MONEY GONE WEIRD

elizabeth murray

Fourthajuly everywhere, fireworks, explosions, talking heads remind us of wars and rumors of wars, freedom thanks to continuous war. Cheap talk about freedom runs year round like American elections, so much flag consciousness, narcissist nationalism, it makes me uncomfortable. The rest of the world leaves us to it the way a group of people allows the most self-centered among them, the one needing to be the center of attention at all times, allows him to rule. His time will pass. He'll self-destruct. Everybody bears with it and says, "Well, that's just how he is." He rules because his ego demands it, he has more money than anyone else. In America, money is the only measure of an individual's power. I have no money; therefore, I have no power. I have white privilege, though it's only good for a better chance than somebody black not to be killed by a cop. And I don't want the power that goes with money. I don't want to be looked up to for money. I want money to have no role in my life but legal tender for exchange, a form of energy---this energy for that energy. Beyond an exchange of energy, money gets weird. 

elizabeth murray

Social status in America has to do with money and money only. I imagine it's the same other places, so it appears in films from around the earth. Success is measured by money. Respect has to do with money, too. Among the mountain people, the working class, everyone rates basic human respect for mere existence. The middle class people moving into the mountains only respect people up the money-status ladder from themselves. This makes them obnoxious to the mountain people for their snooty arrogance toward people down the ladder. Of course, mountain people who climb the ladder never look down the ladder, either. It's the nature of the money-status hierarchy to want more, not less. Corny as the Beverly Hillbillies tv show was, it plays on the comedy of what hillbillies do when they tap into big money. They do, indeed, become comical, like Texans draped in gold, driving a Cadillac pickup. I never enter the lottery from fear of winning. I know a shit-load of money would make a mess of me. I'd have to give it away immediately, get it out of my mind and out of my hands.  

elizabeth murray

The system of money, status and power is American from all the way back to inspiration to cross the ocean. Making money overran a continent, drained it of its resources, squandered its profits and is left like a working-poor man who won the lottery and a year later is that much in debt. Something interesting is in the works. It's not yet on the surface visible. I'm thinking of an example of the process in the art world, like while abstract expressionism was having its moment, taught all over the country in university art departments as pure art, young artists were doing what was to become Pop and some others to become minimalism in the background, unknown, unanticipated. The artworks were being made over a period of years, shown in small galleries nobody outside New York ever heard of. Eventually, a few of the artists are heard of beyond New York, and a very, very few everybody knows, like Andy Warhol. In this time when the rich have taken all to themselves in off-shore, tax-free, numbered accounts, something unknown to outsiders is stirring. 

elizabeth murray

I can't help but think Bernie Sanders is coming from what's next. Greece, Spain and Puerto Rico are putting a strain on the old way. Something new is yet to come forward, though I doubt it is far away. Finally, the Pope, a Christian who appears to speak and make papal (infallible) decisions with attention to the true spirit of the Christ. The people who identify Christian, yet are quietly embarrassed by the Fundamentalist misuse of the identity, they must be feeling good to see the Pope Francis example take Christian back to where it has dimension beyond cartoon. Sanders, a politician talking straight, finds overwhelming support every appearance. Whether an honest man can make it all the way through the corridors of corruption to a win will be seen in its time. He gives me the appearance that he represents a rising wave of a population of people becoming aware they want their democracy and their economy back. I don't mean  to pretend to be a prophet. Sanders and the pope seem like two public figures speaking honestly in a time of deception, just when we needed them most. I wonder if they could be a sign more individuals of good faith are finding a forum.   

