Wayside Pulpit

to be or not to be

We must have an identity. It is something that is pushed on us in American society. This identity is how the world knows us, and it is the filter through which we see the world. Our identity is a place to hang our hats; without who we are, who would we be?

So much in our lives is about trying to maintain, create or get rid of an identity. Being a runner is a great thing until you damage a knee and realize that you may never run again. The grief from losing this identity is profound.

You are a smoker and know you shouldn’t be. It’s bad for you, for the kids in your household and it costs a fortune. You constantly beat yourself up for smoking. You think often how you should quit. You even wish, right as you are enjoying a cigarette, that you didn’t smoke. You hate yourself for being a smoker at all.

The woman down your street really wants to be a doctor. She’s been thinking about being a doctor since she was ten. Yet, right now, she’s at home with four kids and no money. She helps her kids with their homework, but isn’t really completely there. Her mind is on what she didn’t do with her life, what she wishes she could do, what she believes will make her happy.

As we search to become something, as we hold on to what we are, as we try to push what we don’t like about ourselves away, we lose something so precious. We lose the present moment. We lose everything about right now. We become so attached to who we are that we forgot everything else about ourselves. We hate something we do and so we imagine what it will be like when we no longer do it. We dislike our lives so we live in a fantasy about what it might be, someday.

Can you, right now, just be who you are? Can you do it without judgment, without hoping, dreaming, wanting to be something else? If you can, even for a moment, you’ll get a taste of paradise.

The Jesus Process

I was at a meeting some time ago and I listened to a woman talk about a problem she was having with her spiritual practice. It seems that she had been studying the writings of a particular man and had found his teachings meaningful. So, after only reading what he had written for a number of years, she decided to attend a spiritual retreat that he was conducting. She found him irritating, non-enlightened and far from the spiritual guru that she had grown to love over the years. Meeting the man in person completely destroyed, for her, his teachings. He was no longer a person she felt she could look up to, or learn from.

I see how this happens in American society, we can’t separate the ideas from the personality. A dualistic view of the world doesn’t give the majority of us much practice living in the grey areas of life. Someone is either good or they are bad, and we base much of this either/or choice on personality and behavior. Personality rules, behavior rules. The content of who we are is what makes us worthy or unworthy.

Yet, content is completely subjective, and more often than not, it is created by our own projection of our own selves. We see irritation in the same place that we cause irritation. We see non-enlightenment from the place of non-enlightenment within ourselves. We create the content, therefore the only way to judge the content is to judge ourselves.

Could we, perhaps, begin to relate to others as process, rather content? Could we see “others” as the meeting of both them and us; that unique space that happens in every encounter that shows that we are not separate beings. My content is not different from your content. Together we are process.

An intriguing question for me, what if we began to relate to Jesus as process, rather than content? What if the complicated Christian story isn’t the focus? Who does Jesus become if he is no longer a man, a martyr, a savior, the son of God, the product of the virgin birth – really anything that has become the content of a self-differentiated person? Jesus becomes the process that occurs when the teachings that are attributed to him encounter an “other.”

Anger of God

I recently received a book from a friend who also understands himself to be Christian. However, the structure of our faiths is so vastly different, I feel sometimes as if we belong to two distinctly different religions. The book he sent me, "After Darkness, Light: Essays in Honor of R.C. Sproul," edited by R.C. Sproul Jr., is a book that reviews and highlights some of the theological hallmarks of the Protestant Reformation.

The first essay called, "Total Depravity," is focused on the depraved nature of humankind and the wrath of God as a result of this nature. Sproul is quoted as saying, "Man is very, very bad and God is very, very mad." As far as poetic catchiness it has potential, but for its theological merit, I can only sigh in disagreement and fatigue. This image of a vengeful and angry God is harmful to a world that is desperately in need of a compassionate God.

I have also been reading, "Anger," by Thich Nhat Hanh. In it he says, "We nourish our anger . . . with what we consume with our eyes, ears, and consciousness." According to Hanh, the anger in movies, books, television, even the food we eat, causes us to embody anger more deeply. As a result we suffer more because our angry natures are strengthen and reinforced. In the case of God then, the theological idea of an angry God can only perpetuate our own anger toward ourselves and each other.

