The Ocean of Pain

Mark Rothko, Green and Maroon 1953, detail

I became enlightened for a brief time today and it really, really sucked. So I stopped doing that.

Forgive me Lord, you offered me your cross today and I was unready for it.

A little background: some people drink, other people shoot smack or watch porn, I smoke cigarettes. Just like them, I smoke so that I am not aware of the real world. So that I am insulated from it. So that the pain stops, for a time.

I had started an experiment, based on my last blog post. The experiment was, that once I truly understand the basis of my smoking I would be able to defeat it and the way to uproot the sin of smoking was to truly understand it and understand the illusions upon which that behavior is based. I became aware that I smoked in order to deaden my real feelings, in order to become numb. And so I sought to embrace and understand my true feelings, my real state of awareness.

This, as it turns out, was a little too much and so early in the morning I set out on the mighty BattleSchwinn (my cargo tricycle) to go to the store and get some smokes. Because I was starting to have some real issues coping. I went into my favorite donut store first to pick up a couple eclairs and at this hour it was completely packed full of people seeking oblivion in the form of beautiful sweet donuts. A man was at the counter ordering enough donuts to provide breakfast for a battalion of U.S. Marines. And I thought to myself, all these folks are here for the same thing. Sweet sweet donut oblivion. You eat that fucking eclair or that chocolate glazed, and for that moment (and these folks make great donuts too) there is nothing wrong with the world. Cigarettes, donuts, liquor, smack, lust, greed, it's all the same.

And we all, in our desperation for oblivion, go about madly bumping into each other and causing each other pain as we seek our own particular way to assuage the pain of existence. For some pain is assuaged by power, or violence, or the consumption of luxury items, or by looking down on others - lust greed lying theft murder - any of the varieties of sin in this world. This is the most essential fact in existence, and in this the Buddha was on to something. We all seek to dull the pain of consciousness. And for a time I was really conscious, and it really sucked badly.

I knew that I could judge no one, we were all the same. Give a man enough consciousness, and he would stab his own grandmother with a rusty AIDS needle to make it stop. I bought my cigarettes and biked back, and as I got back in the door it really started flooding in. Congratulations, you are enlightened. You now understand the true state of the world. And all you want to do is make it stop.

This is the cross Jesus was offering me, to know. To feel the cry of every starving baby in the world echo in your soul. To feel the promise of new life get sucked out to a cold death in the abortion clinic. To feel every poor junkie blotting himself out in an alley, their heartbeat still, their breath leave, their bodies grow cold. I felt I could feel all of it, the true condition of humanity in the world. And I couldn't bear it. So I lit up, and for the first time in my life I was truly aware of the numbness spreading within me with every inhale. The blessed, cursed, terrible numbness.

For the first time in my life, I was truly aware of why I smoke.

Now what do I do? I cannot go back nor forward. I can't really embrace that, that awareness, nor can I ever forget it. So as always, I guess I work my way forward as best I can.

Illusion

Image by Rafał Pocztarski

I think that we tend to think of sin, if we think of it at all, as a failure of character and a failure of will. And so we blame the sinner: essentially if this person had a stronger will or a better character, he would not be afflicted so. This has become almost a characteristic Christian thing unfortunately: blame the sin on the sinner's personal weakness. Essentially, on their inferiority as a man or woman.

A man cannot will something different from what the inner man actually thinks, wants or believes. The inner man wins out. It's no different from willing yourself to hold your breath: eventually the real you wants to breathe and will decide the matter. So if someone has a serious porn addiction for instance, he can claim to wish to beat it all he wants (no pun intended,) but this does not defeat the root cause of why he desires it. It's not a matter of strength of will. It is a matter of wanting what you do not really want. Or, you want the benefits of giving up the sin, but you don't want to actually give it up. You want to keep the sin and avoid the negative effects of sinning, both. Which is of course an impossible wish.

So, instead of using the old Christian stand-by of shame and guilt interspersed with prayer, we should consider what actually WOULD work to overcome this behavior. What DOES destroy sinful behavior? What does throw the money-changers out of the Temple of your soul for real?

