Original Faith

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2010-03-06T15:22:00.001-05:00

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Spiritual/Religious Experience: A Presence

2010-03-06T11:39:00.005-05:00

Here’s an abridged version of something I wrote about immediately after having the experience early in 2002. Someone who hasn’t experienced something like this might dismiss such an account as, say, a vivid dream. I can also see how someone could interpret this sort of experience literally and decide that they really had traveled, met other people and so forth. Personally, neither of these approaches was an option.

I am on the move, traveling far and wide from place to place but in some manner that is neither observed by others nor understood by me. It’s a dark, disembodied, onrushing sensation, a kind of rapid transit flying. All the while, I feel myself closely accompanied by a great and unseen Presence, a person of some kind who I can't see although I seem to know where he is.

I go in and out of many houses, meeting many people – sometimes folks I know and sometimes not, but always well received. Initially I’m a little uncomfortable with my unconventional “floating” way of moving room to room whenever others aren’t around – like they might catch me. I’m never all that worried though because of the continuing sense that I am closely and powerfully accompanied.

At times the physical exploration becomes exceptionally crisp and vivid, like when I find myself standing in front of a small wall-hanging – a weaving or tapestry about the size of a sheet of paper. It's a red Z on a white background, and seems to be some sort of symbol. Although the design is simple, the redness is spectacularly brilliant, as if redness had eyes that could stare back at you.

Children dressed in white who are supposed to be from my elementary school, though I can’t identify them, are standing around waiting for some event or ceremony to take place that I’m involved with. A boy gives me something, I don’t know what, which I’m honored to receive.

After what seems like hours, I’m standing at one of the windows in my own bedroom. Morning has come. I’m about to open the blinds.

I see the blinds in such great detail, observing how the shaded light filters through each slightly yellowed slat, that I’m almost certain I’m awake. But when I try touching them to confirm this - two, three times - I don’t seem to feel anything.

Still trying to figure out if I’m awake, I try relaxing all my muscles and find that I feel no sensation of starting to fall. At that point I momentarily notice that I’m actually still in bed and that the room is still dark…

I enter a house to deliver a message to a father about his son. The boy’s a little worried, but I know it’s nothing that will upset the father. The father and son seem to be locals, but they have guests who appear to be from the Mideast. The guests in turn each half rise from their seats at the table to grasp my hand in both of theirs, greeting me with friendliness and respect.

There are lulls between some of these episodes during which I enter a barely conscious resting state, as though trying to recover. These end when I hear the sound of my heart beating hard against the mattress and feel the Presence rejoining me for further travels. It’s at one of these junctures that my concern with how fast my heart is racing takes me out of the experience. Disoriented for a couple minutes and then amazed, I get up to write down these words.

Many Paths to the Same... Question?

2010-02-28T11:19:00.004-05:00

“It’s True for Me” Means What?

In different ways, a number of you have suggested (previous post) that when it comes to religion and spirituality, our beliefs are true for us as individuals. Certainly every belief is true to every believer in the sense that believers believe what they believe. Or if we want to use “true” as a synonym for “meaningful,” then this works too. Clearly everyone finds their religious/spiritual beliefs meaningful or they wouldn’t believe them.

I don’t think that by saying beliefs are true to believers themselves people meant to state that religious/spiritual beliefs are entirely subjective – like dreams or hallucinations. Certainly beliefs or claims of knowledge about divine matters sound like factual statements of some kind - statements concerning realities beyond the speaker’s own state of mind. Examples: we are immortal; Jesus is Lord and Savior; Mohammed is Seal of the Prophets; the law of karma, the law of attraction, heaven, hell, nirvana, cosmic consciousness…

Many Paths…

The idea of “many paths to the same Truth” is an attempt to reconcile the great variety of religious and spiritual beliefs that people hold. But it has some problems.

Many of humanity’s beliefs are incompatible and even contradictory. For example, Jesus can’t both be God (Christianity) and not-God – a completely human prophet who helped pave the way for Mohammed’s ministry (Islam). And when it comes to trying to pin down what that Truth is to which all paths lead – that’s not so easy either.

If this is because the Truth is beyond words, OK, but still… how could you know or what would convince you that whatever ineffable experience you had referenced a cosmic Truth and not a particular kind of subjective consciousness that’s peculiar to members of our own species? How would you know that you know?

To know, don’t you have to know that you know?

2010-02-19T12:34:00.002-05:00

A commenter to the previous thread mentioned a relative who’d been to a white light and back. She writes that she herself has experienced other peoples beyond where she is.

I’ve also had experiences that fall in the “altered state of consciousness” category. One involved a sense of being accompanied by a presence and traveling to visit people around the world.

Although that’s what the experience felt like, I don’t know that I really went around the world accompanied by a mysterious presence. I don’t know how I’d tell the difference between having an experience that felt like that from one that really happened.

Did this experience feel more real and significant than a dream? Absolutely. Did this feeling of reality reveal to me that the experience was in fact real and not imaginary?

Absolutely not. I know it's possible to strongly feel that something is true or real without it being so.

More than Faith: Divine Knowledge

2010-02-13T11:51:00.001-05:00

People sometimes consider themselves to know divine truths. They may say that they know that Jesus Christ is Lord and Savior, or that they see angels, know that saints intercede for us, perceive energies or auras, receive visitations from deceased loved ones that prove personal immortality…

I expect that pretty much every spiritual and religious belief that people have ever held has included a minority of adherents who go beyond saying that they believe to stating that they know.

