He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to DO JUSTICE, AND TO LOVE KINDNESS, AND TO WALK HUMBLY WITH YOUR GOD? ~ Micah 6:8
I get a little unhappy with folks who think they get to dictate who deserves justice and kindness in a place where so many have been deprived of it in favor of others who meet a certain criteria.
It is not a good thing (or a God thing) to show favoritism. It is in fact a sin to do so (see James 2:9). The point is to open the table to ALL. When the Master said to His servant, “Go out into the roads and lanes, and compel people to come in, so that my house may be filled," he did not tell the servant to inquire about their personal lives, pedigrees, gender, or skin color first. He said "Tell them to come in that my house may be full."
Seems to me that we should actually heed this instead of building fences, complaining about someone coming to take "muh guns," deciding certain people have mental problems because of who they choose to be, and denying basic decency to children and refugees.
I've been thinking about this a lot since reading about all these folks wanting to drag Michael Vick (again). I saw the articles about the petition and was like, "Didn't he go to jail for that already? What's this about?" I'm no huge football fan or anything but certain things stick out, you know?
So I totally get the disgust. Vick raised dogs to fight and encouraged others to do the same by running a dog fighting ring. That's horrible.
That was kind of a big deal. TWELVE YEARS AGO. In TWO THOUSAND AND SEVEN.
I just don't understand!
And it's not like he, oh I dunno...walked into a man's own home and blew him away or anything.
Yet for some reason the latter is granted forgiveness (and a hug, no less) before the former. Even though Vick has served time, done multiple speaking tours about the evils of dog fighting, and donated money to every animal charity under the sun.
And, frankly, even though I love me some dogs and think dog fighting is horrific, I kind of think the latter is WAY worse than the former. Just my humble yet accurate opinion.
But certain folk will jump all over a bandwagon to forgive, or at least give a pass to, certain people for just about anything while at the same time holding certain others hostage to their past foibles. Never mind that they have paid for their crime, were very young, didn't know what they were doing, blah blah blah.
Now don't get me wrong. I do actually know the reason why. It's the same thing that causes folk, after a black person has been shot or assaulted by a white policeman or had the cops called on them for living theor lives, to say things like:
what were they doing to make them shoot/call the police
why didn't they just do as they were told/not do that
why were they wearing that/living their life
why were they black in a public space
It's maddening.
As the article says, no one is owed forgiveness. That is not a thing. It's the partiality I question. The blatant favoritism. Good Lord don't black men deserve the same consideration of others to rectify the situation, pay their dues, and go on? I'm not sure, but I think St. Paul said something about that and in the words of the article,
"So think of forgiveness this way-you’re able to do it with your uncle that says homophobic and racist things every Thanksgiving. You’re able to do it with the boyfriend who holds your head under the sheets and farts. You’re able to do it when a girl buries a baby alive or a woman comes into the home of a man and shoots him dead. Figure out what internally is causing you to hold back on allowing Black men to grow from their mistakes, not be caught up in their past, and live their lives."
Runny noses SUCK. Stuffy noses SUCK. One nostril stuffy while other nostril flows like the freakin' Colorado River SUCKS. Coughing up a lung and waking up in the middle of the night SUCKS (although actually "coughing up a lung" is a thing and can be fatal, don't do it). Sore throats SUCK.
"Who's got a blog and wants to try an experiment with me?
Here's what I have in mind. Round up as many people with blogs as I can, and have us all follow each other's blogs. Then, for 3 days, we communicate via our blogs INSTEAD of social media. We post on our blogs the way we'd post here - informal, chatty, what's up at the moment, stream of consciousness, whatever it is that constitutes a conversation for you at the time. Everyone in the group reads everyone in the group, and we visit by commenting on posts. Anyone who doesn't have a blog but wants to join in commenting is very welcome. After 3 days, we decide what, if anything, we've discovered." ~ Melinda Johnson
So I decided to participate in a thing. Look at me. Joining.
I have a lot of opinions and thoughts about things, but for a while now I've just let them fly from the id. To quote Nomad (let the reader understand), "That unit is defective. It's thinking is chaotic. Absorbing it unsettled me...A mass of conflicting impulses." I'm thinking and feeling so many things at once sometimes that it is hard to put them into any kind of order so EVERYTHING becomes stream of consciousness.
It's unsettling.
Do not like.
So I'm going to do that here for the next three days (see date stamp).
For anyone following me for this, beware. I can get rather...salty. And prolific.
Once upon a time, the world was very small. People could claim things about other people that were not true and folks were less likely to check to see that these things were true because it was too much effort or something to read a book and too scary to meet people who were different from them. Things like:
All Asian women are demure, delicate flowers and like being ordered around
All Asian men are mathematical geniuses
All Black women are loud, angry, welfare hoes
All Black men are gang-bangers
All Mexicans are drug dealers
All people who speak Spanish are Mexican
All British people are stiff, polite, and upstanding
All Scientists are lying about their research to get more money
All Teachers get a three month paid vacation
Etc, etc, etc, ad infinitum, ad nauseam
Now, however, we have the ability to learn otherwise. We have this thing called the internet and we have Google and we have televisions and we still have books but now we have books that are narrated to you.
