Fear and Hate: Why Do We Think These Are Family Values?

We just got back from a 12-day trip to Ireland. What a wonderful country with such a difficult past history. The Irish refer to the recent past (1960s-1980s) as “the troubles.” Most of us remember portions of that as well. The bombings. The police/Army battles with crowds. The Irish Republican Army (IRA) and the Ulster Defense League (UDF) fighting each other and fighting London. It was a confusing bloody time.

This got me thinking on the flight back home about the significant difference between religion’s focus on exclusivity and spirituality’s focus on inclusivity. I know with my head that this is an oversimplification, but I experienced this viscerally while touring Northern Ireland last week.

Ireland’s 32 counties today are split between the Republic of Ireland (the southern 26, and mostly Catholic counties) and Northern Ireland (the northeastern 6 counties, mostly Protestant, and a part of the United Kingdom, which includes England and Scotland. This split was begun following the civil war (1916-1922) when Ireland was granted partial independence from Britain and was known as the Irish Free State.  Ireland remained a dominion of the British Commonwealth. In 1948 the Irish Free State formally left the British Commonwealth and adopted their official name of The Republic of Ireland. The country’s constitution, however, included a claim on Northern Ireland’s six counties as a part of its national territory. In 1998, as part of the Good Friday Agreement, brokered in part by President Clinton, the Irish constitution was altered by referendum to remove the territorial claim to Northern Ireland and instead extend the right of Irish citizenship to all the people of the island should they wish to have it.

As we toured the 26 counties of the Republic of Ireland, I got a recognizable sense of inclusivity. We saw town after town where it was pointed out to us that there was a Church of Ireland (Catholic) built there recently – the first since the mid-1600s when Oliver Cromwell destroyed all things Catholic – with joint contributions from both the Catholic and Protestant communities. Police stations were small and indiscriminate. Individual police personnel were unarmed. Police cars were brightly colored – quite cute, actually.

After 8 days of touring we entered Northern Ireland in the Province of Ulster and dominated by the city of Belfast. As we drove in the area, especially Belfast, the police cars were modified Range Rovers that looked like small armored tanks. Police stations were surrounded by 10-12 foot high stone/brick fences topped with broken glass and razor wire. Police personnel were heavily armed – mace, tear gas, and hand weapons.

Within Belfast, itself, there is still one portion of Belfast where Catholics and Protestants live in very close proximity. These Catholic and Protestant neighborhoods are separated by a menacing fence – brick and stone with razor wire – from 12-20 feet high. Streets between the neighborhoods are installed with gates that are closed and locked at night and opened in the morning. The whole area is collectively known by the extensive, and mostly political, murals that adorn buildings and walls there. In fact, it has become a tourist attraction of sorts. However, I found the differences between the Catholic and Protestant neighborhoods quite distinct and significant.

The Catholic neighborhood is rather non-descript neighborhood. It is clearly a lower/lower middle class area. The murals, although political, express the past in a historic kind of way. Murals were painted of the critical leaders of the early 1900s civil war. They also depict significant leaders that came during the “troubles” to help solve the tensions – Nelson Mandela, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, for example. The headquarters of Sinn Fein, the party of the IRA, is still there, but it is now a political organization electing people to the British Parliament.

The Protestant neighborhood was quite different. Also a lower class area, many of the houses had their own private fences around their property. Bars were on windows. The murals there were much more pointed, threatening and violent. They extolled only the leaders of the UDF during the 1960s – 1980s. It was simply a chilling feeling.

I asked our Belfast tour guide what was causing this difference between these Catholic and Protestant neighborhoods. Her answer was that the Protestant neighborhood was much more fearful. The churches and political rallies consist of much more fear mongering.

Efforts by the City of Belfast to educate and encourage families to train their children that all religions need to be respected are taken seriously in the Catholic but rebuffed in the Protestant neighborhood.

Fear. Hate. Enmity. Why do we still consider these to be “family values?”

In my book, How the Bible became the Bible, ISBN 978-0-7414-2993-3 pages 213-14, I discuss The End of Days and refer to instances when fear and anxiety are high. When this is the case, Christian churches quite often begin spending more time preaching and quoting from the Old Testament or the Book of Revelation. The focus, of course, is on obeying the Law in order to gain God’s favor and admittance to Heaven. The alternative is eternal anguish. This is dogma, and where dogma is predominant, so will be fear and exclusivity because belief in the dogma is what will “save” you. Of course, if you don't believe the dogma, you are wrong, evil and threatening. Spirituality focuses on the universal experiences of openness, acceptance, peace and joy. It’s a perception that focuses on “I think my way. You think yours. As long as you respect me, that’s all right.”