elizabeth murray herself

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BALANCE: SUNLIGHT AND RAIN

A quiet rainy day. It started overcast, then sprinkled and steadily more until it became a full rain falling straight down. The wild violet leaves covering the ground outside the window dance, randomly touched by drops of water dripping from leaves above. The rhododendron leaves catch a falling drop and dance in their random patterns too. I hear in my head voices complaining about the rain. I thought about giving a friend a call, then revised the thought: not while it's raining--he'll complain about it raining as long as I'll listen. Everywhere I go on a rainy day, somebody is complaining about the inconvenience. I just write it off as a case of somebody who wants to be spoiled and have everything just right all the time. I find it refreshing when somebody speaks in favor of rain, its nourishing quality, its ability to keep drought away. I'm recalling someone I knew in the early 1980s who said of a hot, dry summer, God is tired of hearing tv weathermen wanting clear, sunny days. OK, you want sunny days, you got em. You want everything in your life cheery and bright, here it is. Don't forget to enjoy the drought that follows. The sun is nourishing and the rain is nourishing, each in moderation. Too much sun and life forms wither. Too much rain and life forms wither. In my first years on the spiritual path, I found from going to special spiritual places and getting into the swoon of the spirit that later at home I come down from the lofty height and drop way down into depression, minor despair for at least the same amount of time. Balance. In my early years with Meher Baba, others would say to me, You gotta go to Baba's center in India. You'll love it. It's the best feeling. You gotta. Fortunately, I never had the money to go spend a couple weeks in India. A time came when I had the money and the time, but I remembered every time I experienced a spiritual high, next thing was spiritual low for the balance. I'd rather give up the high to avoid the low that follows. I don't want a bi-polar spiritual life.

Later, after several years, I'd hear, You haven't been to India yet? You gotta go! My thought I kept to myself, if I really gotta go, it will happen. It hasn't happened yet, so I must not gotta. Then it came to the place I am now, don't want to go to India. Don't want to deal with airports and sitting strapped in a seat with a window that looks onto the wing for endless hours, the Mumbai airport and the city with throngs of bobbing heads, stepping over the dying and the dead, the scent of old urine everywhere. Massive, intense poverty, arrogant Brahmans, humble Untouchables, racism that makes our racism look casual, chaos that makes our own look like order. Americans go to India to swoon in spiritual emotion and Indians come to America to swoon in money. So I go from a country that is only interested in money to one that has so little that people are only interested in money. Why spend a couple thousand dollars to go from one form of loving money to another form of same? Hindus and Muslims hate each other murderously. Hindus slaughter Muslims and Muslims slaughter Hindus at any provocation. A neighborhood of Hindus with machetes will run through a neighborhood of Muslims slashing everybody they see. It happens the other way around too. I have a problem with the hate in the American air, so why go someplace where they hate even more vehemently? Yes, I know, ignore all that and feel the spiritual high at Baba's tomb. Maybe I could, but why? I go home by way of mechanical flight, endure airports, grow weary of reading and look out the window at the wing for hours, feeling wow I did something big. Get home, cat is depressed and mad at me for being gone so long, everything in my life is on hold, a stack of bills and trash in the mailbox, then fall into depression for six months in grief because I can't have a spiritual high all the time, poor me. I must not be very advanced. I'm a slow-witted dolt who doesn't get anything, trapped in a limited body and mind, woe, aint it awful. Months of addressing this issue in self and reasoning self out of this thinking. 

I'd rather stay home. God, the spirit, the way, creator-sustainer-destroyer, is not localized in India. It's not localized in tombs, shrines, naked men covered with ashes in long beards. I'd just as soon jump into the local waste-water treatment plant for a swim as to bathe in the Ganges. I keep an African mask on the wall that for me is an emblem of balance, a visual reminder. I prefer the waves of my flow to stay at moderate levels, not too high, not too low, a slight pendulum swing, not the full arc. A nice rainy day reminds me that rain is always something to welcome, even when it's too much and the water runs in torrents out of the creek beds. Too much wet, even unto monsoon, is better than too much dry. I've come to a place in the life where I would rather have warm, sunny days and overcast rainy days in waves of moderation that keep the green world happy, and through the green world everything else. I don't want the rush of a spiritual high. There was a time I craved the spiritual high, because I thought I was supposed to. So many people were into the high I felt like it was the real deal and I need to get it too. I don't think it's the real deal anymore. I don't think it has any real importance. Living my life has become my spiritual practice. I have come to see that at least in this phase of my inner growth, everyday life is the shrine I worship at, my home my mosque. I used to feel like I could find that woo-woo feeling in the woods among the silent trees. I can recall a few times in the past that woo-woo feeling took me over for a day and made me believe I was doing something really special. Then I crashed for a period of time. I don't like the crash. And I don't believe the high is all that important. This summer has been a good one of balanced weather. Three days to a week of sunny days, then three or so days of light rain and overcast. The temperature has mostly been in the lower 70s during the day and lower 60s, sometimes 50s at night. This is the balance I've come to like in my spiritual life. Sunlight and rain in balance, keeping my interior life lush and green sparkling with wildflowers.

