Gospel, Chapter Twelve: The Right Way
In a comment recently, Misti asked, “How does one live life?” Without pretending that one person can answer that question for another person, it’s still a good question. So this unplanned post is an attempt to say something in response to Misti’s question that may at least be relevant.
The contents of the two pieces that follow have similarities, but also differences. They help illustrate something about the general answer to the question of how to live as I’ve experienced it. They also show how the answer to this question changes – without, I think, changing direction – according to our stage of life and life circumstances.
Start of the Season
for Laura
I love the way this gangly grade-school girl
Sun-lit, freckle-spangled,
Surprises me with real speed sprinting for first base
Growing into her long legs.
I love the way she makes the God in me
Spread slowly into a long grin.
Broad as the greening lawn, my love rounds third for home
Growing into its own world.
Around twenty years later…
Tenacity Prayer: The Wisdom to Make a Difference
Let me understand that no special arrangements have been made for me by the circumstances of reality to nurture my potential into being, and that I will have to make do with the general arrangements.
Let me acknowledge that in this struggling and imperfect world, I may falter badly or even fail in attempting my love’s best work.
Let me come to fully know our faith that, win or lose, the Whole that holds us all will ultimately be all right.
In light of these understandings, give me this courage: the willingness to do all I can while I can to make what difference I am able to.
posted by Darius @ 6:57 PM
43 Comments:
This shows the spirtual growth in the young man. We gotta keep trying...thats the best we can do.
Thanks Darius
Morality and the "right way"...
There is no possible "right way" to live. All morality is merely subjective, as is the value of any great deed.
Doing ones best is also subjective. Working towards a common good is meritless, how can anything common contain value?
Our ways will differ their is no right way, just live as you see fit, you are the only person to whom you will ever have to answer.
To make this fully philosophical here is a small piece on moral relativism...
Herodotus: If anyone, no matter who, were given the oppurtunity of choosing amongst all the nations in
the world the set of beliefs which he thought best, he would invariably, after careful consideration of their relative merits, choose that of his own country.
Hi Darius,
Let me understand that no special arrangements have been made for me by the circumstances of reality to nurture my potential into being, and that I will have to make do with the general arrangements.
... it's noble but I still hate the idea ... I want some special arrangements!
In light of these understandings, give me this courage: the willingness to do all I can while I can to make what difference I am able to.
... I remember a movie about Jesus in which the script has him say ... "those who want to will find in me the strength to love until the end." I try to do that, but when things are bad, I don't want to stick around and make a difference for the better, I want to leave.
I think your attitude is best, but I don't know how to feel that way.
Darius, this is a prayer filled with wisdom: I like it.
In light of these understandings, give me this courage: the willingness to do all I can while I can to make what difference I am able to.
I'm feeling the importance to do what I can more than ever now, especially after seeing "An Inconvenient Truth" (which again, I implore you all to see). My grandmother recently asked me, "do you really think just one person can make a difference? Are there enough people in this world who want to change that it will make a difference before it's too late?" I told her I certainly hope so, but I'm trying my best. You can't dwell on others, you just need to do what you know in your heart is the right thing to do, no matter what others think.
KATHY: And as far as the “keep trying” goes, for me faith has been necessary for that. In later posts I’m going to try to suggest what I mean by a faith that has nothing to do with any belief system, but don’t think I can do much better than suggest in a blog format.
AIDAN: I agree that there’s no “right way” to live in a prescriptive sense - as I stated briefly in introducing the two pieces. But I think there’s a right way in the sense of a direction to take that holds promise for us as individuals and as a species.
I’d agree that morality is subjective in the sense that it comes from experiences and reflections that go on in the human mind. It’s not subjective in the sense that it crosses cultures. While the particulars of social customs and mores often differ, things like honesty, mutual support, dependability, refraining from violence against others in day to day life, etc, are highly cross-cultural. One way of conceiving this phenomenon is that morality reflects our acknowledgment and respect for the real needs of other human beings. Immorality takes only the needs of self seriously.
