The Occupant.

Advertizers, con-men, and seducers, not to mention corrupt and authoritarian politicians, all know how to get people to do what they want.  They influence people by appealing to the force that occupies our souls: the fearful, angry, ashamed, and deeply selfish ego.  They represent and reflect back to us the worst and most destructive parts of us… which are unfortunately often the most appealing.    

Christianity is designed to liberate us from social tyranny by releasing us from the grip of this illegitimate occupant within.  This is what Jesus means when he says things like “You must lose your life in order to save it,” and “You must take up your cross and follow me.”  He is instructing us to get over ourselves.  The ego that tells us who we are has convinced us it is our very life.  But that is what has to go if we are ever to realize our true life in Christ.

Baptism has to do with this dying, which leads to a rising to new life which is fed in the  Eucharist with Christ himself. 

But far too often Christianity has grievously failed in this, its primary task.  It became largely a lapdog for our fragile, fearful egos.  Instead of the Way of transcendence and union with the Creator through Christ, Christianity was reduced to just another religion of laws, rules, control, and caste, serving the interests of those in charge.  Instead of bringing people to Christ, it inoculated people against him, injecting us with a weak, synthesized version of faith, designed to prop up and amplify the fear and rage of our ego.  We want a religion that feeds, comforts, and reassures our ego.  This is the way Christianity is used, most of the time.        

Bonhoeffer said that “when Christ calls us he bids us come and die.”  But that is absolutely the last thing people look for in a church.  Instead, we shop for the place that will provide themes benefits for our ego.  Church, in this view, should tell us what we want to hear.

How did this happen?  

As soon as we are flushed into this world, suddenly finding ourself separate from our secure and connected womb-environment, and where now everyone else is apparently separate from us, our brains go to work figuring out how to deal with this new situation.  We perceive that we are small, needy, helpless, dependent, and vulnerable.  We feel alone.  We feel trapped in a little, discrete container of flesh.  So we welcome the ego’s strong and soothing voice that gives us seemingly good advice for how to survive.  We develop strategies for coping, defense, getting what we need and want, and ingratiating ourselves to our caretakers and protectors.  We spin a personality, we tell ourselves stories, we manipulate memories, we build a self based on the instruction of this inner occupant, our ego.

The ego tells us we are at risk and “I alone can fix it.”  It says that only by following this regime of nihilistic narcissism, with its addiction to lying, cheating, stealing, hating, fearing, and killing, will we survive amid the “carnage” of this existence.  The motto here is “me first!”  No one else matters.  The ego accepts no responsibility; it is rather always looking to blame others for its circumstances.  It invents wild, improbable, even impossible tales to justify its own desires and strategies for meeting them.  It has a cold and callous disregard for the suffering of others.  It will seek ruthlessly to win, by any means necessary.  

The consequence is annihilation of the self, society, and planet.  It is the regime of death represented by the Beast in the Book of Revelation. 

Jesus threatens this system by proclaiming a different reality, that of God’s Kingdom, a true  alternative to the false and toxic tyranny of ego.  He brings us to see more deeply and fully, from a higher perspective, that we are not alone.  We are not at-risk.  Our fears are unwarranted; our anger baseless.  It is humans who think the world is dangerous, and who, by this thinking, make it so.  In reality “the Earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein.”  The truth is that we are children of a beneficent Creator who made everything “very good.”  We are all connected.  We are made for togetherness, delight, wonder, wisdom, and peace.  We are made to live eternally, in the fullness of time, in joy, praise, and thanksgiving.

When Jesus says we have to die to ourselves, he means we have to let go of the lies upon which we have based our existence.  Who our egos tell us we are is a lie.  Indeed, lies never hold up.  They and everything built on them collapse and crumble into nonexistence, a process which is always happening, and which is the cause of our suffering.  Our thinking is incompatible with the truth; our actions create a world of falsehood.  The collision between God’s truth and our lies generates the misery of our existence.   

To follow Jesus is to live in the light of his Word instead of the tempting slogans of our ego.

Before we will truly be truly free of the corrupt, lying, incompetent, fearful, angry forces occupying leadership positions over us, we have to deal with the occupant within us: the corrupt, lying, incompetent, fearful, angry ego that rules in our own souls.  And we have to let that all go.    