I don't want to go to church to hear a self-called preacher bombast about Satan. In the course of a phone conversation with my Christian mother, she'll say Satan a dozen times and never the name of Jesus once. She warned me a couple years ago that I'm not afraid enough of Satan, "You better watch out." My thought: I'm not the one paying attention to Faux news and giving my power to people spewing hate. She's never one time said to me anything about the power of love, but multiple, multiple times stressed the power of Satan. It tells me her "Christian" church is awfully dedicated to the dark side. OK, they like the dark side. It's good for them. I grew up in that inner darkness that called  itself Christian and ran for my life. I like to go to a Primitive Baptist church from time to time, primarily for the singing, and the Primitive preachers are true to the spirit. However, when the expectations begin, I'm gone. In church, expectations start immediately. My last visit to a Primitive church a man said to me, How long's it been since we seen ye last, brother? I said about a year (actually 2). He said, You need to do a little better'n 'at. My unspoken thought: I will do much better; you'll never see me here again. In my own personal belief system, love is not about intimidating others into believing what I believe with the threat of hell if you don't see it my way. I call it arrogance, not love. The Lord told them to admonish the ones that don't walk the line. And the Lord told me to go my own way, bye-bye. I like to maintain my balance doing right by others and myself. I don't even want woo-woo spirit in my life anymore. I've come to where I see the spiritual path is right here at home in my own life among the people I live among. No need to seek enlightened masters to make me spiritual. No need to observe any ritual or belong to a group, abstain from liquor, read scripture, or anything. A brief visit with someone I see in town by chance can be as great a spiritual experience as praying at a tomb in India.          

photos by tj worthington

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GRUMPY OLD BASTARD HURRYING SLOWLY

bluets

In a minor swivet today, attempting to make some progress on some art projects I have around the house in different phases of development, waiting for paint to dry that will take weeks. I like oil paint, and don't care that it takes a long time to dry. It's part of my hurry slowly ethic. I don't want to allow myself to fall into needing everything to be right now. It hasn't been many years, if it can be measured in years, that I've found my flow and fell in tune with it. The reason I never saw it before is my flow is slow. I only feel engaged with my flow when my body and mind are in slow gear. It took slowing way, way down to find it. I couldn't believe how slow it seemed. Mind in this time is set on racing speed. It was called the rat race in the Fifties. Today, it's expected. I went from being something of a fishing boat with an outboard motor to a sailboat. I like it much better. I prefer the sound of water slapping the hull to a gasoline motor spewing pollution. It was a surprise to find my flow is so slow. It was also not a surprise. I hadn't thought of the rate of the flow, how fast or slow it goes. A moment's thought tells me the flow is slow. The money flow is fast. When I separate myself from the money flow, I slow way down, slow down so much that I meet my flow like using sails instead of the internal combustion engine with the gas, the oil, the breakdowns, the noise, the unreliability, the indifference to the flow of air or water. I want to be in tune with the flow of the weather, the air, the flow of the donkeys, ants, of the trees. When my flow is slow I feel a rapport with the natural world around me, with the crows, the donkeys, the trees, the ground, the air, the ferns that are uncurled to full leaf, the water flowing over and around rocks in the creek.