The reality of the difference between exclusivity and inclusivity was palpable as we travelled Ireland. Sadly, it reminded me of the hateful rhetoric here in the States.

Although these messages are mostly for me, thanks for listening. As always – feel free to forward this message to your friends, family, and those accompanying you on your spiritual journey.

Don.

#1 June, 2013

Copyright, 2013

Is Our Suffering God’s Will?

A subscriber sent me an email with an article that had appeared on CNN.com. It was pertinent, according to the sender, since the news about the Oklahoma tornado. The article was about a young man, Joshua Prager, who had just written a book about a horrible accident he has suffered 23 years earlier. His book is titled: "Half-Life: Reflections from Jersusalem on a Broken Neck" published by Byliner.

(CNN) -- At noon on May 16, 1990, a runaway truck struck a minibus at the foot of Jerusalem and bound together the lives of 22 people: 18 Israeli Chasidim, two American Jews, an Israeli Arab and an Israeli Jew who had just found religion. The last died at the wheel of his bus. The rest of us returned to our homes to heal -- a medical jet flying me, my broken neck and a respirator back to New York. I was 19.

… I was a hemiplegic and would be always. And when last year I returned to Jerusalem at age 40, stepping from the plane with my cane and ankle brace, I hoped to write of the crash and its place in my life….

Was it owing to the crash that I was not married, that I was ever-mindful of time, that people seemed to tell me what they told no one else? I wondered if my crash-mates wondered similar things. I wondered how they had made sense of the crash. And so, 22 years after it, I set off to look for them.

I found the Chasidim first. They were a large extended family that, together with me and my American friend, had been riding the bus to Jerusalem where they planned to worship at the Western Wall, the Kotel. I found them in the ultra-Orthodox town of Bnei Brak. They welcomed me into their home.

Surrounded by seven shelves of holy books, Yaakov, the family patriarch, told me that God had caused the crash and spared our lives. He said we had to follow the example of Job and serve God though we did not understand him.

Next, I found the widow of the bus driver. She was a secular Jew of Yemeni descent and lived in the industrial town of Petach Tikvah. (She wished to keep her name private.) She told me that her husband had feared nothing but God. And, she said, it was God who had ordained the crash. "It is written," she told me. "If you don't believe that, you will go crazy."

Finally, in the Arab town of Kfar Qara, I found the driver whose truck had crashed into the left rear of the bus where I sat. Abed told me that he had become religious after the crash and that the crash was an act of God. He then paused from his coffee and his Hebrew to speak an Arabic word: Maktoob. "It is written."

I left Abed, mindful as I drove south toward Jerusalem that, in this land of competing narratives, Arab and Jew were for once in perfect agreement.

Now -- 23 years later -- it finally is. I have written my book. And it occurs to me that whenever any of us wish to assimilate why we suffer (or prosper), we must choose between these same two narratives. We can attribute our lots to God and his writings, his unknowable ways. Or we can root them in the natural world and chronicle them ourselves -- on paper or simply in our minds. We can take comfort in ultimate if inscrutable justice. Or we can take comfort in observable reason and responsibility.

We can take comfort in some form of God’s justice or in the observable natural world of reason and responsibility. These were the only two choices he believed he had after he had rationally distilled the situation.

But what if there is a third choice?

I, like Mr. Prager, cannot believe in a God that orchestrates auto crashes in Israel or tornados in Oklahoma in order to “teach some of us some kind of lesson.” That is not the unconditional love of humankind that Jesus portrayed. That is the “love” of a God of an extremely patriarchal late Bronze Age mentality. That is the creation of a Supreme Being – male, of course – that is merely a gigantic, overblown version of ourselves: Judgmental, aggressive, jealous, power hungry and insecure, vindictive and, apparently, very finicky.

Our egos try very hard to demand answers of situations that cause grief, physical pain, emotional anguish and destruction. Our egos need to make sense of things. What else is “being in control” all about, if it isn’t this?

But grief, physical pain, emotional anguish and destruction are all an illusionary set of meanings we apply to the events of our perceived world. It is the same with the more positive meanings, as well. These meanings are of our own creation. [This was the subject of last week’s post: Why Is It So Difficult To Change What I Perceive?]

