Twisted

Okay, I can't be serious all of the time. From the twisted mind of yours truly comes the following observation on the bleakest of Monday's on the NYSE: I was looking at the big board listings on CNBC (all red down arrows) and noted with a giggle that turned into a raucous belly laugh (or is it gallows humor) that aside from the safe haven of gold which soared above the $900 mark, the only stock that went up today as the Dow fell 777 points was Campbell's Soups!!

I looked for Kraft Macaroni & Cheese but it isn't a stock symbol.

It's All Good

I have been haunted by memories of late. I guess when one is approaching a full six decades there's a lot the inner haunter has to choose from. But don't hear that as a bad or a good - it just is what is happening. In fact, that is the problem: what is showing up in retrospect is how what seemed good, wasn't (or may have been) and what was a horror has become the foundation of a towering strength today. So these reviews are more like movie watching - scary scenes and fun scenes but both just some screen event with no real power over me anymore. The take-away here is that each event held within it the power to be positive or negative depending on how I chose then or see it now.

The Greeks had a word for spirit, daemonae (my Greek is 40 years old so sue me if it's spelled wrong), which was not just the demonic (evil) as it is known today. It was actually the force within that could be good (rightly used) or bad (improperly used). It was the root of happiness (eudaemonika) as well. I think they nailed that one. Life is like that - each moment is rife with the power of good and bad. However I see it, however I choose, it becomes that. Moreover, after the fact, it still maintains that power to morph from good to bad or bad to good. And, think I, if that is so of life, is it not also true of my experience of god? My belief in god (should you not have read others of these blogs of mine - god is a word of convenience but not to be confused with the bearded, robed, grandfatherish thing of lore) is that god is in through and a part of all life and movement throughout the cosmos - and that includes me and my tiny little corner. God holds that same daemonic power - the source of joy and the fear of destruction (remember, you and I can be taken at anytime). What if god were not good or bad (those are human terms), what if god just was/is; all powerful, meaning just that - the power to source everything and be channeled to good or bad?

Then that puts the responsibility squarely on me to choose (right and wrong) and to interpret the past (good and bad). Thanks god! It would be so much simpler if the rules were just spelled out, I mean beyond the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule. But of course that is impossible - 6 billion people times a lifetime of living an infinite number of moment-by-moment choices - it would not be possible to write the rule book for that. Se we - I - have to think and choose, and who is to say what is good or bad? Life is just rich - filled with the spirit of it all, with the daemonic, the yin and yang of all-in-one richness.

Yesterday I got a note from a friend of long ago - someone who in the good and bad of it all I thought I had hurt. In telling her life story to her 18 year old, she had reflected warmly about our years together. Well - there you go! It's like Glenda asked, "Are you a good witch or a bad witch?" I dunno - which witch is which? I guess to me it's all good!

Theology of Words

I don't have the words right yet to deal with what is tumbling around inside me. I am in this class with a magnificent professor - brilliant and pedigreed - and of course I find myself debating with him in class. It is sport and my own unique way of learning (if I can dialog with him the words and concepts have a better shot of sticking in with the cobwebs inside my cranium). And then it happens: this brilliant man says something that leads me to think that what he calls theology - a legacy of concepts from Niebuhr to Tillich to Stackhouse - a sound and well honed discourse, is in fact light years away from my personal theology. My beliefs are borne of those and other readings but then lightly tossed in a big bowl with a lot of vinegar, or more like dust and blood and events and dark nights alone in prayer. And as a result my "theology" if it can be called that, is not only personally defined but quite different.

Belief - that is the operative word - is something that I have because there can be no evidence for what I name god. (Sorry but I use that word/name for convenience because Voldemort stole "He who cannot be named"). Anyway faith and belief is what appears in the void not what happens when some Sunday School Teacher says "cuz the Bible tells me so." I believe in and follow what Joshua (aka Jesus the Nazarene) preached - a somewhat radical and reverse logic that in order to be filled one must be empty, in order to save your life you have to lose it, that the rich are poor and the poor have abundance. He told us that what we think is good is what is in the way and that when we embrace what is bad (our faults and defects) we are made whole and filled with compassion for others. This practical but counterintuitive logic seems to be quite different from the teachings of my church and certainly this classically educated professor.

Now I am not a suck for a grade, and I can go to the mat with the best of them, but I do feel this dilemma. How am I to explain and justify that which is only my journey? Each of us has a personal spiritual journey and most likely none of those will fit within the structure of any classic theology. It can't. Textbook theology is perhaps what we are supposed to think and espouse, but the experience of spiritual contact cannot be defined, or bottled up or very often spoken. Then what am I to do? Argue my points from a textbook definition which no longer lives for me? Or struggle to place my experience in some conceptual framework knowing that it may never make "real" sense to anyone but me?

The Groundhog

We have a groundhog in our neighborhood - that I think lives under my tool shed. - and who helps himself to our herbs and flowers as well as the apples that fall over the fence from my neighbor's tree. He is big, and fat, and as it appears to me, quite happy in life.

I was watching him this morning at breakfast. He sat peacefully on the hillside, alternating munching on well watered grasses and observing the occasional joggers going by. I wondered what I could learn from him. First of all, he wants for nothing, yet he did not plant it, care for it or invest anything in it. If he could speak I am certain that he would view this world as his idea, his garden, his tossed salad on a silver platter! Yet I worry so much. How will I pay for this or that? Will I be able to feed my family? What about the leak I always get in the cellar after a heavy rain? How can I start seeing the world as my garden?

But he is also serene. Nothing seems to hurry my rather annoying visitor. He knows where his safe places are - the nearest bush or tunnel to escape me or another neighbor who has had it with his confounded eating our precious flowers. But he is calm and, yes, serene. he eats peacefully, looks up and surveys his world peacefully, and returns to his apple slowly and calmly. He isn't rushed - as I am - running from pillar to post, from one client to the next. Where is my peace, my pace, in this hurry-up world in which I live.

So I have declared today as Groundhog Day! And maybe tomorrow too. But unlike the movie of the same name, it will not be reliving the same events to get it right. It will be to see the world as my salad plate, to take my time, to know where my safety really is and to observe everything with a calm serenity. I have despised the little bastard, for always showing me up and outsmarting my attempts to stop him. But now he has the audacity to become my teacher!