It's amazing the sheer number of ways and means we have the ability to get accurate information from...
And yet don't.
It's very sad. It's not supposed to be this way.
"When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” He said to him, “’You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”
Please note the Commandment includes using your mind and is, in Christ's own words, "the greatest and first commandment."
Use your brain. Or as my mother would say, "Use your head for something besides a hat-rack."
I love Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Absolutely love it. For me, DS9 was the best of the Star Trek franchise in terms of acting, writing, and just telling a story. It gripped me time and again with every episode, even the silly ones. But one thing stayed with me even now, 25 years on, and that was the very first episode, Emissary. In it, the new commander of The Space Station Formerly Known as Terok Nor, Sisko, first encounters the wormhole aliens--entities that exist inside a stable wormhole that links the Alpha and Delta Quadrants of the Milky way.
The wormhole entities exist in a timeless state and do not uderstand corporeal beings who live “in time” so Sisko, in tried and true “seek out new life” manner, tries to explain it to them. However, the wormhole aliens, who are accessing his personal memories so they can interact with him by taking the form of people he knows -- his son, Jake, his wife, Jennifer, Captain Jean-Luc Picard-- can’t grasp the idea that humans (and other corporeal beings) live in a linear timeline because Sisko keeps returning to the scene of his wife’s death at the Battle of Wolf 359. He tries again and again but keeps returning in his memories to where he lost his wife. Accordingly, the entities ask him, “Well if that is true, that you do live linearly, why do you exist in this place? At this time? In this moment?”
And that is when Sisko realizes that he does live, move, and have his being in that place, that time, that moment. Everything he does, every choice he makes arises from that time when he was so profoundly traumatised. He can't leave it. No, he won't leave it. He chooses to remain in that space with those fires and those alarms, and the horror of watching his wife die and being able to do nothing about it.
Understanding dawns and he realizes he is choosing to exist in that place. He is choosing to exist in that place. He is choosing to exist in that place.
It is not linear.
It is not growth.
It is his choice.
Spoiler alert: At the end of the episode, Sisko is beginning to make different choices. He begins to choose to live in a different place. The trauma is still there. The grief is not gone but he no longer chooses to exist, to live, move, and have his being in that place. He begins to heal.
I think we all have those places in ourselves. Individually and corporately. We get profoundly hurt and the trauma is real. It's Ground Zero. Our life looks like Mt. St. Helens blew up and took the very earth from beneath our feet, destroying and ruining the entire landscape of our being.
Borrowed from Del Tackett via Google Images
My Mt. St. Helens blew in my living room about a month ago, 2007. And I lived in that devastation there for YEARS. It was comfortable there, with all that nice sticky mud around me, conforming to my emotions but there was always something (someONE) telling me this is not how you are supposed to live. There isn't supposed to be ash and rubble everywhere ALL the time. The still pools of your spirit aren't supposed to be choked with regret, the rivers of your soul should flow, not continue to stagnate with death and destruction.
I had to choose to do the work that is necessary to NOT exist there.
It was hard work. It involved facing what I did, did not do, was not able to do as well as what was done to me.
It involved forgiveness of others and of myself.
It involved letting it go and letting it be.
It involved recognizing that the only person keeping me in that place, that time, that moment...Is me.
It's not easy to recognize that you are choosing to live in a place of destruction if you've lived there a long time. Humanity is successful because humanity is adaptable. We can adjust to live in just about any environment, including a toxic one of our own making. Defenses are erected, lookouts are posted for any sign of offense, real or imagined, and we settle into our bunker, our muddy foxhole and decide this is how it should be and damn the person who says, "Would you like me to help you move these dead trees and clear out this mud?"
It becomes the place where we exist. Where we live move and have our being. We like our dead trees and mud.
Letting go of that is one of the hardest things I ever did but the first step, saying to myself, "No I do not want to live here. I want to live a linear life. I want to move" was the best one. I revisit these places but on a vertical spiral. The spiral goes up--because I choose for it to go up. When I see the broken places from a higher place, I can see where I need to ask for help to fix them: that river is choked with mud, these busted trees are piled too high for light to shine on the saplings. And then the river flows and the trees grow and I go up again. When I see that space again I see something else that needs adjusting so that light can shine and water can move.
But it has to be a choice I make. No one can do it for me.
Edited to add: I think the entire country is living in a place of trauma. I won't speculate on when the trauma occurred but what is happening now is a symptom of so many years of ignoring a huge festering wound where, whether we recognize it or not, we still collectively, exist--live, move, and have our being.
We need to move, collectively, to a better space or else nothing we do will change. We need to choose to not exist as a traumatized people.
I read an article recently that spoke much to me about some of the "knots" I've been asking the Theotokos to untie for me. Basically, let it be.
NOT "let it go". There is a difference. My life is not a Disney movie. I am no princess. Queen, maybe...but I digress.
Let it be. Let it be truth and joy and wisdom that I portray. Let it be mercy and grace. Exist in the way I know that God has told me to exist and things will be, in spite of me.
"Remember then from what you have fallen;
repent, and do the works you did at first."
