Ginger56’s Weblog

As a self-designated “faithful heretic,” amid my ongoing conflicts, I can continue attending church though so often I end up in battle with the saints and the angels because there are important areas of agreement. In my sermon notes there are frequently panicked comments about a sermon on judgement or Jesus’ exclusive divinity that morph into a kind of surrender when it comes down (as it did in fact today) to the “believer’s” accepting his or her inadequacy and surrendering to God’s author-ity.

I began today before church with some reading in Andrew Harvey’s Son of Man—which attempts to rescue Christ from the death-grip of Jesus-ism. A contemporary heretic of the best (or worst) kind, Harvey declares that Jesus never claimed divinity and that he aimed not to establish but to overthrow all religions. At the same time, Harvey celebrates the unconditional universal love of creator / creation for—itself / itselves, declaring that true Christianity—in the mystical tradition of William Blake and Julian of Norwich—begins with an acknowledgment of the soul’s essential oneness with God.

I felt a little guilty walking into church with this sacrilege ringing in my heart and prepared myself to consume second Corinthians so I could ignore the preaching I knew would focus on Jesus as singular savior and necessarily crucified, etc, etc, etc. I wasn’t completely wrong. the preacher did indeed echo a line I’ve heard before when I questioned whether Jesus is the only path: “Why did he have to die” if not to save us (me, you, everyone) from sin? That is, if other paths will work, why is this one there at all (I guess that’s a standard argument against any new plan: but the old one works fine. But this one seeks to be axiomatic.)

My answer is generally, maybe he didn’t “have to”—not in the sense of the choreographed (a.k.a. “purpose driven”) creation, which so distresses me with its lack of free will and surprise. Maybe he was led to because he had reached a point where self-sacrifice allowed him to accomplish two great things: first, to free himself for true union with the greater self—the Christ-soul, the Atman; and second to demonstrate that radical surrender to his followers.

But in spite of that (endlessly repeated) argument, I found myself completely at peace with several points Alex made and feeling that we’re headed to the same place even though his (and my fellow churchgoers’) path repudiates all other paths as leading to it. Here’s what I found I agreed with.

One, he said that the nakedness of Adam and Eve was not (or not exclusively) a lack of clothing but a complete openness between them and the creator: a mutual consciousness, if you will, a shared psyche. Humanity’s “natural” state is communion with the divine.

He also said that our own (rational) efforts to unite with God are fraught with failure and, ultimately, doomed. We must surrender and let the power of God / the universe wash through us. That power and awareness, which I (and maybe both of us) call Christ, leads us (as the Psalm says) beside still waters and restores our souls. As lilies of the field, we simply awaken to the eternal presence of divinity with and within us and, letting go of our petty claims to knowledge, wisdom and control, are led toward the essence of ourselves—or rediscover it. That enduring essence, bound up as it is with things eternal, outlasts this existence and buffers us against the trials we face—though it does not relieve us of the duty to address those trials when they cause other creatures / beings to suffer. (This remains, I believe, Christianity’s great contribution to sacred tradition: that relieving suffering of fellow beings and, generally, action in the world are part and parcel of the redeemed, enlightened, saved spirit. That willingness to sacrifice for the good of the whole is both a catalyst to and a fruit of spiritual maturity. Unless you’re doing some of that you’re probably not far enough beyond your own ego.)

We can surrender to and become like “God” because we are, first and foremost, “children” of “God.” This means we are by definition lovable—because (in the most central tenet—I think—of any Christian theology) God is love and loves unstintingly. Harvey extends this to plants, rocks, giraffes and fireflies. My church friends probably stop with people, but the essential message, which is naturally for people, remains the same. As offspring of the heavenly (chips off the old block), we can become like God, like Christ. We are of the same nature and stock, “heirs” as Paul says.

Thus redeemed by surrender to Christ (not by Jesus per se) we take up our staffs (and crosses) and follow because the journey leads to reunion—with the family, with the originator, with what we always were.

Sin is separation and blindness. We are separate from God not because we do what is wrong but because we cannot do what is right outside of recognizing that our actions and behaviors originate in God and are redeemed by definition if we simply acknowledge that. Like the prodigal son, just by coming home we receive blessing. It’s the relationship—the identification, even the identity—that matters not what we do.

Except that, once returned to that “nakedness” we must redeem the world. For God’s love mandates that. Other laws, divine or otherwise, are stand-ins for the law of love. As Jesus said, “Love God” and “love your neighbor” “on these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” That’s all it’s about: Love.

And on that, my church friends and I most emphatically agree.

Tuesday morning, NPR ran a creepily light-hearted feature on bioengineering students cloning new strains (that is, essentially, new species or at least sub-species) of E.Coli. In particular, they were adding new genes to change the odor. The students’ cavalier attitude—“what fun! Now they smell like banana!”—expressed itself in the end (and I quote) as, “we’re just making stuff,” emphasis firmly on “stuff.”

