yahweh’s freedom in its capacity for historical results. Yahweh’s freedom is boundless, but the essential freedom of humans is limited to initiating temporal results in accordance with the temporal powers possessed by human individuals and groups. Humans bend history, but they do not control history. We find ourselves continually surprised by the results of our own actions. Yahweh, our God is the determiner of the results of our free choices. Our free choices are like petitions pushed into the face of mystery. Final results are out of our hands.

Our essential freedom draws a great deal of its boldness from our trust in the total forgiveness of all our deeds—before, during, and after those deeds are performed. After our deeds are performed, we must release them into the imagined “hands” of Profound Reality who now clearly owns our done deeds and their consequences. We cannot take back our deeds.

In the context of this forgiveness, we can take into ourselves the guilt of all the malfunctioning of our species that has led up to our current options. The boldness to take on the guilt of the entire species is made possible by the faith that all is forgiven nd that a fresh start in realistic freedom is before us. However horrific that may sound on the surface of it, being our freedom is found to be restful, even though it is certainly not “rest” in the sense of a withdrawal from the battle of living. We rest in our activism. We do not burn out. We find that our freedom is a gift that keeps on giving energy to us from that Profound Reality that we are trusting as our forgiving God.

Alongside our amazing freedom, we notice that there are other powers already in motion—material and social forces that are producing historical results along with whatever historical power we bring into play. In most cases our own human freedom can bring to the fray only a small vector of force within that vast sea of force vectors that combine to spell out the actual results. Nevertheless, historical outcomes can be bent through the agency of our human choices—real choices that are made by our own freedom. And the choices of multitudes of individual vectors of force strategically applied to real historical situations can create a true revolution in social structures.

While a million human beings acting in some sort of coordinated response have many times more temporal power than a single person, even the power of billions of humans is severely limited in relation to the vast forces of the natural cosmos. Just as the Earth swings around the sun with massive force, so also are there forces in human historical movement that simply have to be respected and worked with rather than against.

Profound Reality is manifest towards us as an unconditional Power we cannot resist, yet part of that boundless Power has been delegated to us humans. If we include the plain fact of this delegating of power to humans and to other living beings, the power of Profound Reality can be said to remains unlimited. Both the life and the freedom of all living beings remains in the overall control of this One all-powerful Power. There is no contradiction between real human power and the All-powerful Power of that Profound Reality that can be the God we obey, honor, and serve.

These awarenesses enable us to picture a human life in dialogue with Profound Reality. If we are dedicated to consciously living within the stern yet merciful realism of a dialogue with Profound Reality, then we can say that Profound Reality has become our “God”—the “focus” of our devotion. This personal devotion allows us to symbolize Profound Reality as an Infinite “Thou.” In the light of this devotion, human history becomes the story of Thou—we—Thou—we—Thou—we— . . . Thou. “Thou” has both the initial word and the final word in each human story. Yet we humans do have a role in the choreography of this historical dance, the making of this music, the authorship of this drama.

Conclusion

The prophets of the Old Testament, Jesus, and the authors of the New Testament dared to to speak for Reality to humanity and to speak back to Reality on behalf of humanity. They wrote their poetry about living within the overview of this relentlessly all-powerful Reality. Such a God-devotion to Profound Reality includes at least these three broad themes: (1) the judgments of Reality upon our inadequate customary living—calling us to a relinquishment of our clinging to obsolete and illusory ways of living, (2) Reality showing us the openings toward whole new futures for human living, and (3) Reality’s callings to us for courageous ventures into these new possibilities well ahead of the crowds. This means that however meager be our talents or skills, we may become luminaries and exemplars who are showing forth our own unique adventure into an unknown future that many may fear, hate, and oppose, and many others may honor and join. Onward ye history benders!

The post Bending History first appeared on Realistic Living.

Our cat and I are both skilled at using signs. We share this very old mode of consciousness. Signs, as I distinguish them from symbols, are expressive of an inner multi-sensory-rerun form of mental products composed of memories of whole body sensory experiences. All animal life has this level of intelligence. You and I also run a large portion of our lives with this multi-sensory-rerun form of intelligence.

