See what happens as the mind crumbles

Opening emails after church Sunday afternoon, one from a friend asked how I feel about today’s The Daily Sip. Reading it, I have to think. And I think my answer is that It revived my struggle that I thought I had successfully suppressed. Metaphorically, I suppose, or gothically, bringing to mind the beautiful portrait that was painted of me about 1958 when I was 22 or so, “The New Ensign”, that Hurricane Michael soaked and is flaking, crumbling, moldering in the back of a closet. Dorian Gray in the attic in reverse; maybe as it decays I will grow younger? After reading The Daily Sip, I’m thinking again about certainties, my certainties, their evolution.

I was sure of things, fairly sure, pretty much certain in fact. No, by God, I was damn sure, until a couple things developed, evolved, over the years of my life. Not just “happened” nor simply came to pass, but were laid on me from within, perhaps as part of my aging; or, more specific, my maturing. Come to think of it there are three things, not just a couple; the third thing being Awareness, dawning awareness of my self-awareness, and contemplating the self awareness that distinguishes us from other, “lower”, animals. Lower in quotation marks because when it comes down to it, we hating and murderous humans have fallen as low as creatures, created beings, can be. I mean, to stray off my track, if you are offered a choice of being either human or a butterfly, don’t come here. Or a hummingbird. A horseshoe crab.

I don’t want to lose my train of thought, so I’ll have to keep coming back.

One of the two things that developed is Realization that although I am sure of certain things (we are talking, I am thinking first, of divine things, which LaFond evidently experienced as cultural things), other people who are fully as intelligent and human as I am, are even more certain of opposite things. Where theirs and mine are mutually exclusive and both cannot be Truth. 

Not just Christian v. Jew v. Muslim v. Agnostic v. Atheist v. et.al but opposite to the Christian idea in general, I am not sin-oriented. Most inappropriate to confess in Lent, I do not have a sense of sinfulness, nor of a need for my or your or humanity's need to be divinely forgiven for the sins of the world in order to be saved into. There was a Time, even still clung to hopefully, when I'd agree with God's assessment in Genesis 1:31, that all that he'd made was very good, including us, man, Gen 1:27 הָֽאָדָם֙ ha-adam humankind! WOW! humans: what a great idea! - - and one man's one disobedience does not make all of us always all bad; the notion of original sin is nonsense. More, I buy into the Jesus Movement of Love that seems prevalent in my denomination these days. But not the certainty of sin that I was born into and grew up into.

Still on certainty, some of us are willing to die as martyrs for what we believe, others are not only willing to die for but are willing to kill for. “Islam or the sword” my World History teacher at Bay High used to shout in quoting from that era of history. Or the Inquisition, a Christian manifestation of the same arrogance, mentality and certitude. You must believe what I believe or I will kill you; and even if you don’t really believe it, you must SAY you do, become what I am.

Still holding on to my train of thought. 

Anyway, that’s the first thing: that you and I are absolutely certain of opposite Truths. And there are many out there, with third and fourth and fiftieth and zillionth certainties. All incompatible. So the first thing is that I become wary of my own certainties. Even to the point that, at least in my mind, I condemn religious certainties as evil, the greatest sin, because of the horrors they have wrought on humans and civilizations and the world in the name of A Name. Mind, unless it is harmful, to choose and practice a religion is not evil, realizing that there are many religions and that one has chosen one among many from which one might have selected instead. It is the unselfaware convicted zealous religious fanatic who tells me that if I don’t believe what s/he believes, I’m going to Hell or that s/he is going to kill me. And I know for gardenia sure that I’m not going to believe absurdities just to save my axe. 

