The G*d-Place

3/24/17 Friday

OT Jeremiah 11:1-8,14-20 A prophet’s tantrum. “God will punish you because you treated me like shit.”

“but everyone walked in the stubbornness of an evil will. So I brought upon them all the words of this covenant, which I commanded them to do, but they did not. As for you, do not pray for this people, or lift up a cry or prayer on their behalf, for I will not listen when they call to me in the time of their trouble.” And, “But I was like a gentle lamb led to the slaughter. And I did not know it was against me that they devised schemes, saying, "Let us destroy the tree with its fruit, let us cut him off from the land of the living, so that his name will no longer be remembered!" But you, O LORD of hosts, who judge righteously, who try the heart and the mind, let me see your retribution upon them, for to you I have committed my cause.”

 

NT Romans 6:1-11 Baptized into death. “Our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be destroyed, and we might no longer be enslaved to sin. For whoever has died is freed from sin.” Oh well, it’s Lent.

Gospel John 8:33-47 Synchrony. Just two days ago I read a review of Elaine Pagel’s book about Satan. Now in today’s reading Jesus delineates the devil and claims that a person can be the devil’s child instead of God’s. Names the devil “a murderer from the beginning,” and “a liar and the father of lies.” He also says that “anyone who commits a sin is a slave to sin.”  Pretty unequivocal.

So, the long struggle against duality and confusion continues. Having trained my mind to encompass duality, and succeeded somewhat in freeing it from conceptual distinctions, how then do I find the words to describe the result? I no longer think in terms of dualistic pairs such as “submit vs. resist,” “us vs. them,” “good vs. evil,” “God vs. Satan” and yet I am experiencing the certainty that, paradoxically, what arises from this understanding is affinity, compassion, and a boundless generosity. I believe I know why the old Zen masters expressed themselves in koans, and in poetry written on cook shed walls and cliff walls above the timberline.

Holding myself in this understanding, balancing in the wind of contention and malice, is often the limit of my wisdom. I would like to find a way to turn sideways to this wind, at least enough so that it no longer snatches the breath from my lungs, and stops me from speaking.

Knowing that all actions by their very nature will produce unwanted consequences, and yet knowing just as certainly that doing nothing also causes suffering, leaves me with a clear perception of what the old masters were talking about when they said that the answer lay in neither action or inaction, but in something they called “wu wei,” the “action of non-action.” I believe most surely that this is what Jesus was talking about when he said, (from John’s Gospel, Ch. 3) “6 That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. 7 Do not marvel that I said to you, ‘You must be born anew.’ 8 The wind blows where it wills, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know whence it comes or whither it goes; so it is with every one who is born of the Spirit.” He says that everyone must be born of water and the Spirit in order to enter the realm of God. To me this is saying that it has to be both, flesh and spirit, not one exclusive of the other. Also, not merely both together, but somehow merged into one. This is what the haunting image of the sound of the wind stands for. You hear it, but you don’t know where it comes from or where it is going. This is how flesh born of the spirit behaves. Not just flesh, not just Spirit, but the invisible sound, scent and touch of a wind that is both material and immaterial; present and absent; traveling and remaining.

Ursula le Guin calls it “the Other Wind” and her dragons fly there. I’ve always felt that phrase touch my sense of the immanence of God, inherent in all things.