What kind of people can we become if our God is filled with anger? How can we learn to love each other, to work for peace, to bring compassionate awareness to our lives, if the ultimate divine model we have is filled with wrath? If we become the anger that surrounds us, then a God of wrath helps to make us wrathful people.

The True Story

My seven year old daughter just returned from a week at summer camp. She, and the other children her age, were told the story of Smokey Bear and given a lesson in wilderness fire safety. In her stack of stuff that she brought home was a comic book titled, "The True Story of Smokey Bear." The title gave me pause because I know there is never just one true story about anything.

History is filled with true stories, but each true story, when examined from a variety of different angles begins to reveal all sorts of discrepancies. Therefore, I know that there can never be one true way to see anything in both the past and the present. Each of us brings a different set of lenses and perspectives to our experiences of history and our daily lives. Reality, or what is true, is like light shining through a prism and reflecting colors on a wall.

This is one of the reasons that I believe that the Bible is not the Word of God. It is, in all its beauty and complexity, a collection of dancing prism lights reflecting years of attempts to understand the world theologically. It is also not just a, "collection of stories," rather it is a set of tales, poetry, legal writings, satire and even epics, each influenced by spirituality, history and political maneuverings. The bible is living document; it is continually recreated as each generation of Christians reinterpret and make the text their own.

I believe the Bible, like many books, provides clues as to how our souls can become closer to God, humanity and the creation that supports us all. Yet, the Bible’s clues are more directed to who we are, rather than to who God is. Once we get this, the truth becomes clear, that the story painted by Christianity is not there to just exult God, Christ or Jesus. Rather it is there to provide clues on how we can become more compassionate and actualized human beings.

Know News

I haven't had television in years, so TV has not be a news source for me. However, I have always been quite the radio junkie; listening to everything from conservative talk radio to the far left liberal stations in the San Francisco Bay Area. While I was in Europe this summer I had no radios or newspapers, no way to really know what was happening in the world and, interestingly, after a few days I no longer cared. As a result, I made the decision to not listen or read the news for at least month, maybe more. I want to see what it is like not to "know" about the "world" as it given in the "news."

I thought that my life might get smaller if I didn't know what was going on in the media. However, just the opposite has happened. There is no news to fight against, to worry about, to talk to friends about, to obsess about. Instead that space is now empty and free to be used for creativity, ideas, projects and conversing with people on a completely new level. I think if the gunk goes away there is so much more bandwidth for the spiritual, for the divine to move within us, and for us to have access to that power.

I've also noticed a decrease in my fear and an increase in my hopefulness. No longer is the world as scary as it was. I no longer know how many drive by shootings happened in my neighborhood or the possibility of interest rates increasing again at months end. It just doesn't matter anymore. I look at the sky and I don't worry that it will fall. It might, but then it might not. So, I'll plant some flowers anyways and worry about it only if the pieces start landing in the driveway.

A sort of disquieting peace has settled over me. Disquieting because the space left by all that news has forced me to be alone with myself. Here in the United States most of us don't spend time alone, working, living, driving and breathing without the hum of talking heads over our shoulders. When the talking heads are gone it is only myself that I must turn to, which is a strange and disconcerting experience.

Projecting God

We are conditioned to look outside of ourselves for answers. We attend training sessions, buy self-help books, and listen to the news on the radio. We think that the answers to what we should be, how we should act and what is really happening in the world are outside of our knowing, outside of our expertise. So, we turn to experts; authors, psychologists, religious leaders, politicians and even our favorite bloggers, looking for answers to those things that we cannot explain by ourselves.

This conditioned response to look outward, makes it all the more difficult to grasp that God is within us, not outside (In fact, I'm not even sure if there is an inside/outside, but that is for another discussion). We don't need to go find God in a church, in nature, in music, in the bible, or in our favorite spiritual anthology. It isn't that God is NOT in these places, it is that we don't need to go anywhere then right where we are to find God.

If we find God in a church, it is because we are projecting our inherent Godness into the experience of church. If we find God climbing through wildflowers in the mountains, or dancing at our favorite club, it is because we have brought God with us. God is where we are, not because of the nature of God, but because we hold God in our centers.

Conditioning presses us outward to find God, but God calls from within. We give God a window, a door, a space to enter the world. This is our gift to God.