Cats

Our cat is clearly a conscious being who joins me is sharing this muti-sensory-rerun form of consciousness. I, however, also spend many hours of my life fully engaged in my symbol-using art, language, and mathematics. A cat does not have the biological supports for that level of consciousness. We humans do share with cats the drive for survival that ancient India called charka one—a swirl of consciousness they located at the base of the human spin. Slightly further up the spine they located a swirl of consciousness they associated with pain and pleasure, including sex. All we animals share that swirl of consciousness as well. Near the belly or solar-plexus, they located a swirl of consciousness that has to do with the capacity for purpose and planning that I introduced above as the multi-sensory-rerun form of intelligence. Animal life also shares that form of consciousness.

The above are conclusions that are easily made with our interior sensibilities as we watch the behaviors of cats, dogs, horses, turtles, even grasshoppers. In addition to those first three swirls of consciousness, we mammals share an emotional intelligence that is only minimally present in the reptiles and birds. India located that fourth swirl of human consciousness in the heart or chest area.

Humans

In the throat or speech area of the human body, India located the symbol-using swirl of consciousness. That swirl, chakra five, is only present among living species in the human. This intensity of human consciousness uses art, language, and mathematics to construct our amazing detachments and engagements in living. A few other primates can be taught by humans possible fragments of this intelligence, but a three-year old child has a facility with symbol-using consciousness that no other species can match.

This fifth mode of consciousness is so prominent in human life that we often identify the word “consciousness” with this mode of consciousness and call “instincts” those first four modes of consciousness that we share with the other animals. This limited view of consciousness can result in a demeaning of our emotional consciousness and our multi-sensory-rerun-using consciousness, both of which are very important for our best thinking and living. We may also hold our pain-and-pleasure consciousness in contempt. Even our survival-affirming consciousness can lose its appropriate power in our lives when we attempt to make art, language, and mathematics the whole scope of our conscious aliveness. The first four chakras of consciousness are foundational for our symbol-using human consciousness. Our fifth chakra thinking is weakened when we hold these first four aspects of being conscious in weak regard.

Religion

India has also illuminated for us two more swirls of consciousness— chakras six and seven. Chakra six is located in the center of the forehead, commonly called the third eye consciousness. Therapists often call this ability “the third ear.” It actually has nothing to do with a literal eye or ear. Chakra six has to do with a direct seeing and a hearing by our human consciousness in ways that reach beyond the reach of art, language, and mathematics. Strange as it can seem to the common mind, consciousness can reach into a larger than rational Reality. We sometimes call this swirl of consciousness “intuition.” There is no way to properly understand “religion” if this aspect of consciousness is ignored.

The seventh chakra or swirl of consciousness that India observed was located at the crown of the head. Chakra seven is pictured as the most rapid spin of conscious awareness. We might even say that this swirl is swirling beyond the head, thereby connecting the crowns of the human to the entire cosmos. We find a discussion of this aspect of our human essence in Paul Tillich’s use of the word “Unconditional.” Tillich contrasts our conscious experiences of the Unconditional with our consciousness of conditional realities—realities that are impermanent, like moments, days, human bodies, planets, stars, electromagnetic radiation, feelings, pains, pleasures, thoughts, and impulses—everything that comes into being stays a while and passes back into the abyss.

We can only talk about our relationship with the Unconditional using mythic forms of language. For example, the first verse of the Bible uses a mythic form of human talk. Here is a restatement of that mythic verse in the symbols of Tillich’s vocabulary.

In the beginning was the Unconditional from which all conditional things and processes came to be and continue coming to be.

This is still mythic talk, for saying “In the beginning was” is to speak of a “time” before time began—a time before temporality or impermanence came into process. Any speech about our consciousness being directed toward the Unconditional will be mythic speech. Religion depends on mythic talk—cryptic language of some sort, such as enlightenment, resurrection, virgin birth, and hundreds of other cryptic symbols.

