Seditious Faith

Halloween’s secrets

I'm not really a fan of Halloween. I guess I never really have been, either. But this is an excellent opportunity to say some things that need to be said.

Let me start by reviewing some things most of you sense might be true, in one form or another:

• There is more to our experiences than meets the eye.
• There is a "component" of each one of us that transcends our physical deaths.
• Alive or dead, we seem to be spiritually connected to one another.

"Life after death" is a misunderstanding. Our experience of "life" is a physical one. What transcends death is something quite different. We also need to get that out on the table, too. For now, I'll use the term "soul" to refer to that part of each one of us that is eternal.

What follows next is a condensed version of what I have learned over many years. I'm offering this as something of an anti-ghost story for you to take away and ponder.

• Our living consciousness is an amalgam of our physical reality and the experiences our souls bring to bear.
  • You see, souls are not typically ever destroyed. They come back in other lives. Some—most—are very young, perhaps with the experiences of one or only a few lives. Others can be older, some very old.
  • When we physically "die" our experiences and learning "survive" in our souls.
• While we are alive, we experience communication physically person-to-person, and "otherwise", as soul-to-soul.
  • The degree to which physical and soul communication interacts varies greatly in each of us.
  • Younger souls have great need for communication with one another; as souls age they tend to act more autonomously.
  • By the way, souls aren't perfect. In fact, they are with us to learn and grow, oddly enough.
  • And yes, some, it seems, never learn.
  • And for those of you with a scientific bent: I like to talk about that "alternative" part of our reality as the one for which the speed of light is not a constant in vacuum. Think about that for a moment. The laws of probability and interaction are fluid.
  • Although not a universal constant, psychic ability tends to belong to younger souls that are still more "communicative" with other souls.
  • Prayer, as a consequence, is primarily a soul-to-soul activity. That may come as a surprise to many, but the efficacy of prayer and intentions that are passed from soul to soul and can affect us physically bears this out.
• Believe it or not, organized religion has a valuable role to play in all of this.
  • Religion, when it is not abusive or fundamentalist, offers a sense of perspective to each of our lives.
  • That perspective helps us to realize that there are greater gifts than what we offer, that each of us has responsibility to all creation, and that harmony must be the goal of all we do.
  • Religion has consistently abused these points, but not always and everywhere unrecoverably. Religion is shaped and governed by humans, after all.
  • There is a creator force in the world, but it creates the souls that are part of us. Our physical world is just that—shaped by physics.
• There are many ways that we can try to understand our interactions with our souls. Some work better than others, of course, and there's no "one-size-fits-all".
  • One of the most surprising things we can notice about ourselves as humans is that we have developed a great sense of learning things. We aren't so much "tool makers" as we are "learners and adapters." Most species can "use" a tool; we learn what can be done with it, and that's the developmental, the learning side of who we are.
  • A consequence of this is that we spend most of our lives working out the "how?" of things. Daily life is managed by knowing the answers—or figuring them out—to all the "how?" situations that are presented.
  • We then must also figure out the "what?" part of these "how?" situations. We usually know—or again, figure out—"what" to use and "how" to use it.
  • Religion and spirituality are primarily concerned with the "what" and "how" situations. Scripture and ritual are essential to navigating the "what" and "how" kinds of questions.
  • What's usually missing is the "why?" Salvation, damnation, and things like that aren't real motivators, though we still act as though they are. They usually lead to things like "righteousness", and that just leads to self-righteousness, and that can (and usually does) lead to bad things.
  • So here's the trick: Our "Why?" is really wrapped up in our cumulative ability to maintain harmony. By that I don't mean the foolishly simplistic ideas of the 1960s. I'd never want to relive that! And harmony is never—repeat NEVER—approached by checking out from reality. Real harmony is much more pervasive and wrapped up in different attitudes towards power. I'll leave that for another entry…but I do have to say that our attitudes toward power are key to all we are and do, and all our souls experience and learn. Simple, eh?
  • Harmony is purpose, achievement, and mastery. It is our only real calling. It is our souls' only calling.

There are "ghosts," if you will. They are young souls that can't find their way home. Some of them go very, very seriously wrong, desiring eternal power on an earth where it isn't easily defended against. To that end, they find and attach other young souls who can be forced to share their quest for power. We call them demons. Yes, stay away from them.

Enough for now. Happy Halloween.

Shame on Nobody

The impetus for this entry is hard to pin down, so I won't try to. But what I can say, based on that, is that the reasons for this entry can be gathered from many corners of my experiences.

There are many instances in our lives—and in human history—that offer choices and outcomes based on honor. In fact, either directly or indirectly, most of the oppression that we face in our lives comes from actions based on the goal of honor.

That is said, knowing that honor is never possible without its constant companion: shame. Shame is that which is without honor, and a person is shamed when their sense of honor and self-worth are removed. Entire societies have come and gone, basing their social order and their politics on the honor/shame model. Many of these social constructs exist today, as it turns out, and their patterns seep out into the rest of the world, providing a well-understood basis for doing whatever feels "right." More's the pity.

One good example is the typical honor/shame society as it existed in the Mediterranean world a few centuries ago. Simply put, men held the honor of the family, while women guarded against the shame of the family. Men we "born with honor" based on their family's status. Women were "born into shame" based on that same reasoning. It was difficult for a woman to attain honor. However, she could either guard against shame or allow herself—and by extension the family—to receive shame. Protection against shame required certain ways of dressing (e.g., the birka) and acting (e.g., not being alone with a non-family male). The examples, by the way, also belong to that region's dress and deportment centuries before our current scriptures were written. But merely doing something that might make shaming possible is shame itself in one way or another.