Every sin is based on an illusion, on a false understanding of life. They can be illusory thoughts, but mostly they are illusory emotional patterns. Emotional reactions that can go very deep, to childhood perhaps, but which are always based on illusory desires and associations. It is of no use to blame the sinner: he must release the false reality he is holding on to and embrace a truer understanding. He must uncloud his own eyes and see the truth.

I'll give you some practical examples. I avoid anything pornographic but once in awhile I will unintentionally run across pictures of naked women on the internet, and I am a heterosexual man. This may have the effect of arousing me, so how do I respond to that? I look at what I am really feeling. Sexual desire of course, but also a desire for a feeling of comfort. And then I think about how what I am seeing is in no way a sensible target for those wants. For starters, it's just a picture. Just photons coming off a screen. There is no true reality there, only a fiction. For second, the women depicted are sinners same as I, they are made of meat and snot and poop same as I, and they are subject to corruption and death same as I. Being human, they probably lie and hate and anger and fool themselves, not unlike myself. What part of that do I really find desirable? And so my illusory feelings are replaced by the truth, and I do not desire anymore. Problem solved.

I think most sins are subject to being treated in the same way, if the person really wants to understand and challenge those illusions. This is not a challenge of will, this is a challenge of seeing, of perception, of understanding the true state of things. The real test for me I guess is if I am able to apply the same thinking to my tobacco smoking, which is my abiding problem. If this method succeeds against that persistent problem where everything else has not, I will  know that this is pretty much the Swiss army knife for dealing with such things because I have literally tried everything.

The method does require someone who really wants to apply it to the problem however, which is not always a given. We shall see how it works for me.

The Shtiebel and the Synagogue

Great Synagogue at Capernaum, which sits on the site of the Synagogue that
Jesus taught at in Capernaum. Image by Eddie Gerald/UNESCO

“Very truly I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man

and drink his blood, you have no life in you...."

He said this while teaching in the synagogue in Capernaum.

~John 6:53,59

One thing that becomes very clear about the synagogue and also the Temple itself in Jesus' time is, ANYBODY could stand up at the lectern and give his two cents about anything relating to the interpretation of scripture. Or apparently, anything God-related whatsoever. The fact that Jesus could stand up in the synagogue at Capernaum and say an absolutely outrageous thing by First-Century Jewish standards is testimony to that. Now, the Jews of the First Century were in no way more tolerant than people today or less likely to condemn, but it was an established principle that at least any adult Jewish male could stand up before the whole congregation and say what was on their mind, God-wise. The Rabbi lent some order to this chaos, but the Rabbi did not DO or PERFORM synagogue. The members of the synagogue did synagogue. Aside from handling the Torah and doing weddings and assuring that things did not descend to fistfights, the Rabbi mostly got out of their way and let them do their thing.

The synagogue was also a place where Jewish males just gathered to hang out and talk about God or study scripture or disagree about scripture sometimes. And this happened when no "services" were taking place, and technically a prayer service could take place any time 10 or more Jewish males gathered together. You didn't even need the Rabbi there. The synagogue was a meeting house and a house of prayer in the most general sense: as long as people were talking about God or studying scripture or praying, they pretty much could be there. In fact in Israel today there are storefront shtiebels, mini-synagogues hardly more than stalls, open all night even, where any time you get 10 dudes together you have "church." Now the male-centrism isn't so nice, but otherwise what a refreshing difference from a Christian church!

On the other hand, the churches of Christianity have a terrible leader complex. Attendees to church services are not so much participants in church but spectators in a religious spectator sport: the priest or pastor stands up front and speaks or performs mass or whatever, the choir sings, and the attendees are just standing or sitting or kneeling or sitting or are compelled to recite text of some sort and otherwise are passive spectators to the priest/pastor "doing" church. In most cases, attendees are not invited to get up and speak unless it is to give canned testimonials on how they were "saved" and what wretches they were previously. And however nice a smiley face of tolerance you want to paint on doctrine, most churches are absolutely utterly inflexible as to what is and is not acceptable belief. It is their way or the highway, period. Sure, sometimes they might dress that up a bit, but at core all Christian churches have some dogma on which they are utterly inflexible, and sometimes that dogma is quite extensive. So for instance myself as a non-Trinitarian could never attend any Christian church because they all either recite the Nicene Creed or at least certainly believe it and might recite it, and I don't ascribe to it. This is why every difference of opinion becomes a new schism, with new self-righteous leaders who are just as certain that their way is right and the other way leads to hell, as the church they split from.