~ Revelation 2:5
Virgin mother, Mary, you untie the knots, with the grace and power of your intercession,
take my supplications to your Son Jesus, my God, my Savior and my only Lord, and
dissolve and unleash the knot that makes me suffer so much. I hope
and trust you, sweet and generous mother. Holy Theotokos, please untie my
knots, keep me, guide me,
protect me, be my refuge, enlighten me, give me strength and grant me with immense faith I ask you.
I asked the Theotokos for a knot to be untied. She spoke to me in a way I could understand and led me to a shoulder who will understand my need and teach me to pray for it.
I've become angry. It has been a long time since that happened although not so long ago that I don't recall it. It took me a long time to get over being angry last time and in some ways I am still working on that. To paraphrase Abba Ammonas, "I have spent MANY years...asking God night and day to grant me the victory over anger." Okay maybe not night and day. I mean, to be perfectly honest, there were some days when it felt pretty damn sweet to rage like a hurricane. But those days became more and more rare as time went by. Confession and prayer for one's enemies is good for the soul, and trust me when I say that neither of those things are easy or fun. After a while though I felt like I had gotten a handle on things, praise God, and was moving right along. I will admit I rested on my laurels for a while. It was just so good to not be angry. Anger takes a lot of energy
Then 2016 happened.
Oh. My. Giddy. Aunt.
WTVeryF is happening in this world? We have this election cycle going on. Shenanigans from both left and right. Donald effing Trump. Hillary effing Clinton. Trigger happy cops killing folk like they're playing some kind of game. People rioting and marching. Racists and bigots crawling out from under the rocks they had been cowering under for the past few years. Racism rearing it's ungly head all over the damned place. Rapists being allowed to go free. Judges picking rapists over their victims and remaining on the bench...It's gotten freakin' insane in the US.
It seems like everytime I go online or turn on the news I'm seeing this insanity. And it's pissing. Me. Off. I can actually feel my blood pressure going up some days.
Photo shamelessly lifted from The Sun, Please don't sue me
So I try to limit my information consumption and I still get the info slapping me upside the head which starts the spiral all over again. It's exactly like being caught in a whirlpool. See that boat? that boat is me. That place where those buildings are? That's what I THOUGHT was safety.
Someone once told me that most of the time anger is a secondary emotion. Sometimes it is legitimately in response to an injustice done and a need to protect and it is a primary emotion. But most of the time anger is the manifestation of an stronger underlying basic emotion: Fear.
Which is why I recognize this manifestation as being based in fear.
I fear for my son. I fear for myself. I fear for this country.
I don't want to be afraid. In fact I am commanded not to be afraid over 80 times in Scripture (yes, yes I know there are supposed to be over 300 mentions but there are not but whatever). But it's kind of hard when you think about all the things that are out there. Gunning for you. Gunning for your kid. And I use the word "gunning" very deliberately here.
I guess I need to "repent and do the things [I] did before". It seems to be a theme with me at this time.
Do all the things. Do ALL the things. DO. ALL. THE. THINGS!
What are the things?
Fr. Thomas Hopko laid it out very succinctly in a formula that is pretty hard to get wrong:
Remember God. Say my prayers. Go to church. Forgive my brother. Obey the commandments.
Okey dokey.
Why does that seem so hard right now? I really need an easier formula please. ~sigh~ This is why I'll never be a saint. I suck at all of these things. Like a Dyson. I'm working on it but I am pretty sure my angel has a permanent facepalm. I really want God to look at me and say "Well done."
Somehow I do not think my fearful anger is well pleasing to Him. I'm going back to the basics though. Maybe they will help now as they did before.
"I know your works, your toil and your patient endurance. I know that you cannot tolerate evildoers; you have tested those who claim to be apostles but are not, and have found them to be false. I also know that you are enduring patiently and bearing up for the sake of my name, and that you have not grown weary. But I have this against you, that you have abandoned the love you had at first. Remember then from what you have fallen; repent, and do the works you did at first. If not, I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place, unless you repent."
~ Revelation 2:2-5
St Teresa of Avila
This reference came to me today after I had the overwhelming desire to re-read the Life of Teresa of Avila. St Teresa is one of my heroes and has been a signpost along the way many times in my journey heretofore. In fact, her works were the first mystical Christian writings I ever studied very nearly 20 years ago (!!!!!). I do not think this great saint and friend of God would steer me wrong. So I am starting over with the works I did at first.
I seem to be on a plateau, wandering round and round, looking for a way up or off. I'm not sure what precisely I am looking for and that is okay. I know I am Looking for Something Good and God has always given me good things when I actively sought Him. Which is of course the rub. I have not actively sought Him in a long long time. I know I am just going through the motions.
In her Life, St Teresa says the evil one always makes us think it is more humble to NOT pray, NOT seek God, NOT commune with Him. That by hovering at the back of the audience chamber, or even not even coming into the the chamber, let alone approaching the throne, I am somehow proving how humble I am. How silly is that? But this is what I have been doing.
So I am starting over from the beginning. I am repenting and doing what I did at first. When you are lost you have to retrace your steps, right? Because just sitting here isn't going to make me any less lost.
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.