woody allen

It was a day of the phone ringing over and over. Nielsen tv ratings, 800 service, mostly. And people I knew called. I don't recall a day of the phone ringing so many times. With Caller ID it's easy to just let the phone ring. It's been happening so much lately, I click TALK, then click END immediately to stop the phone from ringing. I don't care what it does at the other end. I'm thinking about picking it up next time and telling whatever college student is working a shit job for next to no pay to stop calling this number. Haven't done it yet because I doubt it will do any good. It's nothing personal at their end. It's only personal at my end. I'm on the no-call list, like it matters. I despise these invasions of my life at home so much that I look for ways to be a nuisance in return. I can't blow a whistle into the phone or cuss whoever it is at the other end. It's a sucker college student taking the last job he or she can find that pays anything. They're not my problem. Management is my problem, the decision-makers who find disturbing me in my home at meal times is good marketing. When corporate junk mail sends a return envelope pre-paid, I'll put some paper I'd otherwise throw away, junk mail from another source, back to them on their own cut-rate first class postage. I don't make them nasty because the only person who will ever see the contents is the one assigned to opening the mail from the corporation's own envelopes, somebody being paid nearly nothing. I do it to add a few cents to their operating expenses. It's nothing to the corporate accountants, but it's personal to me. The international corporations buy legislation to make it legal to trample my individual freedoms and I have no recourse. Sending junk mail back to them is my recourse. It is little in cost with negligible nuisance factor at their end, but it satisfies me, junk mail for junk mail. You trample my right to a peaceable life at home engaged in my own flow, I trample yours. A rule of thumb I live by is to never buy anything advertised on television, except by necessity. I stay out of Walmart, except for necessity, which is rare.

the restaurant at the edge of the universe

I've never felt right supporting the Death Star with my taxes. Two-thirds of what I pay in taxes goes to the Pentagon. I cannot, in conscience, have so much income I pay multiple thousands a year into the machine to kill and destroy the lives of poor people in defenseless countries and put black people in prison at home. I cannot support the war on the poor around the globe and at home. It's been my philosophy since as far back as I can remember in my working life, to live on the least income possible and pay the least into that which I am coerced against my will to support. I laugh at the teabaggers waving AKs in the air, snorting about not wanting to pay taxes. I think: Dude, you're taxed for what you want. Want less, you pay less taxes. Want nothing, you pay no taxes. You rant about being a Christian. Didn't Jesus say, render unto Caesar what is Caesar's. It doesn't take much stretch of the imagination to get it that he's talking about paying your taxes. You want peace of mind, pay your taxes. You don't want peace of mind, do what you gotta do. I wouldn't hold them to Jesus' teaching if they didn't make a public issue of supposed adherence to Southern Baptistism. They holler Bible and Constitution and don't know either one, nor American History. They embarrass themselves and everyone else in Christendom by wrapping themselves in the word Christian. Maybe ten years ago I was talking with some people from Pennsylvania, pleasantly, and then, Are you a Christian? I thought: Ruin a good conversation. My right front tire went flat, pulled me into the wall; had to get out of this conversation now. I said, Christian is a political party and I'm not a member. Of course, that's not what they meant. Was I saved? I felt even more distant from them. I could only think, It's none of your damn business. Do you have your underwear on today? All I said was yes. From then on my air was leave me alone. We didn't waste each other's time much longer. I'm too easily bored by robots and parrots to have a successful social life.

fencepost ruin

 

 