What Do You Think?

How would you know that, say, your vivid vision of your deceased grandmother or a feeling of her presence was really a visit from beyond the grave and not a product of your memory, imagination and so forth? What would let you know – not just believe, but know – that it was real?

Do some claims of divine knowledge strike you as more credible than others? If so, what might make one claim more credible than another?

What Do You Hope For?

2010-02-06T13:39:00.003-05:00

It seems to me that there are at least these four things that people hope for religiously or spiritually:

1. Their individual lives and the lives of loved ones

2. Our species

3. Our planet, as in “Maybe some other species will come along and do a better job with life on earth if we don’t last long.”

4. Reality or being itself – hope for the entire universe and whatever full or complete context may hold it.

1. Hope for the individual – Most westerners find this presented by their religious traditions as hope for personal immortality.

On the one hand, you hate to think of yourself and those you love being annihilated in the end. On the other, you can reach a point in life where you sincerely don’t want to be immortal. The idea of being yourself forever can seem way too long as you realize your inherent limitations.

2. Hope for our species - This might be the most widely shared item on the human hope list. Most of us want to see our species survive and thrive long term. It would appear though, that this is a universe in which all species go extinct sooner or later.

3. Hope for the planet – It’s easy to imagine a scenario where humans go extinct through human or natural causes (or some combination of the two) and some other life form takes our place to “live long and prosper” (Mr. Spock). On the one hand, this has a hopeful ring to it, kind of. On the other, humans are all dead.

4. Hope for reality or being itself – It’s hard to imagine just what this means. Language can’t do more than allude to such a possibility. I think, for example, of a phrase from the Christmas carol, “Joy to the World” that goes “and heaven and nature sing.” Or Tennyson’s reference to “that one far-off divine event to which creation moves.”

You Don’t Need Hope If You Have Certainty…

One commenter on the previous thread seemed to suggest that hope may be unnecessary or irrelevant. I’d have to guess that this commenter, like quite a lot of people, feel that they know things turn out well and that such knowledge makes hope unnecessary.

###

What do you see as the biggest threats to our species in the long run? How hopeful or hopeless do you feel about overcoming them?

If you consider yourself to know something about life that leaves you with no need for hope, then what is it that you know and how do you know it?

If you lack this kind of certainty, what kind of hope is most important to you?

“Hope Springs Eternal…” in the Believing Breast?

2010-01-30T11:17:00.001-05:00

“Man is, properly speaking, based upon Hope, he has no other possession but Hope; this world of his is emphatically the Place of Hope.” What, then, was our Professor’s possession? We see him, for the present, quite shut-out from Hope; looking not into the golden orient, but vaguely, all round into a dim copper firmament, pregnant with earthquake and tornado. … Doubt had darkened into Unbelief…

From “The Everlasting No” by Thomas Carlyle, 19th century essayist

Is hopefulness about life important to how you feel and live in the present? If so, and you hold religious or spiritual beliefs, do you consider them necessary to your hopefulness about life?

If you’ve rejected spiritual and religious beliefs, do you feel hopeless about life? Is that OK or hard to live with?

The Spiritual Mentor as Crazy Person

2010-01-24T00:04:00.004-05:00

When I wrote the following lines several years ago, a new sense of identity, a new feeling for my place in relation to life as a whole, was coming into sharper focus for me despite how hard it is to articulate.

None of this is on my time. I resent nothing and no one.
I share in the whole world by laying claim to none of it,
Tasting what is sweet and bitter even in my own life
Like a sample off a plate in someone else’s home.
I am not here to stay and know it, and I no longer have a care
Because I wish to stay sane enough to keep caring.
Care like you died and kept on caring.
Care without a care, almost in just the way so many other events
Happen with no reflection or without meaning to,
But only because you mean it so much
That you are willing to be as heedless as it takes.

Not long after writing this I had a chance to put it to the test…

It was a mild and sunny Sunday afternoon late in the winter of 2002 as I pulled my aging Toyota hatchback into a space at my local Giants grocery store in Arlington, Virginia, across the Key Bridge from Washington, DC. I was disabled but still getting around. You couldn’t tell yet from looking at me that there was anything wrong – you had to be around me a little while to see the stuff I had trouble with, for example, reaching and bending.

As I painstakingly went about locking my heavy “Club” to the steering wheel and prepared to leave my car, I noticed a large SUV pull up directly behind me in my rearview mirror. It looked like this might have something to do with me, but I couldn’t imagine what, I wasn’t sure, and I half forgot about it as I concentrated on getting out of my vehicle without hurting my back.

As I stepped away from my car, the man in the SUV, who’d rolled his windows down on both sides, started shouting obscenities. After several seconds, I could hear, scattered among the expletives, that he was claiming I had deliberately taken the space he was going to back into.

It was pretty confusing. To begin with, there were empty spaces all over the place. But as the yelling continued, a vague image flashed across my mind that as I was pulling in, there may have been a large black vehicle twenty or thirty yards away with its back up lights on that must have been his. I don’t think anyone could have guessed that he was specifically targeting the space I’d chosen.

“I had no idea what you were doing,” I called out simply and with no trace of an attitude. The torrent of obscenities continued. After a pause, and without any note of sarcasm or hostility in my voice, I suggested, “Why don’t you just take it easy?”