The Antiquity of Religion

Our symbol-using human consciousness began among some ancient upright-walking chimpanzees over a million years ago. Symbol using began with very elemental mental forms that evolved into art, language, and mathematics. We can ask ourselves which of these symbolic forms was the oldest, the most ancient, and in that sense the most basic to the structures of human consciousness.

Many linguists would say that language is older than mathematics and that poetic language is older than prose language. Based on my current intuition as well as a bit of outward data from archeological digs, I intuit that dance and sculpture are even older than poetic language. Just as the more abstract symbols of mathematics formed later than language, so the symbols of language formed later than these pre-linguistic arts. Sculpture is surely older than painting. Dance is surely older than music.

It may be true that those first sculptures were also icons used to direct human consciousness toward the Unconditional. It may also be true that those first dances were also rituals used to direct human consciousness toward the Unconditional. If that be true, then icon and ritual are religious forms that are older than language.

I have just done some informed guesses about very ancient origins. Let us notice some implications of these guess. A special sort of religion is being viewed as more basic to human consciousness than language or mathematics. Ritual, icon, and eventually myth have long been used by hominid species to direct human consciousness toward the Unconditional. Therefore, such Unconditional-oriented religion is a foundation of the human form of consciousness. So we can view religion, when so understood, as a basic practice taking place at or near the origin of the chakra-five uniquely human mode of consciousness.

Therefore, any thoroughgoing reinvigoration of any religion—Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, etc.—requires a deep dive into this essential nature of religion that directs us toward the Unconditional—in order for there to be any valid sort of reinvention or reformation of that religion. This also means that any religion that is validly religious in this Unconditional-referencing manner can be viewed as an example of an essential social process alongside art, language, mathematics, education, politics, and sewage disposal.

Like all manifest social processes, a specific expression of religion can become obsolete or corrupt. But religion, as the directing of human consciousness toward the Unconditional, is an essential social process, a healthy social form that we cannot do without. We have discovered here an axiom of thought for fostering the good of the entire scope of social health. Such “good” religion is foundational for a healthy society.  Religion, so understood, is not an option, but a necessity.

This thread of consideration will be continued in 2020.

The post Cats, Humans, and Religion 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.

The Depth of Love

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

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

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

A Christian Social Ethics for 2018

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Road From Empire to Eco-Democracy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

One of the best stories about penetrating a moralistic personality is the story in which Jesus is having a meal and a discussion with a Pharisee who invited him for a visit and apparently has a modicum of interest in Jesus and his wisdom.  While they are there at the table, a woman comes in and begins washing Jesus’ feet with her tears and drying them with her hair.  The Pharisee recognizes her as a woman of the streets who has probably made her living providing bodily comforts to the male population.  He is repulsed that Jesus is permitting such a woman to touch him.  Jesus recognizes the Pharisee’s feelings and asks to speak to him.  The Pharisee consents, and Jesus tells a story about two men who owe another man a debt.  One of them owes a big debt and the other a small debt.  The lender forgives them both.  Jesus asks the Pharisee, “Which one do you suppose will love the lender the most?”  The Pharisee gives the obvious answer that it is the one who owes the most.  Then Jesus points out that this woman whose sins are very great is showing great love.  He also points out that nothing comparable is being shown him by the Pharisee.  Then Jesus makes this penetrating remark, “Her great love proves that her many sins have been forgiven; where little has been forgiven, little love is shown.” (Luke 7:47)  The Pharisee is left to ponder whether his harshness toward the woman and his lack of love for Jesus indicates layers in his own life that need forgiveness.

Here are some other examples of New Testament stories in which Jesus penetrates someone’s personality with a challenge to that person to access their Spirit Being:

[Jesus] said to another man, “Follow me.”  And he replied, “Let me go and bury my father first.”  But Jesus told him, “Leave the dead to bury their own dead.  You must come away and preach the Kingdom of God.”   (Luke 9:59-60; J. B. Phillips translation)

Jesus sees that this man’s personality includes an attachment to family obligations.  For this man to enter the “Kingdom of Spirit” he must turn loose of that old pattern.  Jesus’ words penetrate his sense of reality, penetrate the box of personality in which he is living.

