Being Bodhisattva

Numbers 11: 24-33 (34-35) (Sorry, everybody, I never got past the Old Testament this morning….)

33 But while the meat was still in their mouth, before they had chewed it up, the anger of Adonai flared up against the people, and Adonai struck the people with a terrible plague. (34 Therefore that place was named Kivrot-HaTa’avah [graves of greed], because there they buried the people who were so greedy.)

Still annoyed about redacting verses. Someone hearing the passage without verse 34 might think that Adonai was capricious and cruel, giving the complainers what they wanted and then making them sick because they ate what he gave them. I am sick of Bible verses being ripped out of context and used to further people’s various agendas. Not that this missing verse was left out for that reason. (I should probably not look at Facebook before doing Lectio Divina.)

The whole story is that the Israelites were scared. They didn’t trust God, and they whined and complained, and weren’t satisfied with the manna. They missed the food they had when they were slaves— “the fish… and the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, the garlic!”

So Moses got pissed off and said to Adonai, “ Did I conceive this people? Was I their father, so that you tell me, ‘Carry them in your arms, like a nurse carrying a baby?  Where am I going to get meat to give to this entire people? — because they keep bothering me with their crying and saying, ‘Give us meat to eat!’  I can’t carry this entire people by myself alone — it’s too much for me!  If you are going to treat me this way, then just kill me outright!”  So God said, “FINE!” and told Moses he would feed them meat until it chokes them: “All right, Adonai is going to give you meat, and you will eat it. 19 You won’t eat it just one day, or two days, or five, or ten, or twenty days, 20 but a whole month! — until it comes out of your nose and you hate it! — because you have rejected Adonai, who is here with you..”

We are still like that. Not satisfied with what we have, but wishing we had something else. That’s so obvious that I’m going to leave it alone and come at it from the other side. Look at how God acts. Let’s put ourselves in God’s place. After all we are the ones whose souls are made in God’s image; whose spirits are like God’s spirit.

So if we are kindly; if we give from a desire to help, or to relieve distress, or to free people from a bad situation in which they are being abused or exploited; if we act out of generosity and justice, but the gift is spit back in our faces, what then? When the receiver of the gift says, “I don’t want what you’re giving me, I want what I dream of having; what I wish I had; what I used to have,” and we say, “Fine! I’ll give you what you want until you choke on it! Be that way!” then we are acting perfectly like God. The difference is, that we tend to abandon those who’ve treated us badly. God never does. God sticks with us. We greedy, lazy, impatient, self-righteous, ignorant, mean, and self-entitled human beings.

So in my own case, I guess I will keep on being angry for a while. I will yell at God, “I’m not responsible for anyone else! I can’t carry another adult like an infant, and feed them from a bottle! Don’t even ask me to do that! I’d rather die first!” But I won’t give up on humans. I won’t turn my back. I will see them choke on their greed and selfishness, and I will know that it was inevitable, but I won’t be any happier about it than God was when his greedy people got what they wanted and it didn’t agree with them.

No, I’ll actually go one step further: I’ll stick around while all the bad shit goes down, and I won’t point any fingers. I might say, “Well, this is what you get….” but I won’t say, “Serves you right!” I might say, “This is happening as a result of your actions,” but I won’t say, “You got what was coming to you.”

There’s a saying among jail inmates that I heard often. It was usually jail officers saying it (of whom I was one, for a while…) when somebody was whining about the way they thought things should be, but sometimes it was the inmates themselves trying to make the best of things. It goes like this: You ain’t got nothing comin’. Being a Bodhisattva means changing the pronoun across the board to:
We ain’t got nothing comin’.


Being Bodhisattva goes like this:
It’s not my fault, but it is my responsibility, and my charge.

I am linked— mind, body, heart, and spirit
with the racist, the profiteer, the propagandist;
with the radical, the terrorist, the liar;
with the child abuser, the politician, the rapist, the pedophile.

I am linked— mind, body, heart, and spirit
with the abandoned child,
with the terrified victim of violence,
with the prisoner of injustice.

I am linked— mind, body, heart, and spirit
with the takers, the greedy, the vicious.
with the rescuers, the helpers, the heroes;
with the healers, the teachers, the givers.

Don’t worry, I’m stickin’ around.