There are physical laws and spiritual laws we live by and they work whether we believe or acknowledge them. The most innocent baby will fall from a 10-story window due to gravity. God will continue to love us unconditionally whether we think we “deserve” it or not. Our egos cannot comprehend these kinds of things – so we concoct a god that plays favorites and can be rather whimsical when it comes to who lives or dies in a natural catastrophe. Thinking that way allows my ego to continue to believe it’s in control – it can still choose whether or not to believe in God or to trust Him or to love Him or to believe He truly accepts me as I am.

There is a third choice.

As ACIM has taught me, I am not an ego. I am not a human being. The True Me does not live in a physical body that houses – somewhere – an eternal soul, which God will either bless or damn at my physical death. I am an already-loved eternal spirit that is permanently connected to and loved by God – always have been and always will be.  Amen.

Just because I perceive something as either good or bad, doesn’t make it so. As friends in AA used to tell me, “Don, you don’t have to believe in everything you think.”

Although these messages are mostly for me, thanks for listening. As always – feel free to forward this message to your friends, family, and those accompanying you on your spiritual journey.

Don

PS:  I will be on holiday for 2 weeks. There will be no posts from me during that time.

#4 May, 2013

Copyright, 2013

Why Is It So Difficult To Change What I Perceive?

A subscriber recently asked: “Why isn’t what I perceive accurate? After all, everyone else perceives or see just like I do.” Thank you for another excellent question.

A Course in Miracles (ACIM) distinguishes between seeing and perception. On this physical plane we see with our eyes and our egos equate that with perception, as if it’s reality. On the spiritual (or real) plane we still see with our eyes but perceive with true vision. We have interpreted what we’ve seen with our Christ mind or our True Self.

What we see is not how we apply meaning. Meaning (or perception) does not come from eyeballs, rods and cones in our retina, or optic nerves. Meaning is applied by our minds. Change your mind and you will change your meaning. Changed meaning leads to changed perception.

We’ve all been to family reunions or wedding gatherings where there are a lot of camera flashes, as picture after picture is taken. Inevitably there are infants who, after several flash-and-clicks, begin to reach for the “flash bulb bubbles” that are floating before them. The bubbles are real to them. All of us smile and think: “Isn’t that just darling!”

Although we’ve grown, we still try to grab perceived bubbles, as if they’re real. Our bubbles have changed, of course. For example, individuals, who have studied federal and state regulations and have learned how to “milk” the Medicaid or Food Stamp programs, are considered to be Welfare Queens. We lose respect for them. Corporations, whose legal offices have found unintended “holes” in state and federal tax codes and have learned how to “milk” that system, are considered to be sharp business tycoons.

It’s all meaning. It’s all perception.

While living in Saint Augustine, Florida, my wife and I were downtown one afternoon just enjoying walking, window-shopping, and people-watching. We stopped for a pastry and iced tea at a small French bakery/bistro off Charlotte Street. There were quite a few motorcycles outside. As we walked in there was a large table of bikers and biker-babes – all dressed in black leather, of course. I guess I was expecting Marlon Brando and his bunch of “Wild Ones.” Regardless of my predisposition, they were perfectly polite, social adept, and, as I listened, were speaking French!  My confidence in the “rightness” of my anticipated perception was shattered. All I could do was laugh.

If meaning doesn’t come from my retina, where does it come from? My ego. Your ego. Our taught social/cultural ego. Yes, many have applied the same meaning to similar situations because we’ve all been taught in similar ways. That doesn’t mean it’s correct. It just means we were taught similarly. The Course says: “It is surely the mind that judges what the eyes behold. It is the mind that interprets the eyes’ messages and gives them the “meaning.” And this meaning does not exist in the world outside at all.” [M-8.3:3-5]

We do not “see” meaning. We see things – colors, shapes, objects, and movement. The meaning we assign these things comes from our minds. We’ve all had the experience of noticing something and then seeing it all over the place. I had a friend tell me this past week that she had noticed a bumper sticker on my car that says; COEXIST. It uses symbols from all major religions as its letters. She laughed, then went on to tell me how many other cars she has seen with that same bumper sticker. I told her how we had that same experience after we bought a Toyota Prius – an electric/gas hybrid car. Driving around, suddenly, we noticed there were dozens of Priuses all over the place. We simply hadn’t noticed them.

The Course also recognizes this. “Perception selects, and makes the world you see.” [T-21.V.1:1] As Robert Perry wrote, “If I look for acts of kindness, I’ll live in a different world than the person who focuses on acts of callousness, and each of us will live in a different world than the guy who has a shoe fetish. What we focus on makes our world.” [Path of Light, Circle Publishing, 2004, p.98]

This all sounds very sweet and innocuous. The trouble arises when I say to myself: “I focus on acceptance and kindness, and so I’m more right than the person who focuses on selfishness and greed or the person who has a shoe fetish.”

