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Father’s Day – and Fathers’ Day

Father’s Day – and Fathers’ Day

Happy Father’s Day!

Empathies and condolences to those whose dads have died or disappeared, and to those have, or had, or are, or must deal with “difficult” fathers.

If Father’s Day brings you pain, this post is for you. If it’s Father’s Day, and there’s no father, or it’s Father’s Day, but there just isn’t a card you could possibly give your father, or it’s Father’s Day, but you’re struggling to play double as a single mom, or it’s Father’s Day but… whatever emotional dynamics make this day non-celebratory for you, there are other things you can do!

For fathers as for mothers, as for humans – all of can use a very ancient method to find a path to celebration.

Try letting go of the literal. CELEBRATE the fatherly qualities that you love as they are expressed through the people you know. There are great dads and great men all around you. There are! If you don’t see any, you need to get out more!

Focus on the qualities that you really, truly, most authentically admire and find worthy when you see them. These are habits and attitudes and actions and values and all sorts of other things that you would sincerely wish to see in play more often (in your world and in the worlds of others).

Imitate those things! Start doing those things or appreciating these things when you see them! Enjoy them! Mimic them! Repeat them! Celebrate them!

This method survives in the religious paths that aim to follow/imitate the person or journey of the Christ, and even in its watered-down version, the WWJD (What Would Jesus Do?) camp. But perhaps religion is part of why you’re not enjoying Father’s Day? Or perhaps the text-based, variously-interpreted Jesus doesn’t actually seem all that great either sometimes, especially through the lens of some of the uses to which it’s been put?

Some people think that you have to project a father into the sky, but that’s only a metaphor for the divinity – one among others, even in the most patriarchic traditions. It’s a way for us to connect with the idea of God by imagining that our own idea of a father is made perfect and loving and all-knowing, to compensate, to make us feel protected and loved. It’s a great idea, and a great feeling, but the divine can also be imagined as a mother, an animal, an idea. The divine isn’t limited. Only our imagination is limited. While I love to imagine the most wonderful of fathers is watching over me and guiding me and loving me, I don’t tend to get very literal about it and then turn around and worship him. Why? Because when I do that, I also can’t help but remember some of the less wonderful stuff, the father of pride and violence and manipulations, the father of unreasonable and conflicting demands – and commands, the father that can sometimes lack kindness or fairness. And these things then get tied up into the divine as well – as we see from our mythologies, and from our social histories.

What’s beautiful here to me is that whether you view this as a spiritual method or a practical method doesn’t really matter. If we all have a spark of the divine – then it’s already within us, and we will be attuned – if we pay attention. And if we don’t have a spark of the divine, we still have a character that continues to develop via questionings and habits and experiences, and we will notice things – if we pay attention.

No-one else is you! You will not admire everything about anyone, nor should you!

Instead, find the something here, and there…

People talk about role models, but I don’t think it’s productive or realistic to imitate or “worship” a person in their entirety – that’s just idolatry or something like that. I’m also not talking about any sort of colonial or predatory form of assimilation like a slash-and-burn cyborg here, and it doesn’t work when it’s in the mode of “should-ing” all over yourself because you feel that you don’t “measure up” in some way either.

It’s much more modest than that.

Just start to incorporate (incarnate?) what you really can’t help but see as a better thing, a sweet thing, a loving thing, a beautiful thing, a true thing, and helpful thing, a wise thing.

The trick here is to really learn to notice and to feel when you just truly admire or enjoy something – however small or fleeting it might be – about another person. You can’t really plan it, or calculate how it’s going to happen, but when you pay attention, you’ll start seeing. And when you start seeing, after a while you can’t believe that you didn’t see those things before.

Learn how to sense what’s real to you, and to follow your own heart and soul, by paying attention, through recognition, and by creative reconstruction, alignment, and re-alliance.

It’s too easy to stay in the realm of ideas on this, through some vision or articulation of a universal ideal. Instead, try really to focus in and allow the force of the galvanic singularities to affect you. Notice aspects and facets of the real people in your life, their ways of being and their actions, and their stories, and the little things that make them who they are. Of these, try picking up just one detail, the very best thing you know and love about that person, the thing you’d mention at their funeral if you had to speak about who they really were.

When you invite these little gems to activate within you, guess what happens? The very thing that you mimic, and re-present, and try to assimilate – transforms! It becomes a unique thing to you, because it can never repeat in exactly the same way when it’s filtered through the YOUness. Maybe there is no “real thing” but instead a chain of variations – sameness within difference, difference within sameness. I don’t know. I wish I did.

But this I can say with some confidence: However loosely bundled your heaps of self might be, it’s always great to pull in stuff that you know (that you intuit, that you feel, that you sense) is just better, truer, and/or more beautiful! Need some inspiration for starters? Try Atticus Finch!

On Father’s Day, I hope that YOU celebrate all those wonderful fatherly sparkles that are blooming here and there, through everyone, all over.

