On a Happy June Morning
06/11/2008 6:53 AM – 7:14 AM
And I’m happy today. It’s not a forced happy. It’s there, rising up from my being. It arrived on the wings of a confluence of events. Those events: I realized that Zen philosophy is crap and I don’t feel so bad about abandoning it (though zazen is still something that I really should do more often), I found a good book by a Christian evolutionist that’s debated Christian creationists, Ben called and we talked about the house in Ithaca and I’m excited about going, I thought of a good project to invest my time in for a few years.
I believe in God this morning. Easily. Faith should be easy. It should be something you just do without having to think about it. It should be like sitting in a chair. You don’t think about it whether it actually exists in a metaphysical sense, you don’t calculate the probability of its ability to hold you up, plotting its strength against time and weight. You just sit in the damn thing and forget about it. Unless you’re using it as an allegory. Stop using faith as an allegory. It’s just faith. A chair is just a chair. Okay, maybe there’s a few things to learn from Zen. I could die very well today. I don’t want to, however. There’s much too much else I want to do.
Science does not rule out God. Are they “non-overlapping magisteria”? I’m not sure. I don’t know if that analogy works. There is a God. He loves me. There is science. It works. That is enough. I don’t want to recapture the beauty of childhood (and I did have some effing magnificent moment in childhood). I want to abide in the beauty of this part of my life. The Spike version of 32. Unmarried. Underpaid. In debt but sort of managing it. Relatively free. Finally getting out of the city. Moving to a college town in the country. Training for a race. Mildly crushing on girls much too young for him and/or spoken for. Writing in his journal every morning. Talking about himself in third person. In fragments. This is an interesting Spike. All of them have been. Sometimes a little too whiny. Sometimes a mooch. Sometimes way, way too afraid. But here. But himself. Further up then, lad. Further up and further in.
posted by Spike at 4:27 AM
4 Comments:
just because Zen doesn't feel at home to you doesn't make it crap...
Sorry, Dude. That was my vitriolic response to the vitriolic treatment of faith in "Hardcore Zen." And I'd hoped that I dampened it a bit when I waffled a bit in the middle section. I still respect the sitting part. A lot. Not so much the "this is what you will discover in the sitting" part. There's nuggets in there, to be sure, but I'm not swallowing the hook.
there's a ragged rusty hook in christianity... called suffering.
suffering is our internal response to things we can't change. Since we, as temporal beings, are anchored to the present, suffering is a natural component of fixation on either the future or the past: the two components of "ourselves" we are powerless to master.
And here comes christianity, with its focus on "original sin" and "christ's sacrifice" there are nothing but reminders of the flawed past, which cannot be changed.
Then the transition from ancient sin to future bliss in the undefined world of heaven, which all good christians wish for every day. And we return to the basic belief of our parents: if heaven is bliss and the past is fucked, all I can hope for is to die and reach eternal joy. In other words, this present moment has no value. This moment. Now.
As you read these words this present moment has overtaken you, and passed you by.
And yet, that thing more precious than rare jewels has no value to christians.
And in all this I must accept that my "now" is valueless in the face of some promised afterlife undefined in quality? Pastors tell us it's everything we were made to love, it's eternal worship service... and yet, wouldn't the act of having a single thing every day make a thing without value?
Eat the same brand and flavor of doughnut every day without fail, and tell me if you still love it.
and if heaven causes some change in our nature where we can be perfectly happy with the same delights day after day... doesn't that defeat the basic nature of our humanity? our quest for adventure and newness? doesn't that make us like angels? free of questions or ideas?
It's a jagged rusty hook, my friend, and much harder for me to swallow than sitting to let my water be still, so i can see to the bottom of the pool.
There’s a bunch of ragged rusty hooks in existence and one of them is called suffering. Sometimes it hooks you, sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes suffering is our internal response to things we can’t change, sometimes it’s the result of other things.
Since we, as temporal beings, are anchored in the present, suffering is sometimes a component of fixating on either the future or the past, sometimes hope is there and sometimes gratitude, but hooks can, in fact, arise there or in the myriad other components of ourselves that we are powerless to master.
And here is Christianity which sometimes focuses its attention on original sin and Christ’s sacrifice and sometimes doesn’t. These sometimes remind us of our flawed past, which we cannot change, and sometimes they don’t. Then sometimes there is the transition from ancient sin to future bliss in the undefinable world of heaven, which some of us Christians yearn for sometimes.
And when we look at the beliefs that some of our parents sometimes held: if heaven is bliss and the past is fucked, all I can hope for is to die and reach eternal joy, in other words this moment has no value, this moment, now – we’re saddened but realize that sometimes some people feel that way and sometimes they feel better and sometimes they don’t.
As you read these words, this present moment has overtaken you and passed you by. And yet that thing that cannot be bought with rare jewels sometimes has no value to some humans, some of whom are Christians. And yet despite all this, I sometimes can manage to hope that my "now" is priceless and I get some promised afterlife, undefinable in quality to boot. Some pastors sometimes tell us it's everything we were made to love, it's eternal worship service... but that is a finger pointing to the moon and its best not to mistake the one for the other.
Life’s full of jagged rusty hooks, my friend, I try to avoid them as much as possible. And sometimes I even manage to be just sitting and let my water be still, so I can feel the bottom of the pool.
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