UNTYING INTERIOR KNOTS

donkey jen at breakfast

Every day I see notice of somebody else who believes the planet is six thousand years old, like it matters. I know people who believe the earth is flat, people who went to school. I'd venture that most fundamentalists believe the earth is six thousand years old. It's fundamentalist popular theology. I have no problem with them believing they're right and everybody else is wrong, as long as they leave me out of it. In the 1950s, the time of Joe McCarthy and red scare propaganda, I sat in church hearing the preacher talk about wanting a fundamentalist theocracy, force everybody to walk the line, the very same republican talk of today. I would think while he was talking that if you want the church to go out in the world and join politics with the intent of taking over, it's the end of your church. I've seen the progression of that line of thinking unto the place now that the Congress and Senate are planted largely with "Christian" intolerance, bought cheap. They see things in black and white, missing the entire rainbow in between the poles where we live our lives. Pat Robertson is now the chief fundamentalist evangelist after Billy Graham sat on the throne half a century. I heard it said Graham was the greatest man of the 20th Century, and I thought: In what category? Slap-stick? I grew up in the choir of Billy Graham praise. 

jenny

Graham was too gross for me. He was a performer like Bob Hope or Red Skelton. Like them, he was in it for the money and attention. His performance of the appearance of piety worked for him. Though I disliked intensely that world to grow up in, seeing in the news the fundamentalist takeover of government, I have insight into where they are coming from. And now I see it every day. I saw then the only outcome will be the destruction of fundamentalism. I thought they would embarrass themselves out of existence. They embarrass themselves dreadfully and don't get it. Michelle Bachmann, for example. They don't get it because they're so popular. The billionaires club bought them a tv channel to manipulate them to work against their own interest and think they're doing something big. It worked. I've put their way of thinking so far in my past, I'm grateful for the review to articulate from memory the motivation that set me running for my life like the guy in Munch's The Scream. I don't know why it failed to take with me and not the other kids in the church. My childhood reading level got "God is love," memorized verses that said the kingdom of heaven is in the heart. Why didn't I ever hear this in church as something practical to live by? Why didn't I ever hear about compassion as a way to live? Hate the communists and justify hating outsiders. God prefers white people. The God in the church was the god of Fear, before whom we shudder, tied up in knots of guilt. Only the preacher was going to heaven for sure. The rest of us were guilty as all hell. It had me twisted up with guilt for any and everything. 

jack

Later, I had a friend in college who was Catholic and just as burned out by bogus theology as I was. Later had a Jewish friend burned out the same as I was. We found the religions we came up in empty shells found on the beach. Pretty. You can hear the ocean in them. There's something ancient and timeless about them. But the spirit is gone. It's off somewhere else with the living. My spirit was suffocated by the emphasis on fear, guilt, punishment. I found the people of my life whose intelligence I respected were the teachers at school. I wanted to be like them. They were somewhat rational, didn't live entirely in the emotional realm. I wanted out of the vacuum of an official belief system. First thing I did, like the dog let off a chain the first time, was run blindly in all directions unaware of dangers, unaware of the world outside that belief system. I wanted to sin, sin, sin. I wanted to indulge in everything I was told not to do because God didn't like it. God doesn't like anything else either. When everything is a sin, I'm free, I can do anything. It's all a sin. Guilt supreme. Control. A belief system built by the needs of the few to control the many. Then one day I came face to face, in the spirit, with Meher Baba and he told me what I already knew, God is love. This was the reward for the fifteen years dismantling, brick by brick, the construction in my head of Kansas fundamentalist theology. God is love is fun. The misinterpretation of God as fear is not fun. God is love allows me to see my donkeys with love in their hearts, embodied spirits, like humans. Under God is fear, I see the donkeys brute beasts devoid of consciousness or mind or heart. I'm able to enjoy the whole personality of my donkey friends, aware of their consciousness, mind and heart. They are aware of same in me, because I'm able to see it in them. One small example of how God is love enhances my life.