Synagogues at least in Jesus' day (I am not familiar with modern ones) were places where any (adult male) could speak and be heard, and differences were clearly accepted to varying degrees as being embraced in the overall umbrella of Judaism. Sadducees and pharisees for instance had strongly divergent beliefs, but they were both Jews and both groups more or less accepted the other as Jews. They didn't attend different synagogues and have different Temples. Jesus' followers were accepted as Jews, at least initially. Zealots may not have been liked by everyone, but they were considered Jews. None of these as far as it is recorded had to attend different synagogues because of it, because synagogues were not thought of in that way. They were a meeting house and house of prayer for Jews, of whatever kind.

I would not be accepted as a Christian in most Christian churches, nor is discussion part of the program. Differences of opinion are not simply disagreed with, they are denounced as heretical. Still, to this day, Christians call other Christians heretics. This is medieval thinking. Used to be, they would burn them.

This intolerance of difference and dissent is a toxic gas choking Christianity. Essentially, not to put too fine a point on it, all the non-Christians who consider Christians and their churches to be intolerant narrow minded self-righteous doctrinaire zealots are in the majority of cases completely correct. That is a fair and largely correct judgment. It is a wonder Christianity has survived this toxic atmosphere this far. Arguably, real Christianity hasn't survived it except for the perseverance of a tiny minority of tolerant Christians. The beginning of this intolerance in the very early centuries A.D. leading up to the ecumenical councils like Nicea were the corruption of true Christianity. Reformers periodically seek to rediscover "primitive Christianity" or the "Christianity of the Book of Acts" but habitually fail because they fail to open up the forum to friendly dissent and they embrace the very causes of Christianity's fall which is the ecumenical councils and the rigid application of dogma.

It is past time to return to the synagogue of the First Century. Now I am not recommending a return to the Law of Moses or anything like that, but to the freedom and openness of a meeting-place dedicated to the worship of God, the study of scripture, and the polite but free and open discussion of ideas on such matters. Where anyone who calls themselves a Christian is welcome and not forced to recite creeds they don't ascribe to. Christianity with a focus on Christians themselves and not their leaders. The practice of Christian churches today practically require passivity and blind obedience. Yes, the Judaism of the First Century had many rabbis and leaders and charismatic figures, but they were merely literate Jews who the people chose to listen to and they could just as easily go listen to someone else or start talking themselves. What did you need to be a rabbi? You needed to be able to read and write and have people start calling you "rabbi." That was about it. That is what strikes one as so different from Christianity: even a child like the 12 year old Jesus could up and go teach in the Temple, and if people listened to him they listened, and if not, well there were other people saying interesting things. That is such a drastic and damning difference from Christianity.

You will never get to First-Century Christianity, original real Christianity, unless you get back to the First-Century synagogue. When Christianity left the synagogue or was forced out, it stopped embracing the right of people to think for themselves. Without that, if Christianity has a future, it is only one of further confusion and apathy. 

A Shtiebel, an informal mini-synagogue or meeting house
for people to meet for prayer.

NOTE: I am definitely no expert on modern Judaism, but I understand that the Christian style of "performance worship" has tended to influence synagogues a great deal in the recent past, particularly I think in the U.S. If so, that would be very unfortunate. I do not know to what extent the relatively freewheeling and member-centric First Century synagogue recorded in the Gospels are typical of Synagogues in all time periods. I would guess though that Christian influences in worship style would be more or less limited to the modern era or at most the last 300 years or so. Also even in previous times, one would think that smaller congregations have the advantage as far as member participation and discussion go. If you have a congregation of 2000 males, obviously opportunities to speak and for individual voices to be heard would be somewhat more limited. 

