The Girl Who Couldn't Sing: Videos!

From, oh, let's see, 1989 to 2006, I wrote songs and performed in coffee shops. Although it was not a lucrative endeavor by any means, it was a fun and fabulous experience. I grew and healed soooooo much ... which was the point of the short story "The Girl Who Couldn't Sing" ... Anyway ...

Over and over friends have told me to write my story. The closest I've come to that and the closest I will ever come to that is in the collection of three short stories in: The Girl Who Believed in Fairy Tales ... which is FREE! (BTW The Girl Who Couldn't Sing is the third and final story in that collection ...)

Free eBook

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Buy the Paperback

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So why did BMI pay me? I actually produced a CD and DVD between 1998 and 2006. The CD was titled The Faith of a Crucified Child. And the DVD was titled My Name is Heather Baker, Welcome to My World. (Heidi Garrett is the name I write under because ... Heidi was the name my mother was going to name me until my paternal grandmother said it sounded like a german milk cow! But I fell in love with the story Heidi when I was a girl ... and Garrett is my mother's maiden name, thus ...)

Here are 3 excerpts from the DVD:

I was working on a second CD, Deep Blue Sea, when I retired my singer/songwriter efforts. Sometimes I regret that I didn't complete that album. I was getting better at learning my voice, playing the keyboard, and I'd met more musicians in the San Diego community where I lived at the time and had them on board to collaborate on the CD. It might have been awesome (hehe), but after my Grandma died, everything seemed to rearrange inside me, and I just didn't have the will to continue. SIGH.  BUT I did "receive" Daughter of Light and it feels like this was the work I was destined (?) to contribute to the world consciousness ...  And I simply CANNOT WAIT until the release of the final installment in the trilogy: War & Grace. I think—HOPE—it's going to be AWESOME!!!

Let's Play

Another book I read last year was Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, & the Secret of Games by Ian Bogost. Bogost is a professor of interactive computing and a founding partner of Persuasive Games and his book is really refreshing.

It got my attention for two reasons:

1. The word play. Although I have an ambivalent relationship with astrology, its mythical archetypes are rich sources for exploring depth psychology (pant! pant! something I love) while the cheesy cookie-cutter personality analyses and forecasts make me cringe (or is it whinge, lol!) And … yet … I do know my North Node is in Leo which at the most basic level suggests that for me, learning to play could be a helpful thing … hehe.
2. The word limits. In my twenties I studied the I Ching. My introduction to Carol Anthony’s Guide to the I Ching was a huge, door-opening into the cosmos experience for me, probably the seed which planted the spiritual arc upon which I’ve journeyed for the past three decades. Why? Amidst all its intricacies, its bedrock was the concept of our internal world and the power of spending time there. Now when I went to the most reputable English translation of the I Ching or Book of Changes by Wilhem/Baynes, I found a mix of concepts which left me quite ambivalent and eventually led me to discard the book. Overlayed—shellacked—with Confucianism (which I don’t like because it promotes misogyny and rigidly hierarchical social structures which are antithetical to the whole concept of diversity, multiplicity, and variety inherent in life) there are liberal sprinklings of Taoism in its birth (which I love) and much poetry in: The Judgements, Images, and Lines, of the hexagrams. (If you’re unfamiliar with the I Ching it’s a collection of 64 hexagrams, images of 6 broken and unbroken lines to which text has been appended; the hexagrams purportedly represent the varying pathways (sequences) of change upon which Life is apt to meander.) Hexagram 61 is: Limitation, its Judgement: Limitation. Success. Galling Limitation must not be persevered in. Those 7 words capture the treachery of both indulgence and tyranny. In his book, Bogost makes a playful and much more wordy pitch for how limits are a key ingredient to success. 
But the overall theme of Play Anything is really about: Engaging with the FINITE, i.e. the material world as we see it and experience it. A theme very much appreciated by me as one who’s sick of our species attempts to discount and/or minimize the miracle around us as an “illusion” or our commitment to focus on its worst aspects and soothe our perspective with a future “afterlife”.

If the FINITE IS the DIVINE’S CREATION … why are we always so committed to an exit? WHY IS IT SO HARD FOR US TO BE HERE … on this planet, in this moment, alive, attending, cherishing … playing …

If attitude/perspective is everything …

Then Bogost’s first chapter, Everywhere, Playgrounds, is a great start in upending the apple cart …

He begins by telling a story of rushing through the mall with his daughter. He describes a game she played along the way with the lines created by the floor tiling. Her win: “She made the most of a mundane situation. She turned misery into fun.”

“…children are constantly compromising, constantly adjusting to an environment that is clearly not theirs, not yet. That’s wisdom, not innocence … we are fools to think we can control the universe. Children are right to allow the humility of their smallness to rule the day.”

“… misery gives way to fun when you take an object, event, situation, or scenario that wasn’t designed for you, that isn’t invested in you, that isn’t concerned in the slightest for your experience of it, and then treat it as if it were … this is what play means. Play isn’t doing what we want, but doing what we can with the materials we find along the way. And fun isn’t the experience of pleasure, but the outcome of tinkering with a small part of the world in a surprising way.”

“… play invites and even requires greater attention, generosity, respect, and investment than its supposedly more serious alternatives do.”

Then Bogost pounds on The Boredom … of daily life, of routine, of all the things we’ve done and seen before. Refreshingly, he transforms boredom to the pointer where we can play … be more attentive, more involved, and more surprised by novelty: novel insights, novel experiences, novel emotions. .. “Joy and pleasure live beyond boredom. Under it, not before nor atop it … once the familiarity of something ordinary is finally, totally, utterly spent, then the novelty of facing it anew can finally start.”

