I will be using this space to post excerpts from my e-book, "A Handbook for the Spiritual Journey," available on Amazon as a Kindle book, and available for free on my WordPress site, "My Published Works." This is a 2012 revision of my paperback published in 2002 with the title, "The Evolution of the Idea of God." Which is to say that the ideas presented here were preached from the pulpit of the Presbyterian Church of the Covenant, in Greensboro, North Carolina, from 2002 until my retirement in February of 2011. And I'm bringing them to light here, because why not? I hope you find reading these excerpts to be helpful in your journey!
From chapter nine, “Community and Chaos”
When we put ourselves in accord with our life (Which is not too different from “living aligned with the Tao”), we have an attitude of openness that receives and perceives each situation as it arises, sees what is happening there, knows what needs to happen, what is called for, what is being asked of us, and responds to it spontaneously–without calculation or consideration.
When we bring reason and logic into play, assessing our options, weighing our likely gains and losses, running a cost/benefit analysis, etc., we have left the realm of the Tao, and moved into doing what’s best, all things considered.
In order to see what is being asked of us in a situation, we have to be able to view that situation without prejudice, that is, without fear, desire or duty coming into play. We have to be free of self-interest on any level in order to evaluate the pluses and minuses and determine the response appropriate to the occasion.
When life is going to hell all around us, it is natural to panic, throw up our hands, give up and go over into “So what? Who cares? Why try? What good will it do to do anything?” And quit. Quit trying. Quit working at our life. Take up slugging strong liquor straight from the bottle. Sit looking at the wall. Embracing depression and saying “The hell with it all!”
It is precisely when life goes to hell all around us that we need to stand up, step forward to meet hell coming at us, and make our best choices under the circumstances. We have to exercise our best judgment because that is when it matters most what we do.
So we sit down, shut up, be quiet and drop into emptiness/stillness/silence (One thing, not three), and wait there for the mud to settle and the water to clear, waiting for something to arise unbidden as realization, recognition, awareness, knowledge, calling us to action as direction from our psyche, our unconscious, our original nature, our innate virtues, our inherent imagination, our intrinsic intuition, and swing into doing what needs to be done, here, now, when, where, and how it needs to be done, because there is no time to waste in endless sorrow, horror, deliberation.
Nothing matters more that living like everything is riding on what we do when it seems as though nothing we do matters.
Faith is something we make up and say it is so. And here, we have to have faith in ourselves and in our life and in life itself, and live as though how we live in each situation as it arises makes all the difference in that situation. Always. No matter what.
We step into the situation and go to meet what is coming to meet us, and make our best possible response to it in light of our experience with emptiness/stillness/silence–and do it again in the next situation that develops from this one, and in all of those that develop after that.
We are going to be challenged again and again to forget our life, to give up, to not care, to not try, to quit, surrender, stop… And we are back to, “It took the Cyclops to bring out the hero in Ulysses.” It takes the Cyclops to bring out the hero in all of us.
And this is where the right kind of community comes into play because it is difficult to remember it on our own. The right kind of community calls us to square up to the truth of how things are and how we wish they were, and to take up the work of growing up some more again by doing the work that grows us up and brings us forth, and constitute the labor pains of our own becoming brought on by encounters with evil in all its myriad forms.
It is our struggle to come to terms (some more again) with the discrepancy between how things are and how we want them to be that makes us servants of the good that we are capable of creating by the way we live in the world. This is soul work, assisted by Communities of Innocence through all of the different stages of our development.
Together, we are good for the things each of us needs in order to live the life that is ours to live in the world of chaos and vicious brutality. We gather to help one another decide what is important. We gather to help one another develop our individual sense of who we are and what we are about–and to deepen/strengthen our connection with the source of our life and being: Our original nature, our innate virtues, our inherent imagination, our intrinsic intuition, out of which we live, and move, and have our being.
We gather to help one another become aware of what is deepest, truest and best about us, and to remind each other of the importance of living toward the best we can imagine in each situation as it arises, anyway, nevertheless, even so–as we do what we love with the gifts that are ours to share. We gather to help one another laugh and cry in the presence of the truth that awakens and sustains us all.
There are two things that are true about truth: laughter and tears. In the presence of truth, we will laugh or cry. We can gage the quality and depth of truth by the degree to which we do one or the other. There are things that are true that never bring us to tears or laughter. For instance, the sun is 96 million miles away, and the speed of light is 186,000 miles a second, which is moving, but it doesn’t move us.
The kind of truth that moves us connects us with the source of life and being, and sustains us in the swirling enter of chaos. If we can bear the pain of the encounter with chaos, and look into the face of evil, we will see that it is the mechanism by which life is laid bare. Evil reveals what is truly important. Evil is good in that way.
When Eve and Adam eat the forbidden fruit, their eyes are opened, and that is not a bad thing. It is the essential thing. Everything hangs on that, flows from it. Spirit, character, heart and soul depend upon our eyes being opened so that we know what is important. Evil is the slap that wakes us up, brings us to life, and enlists us in the service of what matters most if and when we are surrounded by a community of the right kind of people.
The primary social unit has never been an individual acting alone. We have been tribal from the start. And that has as much to do with our emotional and spiritual needs as it does with our physical needs. We need one another to have a chance. But it is not just any other who will do. It takes a community of those who know what they are ding to provide us with what we need to deal with the chaotic intrusions of life. It takes a community well practiced in the art of survival to save us. In a culture like this one, our best chance of finding that kind of community is to create one.
It starts with three or more of us coming together with the purpose of creating a safe, respectful space without answers, willing and able to ask the questions that beg to be asked and say the things that cry out to be said, and capable of listening one another to the truth of how things are and also are–to the truth of what is important, of what is happening and needs to happen in response.
We mold ourselves into the kind of community that saves our souls–not from the eternal fires of hell when we die, but from the turbulent waters of chaos here and now–by reconnecting us with our soul and enabling us to have life “and have it abundantly,” here and now.
We work to become the kind of place that provides us with what we need to take chaos on and bring order and meaning into the present moment of our life together throughout the time left for living.
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