At that point, I realized that while I shuffle through ancient arguments about intangibles like God, these folks are out there literally redefining—reinventing—life itself, becoming agents of evolution and assuring that evolution will now serve (or try to serve) human whims.

But in the long run it may fail to serve human interests.

The consequence of this school-child tampering?

A loss of “life”. Once we marveled at and called it miraculous. Something even the most knowledgeable alchemist could not bestow upon a rock, no matter how humanly shaped. Life the “Chi,” the anima, the spirit. Life is now, simply, “stuff.” We can no longer distinguish its value or miracle from that of base metal.

So as science fiction has warned us since the early 1800s, we’re playing with dangerous fires. But where the nineteenth century read Mary Shelley’s dream of an ill-treated patchwork man, we draw our stories from the morning news. Truly, we are not far from the cyborgs and androids, the odd performing hybrid “toy” creatures of Blade Runner. Nor, it seems, from the callous disregard that characterizes the corporate engineers of those fictional societies in whose radically materialist eyes humans, too, are merely cogs, functioning or not, in the system. Harrison Ford barely has a better life than his condemned, blond paramour. When he fails to perform for the state, a price falls on his head as well. Life, it’s just “stuff” after all.

Apparently we pay no heed to the moral warnings embedded in those tales.

Tragically, the young people performing these Frankensteinian pyrotechnics were completely unaware of their power or any consequences other than, it seems, sweeter smelling excrement. (We already have women buying pills that virtually eliminate their gendered rhythms. Imagine the thrill of purchasing a kit that will forever eliminate your need for bottled bathroom fragrance.)

Someone has to stand up for the sacred spark in life—for freedom as a value and a right that undergirds all progress. As elusive and indefinite as God, it is sacred both to God and to evolution. Without freedom to mutate as they will, living organisms will be more than ever in thrall to the dangerous humans. And like any monopolistic autocracy, the human empire will visit havoc on the order of the universe–or at least the little corner of it we call the earth.

This is a moment to rethink all assumptions. Some will conclude that those intangible, comprehensive categories—life, for instance—never had any more absolute value than the concept of God or transcendance. They will point to better smelling e.coli—potentially better smelling excrement—as a wonderful commodity. Never mind that foul smells inform us—warn us, often, of poisons and danger. Within that new world order human value will be challenged by its own . Our value may plummet with the value of the “stuff” we are made on. And the seemingly innocent pleasures we derive may trigger destructive consequences as the universe—all that other “stuff”— seeks equilibrium.

“Free the E. Coli” seems an absurdist mantra, but I’m thinking of printing it on a t-shirt.

This conversation began for me in a station wagon forty years ago. I was sixteen or so, on my way with “The Group” (a collection of self-declared—and real—misfits on whose outskirts I lingered) to a weekend retreat at the Episcopal campground 50 miles south of Indianapolis where I grew up. Though I’ve forgotten his name, I idolized the young curate who chaperoned us. The rest of the party were friends in the high style of high school soap opera, thriving on strife and stoking their depression and alienation at every opportunity. They wrote poetry, talked about Existentialism, hung-out at each other’s houses bewailing their lot. I wrote poetry, too, but I was undeniably the more conventional, the middle of the roader and more inclined to fit in—or try to.

On the hour drive along two-lane, farm country roads, talk turned, somehow, to absolute and relative truth. A favorite intellectual adversary (Bill, are you listening?) had recently shocked me by declaring, “There are no absolutes.” Brightest and most intellectually mature of all the bright intellectual crowd, he may, even at that age, have read some Nietzsche; regardless, he had read me perfectly and recognized a comment that would spark me to passionate dispute.

I was honestly disturbed—perhaps experiencing what I learned years later to call “aporia,” a dizzying sense that reality had suddenly ruptured beneath me and I was falling through a continental divide into outer space. Take no prisoners relativism still bothers me, but at least now I understand the concept that founds such a radical—and absolute—statement.

So I asked my recently ordained chaperone if there were absolutes and, not missing a beat he replied, “Of course there are.” Coming from him, at the time, this was answer enough.

Like most post-modern philosophies, relativism is fraught with paradox. For Catholicism and other orthodoxies, things go easier. “Absolutely no relativity” leaves no logical wiggle room. But “absolutely only relativism” immediately undermines its own pronouncements, by being, itself an absolute. Unfortunately this clever parlor game entertains mostly the reactionary and terrified orthodox, who like a scholar who’s just found a single spelling mistake in his rival’s dissertation, hold this one kink as disproof of an entire, sophisticated, often unarguable observation of fact. Anyone living in this world without hypocrisy has encountered, I’d venture, at least one instance where “absolute rightness” seemed impossible to determine or when a sudden exception dashed a previously unquestioned and unqualified assertion: an abortion that saved a woman’s life, a theft of bread to feed the hungry, a lie that gentled a hurtful truth, an adulterous affair that saved a despairing life, a war that seems just (at least to some). . . Depending on the commandments you start with, you can make your own list.