Best place for me is at home. I've become paranoid about driving on the highway. The new generation of highway patrol is zero tolerance zealous as per training. In the state of North Carolina, to see the flashing blue light in the rearview mirror costs $200 on sight. Like it costs at least a hundred dollars to step across a doctor's threshold. They're pulling people for everything now. I take the parkway and back roads, going on the highways only when necessary and five miles under the speed limit. Now I know why old people drive so slow. It's been a give-a-shit last couple days. I told Carole on the phone this morning that today I say to the universe I am ready to go, any time is ok from here on. I will not ask for a stay. I'm down to there is nothing I want but to get by. The expenses of just getting by are outrageous. Getting by isn't even fun anymore. So much anger and hate swirl about in the air between people now. Sunday in the car with Nevlim and Nitsuj, two Parsi guys visiting from Mumbai, Nitsuj driving, Nitsuj had to pull off the road in a hurry. A guy in a black pickup went by and shot him the bird. I thought: Wrong thing to do, Mr Big. You better be careful about doing that to people you don't know. Nitsuj went after him, went right up to his bumper, then turned onto the road we were to turn onto. He told me, If you and Nivlem had not been with me, I'd have run him off the road. I can do it. Easy. I don't care. I just didn't want to scare you and Nivlem. He wasn't talking big, either. Might have been a little exaggeration in there for drama, but he would have done something. One of those things I don't do that could lead to a gunfight really fast. A lot of other people would jump at the chance. I'm content to stay at home and let other people fight out their frustrations from feeling helpless in a low-bid world that honors only privilege. I want to stay home and look out the windows at donkeys, squirrels, birds, rhododendron, ferns, wild violets, jewelweed. I have my own library for reading and music. For art projects, I have given myself a control: no buying anything but the minimum necessary, like tubes of white paint. I won't use any paint I don't already have. Canvases, boards, surfaces to paint on, brushes, objects to make things from, will be found in my inventory of found things I've picked up over time; wood, rock, metal, plastic, paper. It's time to collage all the found objects I've picked up over time.

deceased black pine

 

 

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THE POPE AND THE UGLY PAGANS

Earlier, I set out to watch Kurosawa's 1961 film, Sanjuro, his take on a samurai slasher film. It started putting me to sleep. Took a nap. Watched an hour of it and couldn't handle it anymore. For one thing, maybe I've seen too many samurai slasher films, but that's not it. That just increases my appreciation for a really good one like 13 Assassins by Takashi Miike. I'd seen Seven Samurai and Yojimbo, the films of Kurosawa's samurai series before Sanjuro. This one just didn't click with me. I felt like it would have made a comic stage play with stylized pretend slashing with Star Wars light sabers. I'd like to see that. Sanjuro had too much running and hiding, a bozo bunch of sidekicks with the bold samurai that might have worked in 1961, but it doesn't hold my attention now. I turned it off and went back to bed to get out of the cold. I have heat, but the floor is cold and sometimes I feel like a barefoot Sherpa climbing a Himalayan mountain. I have on some warm sox and some warm houseboots that make a difference. I lay in the warm bed listening to an NPR hour-long show of three people telling experiential stories before audiences. It was an attention-holding hour of three people talking what we call some real shit. Wrapped up in my favorite blanket I thought of a few of my friends I saw earlier in the day, stories they could tell, stories I could tell, everyday life moments that matter for one or several of an infinite number of reasons.

 

O

 

I see trends in our television society that I often find heartening in that they acknowledge our humanity. We have well-intended political correctness as a regimen, the ABCs of popular self-censoring. I've realized the republican strategy of using people like Cruz, Palin, Bachman, and a host of others like them, worms that crawled out of the pit of ignorance to infect others with their disease, is based in the predictable rule of thumb that people of lower intelligence levels vote republican. Their appeal is  their ignorance. They appeal to the people of below average intelligence. It's sad to see, but it's always been that way. It's just that Karl Rove brought it to the surface and used it politically. Of course, Ted Cruz does not appeal to anyone with any sense. It's not what his role is about. He stirs up ignorance. So much activity is from the dark side in the capital of the nation and every state, it gives evidence that the only purpose is money, Mammon is worshipped. The new pope nailed it when he called wealth the new golden calf. He has spoken to the world that American fundamentalism is an illness. It is funny in a time when the police state of the world destroys governments and infrastructures of Latin American countries, impoverishing their people, to keep them under control. It was known at the time, and in all time since, that American's bombed Allende, the popularly elected president of Chile, in his office in Santiago, a bomb from a plane aimed at his office. The world looked the other way. USA put fascist Pinochet in power and destroyed Chile such that it will take decades to a century for it to come back, and killed Nobel Prize poet Pablo Neruda. For corporate interests.