Next he takes interesting and thoughtful swipes at the currently trendy Mindfulness:

“Mindfulness is the practice of accepting our own thought and feelings, but what good is it if we accept only ourselves? We need a means to accept other things. A worldfulness to complement—or even replace—the trend of mindfulness.”

“Instead of taking things in stride, instead of transforming them from insufferable to agreeable, our default approach tends toward frustration, overwhelm, anger, and disgust. Rather than accepting the invitation to play, we reject the call as insufficiently compatible with our predetermined needs and wishes.”

Then he confronts the idea set forth by the writer David Foster Wallace that a way to cope with boredom, routine, tedium of adult life is to project “worst-case-scenarios” on all those you encounter to help you shift from a mental self-centeredness to “an equally soul-destroying, utterly boundless hypothetical empathy” … thus retreating “further into the self” because after all, we’re still bound up in our narrative, and what we tell ourselves. “Wallace’s standard—assuming everyone has ‘harder, more tedious or painful lives’—goes … beyond … inventing meaning, our burdened skulls apparently must invoke the most drastic situation in order to subordinate our private feelings to the circumstances we encounter. A rat-race of worst-case scenarios.

It’s insane to think we’d have to make up fake stories when the world is so replete with real stuff waiting for us to notice it—stuff like rectilinear shopping-mall floor tiles, Gibson Les Paul studio guitars, the knobby stem-necks of tangelos, cans of Pringles machine-formed potato chips, the formal constraints of a tweet or a sonnet … To treat things with respect and intrigue, we don’t need to understand the motivations and inner lives—whatever know the inner life of a tangelo or floor tile would mean. We just need to pay enough attention to discover what they do and how they work—to discover what they obviously and truly are—and then to make use of them in gratifyingly novel ways …

The great tragedy of Wallace’s life—a lifelong sufferer of depression, he committed suicide at age forty-six—isn’t only that he killed himself: it was also that he was unable to invent tolerable, lasting mode of living during the years he eked out of the universe, a mode of living that truly allowed the selfish mind to live amidst the great outdoors.”

Interesting, yeah?

Bogost’s attacks on irony are equally fruitful.

“Irony keeps reality at a distance. It has become our primary method for combating the external world’s incompatibility with our own desires. Today’s irony uses increasingly desperate efforts to hold everything in between welcome embrace and sneering mockery. Irony is the great affliction of our age, worthy of it’s own disorder.”

“Irony is the risk management strategy that accompanies selfishness, whether in commercial form as materialism or in spiritual form as mindfulness. By holding everything at a distance, we trap ourselves in our imperfect minds. … To pretend that the world only exists in one’s head is a madness condemned to reproduce itself forever. The error mistakes the big, weird, world outside our heads for a world built to be housed inside that head, inside our comparatively tiny minds … the mania of selfish irony: the world can never fully satisfy me, so I will hold it at arm’s length forever. Wouldn’t it be easier and more productive to work with the objects, people, and situations we encounter? To use, understand, and appreciate them for what they are rather than how they make us feel about ourselves?”

“Irony is the opposite of playground. Rather than embracing, creating, or otherwise accepting the ultimate existential preposterousness of the world and working with it nevertheless, irony takes the first step—drawing the boundary, encircling the materials with which one might then produce novel experience—and then it stops … with a chuckle and a sneer.”

How to play:

“First, pay close, foolish, even absurd attention to things. Then allow their structure, form, and nature to set the limits for the experiences you derive from them. By refusing to ask what could be different, and instead allowing what is present to guide us, we create a new space. A magic circle, a circumscribed, imaginary playground in which the limitation of the things we encounter—of anything we encounter—can produce meaningful experiences.”

“Our world is jam-packed full of splendor and mystery, most of which we never notice as we ply the demands and dissatisfactions of our selfish lives. And even when we find mechanisms for relief—Buddhist mindfulness or libertarian objectivism, sermonic asceticism or unbridled consumerism—they turn our attention inward rather than outward. They tell us stories about the bodies and minds we wish we occupied rather than offering us tactics to live amidst the world as it really is. Playgrounds aren’t things we create so much as structures we discover. They are particular configurations of materials that otherwise go unnoticed, unseen, unloved, and unappreciated. They’re scattered everywhere, stacked, overlapping, exerting their machinations without us, but available for our address and manipulation, if we draw a magic circle around their parts and render them real.”

Wow. Contemplate that!

In closing, I’ll leave you with a few more choice quotes from Play Anything:

“What if we have so little fun not because the world is so unpleasurable, but because we’ve gotten fun so wrong?”

What if “… real fun isn’t in you; it’s in the world. Or better: it’s in the confluence of you-and-the-world that a playground helps you create and see.”

Can/Could “… you accept that meaning can come from outside of you rather than from within. Perhaps even that it must.”

Consider “Physical therapy means better connecting to the world outside ourselves …” and that, perhaps, the ability to “incorporate external things into internal experience” is the key to evolution and consciousness.

Personally, I believe we’re here to change. If “The things to which we attend and the way we do so change us”, what does that say about the things we choose?

In conclusion, what if “Fun isn’t a distraction or an escape from the world, but an ever deeper and more committed engagement with it.”

All quotes are from Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, & the Secret of Games by Ian Bogost.

Is the Divine Within You?

I read God’s Ecstasy by Beatrice Bruteau last year (I think!) It’s a short book (172 pp.) but I read it very slowly because there is simply so much packed into each paragraph.