Another man said to him, “I am going to follow you, Lord, but first let me bid farewell to my people at home.”  But Jesus told him, “Anyone who puts his hand to the plow and then looks behind him is useless for the kingdom of God.” (Luke 9:61-62; J. B. Phillips translation)

In this case, the man wants to make everybody he loves feel good about his decision to be a Spirit person.  This is a violation of the wholeheartedness required for living the Spirit Life.   Jesus penetrates his sense of reality.

And while he was still saying this, a woman in the crowd called out and said, “Oh what a blessing for a woman to have brought you into the world and nursed you.”  But Jesus replied, “Yes, but a far greater blessing to hear the word of God and obey it.”
(Luke 11:27-28; J. B. Phillips translation)

This woman appears to be a helper, an outgoing person who says what she feels to encourage others, but does not appreciate fully the dynamics of her own inner being.  Jesus does not deny the truth of what the woman says about him, nor does he reject her enthusiasm.  Yet he cuts through this woman’s images of subservience and challenges her to be a Spirit woman herself rather than simply an enabler of someone else.  Her flight from Spirit is not her vision of the greatness of Jesus, but her reluctance to see herself as the very same greatness, a potential waiting to be enacted.  If she came to see herself as Jesus saw her, left behind her old images, and received her welcome into the clan of Great Spirit Beings, then Spirit could be said to have penetrated her personality cocoon.

In such stories, individuals in Jesus’ presence are provoked to look beyond their habituated patterns and see the hidden Kingdom, the Spirit Being, the personal essence that is our true human nature.  In such initial experiences of Spirit, one is not asked to demolish personality or to be completely detached from personality or even to stop identifying with one’s personality.  One is asked to simply allow a bit of Spirit into one’s consciousness.   Such is the challenge of the first beatitude:

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. (Matthew 5:3)

This might be reworded to mean:

Blessed are those who experience their profound need,
for they shall find the Commonwealth of Spirit.

Living exclusively in the box of personality sooner or later becomes a desert, lacking moisture, water, juice. Repeating old dry habits over and over ceases to be an alive and vital participation in life. Also, we begin to be more aware of the devilish quality of our own personality. Its addictions, defensiveness, reactive behaviors, violence, meanness, bitterness, and despairs become a never absent pain that haunts our lives that are lived in the box of personality.  Life in this box becomes a meaningless life, a thing of dust, useless worthless dust, like some old discarded something found in an attic, so useless that we might as well be a corpse rotting in the grave. These are examples of that sense of profound need that the first Beatitude calls “blessed.”

Such experiences are blessed because they indicate that the Commonwealth of Spirit is near, that the Kingdom of Full Reality is close by. The box of personality is being penetrated by a larger sense of Reality. This moment is blessed because the Reality that is seeping into our box is a moisture, a refreshment, an innocence, a vitality that we are missing and very much need. We can call this seepage “Awe” or “Spirit,” but whatever we call it, it is something more than living in our box. It means getting in touch with the Mystery, surprise and adventure of our lives

Here is a personal example:  While still in college I attended a lecture by an African American preacher who had written a novel about the life of Jesus. He made it plain that the power and courage of Jesus were possibilities for all human beings. He also made it plain that accepting this simple truth would be costly in terms of one’s acceptability to others. In a private conversation, he chided me that I might not want to pay this price. For some reason, perhaps my own stubbornness, this chiding prompted me to push into the matter even more vigorously. I began to look beyond the box of being a mathematics scholar and teacher acceptable to my parents and expected by my friends. I began to become poor in spirit in the sense that I began to sacrifice my riches of approval by friends and family in order to open to some radical qualities of awareness that most others found foolish and dangerous. But I experienced this rather difficult openness as a blessing, a road to happiness.

Blessed are those who experience their profound need,
for they shall find the Commonwealth of Spirit.

For more discussion of along these lines, consider the essays in:

Unreduced Realism, Course Three:
Steps Toward a Next Christianity
Transfiguring a Religious Tradition

http://www.realisticliving.org/UR3/

The post Spirit Penetration first appeared on Realistic Living.

