I have a movie rec for all us spiritual seekers: AUGUST RUSH, currently in the New Releases section of my Blockbuster, as well as many other sources, I’m sure.
The one quote I went to the trouble to write down was a line spoken by Robin Williams’s character:
“Do you know what music is? It’s God’s little reminder that there’s something else besides us in this universe.”
Blessings!
Sara
Think TEMPORARINESS. That is, this life is very temporary, even fleeting, a drop in the bucket of eternity.
I’ve mentioned elsewhere in this blog that one way to follow Jesus and to find happiness is to view everything in terms of eternity, but I haven’t discussed exactly how to do that. But it’s as simple as remembering that everything on earth is temporary. So we can’t expect wonderful moments to last, but on the other hand, pain & suffering don’t last either, and if we’ve felt the kingdom of heaven (and I think we all have, even if only momentarily at special times), then we know it’s all a prelude to eternal joy.
Indeed, it makes no sense whatsoever that we humans are capable of feeling that ineffable joy if we’re not going to experience it in a more lasting form in the future. It also makes no sense whatsoever that our brains are many times more powerful than we ever use in this brief life, if there’s not a whole lot more to come in the next life!
Blessings on all of you!
By the grace of God I myself usually do this naturally, but the least I can do is to share it in here so that others can try it if they want to—
Many who know me think I’m somehow immune to the pain of life (boredom, meaninglessness, hopelessness, loneliness), but I assure you I’m not! It’s the way I react to it that makes the difference.
Most people—influenced by our culture, no doubt—seem to view the pain as something to be avoided by means of entertainment or activities that they often don’t even particularly enjoy but that merely serve as what one friend of mine calls “boredom preventers,” or by surrounding themselves with expensive possessions, dwellings, & vehicles, with which they hope to buffer themselves against the emptiness.
I and all other deeply joyful people, in contrast, embrace the pain as something to be worked through in the heart, mind, & soul, after which we will feel deeply joyful until the next psychic challenge comes along, and upon working through that pain will be even more joyful than before, thus constantly growing in joy. By embracing the pain instead of trying to insulate ourselves against it, we transcend it and become even happier than we were before the pain struck.
When Jesus said it’s harder for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven, I think part of what he meant was that rich people have more means to do all those artificial things in order to avoid facing the pain and emptiness, the working through of which is the only way to experience true joy, which is surely a chief component of the kingdom! In this sense they’re poorer than those whose circumstances make the pain of life (& the need for God) unavoidable.
Wow, I had to be careful there in the title to make sure I distanced myself from that group who has made such a bad name for themselves that I’m sure many of my readers would read no further: “born-again Christians.”
In their misguided, narrow view, what Jesus’s line “You must be born again” means is something like this: “You must undergo some type of dramatic conversion experience (like getting saved at a Baptist rally) and then dedicate your life to living in strict (and very visible) adherence to supposed principles of sexual and other morality, whichever tenets happen to be emphasized by whichever conservative church you choose to join.”
But what “You must be born again” REALLY means is exactly the same thing I’ve been talking about recently in this blog: if you want to experience the joy of the kingdom of heaven (which is the only way to be genuinely happy on earth), you must continually die to your natural life, to your human nature that puts yourself and your own wants, desires, & conveniences first, and instead continually realign your mind (i.e. be born again) with the God of Love, which leads you to routinely inconvenience yourself in order to serve others.
As an incisive Episcopal priest said in his sermon yesterday, you must be be born again and again and again, as you repeatedly die to the life you’ve built up out of your own selfish hopes & fears, and then continually be born again into the new life in Christ, where you drop all that self-absorbed baggage completely and become a radically new person—an unselfish, loving-others, deeply joyful person.
I don’t know about you, but I’m immensely thankful that we have this option of avoiding the restlessness and emptiness of life by allowing ourselves to be “born again” into the new life centered around the God of Love!
