Thursday, January 17, 2013

Waiting on The Word

The most maddening thing about having children is never knowing when it's time to let them finally fly on their own or fail. When do we stop feeling responsible for not warning them of every danger that we wish we could protect them and their children from experiencing? When do we accept that our children have the right to ignore us and make their own decisions, no matter what harm we foretell, based on our experiences and those of the wise people to whom we have exposed our children? When do we stop feeling their pain all the way into our wombs?

I grew up in an age where children were to be good mirrors of their parents skills and virtues, even if the parents had no idea what they were actually projecting onto their children. Parents turned all their fears into anger, and attempted to control their children with fear of parental reprisal, even into eternity. It was perfectly acceptable in many families to, literally, torture the disobedient child. We had no trouble believing that "God" was a vengeful father who felt no pain if we were burning in hell forever. After all, we deserved it.

Throughout the Judeo-Christian bible, it seems that we never learn that fear doesn't create faith. We continue to go a few steps toward responsible compassion, only to go thousands of years back. We continue to get people of peace to show us the way, and continue to shove them aside when they don't get there fast enough or the road gets too rocky. Why is this?

Maybe the stories of the bible are like that. Maybe we keep getting new words to warn us back onto the path to peaceful co-existence, but we keep getting scared and going back to the mistakes of the beginning. One definition of insanity is when we keep repeating behaviors that don't work, expecting different results. We continued to kill the prophets until there were no more to kill. Is all of humanity insane?

We are now going to have to take responsibility for our own collective future. An earth, like a house, divided against itself will always fail. This earth is all of humanity's home. We will all sink or swim into eternal harmony together. We have the Sacred Spirit in each of us that, collectively, will light the way, if we stop attempting to avoid proximity to each other and competing for most-favored status. Do we really believe that a Sacred Spirit would play favorites like human parents often do?

Maybe we no more need prophets. Maybe we're ready to all be priests, spreading the sacred with our own inner light radiating and igniting others. Maybe we all need to put on our big boy and big girl faith and go forward with confidence in our mission. People of responsible compassion will find you. You don't need to follow any earthly leader other than The Sacred Spirit in your own head. This Spirit never asks anyone to be put to death, except those who have put out The Sacred Spirit's light in a vulnerable soul. This is one way that you know if the voice in your head is The Sacred Spirit.

Abraham was a man of the old way, believing that God, like the gods, wanted blood sacrifice. But he was told by The Sacred Spirit that it was time for a new covenant with The Sacred Spirit. What would have happened to all the world if Abraham hadn't waited for clarification of the voice in his head?

When Jesus was born, there were still many who insisted that God wanted blood sacrifice, even after all of Jewish Jesus' witness to a new way of worship through responsible compassion for our fellow humans. With great sorrow, Jesus went alone to the garden to listen to The Scared Spirit and decided to allow himself to forward with becoming the sacrificial lamb that some of his people demanded.

He was very clear in sharing his vision of The Sacred Spirit, along with instructions for how to spread The Spirit, one relationship at a time, as he shared The Spirit with his friends and followers. He had even given instructions for how to love each other, including how to work out our differences. None of this included killing people, although it did include walking away at times. But Moses had already given us ample example of that.

"When will we ever learn? Oh, when will we ever learn? (With apologies to Pete Seeger and Tao Rodriguez-Seeger's Blowin' in the Wind)