Reality is my shepherd, so I lack nothing.
This shepherd provides green pastures,
and leads me to peaceful drinking water.
This Ground-of-all-being persistently renews life within me,
and guides me step-by-step on the path of righteous realism.
Even when I walk through a valley dark as death,
I fear nothing, for the Great Shepherd is leading me.

Dear God, my shepherd, when Your staff pushes me
or Your crook holds me back,
I see these actions as my comfort.
Indeed, Oh Final Mystery, You spread a picnic for me,
even in the presence of my enemies.
My head is anointed in Your oil of honor.
My cup of aliveness runs over.

So I say to all of you here listening:
Goodness and love unfailing will attend me,
all the days of my life,
and I shall abide happily within this Enduring Wholeness
my whole life long.

I am convinced that the above understanding of this Psalm is the understanding meant by whoever it was that wrote this Psalm.   Though the original vocabulary was different for this ancient poet of realistic living, I believe that his or her deep awareness about realistic living was the same as the one I am attempting to express.

Jesus was surely familiar with this Psalm.  Indeed, I believe that Jesus added nothing to this Psalm except a full devotion to living it.  Jesus was nothing more than a good Jew in the terms meant by this Psalm.  Such a happily devoted trust of Reality is the basic attitude that could unite Jews and Christians and both Jews and Christians with Muslims.

I mean this seriously; Jesus was nothing more than a good Jew, where “good Jew” means living Psalm 23.  Let me spell out how I think Jesus lived this Psalm.  When his disciples became anxious about how they were going to be fed, Jesus referred them to the sparrows.  “God feeds them,” he pointed out.  “You can buy a dozen sparrows for a quarter.  Don’t you think God values you that much?”

The Sadducees of Jesus’ culture were well-to-do religious leaders who had colluded fully with the Roman Empire in order to maintain their status, wealth, and positions.  Jesus viewed them as dead, unlike Abraham Isaac and Jacob who were still alive.

The Zealots of his time sought to protect the integrity of Judaism with military action.  Jesus rebuked this attitude.  He saw that “God” had invested the Roman Empire with an overwhelming power that could not be defeated at that time.  Here is his mode of rebuke of the Zealot attitude:  “If a Roman soldier ask you to carry his pack for a mile (which he is lawfully permitted to do) carry it, and offer to carry it a second mile.  If he slaps your face, offer him a second cheek.  This is how you stand up to Roman power.  This is what realistic living looks like.”

Jesus also rebuked those Pharisees who sought to exalt themselves over the masses through a detailed obedience to the Jewish rulebooks, in order to be rewarded by Reality in this life and in the final audit of time.  He saw that they were honoring minute rules while ignoring the weightier meanings of the law—the full demands for realism, love, and justice.  He likened them to straining gnats out of their soup, while swallowing camels.

Jesus was drawn to the John-the-Baptist movement of his time.  John saw that the core issue toward being realistic in that sick culture was acts of repentance.  Come to the river and have water pour on your head as a public symbol of your departure from unrealistic foolishness and for a renewal of your dedication to realism.  Jesus joined those who did this.

All these acts of Jesus illustrate what living Psalm 23 looks like.  And the Jesus story about Psalm-23 living had an even deeper meaning.  When John got his head chopped off, Jesus, so the story goes, was led by the spirit into the desert for a 40-day fast.  After being temped by the key unrealistic options faced by a powerfully awake person, Jesus began his own movement, knowing full well that the outcome that was met by John would be met by him as well.

The end of the Jesus story spelled out, for those who remembered it and lived it, a seemingly strange paradox.  Living the Psalm 23 means dying to all unrealism in spite of the fact that such living is costly.  Those who are dedicated to unrealism are not going to tolerate such living.  Nevertheless, this is where the beautiful life is to be found.  Such living is the resurrection from all death, despair, and daily foolishness.  Living that complete trust in Reality and in lived realism (expressed in Psalm 23) is the best-case scenario for your life, whatever it costs you.  So let us read the above Psalm once again.

The post The Cost of Realism first appeared on Realistic Living.