Exact same goes for political certainties and racial certainties and prejudices. On a light note, the main character of Fredrik Backman’s  “A Man Called Ove” (oo-veh) was virtually, almost morally, certain of Saab over Volvo, and absolutely over BMW when his once best friend Rune backed his new BMW out of the garage; oh, the outrage, the judgment, the condemnation. Heavier and darker, “the master race” notion that nearly brought down civilization in my own early 20th century lifetime, and anti-Semitism spreading today. Anti-semitism and hatred of Muslim immigrants and everyone who is Other. And what I stumbled over recently, a map of “Eretz Israel as established by HaShem” that I might characterize sarcastically and pointedly to those whose history ought to have taught them better, as Das Größere Israelische Reich: certainty that certain land is ours because it was given to us by our God when others, who own it, don’t at all believe at all what we believe, neither the same god nor the same book. Certainties of unspeakable arrogance, a human character flaw.

Still trying to hold on to the handrails of my train of thought. So, Awareness and self-awareness and Realization.

The other thing is Study. Studying the history of my own particular brand of certainty that, again, I was born into and grew up certain of. And discovering, and letting myself realize, its sources, origins, etiologies, reasons, methods. Historic cruelties, forcefulnesses, intolerances, bloodinesses (read Jenkins, The Jesus Wars). Read, study, find out truths: George Washington had slaves, shall we now hate and shun instead of idolize him, burn Mount Vernon, knock the top off the Washington Monument, change the name of our capital city to Inoccuous, D.C.? It makes them less precious to find out that the certainties of our theological orthodoxies were not settled peaceably but forcefully, inhumanely, even by ballot to decide truth (I mean, mortals voting settles eternal truths? I don't think so). At some point I realized that Pontius Pilate had it right: “What Is Truth?” is the question after all, even if I believe Pilate is looking at Him, looking Truth in the face even as he raises his question.

Letting certain things settle into my awarenesses and applying to myself and my own certainties. Someone said that no amount of belief makes something true. A USMC lieutenant colonel I worked with over half a century ago once remarked to me that “Just because the admiral said it, that don’t make it so” - - applies not only to admirals but to old men drafting and mandating creeds that two thousand years on, I am still obliged to stand and say I believe. And ultimately, that inscription in the lintel over the library door of one of my theological seminaries: “Seek The Truth, Come Whence It May, Cost What It Will”. OMG, what a shocker in a religious institution. But it holds out hope and promise for Uncertainty, and for the Doubt that is an essence of Faith. I hope it’s still there and hasn’t since been judged politically incorrect and obliterated in favor of something as inoffensive as Innocuous, D.C.

Someone who studied an exploratory course of Christianity under my oversight once told me s/he was sorry for having studied it, because it called into question and destroyed all the assurances and certainties that once were so precious and held so dear. That is a very real example of “Cost What It Will” and it can be quite painful; I have been there and experienced the cost, the loss, the grief, the sadness, the sorrow, the emptiness. The Homesickness for what Was, for me. But one gets through it, and comes out on the other side, not happier or feeling better, but certainly “disillusioned” and where the skies are not sunny all day; which, after all, is the way it is.

What’s a cost of Truth, or seeking Truth? The cost can be the center of one’s spiritual being. Laughable maybe, but dead serious for me, it happened in the mid to late 20th century revision of our Book of Common Prayer from 1928 to 1979: devastation, the desolation of losing my spiritual core. I was certain “they” were wrong and I was right: in the biblical “forty years” since then I have realized that I was wrong even if they weren't right; but it’s no consolation, because the beauty that was incomparable is gone anyway. Like that portrait of me at 22 years old, “The New Ensign”, destroyed by the storm: it wasn’t me anymore anyway, I had to let it go, so I might as well. 

But I’m doing fine. Not the same, never the same, but okay, fine. Back on track, same with my certainties. I’m okay without them while still living the Seasons and loving the Stories and singing the Songs. If LaFond knows it as a culture, I'm okay with that. Awareness and Realization and Study. Somewhere in the above rambling is how I feel contemplating LaFond’s latest. I don't disagree with what he wrote, in Time everything dies and rots and something new and hopefully better is seeded and grows up in its place. That goes for institutions and concepts as well as trees. I think he enjoys crotchety and hermit. I hope Kai the Dog is well.

Pic: Sunday Sunrise East of 3rd Street 32401

IDK. I know nothing.
RSF&PTL anyway.
T+