Loaves and Fishes

Artwork by Robert Dodd

There are a relatively few different possibilities when it comes to the miracles of Jesus and miracles generally. Even people who believe in frequent miracles must know they don't happen a lot, don't usually happen in a public manner, and often don't happen where they would seem to be most needed.

One possibility is, they don't happen and never did. The miracles of Jesus were either metaphors or evidence of the power of positive thinking. According to a strictly rational scientific approach, they are bunk and always were and that's the end of it. Problem is, I don't actually believe that. I have seen some pretty damn weird things happen in this life, and generally they happened without the benefit of intoxicants.

The second possibility is, they used to happen, but not now. This is a viewpoint of some theologians. That during the early evangelic age and presumably earlier, they happened so that God could prove the truthfulness of his approved spokespersons and firmly establish the early Church, but that no longer applies. Because, you know, we're not in trouble in this world anymore and everyone believes and everything is set up peachy keen. This interpretation is silly and I will peremptorily dismiss it now. ;) 

A somewhat more interesting twist on this second possibility is that they COULD happen now, but that there are no approved spokespersons. That the Church turned from God in the Great Apostasy leading up to the ecumenical conventions and now all the priests, pastors and Popes and everyone connected with Christianity (and Judaism too I guess) are now too corrupted, so there does not exist anyone who has God's blessing to feed five thousand people with a tuna sandwich, for example. Which in theory the original disciples could do some of that or at least some of that happened to them, which might be more accurate to say. This possibility is interesting so I will get to it again.  

Will not normally feed 5000.

The third possibility is that miracles do happen, but they do not happen when they are needed the most. Not according to a terrestrial evaluation of need, anyway. I say this because during the Holocaust, millions of Jews and no doubt a lot of Christians too (there were Christians in concentration camps as well) prayed mightily for deliverance from their torment, a deliverance which did not occur unless you consider the Allies winning the war to have been that rather tardy deliverance. The problem with a God that intervenes in the world is, babies still get brain cancer and stuff. And you would think that, along with stopping the Nazis from killing 10 million civilians, this would be kind of high on the priority list. 

What we can conclude from this is that if overt miracles ever happen at all, they are extremely rare, and that God does not generally interfere in terrestrial matters even under the most apparently worthy of circumstances. When miracles happened in the New Testament, they were generally for evangelic purposes - the reason Jesus was in a position to need to feed 5000 people at all was that his previous miracles had generated huge publicity. If we take those numbers at face value, this represents what would have been a really large crowd anywhere in the ancient world, nevermind in a backwater like Galilee. So clearly that worked. God is perhaps willing to bend the rules to send a message to humanity, but not generally for purposes that we might consider useful unless it serves that other purpose first. This appears to be God's priority in causing miracles: that spreading his message of love and redemption is the most critical thing and any worldly purpose served is very much subordinate to that central intention. 

All this touches on the Problem of Evil, which is that if God is both omniscient, omnipotent and benevolent, he both could and would stop things like baby brain cancer and the Holocaust. The only major weakness with the Problem of Evil though is a world-centered standard of goodness. If this is the only world that matters, then the Problem of Evil is insoluble. If this is the only world and the only life that matters, God could not be omniscient, omnipotent and benevolent all at the same time. So perhaps we should ask first, what is the purpose of the world to begin with?

If the purpose and meaning of the world is contained within the world itself, the Problem of Evil is not resolvable. If the purpose and meaning of the world is in some higher reality and not strictly in itself, then it IS resolvable. This world then, that has implicit in it the possibility of genocide and uncured brain cancer, would be necessary to achieving a transcendent good. Thus the temporary evil of such things, however great that evil, would be transcended in a higher and permanent good which would be the actual purpose of the whole enterprise of this existence.

Is that actually true? If so, what is that higher good?