The book was written in 1997, but 20 years later it’s still a fascinating read. Dr. Bruteau had degrees in mathematics and philosophy, and she was a contemplative Christian. The book represents her effort to bridge the new insights quantum mechanics has provided about our Cosmos and her religion. I don't think her bridge fully crosses the gorge, but it’s a thought-provoking work.

She relies on three essential Christian religious symbols as the foundation for her thesis: the Incarnation, the Theokotos, and the Trinity. The Incarnation and the Theokotos work well for me as symbolical representations of potent spiritual/metaphysical reality but I confess, whenever she dove into the Trinity, everything became convoluted for me.

The book’s first three chapters discuss her broad views of the universe as “the creation of a self-creating world.”

“the Godmade universe is made as a self-making universe” and “to share in the divine life I must accept the vocation of consciously living in the self-creating universe”

“Joining in the creative work is really central to the whole contemplative enterprise”

“What Earth and the other heavenly bodies are manifesting is the glory, the overflowing creativity activity, that necessarily expresses and thus images the Creator.”

“When we are conscious and knowing the universe is conscious and knowing.”

The final quote is an idea I myself have been pondering for over two decades, that through each of us, through the experience of our lives, the universe and the Infinite become more knowing which would mean that each and every one of the moments of our existence is recorded—felt? received?—by this massive consciousness …

If that’s the case, nothing is meaningless … or static … because everything is constantly in flux as more becomes known.

In Chapters 4 through 7, Bruteau traces the evolution of the universe and some of the potential spiritual implications of that history. In her march through time, Bruteau discuses:

The Big Bang, the Inflation Scenario, Phase Transitions (“it may be that the idea of phase transition is an excellent way to see the whole picture: the universe evolves and ‘self-creates’ by passing through a period of phase transitions."), the stars, astrophysicists, quantum mechanics, the earth’s molten beginnings, symbiotic chemistry and bond formation, molecules of life: sugars, nucleic acids, and proteins, enzymes, catalysts, DNA, RNA, autocatalytic circles, hypercycles, emergents, the first cells, bacteria rule the world (“Bacteria are the ultimate in promiscuity. They engage in gene-swapping all the time.”), oxygen and the eukaryotic cell, diploid nuclei and meiosis, gametes, selection and adaptation, gene wars, and junk DNA, consciousness, language, and memes.


Whew. Makes your head spin! Here are some of her conclusions:

“The interactions are complicated. Organisms have to struggle with the environment, yet the environment is what sustains them. They often fight with members of their own kind, yet they also care for own kind, in some circumstance’s at the individual’s considerable expense. They may be in a predatory/prey relationship with other species, or again they may be in a symbiotic relationship of mutualism, in which each helps the other. The struggles against each other usually lead to discovering better ways to succeed in the struggle, first by one side, then the other. Even better ways to find better ways are developed, better ways to evolve are evolved.

It is one long fascinating story of the creation of novelty.”

“[Nature] is constantly renewing itself and constantly giving rise to forms that never existed before. And the most exciting thing about this novelty is that it is unpredictable. A theology that imagines that the whole history of the world from start to finish is already known is no longer a source of meaningfulness for us. It is not true to our experience.”

“Everywhere there is multiplicity organized into unity, the unity being strongly dependent on the multiplicity and even the diversity … And this is exactly what we see in the world on every level or scale of organization. Galaxies, molecules, organisms, societies—they are all examples of unity supporting and implying multiplicity, and multiplicity sustaining and implying unity.”

“Akin to the conjunction of diversity and unity is the balance of variation and stability…under the conditions of finitude … Randomness and determinism provide for novelty [variety] and stability.”

What’s going on here? Novelty, unpredictability, multiplicity unity, variation … all these words are exciting, inspiring, motivating … and then there is stability. Life needs that too. If we were born and our beings dissolved, i.e. there was no stability, continuity, or constancy of self, how much meaning would be lost? To ourselves? To the universe?

Along with this idea of the need for stability, not a stability that precludes evolution, but a stability of existence, she brings in another interesting concept: Severance.

In a discussion of parenting as the gifting of life as a mirror of the Divine gifting of life, she states:

“One gives being but does not control how it is expressed, one does not know what form it will take, what will happen next, how it will turn out. To pass on the gift of life is to pass on the ability to give the gift of life, and what happens past that point is out of one’s hands. This is that truly makes it a gift of love.”

Ahem. In this particular post I'm not going to discuss those parents—or those children!—who refuse to let go ... we're talking about ideals here!

“Severance is where development starts … and that inevitability involves hurt and failure, but overall, despite, and more often by means of hurts and failure, the whole process becomes more … The closed boundary … is the beginning of selfhood in the finite order … the figure is ‘discrete’, set off, separated … This is the universe’s general tendency to … be discrete and then clump, that’s the basic way of making a universe … when you have … several (from ‘severed)’ discrete bodies, you can have various clumping patterns, and your on your way to variety and creativity … If the universe were just an evenly distributed homogenous continuum of energy there would be no structure: no differences, and hence no creative unions … The great marvel, the great beauty, the great delight of the creative unions to come are dependent on those strange requirements of severance.”

Again, this amazing Cosmos we live in, partake in, is a vast flow of paradoxical elements, we change, grow and evolve in the context of stability, we unite and combine in the context of separation.

And on where we are going …

“Edward Fredkin, an early computer genius, has said that the universe looks to him like a great computer with a program running it. [He also said] the program is so complex that there is no way to shorten it and jump to the final answer. The only way to find out the answer is to let the program run in real time.”

