God Unbound, epilog & ekalog

Installment 25

I.              Epilog/Ekalog,  Rise O Rise, Version 2, 4ja03  

         {such lines are present for outlining purposes}

 

EPILOG and EKALOG

 

I composed this epilog almost 34 years ago. It still summarizes my general feelings about life and my relationship to other humans: I live through my love of mankind and I cannot help but teach. I must comport myself with a certain kind of authority and with the assurance and self confidence that comes from experience and innate quality. But I do not try to flaunt my status as a teacher. I do not stand on any sort of insistent  legalistic authority that might have been given to express my own very human bearing.

 

 

 Reprinted from the ELM BARK, Elmhurst College, of May 2, 1968

 

 

Epilog

 

Rise O Rise

 

 

Reprinted from the ELM BARK

May 2, 1968

 

 

Man sits like a little frog, wondering in his ignorance at the size of his pond whose shores she has never really endeavored to touch, whose deepest depths she has never swum, whose enigmatic veils of mist she has never fully penetrated. And being Man, not a frog, she impatiently draws conclusions about herself and the way in which she grows and becomes in each second as she lives her little life and more fully entangles her being with the world's.

 

He is not really so unique among living things yet his alienation from the living crowd makes him feel all the more lonely, as if he were. He deprecates himself and belittles his natural appurtenances. He subjects to cruel existential criticism his mind, his body, his emotions, in fact, his entire being, in his efforts to compensate for the reflections of pride, arrogance, gross cruelty and utter greed which he sees reflected in his own eyes.

 

We say to ourselves that Man is alone in her search for destiny. We alienate ourselves from the main of Nature, even as we destroy our own mother with our plows and pollution. This place we live in is found so hostile, so angrily determined to eliminate us, yet so innocent of our blame and undeserved of our fury that we seem to grope for a way to escape her dying glance, her death-stare. And so Man, the little frog who doesn't know, either denies the intrinsic goodness of what she sues to demolish (by hurling insults, calling Matter a bastard, and rejecting the existence of God) or she bows down so low before the majesty of reality and speaks philosophically so little of herself that all reason for living, all joy, all love, all trust and comradeship dies in her soul as surely as though she stabs dejectedly into her own heart. 

But it is indeed true that Man is so inextricably bound up in the workings of the world that it is difficult to express, even to a small extent, the magnitude of awesomeness implied by his own existence. Instead of being humbled by the fantastically intricate way his own beautifully complex body merges with and changes with the vast Glory of the Cosmos, he should be delighted, even ecstatic over the fact of his fortunate splendid association with such an inspiringly stupendous display we call all of existence, reality, the universe.

 

The stars hurtle through space at speeds unimaginable, swirling gases spin into galaxies a trillion miles across, dust and gaseous vapors coalesce to form suns and planets, helical structures of molecular-mud and chemical-clay rise up to be Man, atoms bounce wildly in response to secret laws while electrons fly after protons in an endless sequence of macrocosmic chemistry. Yet we are not satisfied.

 

We want more. We reach for a proud aristocracy of being which itself does not exist, or we diminish our own worth and strive for freedom from human ‘frailty’ when the science in us grasps after ‘objectivity’ and ‘pure logic’. Somehow the grandeur of our all-thing is dispersed by the thinker who either elevates the idea of humanity to the heights of deity or plunges mankind's self image into a vast mess of blood and gore that the charnel house of science dumps into our minds.

 

The glass through which we look is soiled. It is defiled by guilt and pain, which we do not wish, fogged and darkened by conceited thought, ostentation and deceit, which we have made. When people finally realize their rightful place in the family of beings, when there is no jealousy or contempt, then will every human being look through the gemlike quality of his own existence at the scintillating quality of reality and then will all people live peacefully together in mutual love and trust.

 

But what are we doing to further this, our own cause? What steps have we taken to descend from our pedestal and rise to self respect? The steps we have taken are steps backward. We burn Nature and choke ourselves in the smoke of her funeral pyre as it belches from the stacks of a million furnaces and roils from thousands of furious bonfires within murderously torched rainforests. We destroy whole temperate coniferous woods so that we effeminate little pipsqueaks might wipe ourselves clean with billions of rolls of soft absorbent pulp, when the filth we remove from our posteriors serves worldwide to muck the very waters we often have to drink.

 

Man, O Man, are you an idiot or a lunatic? Stop this foolishness or you will be neither for you will be stone dead, extinct from your own poisonous wastes! Rise from your nightmare sleep and see the wonder and loveliness in the world around you. For once, try to love the beauty that you are destroying as you toss in that fitful slumber of apathy! It is not too late. Yet.

 

There is still hope that you can put a garden where there is now a cesspool.

 

Or, is it really true that you do not care anymore? Is it true that you never did care at all? What justice there will be if noble minds do not triumph! What poetic justice to warm the heart of this shaggy maned ape to see himself and his siblings pay for their stupid, septic greedy lust!

 

When all the coal is burned and the last tree felled, when the final drop of oil flames up in choking soot and fumes, when the only clean sparkling pool of water left is finally raped with deadly chemical insemination, when atomic wastes join the noxious gases, dusts and mists of horrid death that hangs far beyond the last, clean fresh breath of air, then justice will come.

All life on earth will cease growing and will degenerate and Man with it. Else, only Man will long suffer as his pamper‑medicine keeps his sickly genes from dying - when a howling wind whips the grit and ash of his dead, sere planet and vengefully smites his hollowed cheeks.

 

But I know you do care! Make those who covet lucre and power pay for the beauty they have stolen from you and put in their bank accounts! Make them bring back the scenes of natural wonder every person needs to see each and every day or go urban‑city mad! If you do not see loveliness and grandeur but instead profound ugliness and profaned nature, stop the takers and make them give, for once.