This happens when we to turn instead to Jesus Christ and his Word of compassion, forgiveness, non-violence, simplicity, generosity, and gratitude.  We need to base our lives on that Rock, thereby allowing Christ to emerge in us, and the Kingdom of God to emerge in our world. 

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Discipleship Is Everything.

I have long been of the opinion that discipleship is everything.

Sometimes people ask me if they should read this book, follow this leader, adopt this philosophy, do this practice.  My response to such questions is almost always to ask, “Is it a way to follow Jesus?  Does it help you follow Jesus?  If so, go for it.”

For Christianity is about following Jesus.  It is not about talking, or thinking, or hearing about Jesus.  It is not about adopting this or that creed.  It is not about pinning a label — “Christian” — on yourself, or wearing a cross, or reading a Bible, or even praying regularly.  Those can all be very good things… if they help us actually follow Jesus.    

Following Jesus, though, is a particular path.  It involves specific, identifiable behaviors and actions.  

We follow Jesus by living a life that reflects and expresses the life and teachings of Jesus Christ, as these are attested in the Scriptures, especially the New Testament, mainly the gospels.

We find several places in the gospels where Jesus describes what he is about.  The Beatitudes and the whole rest of the Sermon on the Mount give us remarkably explicit instructions about what it means to follow him.  He sets out his agenda in several places, like the words from Isaiah he quotes in his home town of Nazareth.  In Matthew 11 he points out a list of healing activities that characterize his ministry and validate his Messiahship.   

Jesus’ life and teachings may be summarized as the expression of God’s love.  He demonstrates compassion, forgiveness, healing, welcoming, equality, and justice.  He enacts generosity, wonder, simplicity, reversal, gentleness, and community.  

Jesus is invariably on the side of the poor, the sick, the outcast, the lost, sinners, and losers.  He is also reliably critical of the rich, the powerful, the leaders, and the “religious,” whom he calls hypocrites.

Furthermore, Jesus is very demanding.  He says his disciples have to “lose their life” and “take up a cross.”  Following him means letting go of our ego-centric, self-serving motivations and illusions, in order to realize our oneness with all creation.  He demands courage and trust in him; he would have us be free of fear, anger, and shame.  He requires that those who follow him live not for themselves, but for others.

In the end he gives his own life for us when he is executed by the Romans for blasphemy and sedition… and at the same time he gives his life to us in the resurrection and the ways he gives us to participate together in his new life: the Sacraments of Baptism and the Eucharist.

But the point is always discipleship: which is giving up our own lives and having his life emerge in us.  We surrender our greed, envy, anger, pride, gluttony, lust, and other self-centered behaviors, and we take on his expansive, loving, goodness.  We move from our little darkness into God’s great light.

Discipleship is the touchstone of Christian faith.  We find clear evidence that we believe in Jesus in the quality of our discipleship.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it this way: “Only the one who is obedient believes; only the one who believes is obedient.”  Following Jesus and trusting Jesus are the same thing.  They cannot be separated.  

In other words, just calling ourselves Christians is meaningless.  It is discipleship, not semantics, that is everything.

Today — as in every age, unfortunately — we encounter people who call themselves Christians, but whose lives show scant evidence in their behavior that they actually follow Jesus.  Now, no one follows Jesus perfectly in this existence.  We may follow him better sometimes and in some circumstances.  I get that.  But on the whole our lives bend towards Jesus, or they don’t.  And discipleship means always striving to bring our entire life under the Lordship of Jesus Christ.

But there is no room in discipleship for attitudes and actions that move aggressively counter to the life and teachings of Jesus.  There is no room for murder, stealing, cheating, or lying.  There is no place, in following the One who welcomed and accepted all kinds of people, for nationalism, racism, sexism, or homophobia.  There is no room for paranoid conspiracy theories, in following the Truth.  Can we claim to follow Jesus if we hate Muslims, Gays, immigrants, or atheists?  No.  Can we claim to follow Jesus if our prior allegiance is to a deliberately divisive leader or a political movement that intentionally stokes our fear, our rage, and invokes a toxic nostalgia?