Moreover, there’s a lot of suggestive evidence that unbridled greed won’t work for the long term survival of our species on this planet; and that finding and embracing common grounds for moral action may literally be a matter of life and death. That suggests to me that moral feeling, thought, and action involves reality-contact in a major way.
CRYSTAL: I still have some trouble with the idea too – especially the parts where other people could make arrangements that would help, but don’t. “Human evil” bothers me more than “natural evil.” But weeping and wailing and gnashing my teeth sure doesn’t help. I still sometimes have to take a deep breath and remind myself of that…
My speculation is that you do know how to feel that way – a willingness to act on love, even when things are bad - but haven’t learned that you know this. Probably sounds crazy. But I sure didn’t always know this about myself until being dealt something more than I would have known I could survive with integrity.
HAYDEN, thank you -
MARISSA: Yes, I think doing our best is the best hope for our species; and also, as individuals, gives us a peace and integrity that's impossible to remove or threaten. I don't really know how to feel bad about having done my best, even if it doesn't work out for reasons beyond my control.
Both are wonderful. Thanks Darius.
the willingness to do all I can while I can to make what difference I am able to
Beautiful. This succinctly sums up what life is all about for me. You are an inspiration to me, Darius. I am so glad I found your blog (or did you find mine? In any case, I'm glad it happened, however it did!).
thank you Darius.
your post salves my pain. you care enough to post, and that is kindness and love. i am losing faith, in humanity (some), in god. never dared to lose faith in god, and then i start to wonder. and that is why i do not like to read too much here, or anywhere else which goes too close to home, to raw nerve. i will try to remember this post, more so for what it stands for me. i stopped using some parts of my brain, so that it does not hurt too much to live. in turn, i lost some ability for comprehending lengthy words.
Darius, I thought about what you wrote all last night ... still thinking ... thanks :-)
Hi. 'Start of the Season' is lovely, Darius x
DON I: Glad you liked those –
STACEY: Me too. I think I saw you on Barbara’s blog the first time.
MISTIPURPLE: And thank you for your big question.
Some people seem to never lose faith. A lot of others seem to have to go through a “dark night of the soul” of one kind or another. Some people need help with that; others are better off basically handling it alone. Either way, there’s light at the end of the tunnel.
My confidence in people is less than it once was. I try to remind myself that we live in strange times, that we’re brand new as a species, and if anything I’m in even a worse position, in my little lifetime, to pass judgment on the species than I am passing it on individuals. Who knows whether we’ll wake up in time?
Faith, for me, isn’t directed toward human beings – though sometimes it can be refracted through them – but only toward God (and, for me, not “Og,” although not sure if you’d started reading this blog that early…).
CRYSTAL: You mean the “ice cream parable?” I liked that myself, maybe I should try and turn it into a post!
I admire your combination of being able to articulate your own views well and still seriously “hear” the views of others.
BENJAMIN: Thanks Benjamin. One of those moments that, for some reason, just stick with you. That afternoon with Laura and her friend would have been something I'd have always remembered even if I hadn't written about it.
Well, Darius, this is simply intuitive and wise and all-worldly, religious context or not.
I value its tone and the tomes and the sensitivity in which it was presented, very universally.
It's a pleasure to be able to visit and to feel so free to agree or disagree or to offer something else.
Thanks for the enlightenment.
How does one live life?
Why... you do, of course! Whatever you are doing right this moment (erm, reading my comment) - that is living.
well, i went back and re-read some earlier posts and found:
"..Worshipping Og is like a man who carved a figurine of himself, perfecting his own face and form, and then lost it crossing a field. Later another man inherited the field, found the carving, and admired it. He called out to his family and they fell huddling to the ground, adoring the small figure until its image filled their sight. Their worship darkened and replaced their awe in the face of the blue sky, the green earth, the round of the stars, and the spirit moving over the waters.