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OPEN LETTER TO A FUNDAMENTALIST PREACHER LONG DEAD

salvador dali

Through the late 1940s and the 1950s we were told to be very afraid of nuclear war. The Bomb is gonna getcha. You can't hide from the Bomb. First, it was the A-bomb, then the H-bomb, then the Neutron bomb. I heard an old woman preacher rant about Neutron bombs in the early 1980s, "It'll burn their eyes right outta their sockets." After praising the bomb for its ability not to destroy property. This was the only time I met her. I sure as hell would never have gone to her church. What she told me was that she likes things and dislikes people; that is, the people not dropping dollars in her collection plate. I'd been invited by someone I knew to a "Bible study," one Wednesday evening. This was my early years in the mountains, curious about all aspects of the culture. My mailman of that time was there. He talked about the apocalypse, the rapture and the terrible sufferings at hand for nonbelievers with such zeal for their torment, my respect for him took a downward turn. This was the church mindset I grew up in that set me in motion running for my life away from that mind. It confused me as a kid noticing the church mind was full of derision for the people around them who were not members of the church, a church with attendance seldom more than a dozen, one of them a kid who was present by duress only. I don't know what it was about me that saw the preacher was spreading hate in the name of Jesus, God and the Bible. The contempt toward nonbelievers, the "unsaved," did not mix with my reading of the Bible that said, "God is love." Like Jesus said to his close ones, It's easy for you to love one another. Try loving your neighbor, the people around you, the nonmembers, the people of the world you live in. That's where my fundamentalist upbringing jumped the track. I didn't know of anybody in the church that even liked anybody else in the church. 

salvador dali

I couldn't love indiscriminately, nor could I love the people in the church. I'd been taught about fear and punishment as our relationship with God the judge. I heard about communists that don't believe in God, how they're damned for hell, eternal suffering---they'll get theirs for not being born capitalist Americans. I wanted to talk to the preacher about these issues, but learned early he had no answers. The time the kid brought up the strait and narrow reference in the Bible, noting it is spelled strait, not straight. Same difference. I thought: What? Not according to the dictionary, but the preacher knows better than the dictionary. He knows the Bible. I recall the day at a short-lived bookstore in Sparta an old long-faced preacher stood in the open doorway looking at me. I saw a game about to start and said, "Come on in." He said, "You gonna let me in?" I said, "Sure, it's open to the public." He stepped across the threshold like he was entering the devil's lair and said, "You know, there's only one book." I thought: Oh shit, here we go, and said, "I understand that. But there are a few others." I knew the preacher and he knew me. I was not going to back down from him. I knew him to be a long-faced Bible-thumper with the hawkish eye that kept track of everybody's sins but his own. He was introducing a sermon he had in mind for me: There's only one Book. I wasn't going there and didn't give a shit if I pissed him off. I liberated myself from that mind about three decades before, wasn't going back. And I was not allowing him to control me with his poorly reasoned pontifications. His state of mind was responsible for the worst years of my life. I was not going to humor him. He knew I'd recently left a church and I knew he had heard the gossip around the departure, none of which had to do with what was behind it. He didn't stay long. I have a hard time with a preacher's arrogance; hard time in that I don't honor his role in the masculine hierarchy. I cede nothing of myself to his control. They don't like it. And I say, Good: keeps them away. 

salvador dali

It was bewildering to the kid to be in school learning about the world I lived in, on the one hand, and on the other, church with emphasis on after I'm dead, hell if God won't have me, heaven if I'm lucky. Of course, the preacher is not going to hell for making the people twofold more children for hell than he, himself, but the kid was one heartbeat from hell for thinking about sex. My doctor who diagnosed a heart issue, said in his straightforward minimalism with language, "You're gonna die." I didn't know what to say. I could only think, Duh, and assessed it too disrespectful to say out loud in a place where you say urine instead of piss. I sat thinking, I grew up a fundamentalist, that I will die is one thing I know probably better than anything else. And? By this time in the life, a long time after turning away from church/religion, power of the few over the many, I've found by experience God is love, not a tightrope to walk with hell fire waiting below. I've found what I call raw God, the core, love. The years of religion telling me people of other religions were worshiping the devil, and Satan is everywhere, Halloween forever, took fifteen years of unwinding the burdens of a belief system that kept me in despair. In school, I recall learning the word despair, identifying with it so deeply I got it without having to memorize it. Once I caught on that God is love and love only, it took quite awhile to shed the turtle shell of defense grown from experiences with conditional love as coercion or agenda down through the early years of this lifetime. Spare the rod, spoil the child. Up yours, too, preacher. If God wants me to live my life according to your approval, I don't want anything to do with God. If you want to engage in a constant war with Satan, go for it. I approve. Do what you gotta do. Leave me out of it.  

