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