His swearing intensified. That’s when I looked both ways and unhurriedly stepped directly in front of his vehicle toward the store’s entrance, just as if he’d politely come to a stop in order for me to cross. From the corner of my eye I saw him lurch into reverse, hauling his still swearing self out of earshot.

OK. First, I’ll admit that at one level of myself, what I did was to flip him a very special kind of bird. I gave him a really hard choice. To save face, he’d have to run me over in broad daylight with a large number of late Sunday morning grocery shoppers looking on. So my ego had it figured out that I’d probably win this one.

Second, part of my self-possession was pure disability. I couldn’t run and I couldn’t fight. I didn’t have a lot of choices.

But mainly, the choice that I made, and what allowed me to make it, was a matter of trying out that emerging sense of self that’s so hard to put into words. I’d truly felt calm, strong, and in control throughout, with only the slightest trace of an adrenaline rush. Looking at it more closely afterward, I saw that a kind of mental pulling-back had occurred in the face of his outburst that had allowed me to view the situation from a wider, almost external perspective.

From that perspective, whether he won the encounter or whether I did, meant infinitely less to me than it did to him. Because at the level that had felt most real to me, I wasn’t playing his game at all.

Stepping in front of SUVs driven by angry people who sound like they might want to kill you is still hard to come by as a regular spiritual practice, even in most major American cities. Plus it might hurt. But my opportunity that day to find out for sure whether I really had a new bottom line was irresistible and the main point of how I’d behaved. Now I had no doubt that I’d come to identify more with the One that held me than the one who was being held, and that I was capable of seeing and acting from out of that basis in reality.

###

About "the One” – To paraphrase St. Paul, what I refer to here is “the One in whom we live and move and have our being” – that is, the Wholeness of the whole story that holds the story of each little life, the greatest Context that exists. Some will think of this as a Creator existing apart from creation, others as being or reality itself.

Faith Needs No Justification

2010-01-16T19:18:00.003-05:00

Here's a slight rewording of a comment I left on Crystal’s Perspectives that sums up how I experience faith:

For me it’s come down to "the fact of faith" as I call it in that chapter of Original Faith - and being OK with not knowing what might justify my faith or even being able to know that it's justified.

You could say that my personal re-formation hasn't been about "Justification by faith alone" but the discovery that "Faith stands alone, requiring no justification."

Faith is a function of being. Belief does not create it. Disbelief cannot abolish it. There is only being more or less present to something already presenting itself to you.

Meditation as Help for Insomnia Due to Pain/Anxiety

2010-01-13T11:45:00.004-05:00

…will be the topic of my guest post that will go up on Thursday at Jan Lundy’s Awake is Good. Jan, the author of Your Truest Self: Embracing the Woman You Are Meant to Be, is doing a series of posts about meditation.

Still Life

Into that kitchen, electric with the clock’s ticking,
I came at 4 AM
And found nothing but the dirty cup,
The empty table and the vacant seat,
All immovable, all silent,
As silent and immovable as objects ever were.

I left that empty place.
Back up the stairs I climbed
To my room.
Inside its black space I flipped a switch
And stood starkly in the light
That showed the radiator grinning stupidly,
The sheets crumpled agitatedly,
The decrepit Venetian blinds
Yellowed and dented.
The thin staccato tapping of the clock
Penetrated to the space behind my eyes,
Alerting me.
I directed sleepless senses to the stain on the floor
Near the bed
Where the turtle was torn to tiny green shreds
By the cat
And the smell had sickened me.
I saw that even that spot had grown cold and narrow,
As narrow and cold as the shoulders of my chair.

(Only thing I ever wrote for a creative writing class that turned out OK! Back in 1978, my senior year of college.)

Preconceptions

2010-01-08T14:54:00.003-05:00

A view from flat on my back and thirty years later…

“Gosh, it sure is cold Mr. Martin. My grandma says it’s cold enough to get frostbite!”

“Yeah…” I said a bit absent mindedly. As usual, I was listening to what Hazel was saying with divided attention. I had recess duty and was scanning the treeless brown rectangle of frozen ground for trouble spots. And as usual, Hazel had waited a polite three minutes before approaching me to talk.

Hazel. It was an old-fashioned name. My impression was that she’d probably lived with her grandmother for as long as she could remember. Maybe her grandma had named her.

“David – David!” I hollered.

I excused myself. “Sorry about that Hazel…”

“That’s OK Mr. Martin!”

I walked over to where David, one of two students who was emotionally disturbed as well as cognitively disabled, was bending to pick up another rock.

“David, you know the rule about throwing rocks…” He dropped the stone, glared at me, and headed off in another direction. I headed back for the center of the playground where I could maintain a full three hundred sixty-degree view of events. As I returned to my place, I noticed Hazel approaching from the corner of my eye.

She was fourteen or fifteen. I was twenty-six and an assistant teacher in her self-contained special education program. As someone who’d grown up prior to special ed and who in childhood had only heard “retard” used as a pejorative, this position was an eye-opener for me.

The kids’ personalities were as diverse as that of any other group of people, and they had a wide range of cognitive abilities. While some of them would clearly never be able to live independently, a few, like Hazel, had IQs in the upper seventies and had just missed the cut-off of eighty for a low-average IQ score. For them, the future appeared uncertain and the possibilities disconcerting. Most of their families were poor. While they were capable of work, they weren’t going to be climbing any career ladders.