 

 

 

Reading the public words spoken by the new pope, Francis, is so refreshing they make tears run down my face, tears of joy. The contrast with the force that has power over the American people is such that it shows our entire way of life, the American belief system, the American Dream, to be from the dark side, Mammon. The pope has even brought up Mammon. Our American government and media are coming so much from the dark side in this time that speaking the views of Jesus publicly has rich catholics threatening him with leaving the church out of their tax-deductible charitable giving. This pope might say something like, Get behind me Satan,  if pushed to it with such threats. He said that the people who call themselves Christians and accumulate wealth are "ugly pagans." He's sweeping out the trash. I never imagined in my lifetime seeing a pope as anything other than the top dog in the worlds original and greatest bureaucratic hierarchy. This one appears to have read the gospels. He's a pope who inspires with his truth. Whoever heard of such a thing? Every time I see a new quotation from him it takes my breath that someone in a position of international authority is talking anti-fascism. I don't even need to question what American fundamentalists are going through being called by the pope on the evening news an illness. The funny part is that from their point of view, he's the devil himself. For their sakes, would that he were.

 

 

Now he's saying that hell is a concept of the past, that a loving God would not have such a place. He's speaking from papal infallibility, which he actually may be instrumental in changing. It seems like something he'd do. I won't even let my mother talk to me about it. Hearing it would be a repeat of what I already know. It's Satan, himself, talking. That's all. I don't see the American fundamentalists being moved very much by what the pope said about them. They will wear it with pride and  become even more so, because the devil called them an illness. I don't know and don't want to know, but I see them in my mind's eye making this pope out to be the anti-Christ. I don't want to hear the preaching on the subject, because I already can. He says they can't call themselves Christians and continue to refuse to help the poor. He points out that helping the poor is what Christian is about. Not this side of the Atlantic. I don't think it is that side of the Atlantic either. Won't it be fun to see helping the poor American style. Corporate logos everywhere. This box of instant oatmeal brought to you by Calvary Bible Church in association with Exxon, sign here that you've never had an abortion. I've never held the pope up high, as I did not grow up Catholic, but I've paid attention to the papacy because it was so visible and so in free fall in this time. Pope Francis is something like a parachute opening. I'd like to see a world-wide grassroots trend creep into action everywhere of Catholics reaching out to the poor. I would never anticipate American fundamentalists  doing something the pope said is the Christian thing to do. 

 

 

 

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CHRISTIAN THE POLITICAL PARTY

shroud of turin

It seems like I've come to a place where I want to change my ways of thinking, but know I won't, because, for the most obvious reason, I'm too lazy. My thinking is changing, though. It changes all the time, from cosmologies to everyday life details. A few days ago talking with my friend Crystal, I suspected somebody in particular of an act of meanness. Between then and today, we learned otherwise. Instead of just letting it go, something I would have done in the past, I fessed up and apologized for my suspicion that turned out inaccurate. It was not a problem, at all, but I felt better about owning up to my mistaken lack of confidence in somebody we both knew. I had spoken opinion without knowledge, just like Faux News. Expressing my regret that I'd misread this individual felt like that was the way to go, like using an eraser. I had caught myself doing something I don't like when others do it. I made a conclusion on a subject I knew nothing about. I know better. Hearing myself say it, I remember hesitating within, pointing out to myself I don't know what I'm talking about. I went ahead and said it because it sounded good. I regretted it ever since. Not a big regret, because it doesn't matter, just a misspoken sentence that has fallen into the nothingness of all sentences ever spoken after they're spoken. The dead sentence void. I'd have gone on thinking about it, adding to it failure to apologize and regret over that in addition to the initial regret. Fessing up erased all of it. That's a pretty good example of a recent change in my thinking, an ability to freely open up and say I made an error.