No.  Jesus was crucified by such people, people who wanted to uphold “traditional moral standards,” and maintain their religion and nation.  Some things are simply not compatible with discipleship.  

The problem for Christianity is that a long time ago we managed to make following Jesus optional.  Well, it became so optional that Christianity got identified with many things that Jesus himself rejected.  The Church got domesticated.

Discipleship means the undomestication of the Church.  Which is to say its re-wilding.  Discipleship is a feral Church, a Church that looks only to Jesus Christ and his Way of peace, love, and justice.  A Church that rejects all other “events, powers, figures, and truths” that we posit as expressions of Christianity.  A Church that really does strive first for the Kingdom of God.

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If You're Not in Tears You're Not Paying Attention.

• It was remarked about Simone Weil that she would start weeping just upon hearing of a tragedy somewhere in the world.

• Once on retreat I befriended someone.  We went to worship and the story of the Babylonian destruction of the Temple was read, along with Psalm 74.  I happened to glance at him during the readings and saw tears running down his cheeks. 

• St. Simeon the New Theologian said that we should not presume to come to the Lord’s Table without tears.  In fact, he places great emphasis on the place of tears in the spiritual life.  

Tears, weeping, crying: these are indications of an emotional immediacy that we normally keep repressed.  

But I suggest that the more “woke” we become, that is, the more present we are, the more we are aware of ourselves and our place in the world, the more directly we also  experience both the pain of others and our complicity in causing it.  Shedding tears of sorrow, shame, guilt, and pain is an authentic indication of spiritual awakening.

Now, most of us go through existence separated from the world’s hurt by thick and high interior walls of denial, defense, and ignorance.  Our egos project such barriers as a matter of individual survival; we could not function in the world if our minds allowed us to know the magnitude of creaturely suffering.  It is one of the reasons we lie to ourselves about our personal separateness and independence.  

So we go about our days in a state of numbness, our inherent connection to the Earth and to others rendered inert, our senses weak and ineffective, limited to the physical body and our thinking.

Part of waking up is coming to identify with others’ pain and our own responsibility for it.  

Our egos convince us we have no such responsibility.  Our egos drive us in a psychopathic direction, where others’ suffering has no more effect on us than when we swat a fly.  At worst we justify and even (God help us) celebrate atrocities like Hiroshima, lynchings, executions, torture, and police killings.  We hear of a famine in Africa, a typhoon in Asia, and earthquake in South America, and we shrug and scroll to the next story.  Maybe if we’re a little bit woke we will send some money; if it is a local tragedy perhaps even volunteer our time.  

The closer such events are to us personally, the more seriously we take them.  When they happen to our families, then we feel them more directly.  But when it involves someone else’s family on the other side of the planet, not so much.  Especially if we have decided they are “enemies.”  And when it happens to non-humans?  We usually find ways to ignore it.

If we imagine we have no such complicity in others’ suffering, there is an exercise I recommend.  Consider where you are right now: what are you wearing, using, touching?  Who manufactured our clothing?  Who grew the cotton or sheared the sheep?  Where did the wooden floor on which you stand come from?  The electricity powering your devices?  The food we eat?  The water we drink?  Were all these resources extracted and distributed sustainably?  Were all the people who did all the work paid fairly?  How was the land we live on acquired?  

I guarantee that we are benefiting from centuries of theft and violence, murder and extortion, wanton ecological degradation and destruction.  We sit comfortably atop of mountain of bones of those slaughtered by the Empire we feed.  Our existence is built on slavery, genocide, colonialism, capitalism, patriarchy, and the exploitation of the Earth and people.  We are participating in sin and suffering all the time.  

These are things for which we are complicit somewhat indirectly and therefore easy to disregard.  There are other things we do to others more immediately, even those we love and care for, that they will spend their lives recovering from.  The selfish and thoughtless parental actions.  The harmful and angry words.  The things we do to others “for their own good.”  The things we didn’t even know were bad at the time.  The things we rationalized, justified, explained.  

The more conscious, present, and woke we become, the more we realize in our own hearts what we have done and what has been done in our name.  That’s why the original Christian prayer is, “Lord, have mercy.”  That’s why when we look at the cross what comes to us is the awareness that, in the words of one hymn, “I crucified Thee.”