“I’m having so much trouble with fractions!” Hazel exclaimed, looking up at me with her light, clear eyes as I looked down from scanning the playground. “They’re complicated!” She stomped her feet in a gesture that was one part frustration and one part trying to keep warm on a cold January morning in New Hampshire. Recess could get uncomfortable, but it was also refreshing to get outdoors away from the stale air of the school’s two prefabricated buildings.

“I know,” I replied. “Fractions were complicated for me too.”

“Complicated” was a word that Hazel used a lot for things she found difficult. Hazel herself was not complicated. She was outgoing and friendly, and although she seemed a little insecure – you could see her making an effort to reach out – there was a transparency to her face and demeanor. You could see at a glance that she was honest, trustworthy, and kind.

It also hadn’t taken more than a glance early in the school year to see that she had a crush on me. When she looked at me her eyes lit up with I like looking at you! I like talking to you! Though I assisted in her classroom, she didn’t happen to be assigned to any of the small groups I taught. Playground duty was our only chance to talk.

“That Hazel…” Claire, the other assistant teacher in our classroom, began. It was after school and she and I happened to be alone in the classroom. “A fella sure could do worse than Hazel.”

“That’s true...” I replied with careful disinterest.

This was the second time that Claire had dropped this kind of hint. Each time my unspoken reaction had been Are you out of your mind?

Hazel was obviously a sweet girl, but wasn’t it equally obvious that she and I were a complete mismatch – intellectually and in terms of where we were headed in life? How could a middle-aged woman possibly not understand this? The year before I’d received a master’s from the University of Chicago Divinity School. I’d started writing seriously. I had plans. And it didn’t help that Hazel was attractive to me. Her crush was staring me in the face every day. I was twenty-six and single and I really didn’t need someone pointing out that an underage girl liked me.

But I always ended up being more discomfited than irritated at these remarks from Claire. She seemed unaware of their inappropriateness and completely well meaning. Besides puzzlement, I felt some sympathy for her. She was an unattractive woman with a cleft palate, single, in her mid-forties, and working at a low-paying job. Maybe her thoughts about me and Hazel were vicariously meeting a need for romance in her own life? I had no idea. Too complicated...

It’s nearly thirty years later. Severely disabled and mostly bedridden, I’m thinking about all this – one of the numerous walks down memory lane that someone in my position takes. And I remember something that I might never have thought of again if it wasn’t for spending so much time staring at the ceiling every day.

At the end of that year working in Hazel’s classroom, I’d found a better-paying position for the following year teaching English as a Second Language. And it had been a couple years after that, with Hazel now in her late teens and me in my late twenties, that the principal had invited me to her class’s graduation ceremony.

I remember only a few things about it. First, I’d felt awkward about going. I’d been teaching in a different school district and meanwhile had had no contact with my former employer or any of the students. I felt obligated to go, but had the feeling that with the passage of so much time I’d find myself irrelevant even to the several kids who’d seemed to particularly like me.

Second, I think I arrived late. I don’t recall anything about the ceremony itself and see myself arriving on the grounds of the school afterward, not far from the playground that I’d once supervised. Students, family, and staff were already milling about and intermingling. I felt out of place and wondered who I’d run into. I recall a brief, perfunctory exchange with a tall student named Gary and seeing him in profile as he walked away toward people who now held more significance for him.

Next thing I knew, Hazel had stopped a few yards away from me. I hadn’t seen her coming and was only beginning to realize who it was in the same fraction of a second that I heard her calling to me. I saw that she’d turned toward me to speak and yet – it seemed a little odd – was keeping her distance.

“I had a baby, in case you didn’t know…”

I just stared back for an instant. I had to replay the sentence in order to process it. This definitely wasn’t being delivered as good news. There was an edge to Hazel’s voice that I’d never heard before. She spoke heatedly, fiercely, apparently indicating that this was something that I, in particular, ought to be aware of. After firing off her statement she paused just long enough to take in my uncomfortable congratulatory platitude, then disappeared back into the crowd.

Two Questions

2010-01-01T13:27:00.002-05:00

“Why do good people suffer?”

It’s a question that most of us have probably asked ourselves at one time or another. Notice that the question assumes that good people shouldn’t suffer.

Maybe this assumption is partly founded on how as children we’re rewarded for good behavior and punished for bad behavior by the adults in our lives. There are rules. There are consequences. There is the idea of fairness. Even when the adults in a child’s life are actually inconsistent, unpredictable, and unfair, I’d imagine that most of them still reference ideas about the child’s having been “good” or “bad” when meting out rewards and punishments.

As adults, we learn that it’s not unusual for good people to suffer and that often the cause of their suffering is the actions – or inactions – of other people. If you removed the human causes of suffering, life on earth would look almost like heaven! We’d still be mortal, but imagine our quality of life if even a fraction of the billions of dollars that humans spend on warfare were spent instead on the environment, medical research, education…

Saints and Heroes

“Saints” and “heroes” are basically religious and secular versions of the same thing: a person who’s passionately concerned with the wider world, the bigger picture – others as they exist independently of one’s own needs and desires. In human history so far, such people have been more the exception than the rule and so we’ve needed these special words for them. Maybe good people suffer because that’s the best we can do as a species and our fatal flaw is that generation after generation we’ll never be able to produce more than a small fraction of folks who truly care about life beyond themselves.