Happy Father’s Day, you dear, wonderful fathers!
Happy Father’s Day, you who father others in spirit!
Happy Father’s Day, you who inspire better ways to be a father!
Happy Father’s Day, you children who invoke love in the hearts of fathers!
Happy Father’s Day, you mothers loving fathers!
Happy Father’s Day, you who are fathers to the next generation, and the next!
Happy Father’s Day – everyone!

Reorienting into Your Own Path: Belief Self-Torment

Reorienting into Your Own Path: Belief Self-Torment

For a number of reasons, I haven’t posted anything about Jehovah’s Witnesses for a while. There have been some horrible events in the news, and all sorts of doctrinal and organizational changes, but I find myself more interested these days in some of the larger questions. I’ve been trying to write something about that, but nothing I wrote was satisfactory to me. It turns out that I needed a real question for my thoughts on this to spill out. In trying to help ease someone else’s suffering, the words ring true again. Thank you for being the messenger for this lesson! I preserve the questioner’s privacy, but you know who you are. Big hugs.

I seem to be struggling with my relationship with God. I find myself so confused about what to believe. I used to be absolutely convinced that the Bible was Truth. Is this normal for a person in my situation. Any input that you might have would be appreciated.

It is totally normal for you to feel as you do. I do have some thoughts on this in terms of biblical scholarship and the history of the religions of the book(s), but that’s not what will help you most right now because you need first to find your bearings, your balance, and the (for lack of a better phrase) direction of your attunement to God.

Start with what you solidly know and experience for yourself. Be observant and pay attention and even “hold fast to what is fine.” That place where your mind and spirit and soul all connect in gratitude and admiration is where you start. Think of the qualities of the spirit – where do you see caring and forgiveness and love and thoughtfulness and creativity and all those things that you can just feel are *good* things? Let yourself be drawn into that world. Learn from and enjoy the presence of that “energy” in any moment where it happens. Even just noticing it changes you.

Then – and I resisted this one for a long time – think about service. Not big, cosmic service – just little bits of service. Be a little kinder, think of someone else’s feelings, do something nice for someone else, be a listening ear to a friend. Anything that puts your own needs to the side – even for a moment – changes you.

Think of things that you *truly* admire about people you know or have known or have read about or seen. Everyone is complicated, a mix of darkness and light, so you have to think of specific things, how someone made a good decision, how someone manifested an incredible skill, how someone calmed a situation. Those are things that speak to your inner self, to your inner directionality, and they are worth hearing.

For a while, move away from the questions of belief in this or that. That question will always be there for you, but that doesn’t mean you have to address it and be tormented by it right now. Come back to it when you are in a place of spiritual groundedness.

Your body can help you too, and in ways that you might not expect. Sit quietly and relax, listen to yourself breathe. When you are upset, take a few breaths and consciously let it go. Imagine blowing the seeds of an old dandelion into the wind. Self-torment seems to be part of the deal – but you can choose not to do it. Look again at these things when it isn’t self-punishment. Torturing yourself does nothing for you right now except prevent you from insight and focus your energy on everything that would overwhelm you. Love doesn’t want that, and you need to focus on that central thing. Open your heart and listen. Listen.

Try different body positions. Bow your head, raise your arms up to the sky, imagine your feet taking root in the ground, pretend to be blessed by the stars. Your body-imagination is always trying to help you. If you feel comfortable, reach out to the God *above* the God that is caricatured by the witnesses and ask for guidance in love.

Be authentic, be truthful, see beauty, learn when to trust and admire. Start there. In time, the beliefs will sort themselves out. The list of “I believe in this” and “I don’t believe in that” is really not the primary aspect of spiritual understanding. Assume, for a little while, that all the cosmos needs of you is that you pay attention and appreciate whatever you really, truly can. Go a little on that footpath, and see if you get reoriented.

I feel very strongly that each person’s spiritual path is their own, and cannot be regulated or mandated. This is about your own spirit and soul and heart and mind, and nobody else’s. And in that spirit, take what you find useful for you here – and disregard the rest. These are things I’ve learned for myself and from the experiences of others, so they may be very very helpful for you right now. Or not. You are the only you.

Death, the Afterlife, and Human Being

Death, the Afterlife, and Human Being

We all die. I don’t know whether or not there is an afterlife, and neither does anyone else.

People have a range of beliefs. Some people believe in a heaven of fluffy clouds. Some people believe in a hell of unending torture. Some people believe in a gray space of limbo.

Some believe that one’s place in the afterlife can be purchased with money or obedience or membership or works or sacrifice or mantras.

Some believe that your spirit rejoins the energy of the cosmos, or that you will sing with the stars. Some believe that souls return to the timeless space of eternal Dreaming. Some believe the afterlife will be a difficult journey of some kind, or an entrance into an eternal perspective where all times and places exist together.