 

And you men and you women, 0 Mankind, have the capacity, the will and the power to lift this babe, Humanity, up. Lift her up to the highest places where she can see the stars shine blackly in a sunlit sky. Greatness of the Universe can devolve upon you, but only if you follow the Path of Good for the true benefit of this our own Son of Man, Child of God. Let Jesus come again every single microsecond of every single day in billions of different places. And lest the dreams of countless, once loved little children die in demeaning bigotry, furious hatred, incessant war and soulless insanity, lest the green hills and cool dark forests smother under your presence,

 

Rise again, O Mankind, rise again and be MAN!

  

EKALOG        (DRAFT)

 

I call this a draft because I know I cannot have the last word. So, I leave open the probability that I will have more to add. Maybe I can’t have the final say, but I can try.

 

 

EKALOG

 

In the Residuum 

 

 

 

Church Senility Defined and Even Refined

 

I tilt at windmills and my Holy Grail is in the quest to outdo La Mancha. To follow this Golden Bliss is my revealed path to the Pauline Prize. It is I, however, who hold up mirrors. The only failing of the Church is its unswerving blasphemous worship of Institution. Even the most dedicated disciple of biblical authenticity, now euphemized as historical informism, falls into the trap of mistaking bare leadership for a vaunted high calling and ‘conservatism’ for plain responsibility.

 

I so furiously detest the usurpation of the word ‘conservative’ by people who are everything but. Perhaps they should use ‘restrictive’ or ‘contractive’ or ‘constrictive’ or all three to refer to themselves and others like them. It is a type of extreme fastidiousness that seems impossible to influence or counterbalance. Such people >are< the very walls that divide Christians. Not stones in a foundation but bricks in a disconnecting battlement, constrictivists feel utterly righteous and claim profound prayerful ordination by God Himself through the agency of a supremely understanding or a grimly stern Jesus who speaks utter kindness to them every day and even every hour.

 

Each aspect of church life is a sacrament to them and cannot be much changed nor regularly morphed and certainly not discarded. Each lush green area must be protected like prized animal territory, excluding undesirables, defended as does the male guard his mate and hunting zone or female shields offspring. They are of the snake's old skin. Yet they think that their way must be THE way, for the sake of the flock! Those intricately delicate glass lambs.

 

But in another milieu this would be deemed schizophrenic delusion. In their domain, schizophrenic hallucination is deemed desirable as socially acceptable ‘vision from God’. I think this is wonderful. It may even be true, probably is, for the schizoid shamanic personality is the primal man or woman of God who has been essential not merely for human survival, but for Homo's unprecedented success.

 

Still, it concerns me that the same men and women who pretend to TEACH actually seem never to truly learn. Oh, they have a policy of accepting instruction, even of avidly desiring it, but only from sources they deem qualified. The surprising wellspring goes unrecognized because it is not only unexpected, it is secretly spurned a priori.

 

Pastors and other types of ministers speak as if with authority to their lambs, as shepherds speak to their flock, not really caring to hear or to be influenced or to be changed by the yammering response. They wish only for their soothing cleric voice to tranquilize and bring docile peace.

Hair is a problem

 

It is so predictable! I just smile when so lectured. Hair is a problem. I have hair. I just smile at lectures on my hair. But I have a very high forehead as does my fourteen year old daughter. She does not have a receding hairline. When she wore bangs her face looked one hundred times better, almost like a Vogue style model. Now, with her hair swept severely back into a ponytail, her forehead is prominent and she looks to be a librarian, post menopause. So, I do not like the look of my own mountainous ‘north face’.

 

Unwilling to reflect the image of my dad every day in the mirror, I have begun to comb my hair forward with the intention of eventually styling it when it finally grows out enough so as not to indicate an egghead. God truly knows I do need to avoid that!

But experienced and well accomplished arbiters of taste who should know better still object. Even my pastor calls my ongoing effort to change styles narcissistic. Baloney. And remember what I said about the ability to recognize it when it is seen or heard. This is more important than being able to identify true prophesy.

 

The point is that there is absolutely nothing that churchmen feel unqualified to loose or bind. The Church is monumentally prideful in its insistence, that is, it utterly lacks humility when judging behavior. And judge it does, for there is no area of human life or experience that the Church leaves alone and for which it delegates sole authority and responsibility to the brainless lamb.

 

Yet the Church selfishly claims such responsibility for itself, ignorant of facts and of wisdom that the delegation of responsibility is what God is all about. Father is the Delegator. Son is the One to whom Responsibility is Delegated, we are Christ's brothers. Spirit is Love of Responsibility: Duty in Humility.

 

When I should see a truly humble church, pigs, elephants and whales shall surely fly.

 

 

*******

 

Dear Revered Ministers:

 

I am sorry. You just refuse to understand and to see what you are really doing. You are personally why I do not attend church regularly, as I feel much the same as does my benignly skeptical spiritually closest friend. You ARE why most people in the U.S. avoid the institutional church >and always will<. Almost all of us claim to believe in God, however, and that is good. Sure, there are one hundred forty million nominal registered Christians in this country. How many actually attend very regularly? Do these really consider themselves some kind of Johannine Elect?

Worldwide there are 2 billion nominal Christians, but there are 3 billion who will not even look at us, despite our having ostentatiously postured for them constantly over the span of over 20 centuries. That should have been enough time. Majority rules - and our market share is shrinking.
 

Now, can you still "take it"?

   

p.s.      Oops! Are there angel pigs, satanic elephants and spirit whales?                                                  

cc   Steve Wing, RIP