Or maybe not. Maybe our species will learn better. But it’s becoming pretty clear that if we’re up to that, then the only way we’re going to learn is probably the hard way and that coming generations will see suffering on a massive scale.

A Second Question

“How do you stop being deeply troubled by suffering?”

This is a different question. The answer has to do with a change in perspective and a new sense of identity that’s hard to put into words. I may have posted what follows previously, but it suggests the kind of thing I mean:

Being Here

What is, is. Let me be a piece of that,
Amid the horror, explosions, shatteredness,
The strands of sense and beauty, the irresolvable whole.
WHAT IS is, and I shall be myself.
Contradictions are not resolved, yet I begin to resolve
The contradictions. I do not feel the tension any more.
The Whole is doing what it does, and I
Am wholly doing what I do.
In the crosshairs now, I see WHAT IS.
I cannot miss!
Desiring nothing for my splintered self,
I am being every inch something.
I care, but do not care.
I let go of my stake in all former aspirations;
Aspiring to nothing, I am occupied, every inch, with being something.
The worst cannot undo the act of what I am doing, and the best
Cannot change it. I am here. I am desperate, wise, strong
And live now beyond the land of my own dreams.
None of this is on my time. I resent nothing and no one.
I share in the whole world by laying claim to none of it,
Tasting what is sweet and bitter even in my own life
Like a sample off a plate in someone else’s home.
I am not here to stay and know it, and I no longer have a care
Because I wish to stay sane enough to keep caring.
Care like you died and kept on caring.
Care without a care, almost in just the way so many other events
Happen with no reflection or without meaning to,
But only because you mean it so much
That you are willing to be as heedless as it takes.
Become as ignorant of the parts and the frictions between them
As you were once so conscious of them in relation to yourself.
Be aware of being who you are in the arms or in the teeth of what is.
Forget all that might have been or might not be and there you are.

When Tiny Tim Can’t Ditch the Crutch: Other Sorts of Stories

2009-12-25T11:52:00.002-05:00

The serious but nonfatal illness story that people most enjoy telling and hearing about starts with someone heading down a wrong path in life. A serious illness or accident intervenes, shaking the person up. He or she then recovers physically as well as spiritually.

It’s a wonderful story and people are highly receptive to hearing it. Illness or accident, however, can strike people at any stage of life and sometimes take forms from which physical recovery is impossible.

For me, disease onset came in the prime of life. At age thirty-seven, I was old enough to be mature but young enough to be physically active and feel great. In sum, I was very happy and had been for many years.

So for me, the story wasn't about being snapped out of mental unwellness by disease but of learning not to endlessly grieve the loss of a way of life that I'd truly loved and the shutting down of possibilities I’d hoped for – to keep on keeping on until "my way became easy and my burden light.” I don't often quote scripture, but that line feels about right for what I've experienced.

My physical status is still a burden, and with disease progression, an ever-increasing one. Physically, the right word for my day to day life is “grueling.” I can’t gloss that over. Yet in some very real and critically important sense – critical to my sanity – I’ve been carrying this burden lightly for years.

Thanks to folks who extended holiday greetings via email, Facebook, and comments threads and Happy Holidays to all…

Spiritual Sense or Nonsense? Ritual...

2009-12-19T12:28:00.002-05:00

When the Tao is lost, there is goodness.
When goodness is lost, there is morality.
When morality is lost, there is ritual.
Ritual is the husk of true faith, the beginning of chaos.

From Verse 38 of the Tao Te Ching

I like this passage and wanted to focus on ritual, a topic that I’ve never posted on. Ritual hasn’t played a large role in my spirituality.

When I was a young child, every Sunday I received communion at church services. Coming down the aisle with the wafer in my mouth (you weren’t supposed to chew) I’d feel very holy. It felt like my soul was becoming white, an organ that I pictured as maybe ten to twelve inches long and an inch wide with a vertical orientation and standing about halfway between my back and chest. In-between communions it picked up dark spots that were whitened-away every Sunday.

In divinity school I remember seeing a sacrament defined as “a medium of grace.” Symbolic church activities that are official sacraments are thought to be conduits of grace from God to humans. Personally, I’m not convinced that grace reliably flows through bureaucratically established channels.

My most meaningful experiences of ritual occurred in childhood and youth, but weren’t especially religious – unless you could call it the religion of home and family. For example, Christmas was about decorating our tree, the gathering at my grandmother’s, my mom playing Christmas music on the piano there…

But that soon came to an end. By the time I was nineteen my grandparents were dead; my parents owned no property. Before I'd graduated from college all the sacred places had been sold, including the house where I grew up, which was owned by my maternal grandmother’s second husband.

As an adult, my experience of “ritual” probably doesn’t really qualify for that designation. But certainly I did find enjoyment in the repetition involved in the round of activities that were part of my ordinary routine and that brought me a great deal of happiness – things like jogging, meditating, writing, and some of the little tasks surrounding these things like washing my hands fifty times a day.

Anyway, it seems to me – maybe as a “ritually challenged” individual (no... the hand-washing thing was just to see if you were paying attention) – that rituals would work best when connected to corresponding beliefs. So if you believe that the wafer and wine really are the body and blood of Christ, then for you the act of eating and drinking is an act of communion.