salvador dali

It was several years after seeing by experience God is love that my heart was able to open. Like a flower, it needed it's time to develop toward opening. The first key I got was that love and understanding are the same. I'd held love as a lofty word and couldn't find my own connection to something so "pure." Upon seeing understanding is love, I thought: I can do that. I started paying attention to understanding others more consciously. I feel like understanding led to, or unveiled, empathy. I have come to a place in the life where I have empathic feelings with everyone I know and everyone I meet. I've come to receive people I am present with aware that this is a soul who passes through many lifetimes, like I am, and this is what they're doing this time around. It does not mean I'm full of charming sweetness. There are some people I really don't like to be around for reasons I don't pet rattlesnakes. Still, they have my empathy. They are souls making it awfully hard on themselves, over and over, never seeming to get it, heads full of blaming others, self-unaware and self-centered. I'm understanding as I'm able and feel empathy for their psychological twist, I have my own, but I get too close, they piss me off, so I stay away. Only one time that I know of have I forgiven somebody. I just dismissed the problem. It went away. The one I held bitter contempt for became in that moment one of my better friends. I'm not saying I'm somebody special because I forgave somebody. We all have our own such experiences. This was mine that taught me how enlightening forgiveness is. I'm not a model of forgiveness. I still carry some bitter resentments difficult to let go of, so I don't worry over them. It's ego. They'll fade into indifference. This new kind of seeing self in relation to others, continual awareness of loving neighbor as self, looking to the good for those around me, has grown out of interpreting God as love. The old one, God as fear, made me want to rebel. God as love is convincing to me by way of experience. By now, my heart is so healed I can cry with donkeys. 

  

salvador dali himself

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LOVE IS ALL THERE IS

barnett newman

I want to write all night. I also want to be able to function at least by noon. I want to write to you so bad it makes me want to stay up. The clock has just passed Cinderella's curfew. That's no concern to me. I'm not waiting for a pumpkin on wheels to save me from myself. Not my story. In the time when I was young, inexperienced, stupid and lonely, I hoped to fall in love with somebody who would save me from myself. It never happened. Fell in love a few times against all signs that said: don't go there. Only found turmoil of the mind and disappointment. My pumpkin on wheels turned up empty; it wasn't really love, but fantasy. I didn't know anything about love. Finally, in 1975, Meher Baba tapped me on the shoulder to get my attention and taught me over several years how to save myself from my ignorant mind and befuddled heart. He set me in the direction of finding I don't need somebody to save me from myself. If I can't find how to get in line with myself on my own, assigning the task to someone else isn't going to work. It's only real when I can find by my own searching why I think I need saved from myself. I can't trust myself? Experience tells me my mind can make up a lot of ridiculous fantasies. It's only real when I can find in self how to transcend my ignorant self by tuning in to intuition, allowing higher self to have a say in my decisions, become acquainted with higher self that seemed dormant before I saw to rational and emotional satisfaction that God Is. That was all I needed to know. I'd always been told, but never had any conscious experience of God that I was aware of. The God I grew up with was Fear. It took Meher Baba to point to the words of Jesus, God is love. By way of intuition, I already knew it, though it had been buried under a mountain of dogma, the diamond in a coal mine. 

barnett newman

I could not have found it on my own. In my years of searching for whether or not there is God, I could not see past religion. Religions convinced me a real God would not allow religionists to do to fellow human beings and the living creatures of the earth as has been done continually in multiples, like the German Christians embracing fascism in the 1930s, like American Christians, today, embracing fascism. I've never been able to reconcile God supporting fascism. It doesn't compute. Fascism is about hate. God is not in it. I could not see, before, that God is not in religion. Religion is of the human mind, not God. I missed it before Meher Baba convinced me God Is, and God Is Love. Simple as that. The preachers start qualifying: Yes, except for...Yes, except for.... God hates the sin and loves the sinner. The only thing I can say to that is bullshit. Love does not hate. The so-called sin gets balanced by karma. It takes care of itself. God doesn't need to be concerned with it. Karma automatically keeps us in balance. As for God as judge, love does not judge. I see no reason to explain. It's simple language. Love is not about controlling. Love is about allowing. There is no except. Love allows us to find our own way, make our own mistakes, learn from our own experience. Control does not allow the individual to learn from ones own experience. It's called doubting. Doubting is a sin. God doesn't approve. Really? Love can't stand up to questioning? I found God by doubting the mountain of bullshit that had accumulated in the barn of my mind. I was led to believe the same nonsense the television hypocrite evangelists dress up God in to fit the confines of their own limited intelligence and knowledge. Like old man Tom Pruitt said of them, they're just makin a racket.

