Lights, Camera, Action!
I’m going to dive right into the deep end this week and say the point of this post is to wake people up to the beauty all around us before it’s too late. There I said it.
I’m done.
Brevity is the soul of wit, right?
What else is there to say? It’s summer, the weather is gorgeous. Get out and enjoy. Quit moping around. We all have issues, yours are no better or worse than anybody elses.
Isn’t that good enough? No I didn’t think so. We need stronger poison.
Because we are programmed for failure. Even Jesus was unclear about what mattered. For instance, in the parable where he talks about the foolish rich man, hoarding up his goods on earth. And the day he tells himself: “Good boy, time to eat drink and be merry,” is the day the Lord calls him home. He doesn’t get to enjoy the fruits of his labor. Joke on him is he didn’t listen to Ecclesiastes when he said it was a vanity to do what he did, work all his life in order to amass great wealth and all the perks that come with it.
Obviously, that was a mistake. Of course, he should have taken time earlier to go on vacation and attend banquets.
But that’s not what the preachers tell us. Instead it’s St. Paul’s vision that has predominated in the culture. The lesson instead is that we need to kill off our desires and appetites and concentrate our thoughts on Heaven and the world to come.
But that’s not what Jesus said, necessarily, although it does resonate quite thoroughly with Eastern traditions such as the Bhagavad Ghita, where Lord Krishna, the incarnate son of God, tells the warrior Arguna, worried about the coming apocalyptic battle where he will face many enemy soldiers that are actually his countrymen, that all sensory experience, ie all of life, is an illusion and not to worry whether he kills or doesn’t kill in battle. Just go ahead and do your duty, Krishna says, but with the caveat that we should have no attachment to the outcome of our action.
Sort of the Stoic approach. But not necessarily what Jesus was about. Although he went ahead and accepted his punishment of dying on the cross in the most stoic and heroic manner imaginable. Actually unimaginable. But he had a definite attachment to the outcome — our salvation.
Because for us he said this: “The Sabbath was made for Man, not Man for the Sabbath,” thus declaring that theology and rules of any kind should not impugn against the good of mankind.
He said this: “Nothing that goes into a Man can make him unclean,” thus declaring all foods clean and all authority useless unless it serves us.
What could serve us more than Nature, and the rich, sensory experience of life? What dulls us most to the natural life? It’s the pursuit of man-made experiences, objects, and repute.
Simplicity and faith go hand in hand. Jesus constantly instructs us to learn from nature, from birds, from plants like the mustard, to listen to the wisdom and tradition that comes from acute observation of life unmediated, not blinded or dulled by overconsumption.
(photo credit - Chris Hunkeler)