What spiritual sense have you made of ritual?

The Copenhagen Ritual

End result...

Each nation developed a list of things they’ve volunteered to do – but the list is non-binding.

The stated goal is to prevent global temperature from rising more than two degree Celsius above pre-industrial levels – but what they’ve got on their to-do lists won’t accomplish this.

So it’s not a real agreement. However, I’ve heard it referred to twice now as a “roadmap to an agreement.” I guess we can file it right next to the “roadmap to peace” in the Mideast.

Blessed Are Those Who Don't Care Much?

2009-12-13T11:06:00.001-05:00

God created us to be a short-lived species that would die choking on its waste products while snuffing out numerous other life forms along the way. This was to usher in an end-time that will see a loving Messiah sail in on a (greenhouse gas) cloud to rescue us from the mess we got ourselves into because we didn’t love one another all that much.

I don’t know…

As a species we’re brand-new. It’s hard for me to believe that we weren’t intended to participate in creation rather than self-destruct. At this point, this would require shifting gears.

When Homo sapiens was a small group of primates trying to survive in an all-wild world, boundless greed along with a limited aptitude for cooperation and caring about each other is what allowed us to survive and flourish. But from here on out, we need greater cooperation than ever before and an enhanced social consciousness that includes caring about future generations beyond the stretch of our own lifetimes – along with the ability to recognize and reign in our grasping and hoarding tendencies.

I wonder if we’re up to the challenge. In any case, the jungle we now have to negotiate contains a lot more people than trees, with the disparity growing every day.

I met a girl who sang the blues
And I asked her for some happy news,
But she just smiled and turned away.

From “American Pie”
By Don McLean

As Time Allows – My illness is progressive and bedridden time has risen; I’m no longer able to reply to most comments and emails. I do read everything I get and sometimes this gives me ideas for posts. So please keep them coming and I’ll reply as time allows.

Embracing the Unwelcome Other: Peace on Earth, Good Will Toward Spammers

2009-12-04T12:09:00.007-05:00

This is a time of year that finds charitable donations up, neighborliness on the rise, and connections with family and friends reestablished. Yet how many of us exclude spammers as a group from our holiday charity and good cheer, treating each and all of them as the Unwelcome Other?

Spammers come to us from around the world, struggling to attract our attention by way of improbable messages. They are people just like you and me except for spamming and other illicit activities.

In the spirit of the season, I’ve devoted this comments thread to several spam messages received on this blog over recent weeks that struck me as especially sincere.

Spammed Me but Not Included Here?

Dear Excluded Spammer,

I hated to do it! But if your spam was just URLs without enough words to make out a sentence or phrase, I did not include it in this thread. I knew you wouldn’t have wanted folks to think you were just trying to use a random blog to sell stuff!

Also, very frankly, many of your messages were repetitive and, well, pretty boring.

Next time you contact me may I suggest something like the following Sample Spam.

Sincerely yours,

Paul

Sample Spam

Dear Mr. Martin,

If you’ll check your last month’s sales figures, you’ll notice that you’ve sold 100 copies more of Original Faith than your monthly average.

I was so deeply moved by your book and life’s story that I laughed, I cried – I sang Maureen McGovern’s “There’s Got to Be a Morning After” in the shower.

Then I went out and bought copies of OF for friends, family, colleagues, and anyone I knew with cruise ship plans.

Sorry for any inconvenience due to the sudden upsurge in orders!

Sincerely,

Full Name Including Middle Initial

PS Regular Readers

Please feel free to leave a normal comment – or try your hand at spamming! It doesn't need to be exactly like my sample, which was only to give a general idea…

As Time Allows – My illness is progressive and bedridden time has risen; I’m no longer able to reply to most comments and emails. I do read everything I get and sometimes this gives me ideas for posts. So please keep them coming and I’ll reply as time allows.

The Power of Now and Then

2009-11-28T19:38:00.007-05:00

One dimension of a meaningful life is purpose. But another might be called something like… intrinsic significance.

Intrinsically significant experiences are those that you find worth remembering because of their sheer goodness and joy. Looked at from the perspective of intrinsic significance, really living is about the process of how it feels to make good memories.

There is a depth and mystery to these memories and to the process. It’s a form of significance that seems to point not beyond itself but down deeper into itself, further down than you can peer.

I posted a related poem several months ago.

As Time Allows – My illness is progressive and bedridden time has risen; I’m no longer able to reply to most comments and emails. I do read everything I get and sometimes this gives me ideas for posts. So please keep them coming and I’ll reply as time allows.

Original Faith – the Book, the Life, the Very Notable Endorsement...

2009-11-25T18:08:00.002-05:00

Has anyone noticed my famous book-endorser?

Her endorsement went up on a page of this website a few months ago. Tess at The Bold Life just referenced it in an interview with me.

“There are already plenty of books out there fighting the war over belief in God. For me, it feels more constructive to try to help focus attention on things that unite us.”

Me, quoting, uh, myself – from Tess’s interview…

ALSO

Anything you're under-appreciating? That's the topic of my guest post at Porsidan.

As Time Allows – I’m no longer able to reply to every comment and email I receive. My illness is progressive and bedridden time has gone up, so I need to focus on writing posts. But I read everything I get and sometimes take direction for my posts from comments and emails. So please keep them coming and I’ll reply as time allows.