Seek amazement and not worship. The being of the only One is awesome, and in that awe, there is knowledge of God. Worshipping Og is like a child playing with a toy and imagining that it knows the things known by those who have put away childish things. Cf. I Cors 13:11.."
perhaps you meant that?
i have not lost total faith, just losing some, which is bad enough. sometimes it feels like a step away. but i should pronounce that i think i should make it still. *wink* and, thanks again.
Thank you for this piece of utter
and true beauty! I was so very
touched.
WITHIN, WITHOUT: I'm glad that this post and the blog in general come across that way to you - respectively, as broadly applicable, and inviting divergent points of view. I appreciate the feedback.
ANONYMOUS JULIE: But that could just mean biological existence and a functioning brain. So I think maybe Mistipurple meant more like "What makes life worth doing?"
MISTIPURPLE: Right. What I was getting at in those posts was first that I don't see evidence for the existence of "Og" - an "Other-God," or "Objectfied God," a Creator existing outside and apart from being itself. Rather than belief in such a Entity, religion, for me, has meant increasing awareness of our relationship to the One in whom we live and move and have our being - paraphrasing St. Paul. In other words, awareness of the fact and potentials offered by our own direct experience of our participation in the process of being or existence itself. It's that complete Context, including everything we know of life but going who knows how much beyond, that I call God. So for me, God is reality itself, and not a Someone that made reality whose existence can't be known or demonstrated.
I would guess you'll make it through where you're at now too. Just the fact that you take these things seriously is probably a good sign. I think "Right Effort" is part of Buddhism's Eightfold Path, and will or desire for God are often spoken of in Christian mysticism.
For myself, I felt very much out of touch with my spiritual life in my teens and early twenties. In retrospect I saw that this struggle was itself part of the path I was taking...
SAMURU999 - I'm glad! Thanks for stopping by.
Hey, that was an interesting post you left on my blog. I liked hearing about that (Not that your uncle died, but that you were able to be jovial and lighthearted in thanksgiving for the end of his suffering). Waiter/ress stories always are interesting to me, and I think I partly chose Sociology as my major in order to help me understand my job as a waitress better. That, and it seemed to go hand in hand with my hopeful graduate coursework. Anyway, have a good day.
Darius, this is a lovely way to express faith in life itself, in its inherent goodness and in living responsibly and hopefully always striving to make the best of it.
Interesting blog.
Morality does not cross borders, within this day and age with mass comunication (such as good old blogger) our borders have Just Become more blurred. EVen going back as few as 300 years ago, what one culture would see as perfection others would see as abhorent.
There can be no Objective morality, if there is god (or what ever provides our internal morality) merely does not speak to savages. We are shown how we should live, we are familiar with these ideas which makes them acceptable.
Racism works the same way. Show someone a million facts that (for example) black people are not lazy. But say to someone good they are all the same and our thoughts drift not to the lazy white kid in Seven 11, but the rude black man who refused to serve us while reading the paper.
****Please note I am not a racist this is merely for illustrative purposes*****
As for immorality being mere selfish manifestation. "Immorality takes only the needs of self seriously."
This i belive is somewhat short sighted, immorality is generality the less "refined" of our nature, our lust, our basic and primitive instincts, all of which have their merits. Survival of the species is based on lust if you are not attractive thats it your genes die out because no one will sleep with you. Greed is detrimetal, yes, but tarnishing all immorality as selfish is missing the mark somewhat.
By the way keep up the good work, i truly look forward to coming home after work and reading your thoughts!!
Aidan
'In light of these understandings, give me this courage: the willingness to do all I can while I can to make what difference I am able to'
thats my prayer everyday! Darius, this is good. thks so much 4 this reminder.
Hello. Within Without's comment that this site 'is simply intuitive and wise and all-worldly, religious context or not,' is a lovely review and I entirely agree.
