Our Shadowy World They say reality is an illusion. For instance, maybe we’re dreaming. In the Zhuangzi, an ancient Taoist text, we find Zhuang Zhou’s famous butterfly dream. In it, the sage experienced himself as a happy butterfly. When he woke, he felt confused. Was he a butterfly now dreaming he was a man, or a man dreaming he’d been a butterfly? He couldn’t tell, for we can’t always trust our senses. [1] During the early twentieth century, the Baha’i teacher, Abdu’l-Baha, taught this same thing, that the world is an illusion. Reality exists only in God’s realm. What we see here “is only its shadow stretching out.” [2] Plato,…
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Being Prepared and Universalism
It’s All About Love As a Universalist, I read scriptures and myths to learn about being human. In the case of the Bible, I also learn something about our relationship with the holy, the mysterious, the I Am. Though a good story raises more questions than it answers, in scripture, I can discover insights that encourage my transformation into a better self. For me, the Bible is about love. God is love. Eternal love made life possible, and everything that exists reflects that love. We can pervert love into indifference and animosity, but God—or whatever we choose to call the essence of life—cannot. Thus, God’s wrath, vengeance, and chastisement must…
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Independence and Interdependence
Independence In 1776, on the 4th of July, the founding fathers of the United States signed the Declaration of Independence. No longer would they tolerate British rule. The land they had taken for themselves and their families would belong to them alone, not to a foreign power. Today, with hot dogs and fireworks, we celebrate that declaration of freedom. It’s ironic. There these men were, up in arms about taxation, about not having a say in laws that affected them, about \trade restrictions that hobbled them, yet they never considered the indigenous people who’d maintained this land for 10,000 years, nor did they think of the slaves that many of…
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Creating Ourselves
Losing the Self In my work as a chaplain, I have more than once borne witness to the agony of young adults losing their minds to psychosis. At times, they are convinced nothing is wrong, that the voices, the confused thoughts, the threatening visions are more real than the professionals who would deny their truth. This does not mean these young people are content. Living with someone else’s words in your head can be disconcerting, and also terrifying. If you do realize that the person you call “myself” is slipping away, it can be even more terrifying. How heartbreaking to become your own stranger. One moment, we are trusting in…
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On Being Human
Being Human as Being Set Apart What does it mean to be human? Although a few individuals are born with limitations or predilections or capacities different from the bell curve’s norm, people throughout the world share certain traits. We all have a consciousness that recognizes our selfhood, bodies that experience pain and pleasure, and minds with the capacity to notice, to interpret, and to draw conclusions. Most of us long for intimate connection and supportive community. At times, our emotions get the better of us, especially when our instinct to survive is threatened, and all of us can feel threatened by the most benign thing if it touches on our…
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Seeing But Not Perceiving
Never Perceiving In the kingdom of God, the sick receive healing, the poor have enough to eat, and the weak are powerful. Yet no matter how much Jesus preaches about this kingdom, the disciples don’t get it. They want to know if they’ll sit at his right hand in heaven. They want glory and power. But Jesus called them to serve. In the Gospel of Mark, he must repeatedly admonish them to stop thinking about their own desires, stop seeking to be served, and strive instead to become better servants. As Geert Van Oyen points out in his analysis of the gospel, the acolytes want to fulfill “their own interests”…
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Celebrating Independence
The American Mythos Here in the United States, we value independence. The mythology that we are self-sufficient, free-thinking, rugged individualists has been used to sell trucks, guns, beer, and insurrection. We fought a war against England to guarantee our right to govern ourselves, and no one’s going to take that right from us. “Live free or die,” as they say in New Hampshire. [This 1809 quote from General John Stark became the New Hampshire state motto in 1945.] It’s that kind of sentiment that we celebrate on the Fourth of July. This is not all bad. Values are important, and we in this country do have shared values. We stand…
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The Humble Heart
Rewards for the Humble It’s a common theme in folklore, the youngest brother or sister who makes good after the older ones fail, or the reviled stepsister who earns riches through her compassion, industriousness, and obedience, while her lazy and disrespectful sibling earns beatings or tarring or death. In “Mother Holle,” a Brother’s Grimm tale, the ill-treated girl is sent by her stepmother to fetch a spindle she dropped down the well, so she jumps in. She lands, though, not in the water, but on a grassy knoll. Seeing a meadow of flowers, she walks toward it. On the way, she passes by a baker’s oven. The bread inside calls…
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Protecting the Noncompliant
A Longing for Respect On my morning walks, I often pass by a van parked in our neighborhood. Occasionally, the man who lives in it is awake, and we chat. He’s survived outside for years, having lost his home when he lost his last job. Because he gets food stamps, he eats okay, but his phone hardly ever functions, and he scrounges money to buy gasoline. Who knows where he gets the cash to buy the meth he depends on “to keep warm”? The other day, I found him pacing beside his vehicle, looking disgusted. He told me that someone had snuck into his van while he slept and stolen…
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Racism, Sin, and Love
Original Sin? Slavery has been called America’s “original sin.” Barrett Holmes Pitner used the phrase in his article, “US Must Confront Its Original Sin and Move Forward,” published by the BBC. The University of California, Davis, offers a class called “Slavery: America’s Original Sin,” and the same words make up the title of a book by Jim Willis, America’s Original Sin. Barak Obama used the term in his Race Speech in March 2008, and Paul Krugman used it in a 2020 opinion column. These are just a few examples. According to John Patrick Leary, the phrase is an unfortunate one. He explains that we can’t atone for an original sin.…