Wokeness appears to warrant existential despair.  But another effect of such a broadening awareness is to lose the scales of our blindness and to see something else emerge within us.  That is the other side of the cross: resurrection.  For if we identify and grieve for the mess we are making, we begin to find hope in the word of resurrection.  Our mess is never the last word.  And we can see another life emerging from deep within us.

That life is the true humanity we share with Jesus Christ.  It is our Essence, our true nature.  Once we realize how connected to, and indeed identified with everything, we are, we can stop treating others with careless violence, and start respecting everyone, all of life, all creation, with wonder and joy as sacred expressions of God’s love, bearing the very voiceprint of God’s creative Word, and energized by God’s Breath, the Holy Spirit.

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Heresy.

From the Greek hairesis "a taking or choosing for oneself, a choice, a means of taking; a deliberate plan, purpose; philosophical sect, school," from haireisthai "take, seize," middle voice of hairein "to choose.” https://www.etymonline.com/word/heresy

“Heresy” is one of the more abused words in our faith.  This is because the establishment likes to throw it at people who oppose them.  By this standard, Jesus, Paul, and the apostles were all “heretics,” as defined by the leaders of orthodox religion of their day.  This is what happens when we allow the ruling class to define heresy as whatever threatens them.  And this is the way the word has usually been used.  Which is why it is often embraced as a badge of honor among outsiders and radicals.  It seems that the only significant changes that happen are made by people the insiders initially declared “heretics.”     

Heresy actually means more of a personal preference or choice.  It means going against accepted standards of truth, and deciding to follow your own course, according to your own desires and reasoning.

In other words, it is the whole basis of the Modern world.  All our heroes are heretics, people who perceived the inadequacies of the present order, and chose to set and follow their own course.  Heretics are those who advocate and apply the new paradigm, while the old paradigm is still in force.  They get that label from the offended keepers of the old paradigm.  

The choice therefore seems to be adherence to the old order, maintained and enforced by the establishment of insiders, or think for yourself and set out on a new path, based on new data and evidence.  Of course, the old order is often based on something that had been considered heresy years or centuries before.  The revered pillars of the establishment were once persecuted rebels.  So it’s really just a matter of choosing your own way, or the way of some dead person whose perspective has been institutionalized as the accepted standard.  Those who label other people heretics are usually the descendants and successors of… people who were labeled heretics.  It’s your own personal preference or someone else’s personal preference.  Which means it’s all heresy, by definition.  It’s all personal choices, in competition.  And we’re fine with that.

Following Jesus Christ, however, is not supposed to be about our individual personal preference at all.  Indeed, discipleship means deliberately and intentionally subordinating our personal preference — which is conditioned and controlled by ego — to that of Jesus Christ, true God and true Human.  We call this repentance.  It is about letting go of our own mind, and thereby allowing the mind of Christ, which is always within us by virtue of our sharing his humanity, to emerge.

We release our preference, and become embraced by God’s preference.  We give up our choice in order to realize our having already been chosen.

      

This happens only within the new community of those who understand themselves to be called out of the world of their own choosing, and into the Light of God’s choice.  The ego is too powerful for us to do this as isolated individuals.  A community of compassion, acceptance, forgiveness, honesty, and discipline is necessary.  We realize the true humanity we share in Jesus Christ together.  That’s why the New Testament talks about the Church as the Body of Christ.

That means of course that we are responsible to this community, and in this community we are responsible to Jesus Christ, as he is attested in the Scriptures, by the power of the Holy Spirit.  The Church emerges as the center, the locus and nexus, of God’s Presence in the world.

When the Church is faithfully doing its job of making disciples, that is to say, bringing people to the subordination of ego and the realization of Essence, which is Christ in them, it becomes an outpost and anticipation of the Kingdom of God, and the living embodiment of Jesus Christ.

So I hope to be always against heresy.  To put it bluntly, followers of Christ should not be making their own decisions at all.  The whole point is discerning together the will of God in the Church, expressed in Jesus Christ, and obeying.  It’s not about your choice; it’s about who chooses you for a life of humility, justice, compassion, gentleness, and service.

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