Aidan has something to say and says it with modesty. Does immorality take only the needs of Self seriously? Perhaps the moral codes we are familiar with also tend to put the needs of Self first? Some of us seem to have arrived at a place where we, as individuals, can freely rethink our moral codes without recourse to Og.
Oh, why am I getting into all this again? Things to do... Lots of love x
i recall what you commented to my saying that god does not give one more than he can handle, in which you said that a neighbor jumped from the third floor or something to that effect.
this brought back what i do not want to face. what if, god loves some, more than others? that is somewhere i didn't want to visit for a long time, but it keeps lurking out in times of disappointment. i know all the theoretical answers. still.
really beautiful poem! thanks for posting it.
" ... courage: the willingness to do all I can while I can to make what difference I am able to."
Amen to that.
that is why mistipurple loves to be whimsical and not be serious. lol.
thanks Darius, for the time in answering my comment! have a good day, i'll be back.
Start of the Season brought me back to the bleachers when my daughter would hit grand slams at will. I knew that all of the other parents were looking at me but I would concentrate on her huge smile as she came home. I was proud yes but I was happy for her. She did that on her own. I helped her but I felt blessed just watching her.
Tenacity Prayer
I seem to be losing more of my patience with people hanging on to the consequences of belief in ideas aka FAITH which to me is like trusting a Lifejacket off of the deck of the Titanic.
Hoping for things unseen and yet to come. Its one thing to toss about these notions but meanwhile back at the ranch, this little planet is getting ready to make another correction to the latest in a long line of species that ascended to the head of the pack. US.
You are a much kinder soul and I admire your temperence and the calming effect of your words.
I can feel myself Darth Vadering into the dark side and pushing the FAST FORWARD button..c'mon people...better watch some Arrested Developement pronto!
TRISH: I could see that – sociology to help understand waitressing better! I would think it’s a job that reveals quite a bit about how people interact.
SUSIEQ: Thanks Susie, good summary.
MARV, thanks for dropping in.
AIDAN: Regarding moral relativism: I’m no anthropologist, sociologist, or historian and can’t back up my impressions with statistics, but these are my impressions:
Societies do end up with many customs and practices that differ in many ways. And occasionally there’s even something that appears to be at odds with the morality of one’s own culture – say... cannibalism. Even here, however, it is by no means always clear that the morality differs so much as the practice. I just happened to catch something recently on ritual cannibalism in Papua New Guinea that went on until recent decades. It sounds like people were basically eating their deceased relatives out of respect for them!
While customs often vary, from what I’ve seen, lying, stealing, cheating and violence against others, say, are widely regarded as wrong around the world. Of course such things are done - around the world - every day. But wrongdoers typically try to cover up their misdeeds because they know others will view their behavior as wrong.
On the other hand, helpfulness, respectfulness, fairness, trustworthiness, etc., are widely regarded as right. I happened to have worked with people from literally around the world – Cambodian, Muslims, Thais, Laotians, Bolivians, El Salvadorans, Chinese, Aretrians if I spelled that right (next to Nigeria) etc. If there were any substantial differences in morality between these people and Americans, I couldn’t see them. To be perfectly honest, the thing that struck me most is that kids from these countries have the same values we try to impart to our kids, but as a group, they lived up to them better. Typically I found foreign children more respectful and displaying fewer behavior problems than American kids.
Yes, it’s true that technology and increased contacts around the world could only help promote cross-cultural similarities. But I think it goes deeper. Religious traditions around the world have very different belief systems, but show a great deal of similarity in how they say we are to conduct ourselves. A good Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Muslim, Jew, Taoist – humanist! – would each be treating others in basically the same way, despite their different customs and beliefs.
So I think it’s more than “familiarity” with moral concepts that makes them widely shared. Being loved, cared for, respected – these thing feel good deeply, immediately, and they are helpful to us. On the other hand, being kicked around, literally or figuratively, feels bad, and it tears us down. It doesn’t take a lot of learning or acculturation to find that kind of thing “abhorrent.”
