Closing Thoughts Heading Into The Election

In closing his speech in Georgia tonight, Former President Obama pointed us in the direction that I, too, have been feeling. He implored the crowd to reclaim our once-held decency and honor, and to restore the greatness we once shared, the values that made us a beacon of freedom and a light of hope to the world. Values and decency in the United States lie in broken shards scattered across the land.  It is like the Grinch knocked over our Christmas tree, scattering broken ornaments across the room. The irony is that something like this happened years ago at the beginning of our demise. Made-up claims arose about "liberals making Merry Christmas illegal." Starbucks got tremendous backlash for selling Christmas coffees in cups that said, "Happy Holidays" instead of Merry Christmas.  It expanded like hot air does, stoked by invisible hands manipulating grievance, blaming immigrants & "welfare queens" for everyone's problems. And that same invisible hand, now more obviously held by multi-millionaires, is still working to inflame social media landscapes with recriminations that keep us divided and blind to The Greatest Heist ever pulled. Everyone can point blame, and while we're bickering, the Organ Grinder and his monkeys are robbing us all blind and selling us out to old enemies, stock brokers, and the highest bidder. 

We Americans are far worse off than we have been in many decades. Noble values like generosity, compassion, kindness, neighborliness, compromise, and "leaving nobody behind" have fallen off a cliff. In their place have come avarice, racism, cruelty, untruthful suspicions, violence, and the full-on robbery of our federal treasury. We can't go on like this -- at least, it's not where I want to live, and it's not a country I think is right to leave to future generations to "clean up."  

The first question may be: does anyone still cherish the concept of virtues? Assuming the answer is "yes."  What makes them so difficult to achieve in this social climate? Is it the unscrupulous people who have weaseled their way into political office?  (They didn't get there without a whole lot of our help.)  Is money really the root of all the evil that is gobbling up our souls? Just how is it with your soul?

What does your soul need?  For whom/what would your soul vote? The Republican Party for most of the past 10 years has almost universally represented itself as uncaring and focused only on its power and money.  To be fair, some Democrats also might be working that angle.  The very clear reality staring us down is that the slide away from all virtue and honor has been dramatic in the past 2 years, and if we voters don't vote for change, we will certainly all experience the worst that can happen.  Getting our honor back is already going to be a major undertaking that may take years.  The Lord only knows how long or how bad it gets if we don't change direction now.  

In my mind, the direction toward change is clear.  Virtues are the best building blocks possible for a society. Lack of them is bad for everyone. My advice to all reading this is to elbow your conscience and ask yourself what your faith tells you is right. Because right and wrong are the two choices we all have in front of us. .  

Finding God

I was listening last week to some professionals talking about trauma and how to treat/deal with it.  Gabor Maté, one of the experts, spoke about the power our emotions have on our physical health. According to Maté, a major factor in physical maladies is the presence of all kinds of emotional trauma at play under the surface.  Often that trauma may not be clearly remembered.  To deny or gloss over the emotional aspects of trauma will miss a healing pathway available for the physical breakdown in the organ systems of the body. Like a leaking pipe in one's house that is ignored for a long time, it results in greater damage.

Christianity evolved from a Middle Eastern man, Jesus, who met people on an emotional plane.  Everyday people came to him with physical problems - leprosy, blindness, lameness, even death that were fraught with emotional pain in their lives.  But on the religious side, he faced defensive thinking heads. Jesus healed the emotional & physical hurts in people, but the religious systems diverted the power and influence of that healing into centuries-long cognitive exercises in proper head knowledge. The Church adopted sanctified prescriptions for the "right" way to view God. This led to faith being dominated by "right doctrine" and far less on relevant experience.  Our spiritual lives were pressed into rational explanations rather than who we experienced God to be. 

This reality, alongside Maté's association of physical suffering tied to buried emotional trauma, sent me reassessing how I know who God is.  Who is God?  God is not in creeds or proclaimed doctrine: "I believe in God the Father..." way. But maybe in the "I met God today on the street in the tears of a child" way. One is head knowledge assent.  The other is a living emotional presence. I have known God much more intimately through feelings -- compassion, empathy, sensitivity, and concern.  That's the emotional level that has real connection to the heart - the central organ necessary for life. I posit the heart is central not only to living our physical lives, but to our ability to feel the real touch of God. Feeling our way into God brings us a much stronger "near presence" experience and possibly a regenerative healing spiritual balance to our physicality. If God is, in fact, love, then experiencing love would be the best way to live in God and find union. 

Our Human Predicament - Creation Gone Awry

 The last time our creation went as badly awry as it is at present was way back in the mists of mystery and myth in the story of The Flood -- the one with Noah and his fine ark. Genesis 5:5-7 spells out the problem (somewhat):

"When the Lord saw how wicked everyone on earth was and how evil their thoughts were all the time, God was sorry that humans had ever been made or put upon the earth.  God was so filled with regret that God said, "I will wipe out these people I have created, and also the animals and birds, because I am sorry that I made any of them."

Of course, the short riff of the story is that Noah found favor, built the ark as instructed, sailed the seas of destruction, and then landed with all the pairs of reinhabitants to start a new chapter for humanity (and planet Earth).  God placed the rainbow in the skies as the seal of the covenant never to do that again. 

The majority opinion in mainstream Christianity is that this is a teaching myth, shared by other religions. If so, what lesson should we learn? Maybe that humanity is capable of mucking up the works so badly that there's nothing to do but start over? Which brings us to the present. Are we, as a planet, again at this soon-to-be crossroads? Climate scientists say yes. 

The human predicament is still as it always has been: when we're good- spiritually aware- we can be very good, but when we're bad, it can be very bad. The continuance of the earth depends on a healthy balance between the good and the bad.  Ideally, we will lean in favor of the good.  But in the United States, the current situation is placing "good" on very shaky ground. The driver for this trend appears to be the cynical attitude of the ultra-rich to strip as much from the Earth for themselves as possible. Therein lies the true predicament: a few with over-inflated privilege robbing the whole. Yet we all do it in our own self-centered ways. The predicament grows terminal as each individual starts to assert a right to have and defend what they consider precious. All creation becomes a zoo of silos - each one grabbing onto and storing a hunk of Creation as their very own.  The sole focus of living becomes acquiring and holding tightly to each one's little kingdom. The quibbling, petty physicality of this predicament erases the glue that holds it all together - the spiritual - the Source. Is there an option for saving creation from this foolish myopia that averts the pending utter destruction?

As innumerable sages from all ages and faiths have declared: Return to the Source. The Source is the Wisdom that guides our steps.  It is the collective Care for neighbor.  It is the Gentleness with which we walk the Earth. It is the Union created by holding onto the lessons of past generations, ever conscious of the generations to come. Humans crave what's theirs. They crave simple solutions, e.g., the barrel of a gun.  They seek the easiest answers to the most complicated - answers that usually only serve the few.

Yet, we do not serve only our own kind or just the people next to us. We are woven into a cosmic expanse that transcends time and place. The eons and cosmos are One. Those who have gone before are still inescapably joined to us. They still pray with us to the same Source.  The Vision is that even as Creation continues to expand, it is eternally held tightly in the Love that first brought the Light. 

The remedy to a Flood-type apocalypse wrought by our futile human predicament is to see the forest.  We exist not as individual trees. We're gathered by the Architect of Creation, glued into an evolving beauty that came before we were born into it and lasts as an eternal present moment of evolutionary Hope, where we get to the future together as the Old Testament story of the Promised Land foretold. 

This is our future should we choose to accept it. Staying in this wilderness, worshipping the Golden Calf, comes to naught.