At church and in Christianity generally, people talk a lot about “God’s will” and, lately, discovering “God’s purpose” for one’s life. I have great trouble with the latter, as I decline to regard my life as a B-grade movie pre-ordained and edited, now screened without preview so that I, its audience rather than its protagonist, am the only one who doesn’t know how I turn out. I am said to have free will but in fact, as God foreknows the choices I will make, it hardly seems to merit the term “free.” It’s like being in a first person shooter where suddenly the machine takes over and all you can do is cling to the controls and marvel (or recoil in horror). I don’t want to be God’s errand girl, with the entire “purpose” of my life a simple to do list for the almighty.

Still, I want to be and act in harmony with that will. I have no argument with the larger dimension of divine purpose, if by that we mean, quite simply, what God would prefer. I’m down with real free-will and undetermined futures. And, though it opens quite a can of worms, I’m down with the will of God. And troubled by the question of whether it is absolute—in all or part.

Unfortunately, being finite creatures we can’t always absolutely or immediately ascertain what precisely is the most just, most right configuration of a specific situation. In fact, philosophically as well as literally, “just” and “right” are more like directions, as in “to the right”, than fixed locations. Preferences. In other words, it’s relative.

Two things seem to happen if this is true (maybe more, but these are a good start): First, God’s Will sounds a lot like the Dao. The path and our direction on it trump the indeterminate destination as proof of our “righteousness.” And that correct directionality is itself relative to where we began—kind of like Mecca is a different direction from wherever you are and, if we’re honest, Mecca itself is spinning in orbit on earth and around the sun—not fixed at all. Second, the “righteous” have no “right” of self-righteousness. As Jesus insisted, they had better look to their own sins: take the beams from their eyes and drop their stones. Directionality shifts, almost literally with the tides. The rightness of an action shifts as other beings—sentient, conscious and inert—adjust, take action and move in a direction of their own, whether with or against what from your perspective looks best at the moment. The truth of chaos, the unpredictability of phenomena, derives from their interconnectedness. So acknowledging connection—which we Christians call surrender to love—is the origin of ethical behavior.

So, are there absolutes? If not, can we have righteousness—or even rightness or ethics without them? In avoiding absolutes, I would assert just one. It comes from the old testament. It’s written into many hymns, here it is in the lyrics of one of my favorites:

“What does our god require of you? To seek justice, to love kindness, to walk humbly with your God.”

In accordance with that absolute, we make our relative way. I think that’s probably what my newly collared young cleric meant. It makes me happy to think I’m still down with his viewpoint as well.

Superbowl Sunday. I began with coffee and reading from Mechtilde of Magdeburg. A fourteenth century nun, she encountered God as her lover, her bridegroom. She never saw a football game, probably rarely left the walls of the convent, but her spirit ventured far into mystic fields.

After reading her rapturous account of meeting god as a “naked” soul–stripped even of chastity and humility, I did a few sit-ups, dressed and went to church. During the service, I focused on prayers for the world. Country by country I saw them on the map and considered what I knew of its troubles and needs from our anglocentric, Americo-centric media. I lost myself in images of their shapes as I’ve memorized them. I found I knew quite a lot about some regions and also that there are gaps, big gaps for certain whole regions (Mongolia? who rules there? China? Who lives there? What happens there? Bolivia? Fifty years (or more?) after Che Guevara, who controls that country? What is their government? Their exports? So much of which we know so little.) But I journeyed back across time, where Australia was sleeping, no doubt, and somewhere a new day had begun.

After that immersion in the spirit and in the spirit’s efforts at connection, I shrugged through the day, lazy, accomplishing little, napping a bit, and anticipating a Superbowl party this evening.

What sean links those aspects of my Self? Is that worldly focus unworthy of the spirit? Does that party–with people who, mostly, make almost no effort at spiritual concsiousness–negate those morning meditations and prayers? Even the concern reflects the egoism of an unelightened being.

A married woman, I will never seek Christ as my paramour. In fact, I struggle to personify God, let alone develop a “personal” relationship. So I haven’t arrived, but the power of prayer (in which I believe) somewhat redeems the early hours. Even in the later ones, those moments hold their sway.

Maybe Mechtild’s influence can follow me to the television, into the very worldly atmosphere of wine and chips, beer and shouting, betting and winning and losing.

Maybe.