Honor, on the other hand, is something that the males were born with, to greater or lesser degrees, according to their family. Some family occupations (shepherd, for example) did little to offer honor to the males of the family. But honor was also something one could gain through one's actions. And gaining it mean that someone else—another male, in the case—must lose some honor and feel some shame. That old tale about how David was plucked out of a shepherd's family and achieves greatness actually attests to that. He came, not from a merely lowly upbringing, but from a relatively honor-less one. How he later became great is an object lesson that has never been lost, so it seems: kill and oppress. First, there's Goliath. Battles have always been "field of honor" encounters, but here the outcome was to be decided in a one-on-one duel between the champions sent by each side. The Philistines sent their "most honored in battle" (i.e., most victorious) Goliath. The Israelites had nothing to match him. So the "least honorable" warrior—not a warrior, but a shepherd, seizes the moment and kills Goliath, thereby gaining the honor that the entire Philistine nation lost that day. That's how things worked back then. As a warrior in King Saul's army, David continued to gain honor after honor—that is, he killed a lot of enemy soldiers in battle. Even how King Saul died was ultimately portrayed as "less honorable than David." Saul died on the field of battle—the so-called field of honor—but not at the hands of the enemy, but at the sword of his servants. You see, the story is ultimately about establishing the great honor of King David. A less "honorable" King could never bring home the Ark of the Covenant. David's actual history remains shrouded in mystery. The need to explain his stature—that is, his honor—was all-important.

The point here is not about uncovering King David's past, but the need by cultures to define and use both honor and shame. The story about David is merely interesting because someone had to show how one growing up in an honor-less family (i.e., shepherds, who were deemed also unclean due to their, shall we say, closeness to their flocks) could become King of an honorable nation. You see, this has never gone away. Honor and shame are the forms of currency in an economy that rules most of the world as we know it. And as a ruling entity, it has done more to oppress and subjugate its inhabitants than even the most vile dictators the world has known. Honor versus shame has been the starter of wars, the ethnic cleanser, the caller of armies, the armorer of the hordes and the warriors. It has infiltrated our cultures to make gangs useful "alternatives" and to focus their violence and hatreds. In all armed conflicts, both sides ante-up the currency of so-called "honor" in order to bring shame upon their enemies. In business or politics, the stakes might not be as deadly, but the currency is all too often the same. Honor to the winners. Shame to the vanquished.

So let me offer one thought: Shame on nobody. Honor is meaningless, as is valor or glory. These will never end suffering or bring harmony to any situation. They can only add oppression, destruction, hatred, and despair. Enough for now. Alternatives are for another entry.

Connectivity

Last Sunday I was asked to present a small, portable Bible to a young parishioner about to leave for boot camp. That seems a simple enough task, and as part of that we prayed in front of the congregation for him to return safely. It is difficult to "bless" warriors of any kind. But it is necessary to hope that their "gifts" may be offered but never used or needed. We know that prayer—of some kind—is necessary at such moments. But this matter is part of something much larger. It has to do with what we might call nowadays "connectivity."

We do some things without understanding…or even seeming to need understanding. We pray for one another on a multitude of levels, for a multitude of things. We assume that somehow these messages get uploaded to God—or some angels—for processing. We assume that these heavenly recipients are reading their mail, but it's always been a puzzle as to why the answers are so inconsistent. The real core of this is, as it turns out, too obvious for us to recognize. It has to do with the real nature of our spiritual "connectivity"—the connections within us as individuals.

You see, there's a tendency to see ourselves as "complete" entities. The attitude is that it is me, this person, this fleshly being, that is all that there is, all there is to pray for, all that will survive—somehow. But we know better than that. Death—as we experience the death of another—is the event that emphasizes the fact that the body is merely one part of us, and the soul the other. We just don't think about this on a daily basis, perhaps because it reminds us of our own fear and mortality and that our great achievements are sometimes worth very little in the long run. But it's true. I co-exist with my soul. My soul can be young, or it can be very old. It might be trying to learn lessons through my life experiences, or it might be trying to reach me to guide my life experiences, perhaps even to provide something of value for others or to teach others something valuable. In other words, my prime connection is internal: it is between my life and my soul, between my temporary life and my eternal life, between that produced by human means and that produced by a true Creator.

So this brings me back to the "Prayers of the People" that started this entry. We pray not person-to God-to person (or something like that), we pray on a soul-to-soul basis, at the mercy of—or relying on the receptiveness of—the souls at both ends of this process. And assuming that this process does take place, it becomes vitally obvious how much worth our internal person-to-soul connections have.

But there's another issue, a semantic one. It gets thrown around so much that it's important to clear this up here. We talk about "Faith" in so many confused ways that the word has little meaning. It seems to mostly mean a kind of blind trust in forces greater than ourselves…or it can allude to one's "Faith" in an us-versus-them set of value judgments. From all I have said above, Faith is none of that. It is the connection—the kind of connection and the closeness of connection—that our lives have with our own souls, and how this gets expressed in all else we do. Anything else of a spiritual nature is frankly lame without that. Magic is often what try to invoke, the thing we are praying for, the sort of thing that we expect our "Faith" to influence. But NO, it is never about magic, but about what takes place between us as living beings in a world teeming with life, and between us as souls imbedded in a world that desperately hungers for that connection.