Ok everyone, here are some new posts for worldly monk blog.  First one is this, I just saw a lecture title saying “in the beginning was consciousness.”  Well I did not tune in because I don’t believe in replacing a word in the bible like that, especially if the word is God.  Like consciousness is not a synonym and if it was the bible would have told us that.  I did reflect on it and saw some potential for framing the trinity that way, like consciousness, word, spirit, there is some potential.  But mostly I think it is pandering to the easterners who say mantras like “I am God I am God I am God.” I just don’t believe it.  However, it is an interesting topic to think about, and most of all I want to say that doesn’t every selfish person say that in some way through their actions?  Like if we expect people to fetch stuff for us and work on the sabbath for us and be our societal slaves, have we not said to everyone, “I am God.” Well it was part of the temptation in the garden.  So I am sure I missed something interesting in that presentation but sometimes the most interesting idea is “I don’t believe that crap.”

 Ok here is the second blog post.  I hope I remember what I was going to say.  Ok, I remember it.  It is about how a PhD student teacher in a theology course pointed out that an expression of God’s offer of salvation in the way I worded it one time was incomplete.  I think the way I said it was Methodist and not Presbyterian.  I basically said that Jesus died for anyone.  And I have been taught to finish that sentence and say anyone who believes.  But I felt that when you present to an outside audience, you leave no doubt that they can be included.  You don’t say anyone and maybe you.  You say anyone, so they know of course it can mean them if they choose.  But this teacher hinted to me that I left out some information, and I think I see how the offer of what people would want might be more appealing if you include the exclusive nature of it.  In other words, if you describe both the open door to heaven and the closed door once it is “full.”  Like our enemies won’t be there, and isn’t that half of the blessing.  It is.  No matter how much people criticize the frozen chosen, in our hearts, people want both the open and closed door, the welcome and the safety, the membership and not a lost crowd with no boundaries.  Maybe that is part of what God is teaching everyone in the world now, which sadly happens to be the same stuff he already told us.

 Well hi everyone this is the third of four worldly monk posts, which precede one of my favorite posts.  In this post I am just reporting a fact of my life to be considered biographically which is that a long time ago I thought about that verse in the bible that says “Guard your heart because it is the well spring of life,” and I decided not to.  I felt it was selfish for people to keep their hearts too safe and I think I even told God that I felt I should instead really put it out there as a sacrifice.  That kind of sounds like reporting a good deed for bragging purposes, but I actually at this moment am really wondering if I did do something kind of stupid and the best we can all hope for is to learn from it.

In a way I think God’s plan happened in my life and he worked with me very faithfully and I should be thankful.  But in another way, you can see how my mind and heart actually were shredded and I have now had over 1400 therapy appointments to repair damage from mistreatment that targeted my soul. And I have been hospitalized ten times for mental illness, I see visions of demons and hell, I have been possessed for a few seconds and felt my tongue snarl at a friend, I watched my family be tortured as my life fell apart for the third time, and I have several lost careers and now disability. Not to mention neurological injury and jealousy spells that hurt an organ and now impair my walking ability because of internal damage to the basal ganglia part of the brain.

So that is neat, I just thought I would report it.  Maybe my “heart” was in the right place, ha ha, or maybe I threw it away.  I do not know, but it is interesting if God took me up on it for any reason, especially if it is to tell a large audience what not to do.

life verses

This post is about my “life verse.” The topic was brought up recently by another writer, Diana Butler Bass, who was questioning the practice of people claiming a bible verse like that.  I used to question it some at church, too, when people would talk about which verse most pertains to them, and they usually cited “For I know the plans I have for you,” as being their life verse.  I think it is Jeremiah 29:11.  In fact, I think that was people’s life verse in every single conversation I have ever had about it. And the other interesting trend is that I always knew that wasn’t my life verse.  It wasn’t that I didn’t think God had a good plan for me, but just that I needed to be up for more suffering than seeking that comfort.  And even now I see some contradiction, like when Jesus says don’t seek the seat of honor at a party.  He said that to the disciples in his teaching.  So why does everyone choose that life verse? 

Over time, I jokingly deducted that my life verse is “He had no beauty or majesty to attract us,” from Isaiah 53.  I just think that is so funny to call yourself ugly.  But the world has called me that. Definitely it stuck.  I have been treated like the elephant man, probably because of my bent gender, but I always knew that I was mostly above average.  My health is declining now, so maybe I actually am headed towards being "marred beyond human likeness," but either way I don’t know of a greater honor than if those verses in Isaiah have anything at all to do with me. God must have known the plans he had for me, plans to prosper me and not harm me, and to give me hope and a future. 

Mediating Mediocrity

Well hello everyone, here is an actual theological post about whether sin, death, and evil are needed for true adventure. I have thought yes and no.

No, in that I have seen how things get more interesting, such as literature, when people are doing their darndest to obey God.  Like when you get in the heights, the more interesting thing is whether to put the hymn in B major or C minor, as opposed to some anti-hero’s struggle of faithfulness about some actually low grit aspect of human life.  I really believe that and think that literature might soon recover from groveling in the pit of wishy washy human ambiguity for I don’t know maybe about a hundred years. Washy would be good, actually.

I did not mean to take a judgemental turn there.  But what I am saying about this now, is that I myself dipped into suspicions about purgatory and a variety of afterlife possibilities based on a view of Jesus’s descent into hell after he died, his subsequent raising people from the dead, and Peter’s direction of his upside down crucifixion, which to me could have signaled his intent to follow Jesus’s example to go to other worlds for people’s salvation.

Plus, my hopes long ago of being in a Lord of the Rings adventure someday after the boredom of earth was behind me influenced a willingness for lesser heavens. I also so desperately wanted the holy spirit’s presence that I thought something like that alone could make me tolerate anything else. 

However, I have to say, that there might be some kind of adventure where choosing a route between greater goods might be just as worthy a destiny as fighting some unknown monsters throughout millions of years of muddy reincarnation and evolution. 

Anyway, I just read an article relevant to this discussion, which is Chen Malul’s substack about Dante’s Divine Comedy, and I also now recall Tobias Wolff’s book called “In the Garden of North American Martyrs.”  

Which brings us back to the idea of context and choice, and where is the glory given what location, I mean there are a lot of possibilities, or maybe no possibilities at all, but only reality.