God’s Grandeur, Duct Tape on My Nose, and the Supernatural

2009-11-21T11:24:00.005-05:00

(More in the mood for music than poetry or duct tape? Please see my guest post at Porsidan.)

God's Grandeur
By G.M. Hopkins

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning at the brown brink eastward springs –
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Hopkins was a monk writing in the late 19th century. A few phrases/words need explanation: “reck” meant obey, “foil” meant sword, "trade" meant commerce, and “the ooze of oil crushed” seems to refer to the appearance of oil after being pressed from grapes or olives, I forget which.

I love how thick with sound the poem is. The music of language, with no need for accompaniment by bells, whistles, or percussion instruments, is largely missing from poetry today.

Hopkins died in his forties - early forties, as I recall. His dying request to his best friend was to destroy his writings. Hopkins felt that he had sinned by celebrating nature too much - that his focus on creation must have displeased the Creator.

Duct Tape on My Nose
By P.M. Martin

I wonder about God as Other. If existence can be divided into Creator and creation - or, for that matter, any divine entity or energy on the one hand and less sacred stuff (like duct tape) on the other - don't both still share in that all-important matter of BEING? Aren't they part of the same process?

It seems to me that the relationship between a Creator that IS and the creation that the Creator caused TO BE would be pretty tight...

I know the two are often distinguished as supernatural vs. natural, but when I anyone says "supernatural" I just hear "What does that mean?" Do we already know all the laws and bylaws of nature? The full text? With footnotes? If something happens how do we know it's not natural?

Because it's amazing? I don't know... to me a snail is amazing.

Because it happens very rarely? So then, when that asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs hit the earth, that was supernatural? Or how 'bout this: "If there were less duct tape on my nose I could smile more."

I bet nobody's typed out that sentence before. So then... have you just witnessed a supernatural miracle? (Clarification: there is no duct tape on my nose although my house is pretty much held together by duct tape...)

As Time Allows – I’m no longer able to reply to every comment and email I receive. My illness is progressive and bedridden time has gone up, so I need to focus on writing posts. But I read everything I get and sometimes take direction for my posts from comments and emails. So please keep them coming and I’ll reply as time allows.

Loving It for What It Is

2009-11-18T23:04:00.003-05:00

Just noticed Jay at Porsidan has my guest post up. This was a fun piece to write, thanks for having me Jay.

Spirituality and LOA - The Law of Aliens

2009-11-14T19:25:00.005-05:00

First, Old-School LOA…

Positive thinking is always a plus – and for people who habitually engage in self-defeating thought patterns, learning to think positively can be truly transformative. However, the “Law of Attraction” and similar approaches that I’ve noticed online view negative thinking as the cause of any kind of difficulty that anyone faces in life. If bad stuff happens to you, it’s because your negative thinking attracted it.

Proponents insist. Does the individual suffering dire misfortune appear mentally sound? Well then, the negative thinking must be unconscious. Did the person recently ace a series of personality tests and clinical psychological evaluations? Then the negative thinking was somehow missed or it occurred in a past life.

LOA Breakthrough: The Law of Aliens

The law of aliens states that if bad stuff happens to you it’s because of aliens. Not a trace of trouble-making aliens in this solar system? Then they must exist in another one. Turns out that we’re alone in the universe? Then the aliens are from a different universe.

Which LOA do you believe in?

###

Lisa at Mommy Mystic has me as a guest. She puts a lot of attention on the last couple chapters of Original Faith, which I found hardest to find language for -- Thanks, Lisa!

As Time Allows – I’m no longer able to reply to every comment and email I receive. My illness is progressive and bedridden time has gone up by a couple hours over recent months, so I need to focus on getting posts done. But I read everything I get, and sometimes take direction for upcoming posts from comments and emails. So please keep them coming and I’ll reply as time allows.

Spirituality Beyond Personal Happiness

2009-11-10T22:39:00.002-05:00

Lisa at Mommy Mystic has me as a guest. She puts a lot of attention on the last couple chapters of Original Faith, which I found hardest to find language for --

Thanks, Lisa!

Personal Immortality – Are You Sure You Want That?

2009-11-09T12:23:00.004-05:00

Every moment of your life as you’ve known it has been highly dynamic, a process of change – your experience of a psycho-biological arc of maturing and aging. Throughout, there have been major cumulative changes not only in your biology and inner life, but also your potentiality.

Think, for example, of who you are now and who you were at five. Even as you became the person you’ve become, other possibilities for life have closed down in the wake of that path. For example, whatever training and education you’ve received and whatever you’re doing for work now, you had the potential for many more options when you were born.

Eternity Sounds Really Long…

Would immortality be the extension through all time of your life as it happens to be right now? As it was at age five? Twenty-five? Forty? Is it possible that eternal life-extension isn’t necessarily the best thing that could happen to you? Would you get bored, LOL? I mean, forever – that’s a really long time! Nobody’s even lived a thousand years. Our species has only been around for two hundred thousand years.

And while personal immortality as a kind of reunion with friends and family sounds good to me too, I have to wonder… Much as I loved, say, my Uncle Bob’s goofy sense of humor, would I feel the same after fifty million years?

And if you try to picture doing things with friends and family in a literal end-time - after time ended - what does that mean? Human thought, language, activity, and life are so time-bound that heaven as a glorified version of life as we know it minus the passage of time sounds like a contradiction in terms.