And I love to be right!

Therein lies my problem. More of my life than I want to admit is a simply a replay of the French bakery/bistro. My perception is coming from my mind, which is replaying tapes and lessons from my past. But the past isn’t here anymore. [Last week I discussed how I make my past my present.]

I’m still working on all this, though. Simply bless me and ask for lots of patience – you’ll need it.

Although these messages are mostly for me, thanks for listening. As always – feel free to forward this message to your friends, family, and those accompanying you on your spiritual journey.

Don

#3 May, 2013

Copyright, 2013

My Past Always Becomes My Present

One of the earliest lessons I began to understand in A Course in Miracles (ACIM) was the concept of NOW.

I had come to believe that NOW is always; Now is eternal. I believed that is what Jesus meant when He said, according to the Gospel accounts:

“The constant theme of his message – sometimes in sayings, sometimes in parables, sometimes in works of healing and attending remarks – was to proclaim the ’good news’: The kingdom of God is at hand. Repent. Quit looking ‘out there’ as the source of your problems or the source of your solutions. Look inside you. The Kingdom is already there and has always been there. The Kingdom is now, and now is always eternal. Just as leaven is invisible, yet changes the nature of dough, the Kingdom of God in your heart will change your perception of reality….” [Donald O’Dell, How the Bible became the Bible, Infinity Publishing, 2007, p. 118.]

Because that was my understanding, the essential message of Eckhart Tolle, (The Power of Now) resonated immediately with me. What I learned in AA also reinforced the concept of NOW. Do not take a drink TODAY (not next week or all year long). Take life 24 hours at a time. It’s not an old behavior if I continue doing it.

But, what do I do about my past? I remember things from my past. Events of NOW remind me of the past. Sometimes I try to duplicate past events in order to repeat experiences that have led to very fond memories. But ACIM tells me there is no past. It says: “The one true thing I know about the past is that it is not here.” [WP1-8.2:1]There is only the present. NOW. In my ego-mind of sequential time, there is a past, the present, and the future. But in ACIM-reality there is only NOW.

This troubled me, but I am growing in my understanding.

I have begun to grasp the false illusion my ego continues to bombard me with. “Of course,” it says. “There is a past. Donnie, you can avoid bad results or repeat pleasant ones by looking at your past experiences.”  I am learning to understand that bringing tinted filters of the past, then placing them over my current perception, always colors the present I am focusing on. By remembering the past it has become my ego-mind’s present because I’m thinking about it NOW. Quite often I’m not merely remembering it, but I’m reliving it. All over again I feel the joy, satisfaction, pain, fear, dread, or disappointment. Within the 6-inch universe that exists between my ears my past has become my NOW.

It’s always NOW! I’m either living in the present or I’m reliving the past AS my present.

I remember interviewing a candidate for an analyst’s position in my organization at Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Texas. I asked him to describe the kind of work he did during the 9 years at his current company. He explained how the company operated on an annual cycle – monthly and quarterly financial audits and reports with an annual summary, trends and analysis. I then asked him to explain how each year was different from each other. He didn’t understand my question. I clarified by asking him to explain why he thought he had 9 years of experience rather then one year’s experience he had repeated 8 times. He got angry and terminated the interview.

I certainly didn’t understand – then – how profound my comment really was. I certainly didn’t understand how to apply that comment to myself. I didn’t understand how that concept applied to the reality of my financial difficulties, whether I was earning $13,000 per year, or $30,000, or $80,000. It took another 8 years for me to hit my financial and booze bottom and begin my recovery in AA.

This week I had a tiff with my spouse. I had brought up a tinted filter from my past and it colored the perception I had of the actual event. I reacted (not responded) to my tinted perception and it hurt her. So, I correct my error, try to learn from it, and try to move on – forgiving both myself and the perceptions I have projected on her.

AA taught me to use the Tenth Step – “When we were wrong, promptly admitted it….” ACIM tells me in every encounter with another the Holy Spirit will work to correct my perception of events – to help me see things through Christ eyes. [T-8.III.4:1-5] These can be gracious, open, loving encounters or they can be ugly, petty, hurtful encounters. The Holy Spirit will use all my good/bad/ugly encounters to help me grow spiritually by continuing to begin to perceive things differently.

As painful as it may be, what a blessing!

Although these messages are mostly for me, thanks for listening. As always – feel free to forward this message to your friends, family, and those accompanying you on your spiritual journey.

Don

#2 May, 2013

Copyright, 2013