This is my thinking on the matter. The world is a training ground. For those who aren't allowing themselves to be trained, the world can be viewed as a kind of punishment but not in intention. If you don't learn, perhaps you come back to this world or one similar, and perhaps this is the fate rather than a picturesque flaming hell that Jesus referred to as entailing wailing and gnashing of teeth. Because there is plenty of that in this life, and it would be dreadful to keep going through that all the time rather than completing the course and graduating to better things. Okay, so training for what then? Membership in God's family. This membership probably should not be construed as sitting around in Paradise playing a harp all day. What do we know about the members of God's family, Jesus and perhaps angels? They do stuff. They constantly do stuff, in addition to of course praising God which is not incompatible with doing stuff too. Jesus in fact did everything about this world, according to the Gospels, he actually made it. According to some interpretations, God directly created only Jesus, and Jesus created everything else. So it is not unreasonable that upon graduation, graduates may be called into various roles, possibly an assisting administrative role. Assisting in the administration of existence itself, how do you get a more awesome job title than that?

After all, according to Matthew at least, angels told the shepherds what was going down in the manger. Angels told Mary what was going to happen to her, and told Joseph not to be afraid to take Mary as a wife. Somebody has to do that kind of stuff. ;) How amazing would that be!

Now I mentioned previously the possibility that New Testament-style miracles don't happen a lot or possibly at all now because the original purpose of all such miracles was to spread God's word among humanity, and there now exists no uncorrupted spokespersons to spread that word. The Church was corrupted by the World almost immediately after Jesus left. All we have now is the word that was given then, and the Holy Spirit, to direct us towards God's will. It is also possible that this is regarded as sufficient, and that further miracles would interfere with Humanity's free will. After all, if your local vicar (and everybody else's) went around feeding 5000 on a tuna sandwich, nobody would doubt that he's on to something. ;) Maybe people wouldn't love the message, but they would have to respect the 5000 free tuna sandwiches. ;) And this would change the nature of human choice.

As things stand now, the message is available, but it is an uphill climb to get it. It is truly a matter of your own heart and mind whether you believe or not, and indeed it requires a certain determination of heart and mind to believe and believe with some degree of correct understanding. So that even after you believe, you are able to navigate around the fallen institutional Church to the real message. Some manner of tepid nonbelief is sort of the default state that I think people tend to gravitate towards unless they feel the impetus from within themselves to go elsewhere. Or if they gravitate towards belief in SOME religion somewhere, they don't think about it too much and mostly think about how it benefits them in this world. That's human nature, isn't it? To mostly think about yourself and what is of utility to you in this life?

I don't think any of this closes the door on miracles for good. Maybe the door was always closed on using miracles for worldly objectives, even the healing miracles were not really for medical purposes but evangelical ones, but the door might always be open for the right circumstance with the right servant. It is probably not likely that either arises often, however. 

The Puzzle Palace

Image by Robert Dodd

I am going to talk about something rather unpleasant today. An unpleasant truth, in my opinion. Actually there are a couple of different ways you can take what I am about to say depending on your own personal beliefs, but any of those ways you could reasonably interpret this other than simple denial are unpleasant.

To explain it, I am going to tell you a little fictional tale about a paranoid prince. Once upon a time there was a very paranoid prince who was trying to protect a great treasure. It's not really his treasure to begin with, but lets not get into that part. To keep people from getting to the treasure, he created a vast series of stone walls, a labyrinth. A maze to keep the people away from the treasure. But people built siege engines to try to get over the labyrinth. So the prince built false siege engines all around the labyrinth, siege engines that didn't work right and led nowhere. The prince, being an evil magician, also created many illusions all around the labyrinth. Sometimes the illusion would seem to show the treasure right over the next wall, but in truth it was in the wrong direction and led to nothing.

The prince then recruited people from outside the labyrinth to praise the false siege engines and the false treasures, and these people had the illusion of great power and wisdom. They wore fine clothes and had fine hairdos and nice things, and they led people to false treasure rooms where for a time they might imagine they were swimming in golden coins, but really they were on a dung heap. The evil prince recruited kings from outside the labyrinth to punish those who made actual progress towards the treasure, and reward those who led others astray. This was quite a mess, and the prince thought the treasure quite secure.