To me it appears that acculturation comes into play far more with religious beliefs than with religious experience or morality. For example, it’s one thing to grow up hearing about the manger and the shepherds every Christmas, and the resurrection on Easter Sunday. But if you’re from, say, rural China, and don’t hear a thing about this until maybe you’re 25, I’m sure that Christian beliefs must be highly counterintuitive for lacking that sense of plausibility that comes from growing up with them.
Yes, I think racism is learned too. I find nothing “natural” about hating others because their skin is a different color. I mean, you’d have to have really really strong color preferences. Besides, throughout modern history you would have seen little white kids ditching their brown and black Crayolas and using the wrong colors for trees. At the same time, little black and brown kids would have ditched their white and pink crayons and detested pink lemonade. I’m being goofy, but I’m also serious.
Sounds like you’d tend to equate immorality with sexuality as much as selfishness. To me, sex is morally neutral. I’ve seen it as both an expression of intimacy - an integral part of loving relationships; and also manifested in ways that are – well, selfish. Sometimes extremely so. So I do see selfishness – putting the needs and desires and even whims of self ahead of even the most real and basic needs of others – as the basis of immorality.
You suggest that the survival of the species has depended on sexual attractiveness. I don’t know where you live, but I jus look around me... Seriously, while things like sexiness (probably translated more as “a healthy appearance” than looking like Brittany Spears),competitiveness, and other things that we automatically connect with “life in the jungle” due to Tarzan movies – ok, so I’m not in a serious mood… But my serious point here is that while these sorts of “rugged individualist” traits would have been needed for our survival, so would our pro social traits. People who didn’t know how to cooperate and get along within the group, and work as part of the group, would have been a major liability in the jungle, especially since we lacked the big fangs and claws. So the prosocial stuff was all selected for too. You even see it as a strategy that nature took with other species – for example, the pack-behavior of wolves.
Thanks, seriously, for your thought-provoking comments!
CHRISTABELLE: Glad that works for you -
GANGADHAR: I will, thank you –
BENJAMIN: Thanks, and I enjoy Aidan’s commentary too. I think my replies to his comments above address the ideas of self and morality you refer to, let me know if not –
MISTIPURPLE: To me, the idea of God loving some more than others is an Og-related and not a God-related problem. In other words, if you believe in the existence of an all powerful Other-God who controls everything and then something bad happens to you, then on top of whatever hardship you now have to deal with, you’re also going to feel unhappy about how Og has started treating you - in a pretty unloving way. As you say, there are “answers” that don’t work well – for example, Og is so “mysterious” that when He behaves in a manner that we’d call criminal if you or I did it, it’s “really” an expression of divine love that we just don't understand. To which I’d frankly say: Give me a break!
But if instead of thinking there’s basically a Guy in the sky, there’s just Sky – reality, being-itself – then we become genuine participants instead of spectators. So on the one hand, we can believe in the existence of a Creator that once upon a time said, Presto! Let there be light!, etc., and still remains "behind the scenes" controlling the events of our lives. On the other hand we can view - and even experience -God as the Only process that is: a creation that is still unfolding of its own accord today. And there is no Og to let us down. And we view moral life in terms of how our words and actions help or hinder the wider business of our lives together on this planet instead of in terms of scoring points with Og so that we personally get to enter heaven and avoid hell.
Please don’t take this as anything like a complete or even very coherent account of what faith is for me. You raise questions larger than a comment or even a blog can really handle. But hopefully some of the future posts will give a somewhat better idea…
KEVIN - Happy you liked it.
RENEE, thank you -
MISTIPURPLE: You didn’t sound whimsical, but I’ve had that happen too – hard to work tone of voice/facial expression into type!