Repent means to change your mind, and what this famously misunderstood verse means is NOT “perform self-torturing acts to punish yourself and purge your sins because the time is near when you’re going to burn in hell if you don’t.” Rather, it means to turn from your self-absorption and unhappiness to the abundant joy that comes from focusing your life on God & loving others instead of remaining in the more natural human position of being turned inward on yourself. The “kingdom of heaven” that is “at hand” (i.e., here, now) is this abundant living that is available now to all of us if we will only make the decision to align our lives and minds with God instead of continuing to focus on ourselves, which only leads to emptiness.
SO, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand” means turn from your sadness & emptiness and embrace the joy that God wants to give you!
As open-minded theologians have noted, the Greek word for “salvation” used most frequently in the New Testament means to save from suffering, rather than to save from sins. The point is that Jesus came primarily to bring us healing rather than forgiveness.
This distinction applies even to the passages preferred by hellfire preachers when they want to scare their audiences, such as Philippians 2:12, which says we are to “work out our salvation with fear & trembling.” What this passage actually means is that we must work out our healing in fear & trembling—the goal is not to save ourselves from burning in hell but rather to secure our own well-being, our own greatest joy. Whatever we do in order to “work out our salvation” makes us feel the best we possibly can feel. The “fear & trembling” part is a way of getting across just how much better we can feel by doing this than we feel if we don’t do it!
Of course for most people this well-being is primarily mental rather than physical, but it’s all connected, and moreover, isn’t mental well-being what we all desire anyway? We want to be happy, right? Well, this being right with God and working out whatever it is he wants us to do is, quite simply, the only way to be happy!
If you doubt that claim, just look out there—people who have every level of success & riches imaginable, including people who can seemingly have their pick of romantic partners, are still not happy! The fact of the matter is that the only way to fill up the emptiness that everyone feels in this life is to center our lives around God (the God of Love).
If someone asked me whether I believed in original sin, I would hesitate to answer out of fear of being misinterpreted by fundamentalists, but I’m positive that it’s an inescapable characteristic of human nature that we are utterly incapable of maintaining and sustaining the right frame of mind continuously, even just for one day at a time. The main reason I’m so convinced of this inability is that after all my years of spiritual work and of repeatedly excellent results produced when I am in the right frame of mind, I still have to work on it every day, and usually many times a day. I constantly have to reorient myself around God, making the choice over and over again for the good and creative over the negative and destructive. It’s amazing that after all these years I even have to fool with this issue at all, but the fact is that I am continually taking measures to get back into the right mood when I’ve happened to fall out of it, even though I KNOW that the secret to being happy is to link up with God and do whatever he leads me to do, instead of ignoring that fact and letting myself fall out of the mood and the connection!
I think this human shortcoming is probably an unavoidable result of our having free will, so that “original sin” may not be the best term for it, but it does seem clear to me that it’s always there in every one of us. As Socrates recognized 2500 years ago, despite the obvious irrationality, people frequently know the Good, and know that it is in their own best interest to DO the good, and yet they still don’t do it. Jesus showed us that God is love, but we still have to continually make the choice whether to link up with that love or to remain out in the cold, stupidly trying to accomplish things on our own power. Remaining in the wrong frame of mind is the sin, the thing we all do frequently even though we know it’s to our disadvantage to do so. Being momentarily accosted by the wrong frame of mind is the universal condition of humankind, or “original sin.”
Last Sunday, my wonderful Sunday school class was about how Jesus viewed wealth and social responsibility, and the teacher, a talented preacher and theologian, said that faith transcends politics. He went on to say that we have an ongoing responsibility to continually question our political decisions in light of our faith. I sat there nodding my complete agreement, but I’ll admit that I was also thinking to myself, “Of course Jesus was a progressive, therefore all my progressive political positions are the right ones. I’ll always continue to reexamine my positions, but of course they’re the ones Jesus would take.” And just as I was sitting there thinking those thoughts, I glanced down at the ball-point pen in my hand (which I had happened to bring from home), and the words incribed on it absolutely jumped out and hit me in the face—in bright mauve on a white background, HOLIDAY INN SUNSPREE RESORT. Not only did those words conjure up a pleasant memory of my opulent accomodations during a recent vacation; God was also letting me know in no uncertain terms that one danger of holding progressive political views is that it can make us fail to see that we, too, have the possibility of being greedy and materialistic! What a pointed illustration of how religion must “transcend” politics.