Nevertheless, it was always possible to navigate the labyrinth by walking in one end, at a gap at one end, and by making all the correct turns to arrive at the other end where the treasure was. It was difficult, sure, but by remaining undistracted it could be done. And some did this, but few.

In the end, the prince could never own the treasure: the one thing he could and did do is to try his mightiest to keep anyone else from having it. He was never capable of enjoying the treasure, but only enjoyed defeating others.

I believe that you can take this as a parable of a real state of things. The treasure in the center is holiness, or you might say the way of being of true saints living in the world. The wicked prince is of course the evil one. And the path through the labyrinth is the path of mindfulness and attention that escapes the many traps laid by the prince. The true pilgrim seeking the true path through the maze may get waylaid along many false corridors, but because he is a true pilgrim who truly seeks the treasure and not anything else, he goes back to the point where he first started getting lost, and tries again. And the prince is constantly seeking, trying and trying, to achieve the downfall of the pilgrim.

Now, you could say that the prince is simply human failings and vices if you don't want to acknowledge the existence of any real demons, it probably works either way. However, one of the most widely acknowledged events in the 3 Synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke) is Jesus casting out devils. In John, while there is no mention of Jesus casting out devils, Jesus mentions Satan directly, as he does in Luke. "I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven," Luke 10:18. So if you want direct confirmation of devils in the New Testament, you have a whole lot to choose from.

"...because the prince of this world now stands condemned." - John 16:11.
Jesus said it, and I believe him. Indeed, I felt "pressure" to not write anything of this, which I won't go into except to say that I prayed to the Lord.

In comparison, there are no, none, zero, quotations about the Trinity in the New Testament but every denomination of the Christian faith believes it (falsely.) So yes, I believe that there are such things as demons and that there is such a thing as a prince of them. Whether you do so is up to you. What you should never do, is underestimate the subtlety of that prince, however you rationalize him.

Getting back to the parable, the part about the false siege engines and the false priests who praised them - well to be honest the evil one got into the Church business very early. You have the 4 Gospels in which Jesus is telling us to love our enemies, and as quickly as Acts (written by a disciple of Paul, probably in the late 1st Century) all of a sudden St. Peter is supposedly damning people to death (Ananias and Sapphira) for telling a lie about how much money they got for their own plot of land! My goodness, don't let that man anywhere near Washington D.C.! ;) If this version of Peter were to clone himself and start running around this world, the world would be depopulated very quickly. Not to mention the many other dubious tales of Acts, including an account of how the disciples first got the Holy Spirit that directly conflicts with John. And in Paul you have a man who I am sure had good intentions, but he couldn't control his own temper! He once wished his enemies would cut their own balls off, this is how poorly controlled he was.

How clearly I remember the words of our Savior: "cut your balls off!" No, that was not what he said. It's what Paul said though. And Paul confessed frequently he had problems controlling his own sin, which many people have, but clearly he had a large enough issue with it that it was worthy of mention.

So this means that false teaching set in virtually from the outset, and many if not most of these early leaders were led astray innocently. They did not know they were distorting the gospel, that is why I think the gospel accounts are mostly portrayed accurately. They did not distort what Jesus actually said, they revered what he said, but they distorted what it meant.

And it only got drastically worse from there. In 325 A.D. they had the Council of Nicea, an ecumenical council, a council of bishops, presided over by a ROMAN EMPEROR, Constantine. If that is not a fox in the chicken house, I am not sure what would be. And their first order of business was to suppress the truth, to suppress challengers to their views on Christ which would eventually evolve into the Trinitarian doctrine of today. There were several more councils along these same lines, suppressing dissent.

A short aside, what is Trinitarianism? It is the belief that 1=3, that 3=1, and that simultaneously that both 3 and 1 are equally and fully the case. Readers of George Orwell may recall a similar episode in the novel 1984 in which the protagonist's torturer held up 4 fingers and said it was 5, and tortured him until the protagonist indeed agreed it was 5 and not 4 fingers he was seeing. If they can get you to say 1=3 they can squelch all dissent, because you have given up thinking for yourself and will accept anything they say. You would be surprised how vociferously clerics defend this doctrine even today. The Gospels are clear: yes, Jesus is pre-existing, yes Jesus is the Son of God, yes Jesus is the living Word of God. They are equally clear that Jesus is not the same as God. The fact that he is called the "begotten" Son of God, and that he is called "Son," and that he could genuinely die at all, should make all that adamantly clear to anyone actually paying any attention. Of course for someone for whom 3=1, anything is true.

