Over the next months I will be putting together my own synthesis and interpretation of the chapters of the Tao Te Ching.  Feel free to read, share, comment, enjoy, hate, criticize, admire, as much as you like!  If you borrow, I am honored to have a reference by name or and by link as well.  Thank you very much!

To my Montreat community:

Yesterday a certain special person reminded me to smile. It changed my day!  That one thoughtful remark likely changed a lot that happened that day.

You’ve always heard phrases like “misery loves company” and “Smile!  God loves you!” – and many of you are familiar with the phenomenon that when an elderly husband passes, the wife will often soon follow.

There are people studying social influence in social networks (not just online but including that too) and the studies reveal some very startling observations of the impact of an individual’s outlooks, dispositions, smiles, obesity, smoking (seems relevant for today – thanks for the great lunch!)  many other behaviors, on the people around them.

Most importantly, I thought of our own culture here at Montreat in light of the last staff meeting, and about how negative or positive sentiments might affect all of us, and about how important it is to be an active participant in the “Body of Christ” out of which we are made – embodying honesty, humility, transparency, respect, openness, tenderness and joy with one another.  These are at the root the “fruits of the Spirit.”  These qualities are not exclusive to us as Christians but certainly we might have a calling to embody them fully.

If you watch this presentation,  I invite you to consider the question:  “Am I now being a builder-upper or a tearer-downer?”  I realize the degree to which my choices and behavior may  have a direct, tangible, measurable effect on those around me, or more specifically, on those with whom I work.

The Influence of Social Networks

Excerpt:

Similarly, social networks are required for the spread of good and valuable things like love and kindness and happiness and altruism and ideas. I think, in fact, that if we realized how valuable social networks are, we’d spend a lot more time nourishing them and sustaining them because I think social networks are fundamentally related to goodness, and what I think the world needs now is more connections.

The universe will expand, then it will collapse back on itself, and then it will expand again…..  and it will repeat this process… forever.

What you don’t know is that when the universe expands again, everything will be as it is now.  Whatever mistakes you make this time around, you will live through in your next pass.  Every mistake that you make you will live through.  Again, and again…. forever.

So my advice to you is to get it right this time around.  Because… this time…. is all you have.”

– Prot.  In “K-PAX”

I found the darkest place I could manage in a place surrounded by street lights. One long strip of shadows from trees stretched across the grass, and I spread my blanket to lie down and gaze at the heavens. The dog was as clueless as I as to what to expect.

There is wonder in the stars.  Wonder and mystery and perspective.  The unfathomable mind of God stretches out to infinity, whole galaxies reduced to tiny specks of companionship.  They’re there.  With you.  Whether you’re looking, or not.   You know.

The Leonids gave one magnificent gift to me – a slow burning arc across the sky – some lone traveler’s last heroic gasp.  Was I the only one to say thank you? How ridiculous the notion.

All energy, matter congealed.  Life.

Integral to the Christian faith of many is the separation between CreatOR and CreatED.  That God spoke, and the universe became.

Lately in the halls of Physics the brightest of the feeble human minds have tried to conceive of the unified theory of everything.   It’s a desire to bring together two different physical worlds:  the tiny and the huge.  Theory of Quantum Mechanics governs the tiny. Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity the huge.  But bringing the two together has been a problem, though it has spurned a great deal of creative mathematics far beyond my ability to perceive!

One artifact of all attempts to unify the theories, though, is profound:  Time cancels out of the equation.  Equations that don’t have time in them are not useful for doing things in a universe governed by time.  Instead, the theory reduces to truisms.  Theoretical truisms that are nonetheless profound.

E= m c ^ 2

That great truism that heralds our own self destruction or liberation to utopia stands at the heart of many issues in today’s world.  In the end, it equates matter and energy.  Stuff.  The same stuff, different forms.  Back at the earliest reaches of our universe, the distant past, the very first femtoseconds, all of the universe was energy.  Quark soup, teeming with heat that random perturbation disturbed.  Out of that soup came the neutrons and protons and atoms and molecules and fusion and elements and galaxies with stars and plantes and life and me.

God is Will.  The Word of God is the Will of God born on Spirit.  Energy.

The thing is, before quark soup when the universe was an apple sized orb, there was no time. Time itself congealed.

Time is a perceptual artifact of causality.

Perceptual. Artifact.  It seems to exist because the mixed state of atoms in my brain do not have in them the capability to perceive the future well.   Perceive the future well.  But to perceive the future…. at all???? Does that not point to a symmetry between future and past from this present moment?

To separate God from Creation is to have a God outside – impotent – without Energy. And to allow God in, to allow a divine working presence in the universe, to grant energy, necessarily grants matter.  For how can there be anything outside of what is except to be what is not?  And if God exists, then God is not outside what is. Or God is not.

Christians often propose the problem with a creator-creation tie:  If God is creation, who made?  In Physics, that’s like asking what is before the big bang.  There is no “before”.  Because time itself is part of it.  Just because it is not in our feeble mind’s capability to understand that creator and created can be one and the same and still have created be creator, that doesn’t make it not so.  The absence of a conceivable alternative does not predicate the truth of a limited, easy-to-understand one.

God forbid that me, oh tiny little bit of creation that I am, could begin to conceive of an infinite universe far…. far far… far bigger than this puny brain!

When Newt Gingrich spoke here at Montreat College this past weekend, something bothered me deeply.  Deeply disturbing.  It was peppered through the crowd.  It was the knowing nod.  You’ve seen it.  It’s the “we’ve got it right!” nod.  The Evangelical SUV-American GEEZUS grin.  Pastic and prideful and imperialist.  I do wish, that we in general as humans, were at least smart enough to realize that our brains are very very very very very very PUNY!  And that if there is one truth that stands above others, that is more than anything for sure, it’s this:

We don’t know, and we will never know, what the hell we are talking about when it comes to GOD.

But then I got to reading about Mahavira, and his history.  This guy’s pretty cool.  Born into opulent princehood, he, like so many great Indian sages, gave up everything material for an ascetic life to free himself from the karmic bonds of suffering.

The guy literally went naked.  Everywhere.  In harsh weather, too.  He gave up everything!  His principles, or vows, which seem to align with the basic tenets of Jainism, are:

• Try not to ever hurt any living creature
• Speak truthfully, and only harmless truth at that
• Don’t take stuff for yourself not properly given
• Give up sensuality and most certainly sex… I wonder how he applies to enjoying the gift of chocolate mouse?
• Detach from people, places, and things

What strikes me as odd is that, reviewing the iconography surrounding him, is the incongruity between these vows and the images of him. Though he’s sometimes naked in the middle of the icon and poised with legs crossed in a pose of sublime bliss, around him, and occasionaly on him, are opulent wealth.

As if he is made into a king almost – the king he was born to be.

Or a deity.

It seems a long way from the lifestyle he walked away from.  All the attachment to ritual, to dogma, to stuff.  Even if it is an ideal spiritual portrayal, or spiritual riches if you will, I don’t understand why anyone would connect images of opulent worldly wealth with this guy.

It is yet another example of our broken tendency to make things into that which they are not, to suit our own purposes or fit the paradigm of our own lives and power structures.  The Church did it with Jesus.  I am not sure the degree to which Islam did it with Muhammad but the radical differences between Suni and Shiite suggest that something is off base from its original intention.

This is yet another example of the facade of self-righteousness pinned on  “The Holy”.  In the end, our views, which we may like to claim are based on something divine and external, are our own.  And these holy works, beautiful as they are, do nothing to mask the fact that our convictions are still ours to own and to live by.