Today, in this second decade of the 21st century, many people have no interest, positively or negatively, in these old Christian symbols. If there is some relevant meaning in these old symbols, they don’t care. They even fear that finding some relevant meaning in this confused heritage will justify carrying on with the oppressive forms of Christianity that they have known and now wish to thoroughly avoid. Some of these folk have given up on religion of any sort. Why have a religious practice at all? What good is it? Who needs It? Some of these folk have given up on Christianity, but have moved on to a Buddhist practice or an Islamic practice or a Pagan practice or some other religious practice that they much prefer. Or perhaps some fresh, new therapeutic community or scientific discipline seems to help them well enough to not need a religion.

This new situation for Christian witnessing means at least these three things:

(1) Our presentation of Christianity has to be thoroughgoing in its separation from the old oppressive forms that people rightly dismiss and perhaps hate and fear.

(2) And we need to admit that our renewed Christianity is a finite practice alongside other finite practices of religion, none of which have dropped down from Eternity, but all of which have been created by limited human beings.

(3) At the same time, we need a contemporary vision of Eternity as a profound human experience that all good religions came into being, and stills come into being, to assist us to access. This experience of profound humanness needs to be at the heart of our interreligious dialogues and acts of interreligious cooperation. This experience of profound humanness also needs to be the foundation in Truth that guides us in discerning good religion from bad. All this means walking a sort of razor’s edge between falling back into oppressive dogma on the one hand and on the other hand falling forward into a thoroughgoing relativism that holds that any religious perspective or practice as just as good as any other, leaving us with no serious sense of religious validity.

In this Realistic Living Pointers I want to share some helpful insight that pertain to this third quality of a relevant Christian witness. I will start with this poem:

The temporal has a past and a future,
but no present.
The present is only a passing away,
a goodbye to an impermanence.
The present is only a coming to be,
a hello to what is coming into being
and will hence be going away.

In the present of temporality
there is no resting place,
no “IS,” no “Here I am.”
It is all coming and going.
It is all hello and goodbye.

And there is no space at all
between hello and goodbye.
We can image a space like today,
or this hour, or this year,
but these are merely imaginings of our mind,
not experiences of our body, gut, and awareness.
In our real, every-moment experience
of the temporal realm,
it is never Now!

Inescapable Eternality

Eternality is to be found in that infinitesimal nothingness of the present instant. Strange as it seems to our temporal-based minds, we can jump into that present instant and dwell there. Buddhist mediation is exactly that. As we concentrate our consciousness on the incoming and outgoing breath, we are able to notice consciousness itself sitting in its lasting “place” observing all sounds, all feelings, all thoughts, everything. Christian contemplation is also a jump into the lastingness of that Eternal Now. As we recall the past and anticipate the future, notice others and notice our own self, we are also able to notice consciousness itself, sitting in its lasting “place” observing all things. Each of the major world religions manifests awareness of this strange human capacity for being in the Now as some sort of resting place, as a place to BE between the ever-impending future and the ever-gobbling past.

The term “Eternal Now” found a place in the writings of Paul Tillich. Under that title, Tillich published a whole book of sermons on Biblical passages. Let us further explore in our own awareness what this strange paradoxical term “Eternal Now” can mean for us. This Now has no past and no future; it just IS. So stable is this IS that humans have been reluctant to believe that our IS will ever become IS NOT. Humans have projected a reincarnation of this IS, or a resurrection of our body and its IS in a next eon of time, or the continuance of this IS in a Spirit realm of heavenly bliss, or perhaps everlasting despair. That our IS will become NOT with the death of our body is altogether likely; nevertheless, these ancient projections of an “after-death-IS” witness to the Now experience in our current lives of an Eternality to which we are inescapably related.

For the rest of the essay from which the above excerpt it taken, click:

http://www.realisticliving.org/UR3/3TimeEternity.pdf

And for a ten-session course on Christians, Who Are We?
with course overview, ten essays, ten lesson plans for teaching those ten essays,
plus an eleventh essay for further reading, click:

http://www.realisticliving.org/UR1/

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