Okay, back to the main thrust here. About in the same period, Constantine decreed the death penalty to anyone possessing the writings of Arius (one of their main opponents in the Council of Nicea) and refusing to turn them over. This response to people with dissenting opinions, to burn them alive or otherwise murder them, only became more popular in the following centuries. Because Jesus clearly said to do that... not. No, he said love your enemies, not burn your enemies. But the Church, in full possession by the prince of this world, much preferred to roast them alive. While this no doubt started happening in the 4th Century or earlier, and it is believed that many of the Church's enemies were murdered in various ways long before this, it hit full swing by 1300 A.D.

Lets just let this sink in a minute. The same Church that quoted Matthew 5:44 out of one side of its mouth, gave the order to burn people alive out the other side. Sure, maybe it was the civil authorities who actually lit the match, but with the judgement and approval of the Church. The Church told them to do it.

And of course in the 20th Century we had the lovely phenomenon of the televangelists and the Prosperity Gospel people and so on - may God have mercy on their wretched money-loving souls.

Now though, thankfully, the evil one doesn't need to drag a false image of Jesus around anymore. The Church is passe, it is on its way out. There is a new Gospel much more to Satan's liking: CONSUMERISM. Now, finally, the evil one can express himself frankly. Consume, buy, revel in your wealth, revel in your SELF, because that is all there is. In the 18th Century Enlightenment, Satan said there is no God. Now he doesn't even have to bother, people have found a new and "better" God. All hail your one true god of these latter days - Mammon. See how powerful he is, see how shiny. You know you want him. Golden calf my backside, this is the god that gives you what you really want. Things.

Truly, no deity has ever been so shiny. And what small thing does he ask in return, for all these pretty things?

So, getting back to that labyrinth. First hurdle is even seeking God, the real God, at all. Most don't. It seems apparently contrary to self-interest to do so.

The second hurdle is getting past all the lies, all the wolves in sheep's clothing, that the evil one throws up in front of you. When I first came to Christ a long time ago now, of course I naively assumed that the Church knew how I could get to know God better. I joined a Pentacostal church, people speaking in tongues, the whole bit. When it did not turn out to be true that they helped me know God more, I rejected the God they were supposed to be believing in, thinking that they were accurately representing Him. When I came back to God the second time, I did much the same thing, but I was getting wise. I left to follow another path, a path of my own, one I learned much from. This third time I returned, and I wasn't taking anyone's word for anything but seeking for myself. I might have many illusions to overcome, but at least they will be my own.

The third hurdle is overcoming a limited sense of oneself, as I mentioned in the first part. It seems contrary to self-interest to follow Jesus. Most people think of themselves as like an enclosed box sitting on their shoulders, and everything outside that box is alien and hostile. You have to overcome that false self to find your true self. When I first came to Christ, I looked at what was being called for in the gospels in terms of self-sacrifice and I honestly said to myself, I can't do that. I was being very honest with myself. That is like asking a stone to become a bird. There is no path from the one place, my selfish self, to the other, the child of God and follower of Jesus. They are as alien as alien could be. Like a stone wanting to become a bird.

Well there is a path, but I can't explain what it is. God does it. Just keep pushing towards God.

The fourth hurdle? I guess putting into practice, putting the life of a follower of Jesus into practice, but I am not sure I am at that stage yet. There may be other hurdles I know nothing of.

But the purpose of this post is, you have to take that labyrinth seriously. You have to take the enemy seriously. The latter part of the Gospel of John is full of Jesus describing this world as belonging to the evil one, of the masses of the people belonging to him. Take that seriously.

The Lord bless you and keep you;

the Lord make his face to shine upon you

and be gracious to you;

the Lord turn his countenance upon you

and give you His peace.