So does any of this matter to us, to our daily lives, to our personal relationships? Does it have any impact on our goals and dreams whether they be for world peace or to create a family?

Consider Bruteau’s thoughts on Divine Intervention ….

“… The Infinite does not ‘intervene’ in the finite. The infinite as a whole is ‘exegeted’ in the whole of the finite, but the Infinite cannot be a participant in any interactions between the finite beings because that would finitize it. Only finite beings can be agents in finite interactions. The infinite can be ‘present’ in and even as the whole finite world, but it cannot be some particular part of the finite world or control some particular interaction in the finite world. All finite interactions are defined from particular points of view, and the Infinite cannot take one point of view rather than another. While this may be disappointing, it also relieves us of otherwise intractable problems, especially questions about why the Infinite doesn’t intervene in ways we (from our point of view) would like it to do.”

This strikes me as true. And so does this …

“The new things build on the old things. And as the better working ones crowd out the poorer ones, the population as a whole comes to be characterized by innovations. Those innovations then become part of the foundation on which the next round of innovations is built … But all this comes out of the dynamics, the process, the functions of the spontaneously assembling natural bodies. Nothing is imposed from the outside. There is no guiding hand. Each stage of organization leads naturally to the next on the basis of the way things are already happening. We are modeling a universe that makes itself, from the inside out, as an act of ecstasy, not one that is made from the outside by imposition.”

Then there comes the procession of evil from the biological imperative to survive onward to a what might be considered a higher consciousness.

The protectionism, aggression, deception of the “selfish-gene” advances to alliances for mutual benefit then advances to a reciprocal altruism based on memory, i.e. I will likely have future interactions with you and that advances to the recognition of the “rights of others’” by way of acknowledging the Absolute/Infinite as a mutual Ground of Being. So that “the real basis for sin (I know, a word replete with a millennia of baggage; I would use a word more akin to suffering myself ) … is the failure to find the Absolute in oneself.”

Okay.

So the Theokotos, a Greek word meaning ‘God-bearer’ used traditionally for the Virgin Mary, makes me think of all our mothers as physical vessels giving birth to the infinite in finite form.

We all have the potential to “incarnate” divinity.

How do we do this? Well, folks have been trying to do this for aeons by praying, fasting, meditating, taking pilgrimages, studying sacred texts … Does any of it work? Seems like to a degree. Is it a worthy cause? Effort? Probably only if you believe it to be so. I just don’t think it’s a pursuit that one can be forced or shamed or otherwise coerced into. I also think the process of living itself evolves us, so how much focused effort is actually required?

I don’t know. Regardless, I emphatically do believe that:

“Divinity is within you: it is growing toward emergence.”

So here on this planet, there likely never will be any direct Divine Intervention … there is and will only ever be us and our thoughts and actions. The question is, by cultivating our inner connection to the Divine/Infinite how might our outer/finite world be transformed?

Will there ever come a day when everyone on the planet lives according to this state of being inwardly connected to the Divine? Is this where we're ultimately headed?

Honestly, I hope so.

In War & Grace, I call it Eryai;)

All quotes for this post are from: God's Ecstasy by Beatrice Bruteau

The Silence Listens to Us

I promised closure to my thoughts on the book Silence by Shusaku Ends a while back.

And the Big Theme: In the face of horrific persecution, why does God remain silent? And how does that silence affect the faith and actions of Christians and/or followers of other organized religions?

That was um …. almost 7 weeks ago. So you can see I have taken some time with my response. In the book, silence is most often depicted as something horrifying, a devastating betrayal to the orthodox religious; if you to whom I pray to bow to seek approval from do not ANSWER me, SPEAK to me, INTERVENE on behalf: Then what is THE TRUTH—REALITY—PURPOSE—of it all?

Great questions.

My experience of silence—counterpoint to what I understand the experience of the characters in the story to be—is more like this:

Silence.
The Void.
The Quietest Thing Here.

God. Infinitude. Source. The Cosmos.

Does not speak in words.
Nor in intervention.
It converses in arcs. Nature. Time.

Our communication with the Divine is more like surfing, riding a wave. Clumsy and awkward, becoming absorbed with both success and defeat we lose our balance and flail into the depths.


It can be exhilarating devastating electric and engulfing all at the same time.

Wipe out. Or ride the pipeline. Swear off or never give up.

Static our journey through life is not.


Neither is it predictable, predetermined, or controllable.

How to perfect the art of the dance, achieve the nimble footsteps, sustain attunement to the thing that created us, but unlike us, does not communicate verbally.

One can deny God, but no one can deny Life.

More powerful. More subtle. More profound. More intelligent than anything any one of us can conjure or dream up.

And yet we crave to create. Improve. Manifest. Self-determine. Keep on breathing.

Children of life yearning to harness the invisible force that animates their selves, that is beyond their selves, that sustain their selves.

We find in the Silence:


Despair.

Inspiration.
Truth.

Answers.
Fulfillment.
Devastation.
Solace.
Comfort.
Regeneration.

Not the words, but the experience.

And the Silence listens to our pulse, our neurons, our bodies, our breath.

Overwhelmed by the massive void of quiet, we drown ourselves in a tumult of noise, oblivious to the sacred exchange, missing it all, because we falsely assume, believe that what is subtle, gentle, not forced upon us, not grasping for our attention with branding, violent indoctrination, a tsunami of words is useless, insubstantial, unworthy of our oh-so-precious time.

Silence is the wellspring.