Does Anyone Know Exactly What They're Talking About?

I once read – as I recall it was in a discussion of Hinduism – that what people really want are infinite knowledge, infinite joy, and infinite being. That sounded good to me! Yet it also sounds bigger than me. Inclusive of me, but bigger. And stated in a much less precise way than “Someday you’ll be reunited with your deceased loved ones and enjoy their company again, but this time forever and in perfect health.”

Precise and wonderful as that sounds, not only do I have trouble picturing what an eternity with my loved ones would look like and uncertainty as to whether it’s what I’d really want; I don’t have confidence that it’s realistic or possible. It only takes a little struggle with Einstein’s concepts to realize that your common-sense impressions of what time is are far from the whole story.

What if you don't know enough to know exactly how you want life to turn out?

As Time Allows – I’m no longer able to reply to every comment and email I receive. My illness is progressive and bedridden time has gone up by a couple hours over recent months, so I need to focus on getting posts done. But I read everything I get, and at times take direction from comments and emails for upcoming posts. So please keep them coming and I’ll reply as time allows.

Death and Spirituality: If death isn't a problem then what about...

2009-11-03T10:19:00.007-05:00

Sorry for the inconvenience - I've enabled comments moderator, steady spam for three days.

To simplify, you might say that last post I asked,

“So, does death bother you?”

And that about half of you said “Not a problem!” with the other half saying, “Very deeply...”

“Why do they have to take away the people you love?”

Maria, Grade Three

“Yeah…why can’t it just be your toys or something?”

Karina, Grade Two

-- Two sisters, on the death of their grandmother.

Excerpted from Original Faith: What Your Life Is Trying to Tell You

The work that I did counseling children who were grieving the loss of parents, grandparents, siblings, and sometimes pets leads me to think that most of you who don’t see mortality as a problem didn’t always feel that way. Can you give an idea of the process of how it stopped being a problem?

Power of Nowers

If your answer is a version of learning to live in the moment, I wonder if this is the complete answer...

While being in the moment is possible and desirable in many ways, it’s not a hundred percent for anyone. As an analogy, a quarterback won’t have the ticking clock at the front of his mind while he’s playing – but it’s in the back of his mind. He knows the end of the fourth quarter’s coming. People who practice living in the moment as much as possible still know that death is coming.

Knowers

To those who believe they know that we’re immortal, it seems to me that it’s important to notice that near-death experiences are near death, not death. That’s a really big difference.

Near-death experiences, like every experience that anyone has lived to tell, occur while a person is still very much alive and possesses a biologically intact brain. Almost dead is alive, not dead. Having a profound experience when you’re almost dead or at any other time doesn’t indicate that you can experience anything like it – or anything at all – once your brain has stopped functioning.

Every experience we have occurs while we have a living brain; therefore no one can know that any experience is possible without one.

Contrasting emotional tones?

I seem to notice two emotional tones for those to whom death isn’t a problem. Some of you sound perfectly OK with it - with your existential good cheer perfectly intact, so to speak. It sounds like mortality just hasn't been that big an issue for you. Others sound more like you may have pondered mortality and come to a philosophical perspective on it - like Tennyson in "In Memoriam" (“a sadder and a wiser man”) or the sober but appreciative author of Ecclesiastes who advocates enjoying life’s best and simple pleasures to the utmost because tomorrow we die.

Up next: If death IS a problem to you, how confident are you that personal immortality is the solution?

As Time Allows – I’m no longer able to reply to every comment and email I receive. Disease progression with more bedridden time means having to focus on getting posts done. But I read everything I get, and at times take direction from comments and emails for upcoming posts. So please keep them coming and I’ll reply as time allows.

Personal Immortality - or Not . . .

2009-10-29T11:22:00.004-04:00

Over the years I've increasingly come to feel that my own nature is integral to all being or nature – that I'm part and parcel to the whole process of life or being itself.

You might say that just because I happen to be Paul Martin doesn’t mean that I have to identify exclusively or even primarily with Paul Martin. This leaves me with little concern over the idea of personal immortality.

At the same time, I continue to understand why so many people care deeply about this idea. In life as we know it, it doesn't get any better than being with loved ones.

This brings to mind the western concept of heaven – kind of like a family reunion – and the eastern concept of nirvana, where we finally come not to personal or individual immortality but a universal consciousness.

What are your thoughts and feelings about all this?

Notes

The Axe – Sorry about that - to the couple of people who commented on that last post about the tree. Long story short is that I’ve, uh, chopped it down...

As Time Allows – I’m no longer able to reply to every comment and email I receive. Disease progression with more bedridden time means having to focus on getting posts done. But I read everything I get, and at times take direction from comments and emails for upcoming posts. So please keep them coming and I’ll reply as time allows.

Hmm…

I’m running into kind of a Catch-22. I’d been thinking of blogging material that might make for a book and just finished writing the first piece that seems to work well. However…

I find that it takes a lot more time to write a bit of book, so to speak, than a self-contained blog post. So my original idea of blogging a book and getting feedback as I go may not be so great – I’m now noticing my traffic falling off pretty sharply because more writing time means I’m taking longer between posts and getting around less to other blogs.

In other words, I still haven't figured out exactly how I'm going to work with my increased time limitations.