barnett newman

who's afraid of red, yellow and blue?

In my own personal vision, if it's not about love, it's not about God. What's so frightening about love? I think of abstract expressionist, Barnett Newman's painting title, Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue? Alas, it was slashed in the modern art museum, the Stedelijk, in Amsterdam, by an art reactionary. He was evidently the one afraid of red, yellow and blue. Destroyed it. I'm grateful I had a chance to see it when it was living, about three years after it was painted. My response to it was to stand back and look at it for a long time. I walked up to it on the left side and walked the length of it, almost but not touching it, feeling it, walking the length of red from the vertical blue line, feeling the expanse of red all the way to the vertical yellow line. I wasn't aware that I felt anything special, though there is a memory of experience sensing Barnett Newman, himself, in his two-dimensional environment up close to it applying the paint. His presence was the only notable feeling, presence in so intangible a feeling as to make me wonder if I felt it or thought it. I take it that feeling it made me think it. My feeling about the slasher is he could not handle such an expanse of one color being called art. It was a gesture of control. Perhaps the painting became for him a symbol of modern art being out of control; modernism, itself, was destroying art. Perhaps he felt vulnerable in the face of Newman's effrontery. Perhaps, too, among religionists the word love has a great deal of vulnerability associated with it. We can't let down our guard in this world. The devil's watching you in his cross-hairs. You needta be afraid, braced against, just braced against. I recall William Blake, Damn braces, bless relaxes. He, too, had issues with preachers who skirted around the subject of love, a word too charged with carnal associations for comfort in the control department. Control does not allow. Control is about zero tolerance. Jesus or Hell. 

barnett newman

According to my mother's preacher, I'm not afraid enough of Satan. I couldn't say anything to that one. I knew there was nothing I could do or say. I don't care if they think I should be very afraid and live in fear because God wants me to be afraid. In my way of seeing, God wants for me that I not worry, thus be happy. I can't talk with anybody who demands I believe and think their way. This mind is what spit me out of Kansas as far as land allowed. They can have their Satan all they want. I confess to concern they want Satan a little too much for my comfort. Makes me uncomfortable talking with my mother, who always brings up Satan and dwells on Satan, talking to me like a preacher wanting to convince me, for my own good, to be like them. Been there, done that, not going back. Didn't buy the tshirt. When she told me I'm not afraid enough of Satan, stressing it with, "You better think about it," all I could say was, "I'll leave Satan to you." I feel sad for her. I'm not looking to control her, so I allow her to adore a preacher who tells her to be afraid. She dragged me through that mud all the way through my school years. I'm free of it. She wants it, she's got it. I don't want it. It's why I'm a thousand miles away. On the telephone, when it gets crazy, I can say, "We're not going there." She's learned that I think independently from Fundamentalist dogma, and she will never let it rest. She bred one as relentless in not hearing it as she is relentless in needing to say it; it's her duty to keep in the front of my mind that I am wrong and headed for an eternity of hell fire. Lord have mercy, how did I get here? Remembering the coal mine of fundamentalist hymn book theology I ran for my life from. Literally ran for my life. We talk on the phone across a divide much greater than a thousand land miles. Love is never an issue, except, the great except, at the end, the duty I-love-you. We have very different meanings for love. Hers is to control; mine is to allow. I learned young never to browbeat anybody for any reason. It's just ego talking. I reject control; she rejects allowing. We're stuck. I feel sad for her that she alienated her first born, but all I know to do is allow it to be what it is. An old hillbilly saying comes to mind, it is what it is.

barnett newman

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