Some believe that death is a transition into another realm or dimension, or a pause before starting up another life here through reincarnation.

Some believe that in death, everyone wanders around in an underground cavern.

Some believe that necromancers (the more accurate translation of the biblical “witch”) communicate with the dead, so there must be a place where individual consciousness continues. Some believe that sacrifices or homage ought to be paid to ancestors because they get more energy and can continue their existence that way.

But nobody knows.

We can comfort ourselves with the notions that someone who has died is now with God, or in a better place, singing with the angels, carrying messages, dancing a skeleton dance with us, guarding us and looking down from the stars.

But nobody knows.

It is understandable that the thought of our ultimate non-being causes anxiety.

It is understandable that we want to feel more important when we contemplate the sublime majesty of the universe – and all its possible parallel universes.

It is understandable that comforting mythologies exist that attempt to mitigate the pain of loss and grief and injustice and feelings of powerlessness and meaninglessness that confront us.

Thomas Aquinas proclaimed that one of the sublime joys of heaven had to be witnessing the agonies of those who have hurt us.

When I am sad and anxious about death, I imagine an ideal afterlife. I’ve imagined it in great detail – my fantasy living space, with a community of loving friends and family who are now everything they were meant to be, and surrounded by wonderful smells and tastes (note that I’m not willing to give up a sensual existence of some kind). There is a part of me that persists in the hope that whatever is sufficiently envisioned may exist.

I pray, yes I do. I entreat benevolent entities at all levels of whatever hierarchical or distributed spiritual systems could possibly exist. Male and female and beyond gender. Sure. But I don’t know.

We are the only beings that we know of who live with the knowledge that someday we all – without exception – will die. Heidegger called it Being-towards-death. We can repress and cover-up this knowledge, but that is an inauthentic kind of living.

I taste eternity, but eternity – well, it isn’t human. It’s an everything-ness that overwhelms me, and while it may bring a kind of ecstasy that is beyond language or explanation, it doesn’t seem – to me – to promise an afterlife.

I have a very difficult time believing in consciousness without mind. Perhaps mind can somehow extract itself from the brain’s electro-magnetic impulses, like bees leaving a hive, and find some other form of containment. I don’t know (pause… and neither does anyone else, got it?).

For various reasons (and no reason), it’s a good time to note of some of the thoughts that have been helpful to me, and which have given me some alternatives to the pathological visions that I was imbued with when young.

Living, learning, and navigating around through the admittedly limited form of our existence has been deeply improved and enriched for me with the following attitudinal choices:

Focused Attention. Curiosity and Questioning. Appreciation and Gratitude. Compassion and Caring and Kindness.

They are momentary choices, of course, but the more often you can really pay attention and observe, allow yourself to be curious and to ask questions, feel appreciation and gratitude, and open yourself up to receiving and giving kindness and feeling compassion for self and others… well, the better life seems to be: more real, more textured, more meaningful, more everything.

Tomorrow we may die, but no-one and no-thing can ever take away that we have existed.

The universe is unimaginably large, but our bit of life and history has its place in the timeline and we all help to create and uphold the rich fabric of the cosmos. In our human niche, bound by space and time, we are ourselves – and we affect others and we are all affected by one another and we are all together (Koo koo ka-choo).

The fact that I once saw the sun shining over ochre cliffs is not erased because it was a momentary event. Although it has passed, it is not gone. Although I may misremember or reinterpret it, the very value of that experience is that it happened – on that day, with someone dear. The light was just so, I was in a particular emotional state, I paid attention to it, I was curious about ochre because of its beauty, I was grateful to be there in that moment, and I carry that moment with me. I even have a photograph, but it doesn’t capture the spirit of that moment. It is only a reminder. The aromas, the feeling of the wind, the high-altitude mood, all of it – it happened then, and then the moment was gone (ok, yeah, a little reference to “Dust in the Wind” but stay with me here).

The bits of our lives that we most value are transitory by their very nature.

Everything changes, and if it didn’t, we really would be in hell – and never out of it.

Without passing through (and within and as part of) our human streams of time and space, outside of the ever-moving lines and processes of chaos meeting order, we would have nothing, nothing at all.

While you move in time and space, while you can perceive and question and appreciate, be just as authentic and kind as you can.

Value that spark of eternity in all of us, and dwell there from time to time – alone or in communion – but know this: We exist on the borders, moving, changing, living and dying.

Our lives are so special because we each have our own ways of experiencing, our own limited perspectives, our unique – and yes, transitory – associations and configurations of memory and projection and imagination and meaning-making.

We are human. We have a niche in this cosmos, and it can be very very complex and rich.

Even in pain and suffering and injustice, there are moments of bliss and celebration and laughter and love. With the knowledge of death, and the fundamental ignorance about life after death, be grateful for your span of days.

Our limitations are precisely what enable us to experience and construct our context, our meanings, our lives and our loves.