The trailhead.

Some of us begin the journey.

Because Silence, the Void, the Quietest Thing Here, God, Infinitude, Source, the Cosmos, doesn’t demand allegiance, command obedience, or deliver judgment. It only ever offers.

And for those of us who endeavor to receive, another dimension opens, a different landscape emerges.

The mystery the wonder the awe threads itself into our reality and we are never the same.

I think Endo left his missionaries at the trailhead.

Violence in the Name of Religion is Depressing

I read Silence by Shusaku Endo for the first time in the last week of 2016 and wrote this blog post. However, I’d borrowed the book from the library and couldn’t make notes in it, so … I bought a copy so I could, yes, mark it up and take a deeper dive.

Today, it’s hard to understand why I wanted to do that … the first read took less than two days, the second read took over a month. I just didn’t want to pick the book up. It’s so depressing.

Why is it so depressing?

We’re used to hearing about the violence that Jews perpetrated against Gentiles back in the day, and the violence that Christians perpetrated in the Crusades, and the violence that Muslims have perpetrated against Infidels, but I’d never heard about the violence the Buddhists perpetrated against Christians in the 1600s. The four largest world religions have maimed, murdered, and tortured in the name of … umm … some higher good? Silence is story of Buddhists torturing, killing, and forcing Christians to apostatize. Depressing to realize none of the four largest organized religions are exempt form the darker side.

Silence is also dense. Packed in its 212 pages are layers and layers of themes.

What themes? Here are a few:

1. When one is dealing with organized religion, geopolitics is never far behind. The Portuguese and the Jesuits were the first to reach Japan. Initially they were welcomed along with the silk trade, but when the Spanish and then the English and the Dutch arrived … the seeds of conflict which led to the extermination of the Christian religion in Japan were sown.
   
2. What does it mean to be a Christian priest/missionary/father? Why would you choose to be a missionary? Endo uses the character of Father Rodriques to pose some possible answers to that question. Does one become a missionary because one feels superior to the population whom you intend to convert? Does one become a missionary to become a martyr? Does one become a missionary to be useful? Is a missionary useful when he’s converting others to his belief system? Is a missionary useful when he’s conducting ritual sacraments and prayers? Is a missionary useful when he silently watches others martyr themselves/die for the cause?
3. Who/what is the Christian God? Father Ferreira opines that “the Japanese cannot think of an existence that transcends the human”. He believes the God the Japanese Christians have faith in is not “the Church’s God” but “The Great Sun”. But throughout Silence, Father Rodrigues repeatedly sees/imagines his God as the “man whom he loved” (Christ) “a beautiful, exalted man.” So does Rodrigues's God transcend the human? And … does it really matter?
   
4. In the face of torture and death: water punishment (being tied to a stake and slowly drowned as the tide rises) and the pit (being hung upside down with a slit behind your ears so that your blood drips drop by drop) (Really! These are the ghastly tactics used!) why would anyone become a Christian? The life of the Japanese who became Christians and practiced their faith in secrecy and isolation was limited and impoverished in the extreme. Like we can’t even imagine. They were slaves of the samurai. “The reason our religion has penetrated this territory like water flowing into dry earth is that it has given to this group of people a human warmth they never previously knew. For the first time, they have met men who treated them like human beings. It was the human kindness and charity of the fathers that touched their hearts.” That is the beautiful part of the story. Period.
   
5. And the Big Theme: In the face of horrific persecution, why does God remain silent? And how does that silence affect the faith and actions of Christians and/or followers of other organized religions? Good question.
   
   I think I’ll tackle it in my next blog post.

The Jesus Story, a Japanese Christian and a Dominican Nun

I finally finished reading A Life of Jesus by Shusaku Endo ( a Japanese Christian). It was a slog, for me, but an interesting one. Endo’s analysis of the biblical texts and the verifiable /non-verifable truth in the Jesus story posits interesting questions and some possible answers.

But it didn’t convert me, i.e. the story about the Jesus story is interesting, but the fundamentals problems with the Jesus Story as a basis for a religion remain for me.

1. Life is a forward, progressive movement. All traditional religions require us to spend much (the majority) of the time (trapped?) peering into an increasingly distant (irrelevant?) past. My personal experience has shown me the undefined present is where it’s at and cult-like figures, codified texts, and ecumenical hierarchies are where it is not. Although I will not deny rituals and sacred spaces can have inherent beauty and power. But, honestly, reading an analysis of the Jesus Story while interesting, was actually kind of depressing, and left me feeling dusty and stale.
   
2. It’s really hard to believe that Jesus (the historical figure the Jesus Story was created around) did not manipulate the events of his end and his death to fit the prophesies regarding the Messiah, and this, not even very well. Kind of like direct plagiarism. It’s hard for me to read about Jesus’s trial and crucifixion without thinking: suicide ideation and/or death by cop. It’s like Jesus (the historical figure the Jesus Story was created around) gauged the forks in the road and saw increasing irrelevance or a shot at fulfilling this martyr role. Because it’s like he wanted to die. You know.
   
