Passers-by

Image by Greg Willis

"Be Passers-By"

~Apocryphal Gospel of Thomas

Many of the things I used to do up until very recently, I don't do very often right now. Computer games, I used to play for hours a day not infrequently. It has been days since I played any. News, I used to be a news junkie, now I avoid it more. I don't turn on the television, though I was an infrequent watcher anyway. I don't watch the people I am subscribed to on Youtube, I used to watch them every day. Yesterday I started to play one of those videos, and I was seized by a very strong and sudden feeling - like God was saying, "don't look away from me." Look at me, always look at me. And so I try.

Strangely, things I tend to think of as very problematic sins of mine, I have not been freed from. I still smoke, not nearly as much as I did before my most recent quitting attempt, but I still smoke. I have received no such conviction on that. Facebook, I spend too much time hunting chit-chat on Facebook, though I have been somewhat convicted on that. On other things, the message is clear: don't be distracted. Don't look away. Look at me.

Since I started praying regularly 3 times a day (though today I wasn't feeling well and only did two) I have started having an experience of very keen awareness of a kind that is hard to describe. Being awake, and having a very accurate appraisal of everything that keeps me asleep, that makes me dull. Everything is pared down, all my usual mental chatter is pared away, and the, I guess luminousness, of the permeation of God in and through the world comes forward. I don't know how to say it better than that. I get pared down. He increases, I decrease. The BS of my thoughts that I have usually not even been aware of, gets pared away. What did Jesus say about the idea that even thinking of murder or adultery or whatever, is itself a sin? It's in Matthew 5. He may have been talking about that, that all the time, unawares, we have this background noise in our minds of thoughts and those thoughts are usually not of God. 

“You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, ‘You shall not murder, and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment.’ But I tell you that anyone who is angry with a brother or sister will be subject to judgment."

"You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart."

That quote, that even thinking of sin in your heart is a sin, is something that a lot of people really treat as a throwaway statement of Jesus. They don't spend a lot of time on it. How can you control what you think? By the time you think to control it, you have already thought it! Well you do that by prayer. If God has the upper hand in your heart, the other guy can only nibble around the edges, jabbing at you from the perimeter. He can't plop himself down at the dining room table or in front of the TV and demand you bring him a beer.

But as my distractions begin to get pared away, I start feeling more and more the conflict inherent in my situation. It is like I am on an island and the world is passing around me, oblivious. And meanwhile everyone is buzzing around buying and selling and staring at their phones and watching sitcoms and doing all the things that "normal" humans do, worldly humans do, and I feel more and more alien. Not that I wish to imitate them at all, but I wish to seize someone and tell them about God, or be seized by someone capable of teaching me, and that just won't happen. I become more and more aware of not being part of the world. And there is largely really no point in talking about it to the people I know, because I know they just won't get it and just aren't interested. I am a passer-by in the world.

And there's no point in going to church. The church is not the church. It's a church of the world. And I, according to the doctrine of every single Christian denomination on Earth, am a heretic. So that's that. :) The further I go in seeking to keep looking towards God, the more a stranger on Earth I become.