I'm happy to see at the age when men tend to lock down in their opinions and beliefs to where they're carved in marble, I am able to change my thinking at least a little bit. I see men I know my age and avoid extended conversation, because I really don't want to lapse into White Man mind dead set against this, that and everything else. I can't stand there and say, "Right...Right...Right," on Obama not being an American citizen, government's gonna take our guns, women shouldn't have abortions. I recall a time in my store, a couple in late 70s I was having friendly conversation with, suddenly asked if I'm a Christian. I thought: Oh no! Ruin a good conversation.! I did not want to go there, because they'd already identified themselves fundamentalists. I said, "Christian has become a political party and I'm not a member." That didn't work. They had to explain that's not what they meant. I had to explain my distrust of people calling themselves Christians. Of course, they're Christians. They're white Americans, not from the Middle East. Only thing it tells me when somebody identifies self a Christian is they are absolutists who will soon find me wishy-washy because I don't clamp down on absolutes with the zeal of a preacher pounding a bible with his fist. I like to allow others their own beliefs without me believing it's my place to change them to my way of seeing. Not acceptable Christian behavior. People who make it an issue to call themselves Christian tell me at the start they are not.

I was talking last week with a woman who is a Baptist and she remarked about something God hates. I thought: we're not going there. To change the subject I said, "When did God start hating? I thought God was love." She explained that God really does hate, and I didn't want an explanation. I just wanted her to give it a moment's thought. I've come to a place at a certain age that I don't let somebody get away with making a remark about God hates one thing or another. They're just quoting preachers. They don't know what they're saying. The preacher sez. He doesn't know what he's saying either. Anybody who starts a sentence, "God hates..." does not know what they're saying. They've not thought about it for even a second, ever in their lives. The belief that God hates attributes to God the nature of what the Christians call Satan. It's Satan that hates. But the Baptist religion has become so focused on Satan over the last half century, or maybe I should say Protestantism has been obsessed with Satan and hate for several centuries, they've incorporated hate into God. Like the saying, you are what you eat, we also become the subject of our focus of attention. Like my mother, the Kansas fundamentalist, in the course of a phone conversation will say Satan several times and never once mention Jesus. Jesus is never a consideration except in the clichés, died for your sins, son of God, born of a virgin. Compassion is not given a moment's notice. That's woman stuff. Preaching is a patriarchal phenomenon. Patriarchs don't do love and compassion. That's for women and babies. What if somebody takes advantage of your compassion? And love is a four-letter word. That's how it was in the fundamentalist church I grew up in. I don't see it any different among "Christians" now.

It might possibly be a new way I've come into seeing God that has started changing points in my thinking. Lately, I've been seeing God an invisible flow, like my own consciousness. Consciousness is not a thing. As far as I know, the scientific method has not yet been able to find it. It amounts to essence. Like an image of a hammer in my mind might be the essence of hammer. Merely a mental image: empirically nothing. Love. What is that? Almost everybody knows the experience, but nobody can put their finger on it. A warrior society based in the Hebrew wars of the Old Testament hasn't yet evolved unto love. They're still back in the old way Jesus said was "fulfilled." I think that means it's over. Actually, what I suspect most strongly is behind the "Christian" rejection of love is that it is anti-dramatic. Love is about inner peace. In America the word peace is political. It identifies one a liberal, a 'secular humanist' (whatever that is), anti-war, not a patriot (whatever that is), a hippie. Christians committed genocide on this continent over and over modeling and justifying themselves after the Hebrew wars of genocide. After Catholicism, Protestantism, Fundamentalism, I am unable to go with Christendom. The words of Jesus have been overtaken by belief systems one is expected to believe without questioning. I'll just go my own way seeing God as love, love as God, opening my heart to God to spray WD-40 on its hinges. If understanding equals love, and if allowing equals love, then understanding and allowing are God. This is how I find my perspective with God.  

 

 

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