3. Once you get over 35, you might begin to have other problems with the Jesus Story, i.e. living fast, dying young, and leaving a good-looking corpse (sorry!) isn’t so hard. Really, it’s not. What’s really challenging is the years that follow, and the years that follow those, and the years that continue to follow. If you’re 40 or older, you know you’re a lot wiser and have much more experience than you did at 30, 20 … etc. Which doesn’t mean if you’re under 40 you don’t matter. It’s just that …
   
4. I’ve never been able to shake the belief that we all have a spark of the Divine within us, and it’s pretty much up to us whether or not, or how we choose to cultivate that spark. Flashes in the pan (and Jesus’s Story is a flash in the pan story) (not the enduring religion built around the story)(but the approximately 2 years of his ministry) just don’t have the same … umm … well, I’m always really impressed by those who survive aging with joyousness and light. Life, grief, from all those losses we eventually accumulate if we live long enough, can sculpt us into something gorgeous … umm … I just don’t see that that happened with Jesus (the historical figure the Jesus Story was created around.)
   

So. The first time I turned an objective eye upon the Jesus Story it failed me, as the basis for my life’s purpose, my life’s meaning, a religion, etc. And it still does.

I’m not saying it’s not a good story. It’s a great story! The themes of INCARNATION and RESURRECTION are exceedingly powerful. As is a spirituality of Love vs. a spirituality of Law. In fact, I don’t doubt that Jesus (the historical figure the Jesus Story was created around) experienced cosmic love to a degree that he received a vision of humanity who also experienced cosmic love and lived out of that. And that that was his message. But each of us can have that same experience. And it’s true we all suffer deeply in one way or another—all have our crosses to bear—so, yes, it’s a great story. Obviously, hehe, the religion it engendered, Christianity, remains one of the world’s largest.

But, honestly, I’m with the Dominican nun, Sister Lucia, I’m pretty sure Mary and Joseph were in love and they did it …

Silence by Shusaku Endo

Quietness and silence have been on my mind for several months. From September 2015 to September/October 2016 I was meditating and experimenting with meditation. At first it was wonderful to be reminded of (I’ve been a meditator with widely varying levels of commitment since 1987) and discover new ways of meditating and its fruits. But then my interest waned. (Directly in line with aforementioned varying levels of commitment.) But this time my restlessness didn’t lead to the predictable meditation drop off. No, this time I felt compelled to weed out all extraneous ritual and purpose, to strip away all pretense, and deal with meditation at its most essential level. This led me directly to silence; silence itself being the destination. And so silence has been occupying a place in my mind like a rotating gemstone on display in a cat burglar thriller. I consider the varying planes and refractions, the prisms of light, with an inner hush.

After all, what can you truly say, talk, write about silence?

In 1966, Shusaku Endo wrote an entire novel about it.

An entire novel! I read it in the last week of 2016 and it really is … page after page, paragraph after paragraph, all about silence. Martin Scorsese has now directed a movie based on said novel—which I haven’t seen because it’s not showing in my city yet—and film critics have been reviewing it.

Huh.

My local library had a copy of the novel. So I requested it, number one on the waiting list. I didn’t have to wait long.

“Silence is the story of a man who learns—so painfully—that God’s love is more mysterious than he knows, that he leaves much more to the ways of men than we realize, and that he is always present … even in His silence.” — Martin Scorsese, Forward to Silence

It’s not a long book; I read it in less than two days. It’s a completely depressing story which I couldn’t stop reading. My heart physically ached by the time I was finished. Not sure I’ll be able to watch the movie which looks to be arriving in a local cinema in about a week.

Shusaku Endo lived on borders. Raised in a bilingual and bicultural home, I’m often drawn to border dwellers, their efforts to pull apart and put together more than one way of perceiving the world. Endo is a Japanese who was baptized into the Christian faith at eleven years of age; he also spent a significant amount of time in France. Nice. (Not the noun, the adjective.) His writing mines the intersection of these diverse experiences. (Note: After finishing Silence, I read The Samurai and am in the middle of reading A Life of Jesus—both of which I’m likely to blog about in the future.)

But I was blown away by Silence. And I want to thank Scorsese for bringing the book through the film into the public consciousness.

It’s best to read it without filters, i.e. read it without anyone telling you what you should think about it.

It’s a story about Catholic missionaries and their political expulsion from Japan; and if the reader is meant to identify with the letter writer and primary narrator, Sebastian Rodrigues, then it was an epic fail for this reader.

But I doubt that’s the case. That would be too simplistic for a border dweller.

So what was Endo’s purpose in writing the novel?

Who knows?

But it provokes questions; and it confronts and invokes silence. On just about every level. Halfway through the book, I was like: This should be required reading for every professed Christian/devout believer of anything on the planet. The dark side, the underbelly, of those who wish to “convert/save” is exposed, and it’s hard to look it. You really want to turn away.

“News reached the Church in Rome. Christavao Ferriera, sent to Japan by the Society of Jesus in Portugal, after undergoing the torture of ‘the pit’ at Nagasaki had apostatized.”—Silence by Shusaku Endo

I’m an apostate—without the threat of death and/or torture. If you can be an apostate without ever having been baptized. If you were just raised in the culture but reject it, does that make you an apostate? I don’t know. But organized religion doesn’t work for me.

And yet, Endo’s novel worked really well for me …

So well, in fact, that this will probably be the first post on the quantum enlightenment of what else?



Silence.

There's No Need for Nones to be Grinches

Navigating traditional holidays can be tricky for nones (those of us who check off none of the above when defining their religious affiliations or spiritual tribe), but it doesn’t need to be.

NOTE: If you’re a religious-ex, i.e. if you were born into a family that practiced an organized religion (be it Buddhism, Christiantiy, Judaism, or Islam), and you have come to see the limitations of said religion, the first few years of moving away from that mindset can be challenging. You might even find yourself feeling angry at anyone or anything that reminds you of what it is your working to separate yourself from.

Thankfully, that passes.