HOMOESCAPEONS: It’s true that I’m kind of kind, but not kind enough to use a word like “faith” without really meaning it. My “spiritual journey” in a nutshell:
Unselfconscious belief in God (“Og”) as a kid.
Youthful agnosticism gradually deepening into, “I can’t believe any of this even though I want to,” accompanied by suicidal ideation and the recurring thought: Life really sucks. A love of depressing pop music such as “Dust In The Wind,” which pretty well summed up my attitude.
WHAM! A surprise “altered state of consciousness.” An experience totally incompatible with the negative outlook I’d been building for years. I had no idea what this was – had never studied religion, knew nothing about meditation, what they did in monasteries… All I knew was that whatever I had experienced was, for me, non-classifiable. It wasn’t a dream, it wasn’t a “vision” or hallucination of any kind (there wasn’t even a visual component). It just wasn’t any state of mind I’d ever had before.
So I spent the next fourteen years gradually figuring it out and realizing its implications – well, about as much as I’m able to. It was definitely bigger than the sense I’ve managed to make of it.
I tend to think critically – most of all about my own thoughts, feelings, and experiences. Faith, which was one implication of my pivotal experience, for me has nothing to do with believing anything in an absence of evidence. But it had everything to do with altering my outlook and giving me the energy and purpose to live probably about as constructively as possible under what would turn out to be extremely adverse personal circumstances.
that above, pretty sums up my journey too, with coincidences that God must have a hand in. i guess i should leave the question of how much He loves some, more than others, alone. perhaps, in death, which i always say, i will know the answers. but by then, it might be too late, so i seek the meek way, and try not to be too wayward. God fearing perhaps.
Darius,I love the last phrases...
so inspiring...
MISTIPURPLE: Being loved, and finding out that one is loveable, has to be of tremendous importance. For one thing, I don’t think we can go far toward realizing our own potential to love others without that foundation.
Many people do speak about feeling loved by God. For myself, loving others and loving God (not Og) have been central spiritual experiences; but being loved, and issues around that and how they related to being able to love myself, for me involved not God, but other people. The closest I’ve felt to being loved by God is the knowledge that I am finally at peace with What Is. But “peace,” and a sense of unity with wider reality, describe my feeling for what I receive from my relationship with existence, or being-itself, or the One, more accurately than saying that I feel "loved” by God.
My best guess is that the concept of fairness – for example, God (or Og) as seeming to love some people better than others because some people experience less hardship than others – is off the mark. I think our lives are exactly as fair as human beings make them. In other words, fairness, I think, is a human concept – and a great one for helping us participate effectively in the creative labor that God began for us on this planet and which, at this time and place, has increasingly fallen into our own hands to carry on with.
PASTOR DOUG HOAG: I’ve found that many things in the religious domain are hard to discuss without a lot of back-and-forth – people can mean such different things by the same word or concept. I have the feeling “perfection” would be one of those. There are many aspects of life that would, to say the least, be hard to describe as perfect. Yet to say that life or the world itself is perfect in some sense is undoubtedly trying to point toward something else…
GHEE: Thanks, and glad you've stopped by -
thank you once again. i sometimes wonder what is your calling in life. you can't be a priest eh?
Very spiritually gratifying.
MISTI: My life's been complicated. I should have had a religious vocation; did my best to follow that; and it appears it can't happen due to factors outside my control. (Really major factors that I've done everything possible to overcome - not a matter of making excuses or rationalizations.) Thank you for asking.
FRIDA: Glad something there resonated with you, thanks for stopping by -
MADDY: Thanks!
I think it's not the way that's right .. it's the intention :)
Tenacity, holding on...an important thing to pray for. Thank you.
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NABEEL: Sounds right to me, if you're speaking of right/wrong behavior. One of the most basic distinctions we teach young children is not to get mad if someone broke their toy "by accident..."
PATRY FRANCIS: Thank you for coming by -
Nice put. I must read more
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