However, don’t let it preclude you from experiencing the joy of celebrations—drawn from traditional rituals—that ground the expression of your values.

Let’s take Christmas as an example. No one really knows the date of Jesus’s exact birth, if Jesus is in fact an historical figure. But pagans celebrated the Winter Solstice at the end of December, and it’s believed many of the rituals associated with those parties were adapted to Christianity. This is what humans do. We take what works from the past and carry it forward into the emerging order. So … to pick and choose whatever year-end rituals and traditions hold meaning for you is a perfectly legit way to go.


As each calendar year draws to a close, and the days become shorter, I find it to be a natural time to express gratitude, seek inspiration, contemplate life in greater depth, feast, and experience renewal.

Here are a few specific examples:

1. [GRATITUDE] Since 2007, on December 17th, Wreaths Across America has honored those veterans who gave their lives to preserve our freedoms. You can donate $15 to place a wreath on the grave of someone who gave their life for our country, and/or volunteer to attend the wreath placing ceremony at a cemetery near you where you can #SayThereNames. Since I didn’t serve in the military, nor has any of my immediate family, this is a great way to take action and say a deep and sincere thank you to those who do and have.

2. [RITUAL] Celebrate with an Evergreen tree: It’s not just a Christmas tradition. Egyptians, Romans, Druids, and Germans used a variety of greenery to symbolize the promise of Spring during the shortest and darkest days of the year. So no need to hold back on this one!—History of the Christmas Tree

3. [MAKING WHAT’S OLD NEW] I love christmas music. I can’t help it, I always have and always will. I only listen to it in December, but I really only enjoy it in two specific ways:

• Performed by contemporary artists. Have you heard Pentantonix’s Hallelujah, Mariah Carey’s All I Want for Christmas is You, Whitney Houston’s Do You Hear What I Hear, or one of my all time favorite versions of The Drummer Boy by Mary J. Blige?
• A local live performance. I have snuck into Christmas Eve masses, attended tree-lighting ceremonies, wherever I can find the best christmas music in the city. Nothing beats the chills live music can give.

4. [THOUGHTFUL] There’s not a thing wrong with being thoughtful of those who guide you, help you, and/or just make you smile throughout the year. A card or simple gift will do. Make it a game and challenge yourself to be as thrifty and as creative as you can be.

5. [INSPIRATION] Schedule a binge watch of Peter Jackson’s movie adaption of J. R. R. Tolkien’s classic Good vs. Evil story, The Lord of the Rings. (Caveat: PLEASE do not RUIN the experience by watching any installments of The Hobbit! They will only make you weep!) If you're a true Tolkien fangirl or fanboy check out our J.R.R. Tolkien Epic Reads Group on Goodreads ...

6. [CONTEMPLATION] During the week of December 25th to 31st, set aside some time each day to reflect on: the closing year; the story of your life up til now; what’s coming and/or what you hope will be coming in the upcoming year; and how you’re doing on this journey we call life.

7. [RENEWAL] Send New Year’s Cards. I don’t know if it’s because my Mother’s birthday was on January 1st or because I love new beginnings, probably both, but I just love New Year’s Day and love sending out New Year’s cards!

9. [FEAST] Enjoy a delicious decadent breakfast on December 31st! Once a year isn’t going to hurt you … Because on January 1, whether or not you “diet”, you’ll probably be more than ready for something totally “healthy” … bwahahahaha!

See. No matter who you are or what you believe, you can enjoy this end-of-the-year season which humanity has been celebrating since the beginning of time in one way or another!

Millennials & Nones Refuse to be Programmed

I confess, I'm intrigued by millennials. I'm even more intrigued by nones. I didn't know I was one—a none, not a millennial—until I discovered a "label" has been coined for people like me. (Nones are those who embrace "spirituality" while claiming no religious affiliation with Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, Judaism or any other organized religion.) So ... in this my second blog series on spirituality (the first being Sunburned), I'm going to be including more musings on nones, and how they might just be the crest of the wave of the 2nd Age of Enlightenment.

But today ... I'm just going to riff on voting since the United States 2016 presidential election is next month!

There are a lot of articles around the internet about non-voting millennials/nones.

The main question being: Why—aren't they voting?

Could it possibly be because ...

They know it’s complicated.
They know life is not a soundbite.
They know the whole purpose of talking points is to manipulate.

Politics, okay, the world, is suffering from the application of “marketing strategies” designed to manipulate the target. Vote. Buy. Like. Follow. Sign up.

Millennials/nones recognize the shallowness, dodge the bullet, and avoid further invasive interaction at all costs.

Why?

Many (most?) millennials/nones grew up in divorced (let’s talk about being sick and tired of divisive rhetoric!), single parent, and/or blended families. Parents break the family vase (or simply never have one) and amazingly expect their children to look the other way.

Suck it up, Buttercup.

While I destroy your life, I’ll go out and fulfill mine. While you’re deprived of the basic nutritive ingredients upon which human-beings thrive: attention, security, and the savoring of a child’s unique history, we’re gonna focus on this stranger (new guy or gal) who's—guess what?—moving in with more strangers (kids). And we’re going to create this new family (vase).

What’s that stinky smell beneath the rug? The corpse of your first family—or just the corpse of your other parent, who after all, wasn’t up to snuff. Oh, well. We’ll just spritz it with some nifty lemon-scented air freshener. BECAUSE mommy and daddy are happy—and really!—that’s ALL THAT MATTERS, because we’re in charge. OF YOU.

Why would kids raised in that kind of environment buy into any system? Once a kid figures out the “family system” is a convenient ruse to gain buy-in without any/much/reciprocal investment or consideration on the parents’ part, it’s not a leap to extrapolate that equation to (any) (all) other systems.

Millennials/nones are self-protective. With good reason.

Ironically, as much as the human brain has been compared to a machine, and just as we get all swept up in the glamor and the “maybe it will fix-it-all or maybe it will destroy-it-all” siren song of artificial intelligence … Millennials/nones are refusing to be programmed.

By family—“It is for many almost [obvious] how difficult it is to pass religious passions from one generation to the next.”
By religion—“nones have outstripped the single largest religious group of Americans: Catholics, who are now 21 percent of the adult population. The next largest group, white evangelical Protestants, represent 16 percent.”
By politics—“the religiously unaffiliated is no voting bloc”

Droids, robots, can't do that, by the way.

REFUSE TO BE PROGRAMMED.

Perhaps it will be the millennials/nones who tear down the media mind-meld-wall and envision/create a geo-political future beyond the banal-baiting marketing strategies which increasingly reign supreme around the globe. To its obvious detriment.

Will millennials/nones vote in the upcoming presidential election?

“They could have considerable impact on the political direction of the country but have so far chosen not to do so.”

All quotes are excerpted from this RNS article: More ‘nones’ than you think, but many won’t show up on Election Day by Lauren Markoe

We Are the Creation

We are the creation,
The creation unfolding,
Infinitely loved by the Divine. — Heidi Garrett

Beyond the cliches, platitudes, and other superficials spoutings on love, lies an experience of a type that surpasses verbal explication. This is the experience of which I will attempt to speak. The love that brightens our lives with ecstatic joy and sustains us when we are beyond reach of all else, in the abyss of despair. Every life claims such peaks and troughs of human existence.

And yet love never abandons us.

I’m in the midst of my first read-through of God’s Ecstasy by Beatrice Bruteau. I say my first read-through because this book is going to require a re-read, if not several re-reads. Bruteau is a mathematician and philosopher. She has a mastery of quantum theory that will remain forever beyond me, but it is her extrapolation of that understanding into a theology of “the creation” that has had my mind pinging around like a ball in a pinball machine for the past few months. I read a few paragraphs every day with breakfast and let them percolate. She's the first “theologian” (I use the term loosely to mean anyone who applies spiritual concepts to our experience) who has satisfied my longstanding disagreement with the “we are one” religions and philosophies. [We are one and many.] I love it. Doesn’t THAT have a ring of truth to it? Okay, I’m tangent-ing …

Last summer I began to consistently meditate again. I’d fallen off the bandwagon. As someone who doesn’t have tons of worldly attachments, loosening my spiritual ones has never really been a helpful thing in the long run. So last summer, when I began to realize something was missing from my life, I began consistently meditating again, often outside in my backyard. Among the grass and the trees, the wind and the bugs, the sky and the clouds, the wonderful fresh scent of it all … and I connected with an abundance of love that I don’t remember ever connecting with before.

Sometimes when I meditate I get eureka-type insights. I prefer to not write them down, because I have a strange (is it strange? I don’t know) belief that if the insights are valid they will endure … or rise again until I won’t forget them.

The insight I had on one of those summer nights beneath a full moon was that: We humans are incapable of unconditional love. I know! You laugh that I had to meditate to come to that realization. But this was a cellular understanding. Think about it … we’re all exhorted to “love thy neighbor as thyself” and told that “love conquers all” and, well, you know, “love means never having to say your sorry”. But who is supposed to do all this loving? Imperfect humans? We, who none of us have ever been loved perfectly or unconditionally, are supposed to expect ourselves to be perfectly and  unconditionally loving of others? We who learn by imitation?

Isn’t that a double bind? A demand that simply can’t be achieved?

So … what if we have it a bit wrong? What if all these exhortations, guilt trips, shamings, cajolings, to love one another perfectly and unconditionally are simply … misguided?

I think we do need unconditional love.

But maybe, just maybe, the answer isn’t an outside to outside connection. Maybe the answer is an inside to outside connection. Let’s just say you meditated, and in that meditation, you connected to a source within (What source within? That spark of divinity within us all … the spark I call the soul flame) … so let’s just say you meditated, and in the silence you were able to experience an infusion of unbounded love. Let’s just say, you did this, experienced this for 3 - 5 - 10 - 20 minutes every day, most days. And it was the most complete thorough experience you ever had of feeling perfectly and unconditionally loved. Like you didn’t have to hide even a speck of who you are. And you felt that unbounded love FOR every quark of your being and IN every quark of your being.

Mightn’t that alter the way you perceived, approached your day … and the people around you? Mightn’t you naturally (no pasted on fake sh*t here) smile at the next person who came across your path?

Probably.

Would it create a lightening-strike transformation? Like, would you in one fell swoop be delivered from your old grumpy, irritated-irritating, distracted self?

Probably not.

But, what if … you meditated every day?

I'd like to re-quote a powerful message from one of the meditation articles I linked to in Meditation & Eclectic Spirituality, Volume 4.

A Case for Meditation in Schools: Aguirre's conclusion to this opinion piece is quite powerful:

When we are able through meditation to take the time to love ourselves, we stop looking to the world for love and find it within. Through self-love and awareness, there is no longer a need to inflict your emotional pain upon others, as it becomes easier to view yourself in others, and realize that hurting others is hurting oneself.

I'd like to posit replacing the concept of experiencing self-love with the concept of experiencing the unconditional love of our creator ... the same creator that created the universe the galaxy the stars ... and loves it all.