Message-ID: <15650927.1075860901401.JavaMail.evans@thyme> Date: Mon, 4 Feb 2002 11:33:22 -0800 (PST) From: john.watson@pdq.net To: kimberly.watson@enron.com Subject: FW: [ordinarylife] Is The Story You're Telling The Truth? Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ANSI_X3.4-1968 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-From: John Watson X-To: Watson, Kimberly X-cc: X-bcc: X-Folder: \Kim_Watson_Mar2002\Watson, Kimberly\E-mail Bin X-Origin: Watson-K X-FileName: kwatson (Non-Privileged).pst FYI. ILY. SYT. JTW. -----Original Message----- From: clarencekerley [mailto:Bill@bkspeaks.com] Sent: Monday, February 04, 2002 1:23 PM To: ordinarylife@yahoogroups.com Subject: [ordinarylife] Is The Story You're Telling The Truth? ORDINARY LIFE - Thoughts and Ideas to Help You Live a Happier Life ====================================== Summary of February 3, 2002 ====================================== Dear Folks ? First of all thanks to all of you who responded to the need for financial help in our medical work in Bolivia. I can't recall experiencing such generosity. We are going to be able to give them more than they requested. Plus, several people are already on the list to go down with the next work crew and one person is going to help arrange getting medical supplies to the clinic. Wow! Thanks. The material I offered focused on how our Western approach to "the truth" and how modernity have had destructive effects on our religious and spiritual well being. We have become "fact fundamentalists." I also deal with the perplexing question of what Jesus might do in dealing with terrorism. The lesson ends with a telling of an ancient story from Ethiopia about the battle between Truth and Falsehood. What follows is a full text of the presentation. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Is The Story You're Telling With Your Life the Truth? ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ A boat docked in a tiny Mexican village. An American tourist complimented the Mexican fisherman on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took him to catch them. "Not very long," answered the Mexican. "But then, why didn't you stay out longer and catch more?" asked the American. The Mexican explained that his small catch was sufficient to meet his needs and those of his family. The American asked, "But what do you do with the rest of your time?" "I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, and take a siesta with my wife. In the evenings, I go into the village to see my friends, have a few drinks, play the guitar, and sing a few songs. I have a full life." The American interrupted, "I have an MBA from Harvard and I can help you! "You should start by fishing longer every day. You can then sell the extra fish you catch. With the extra revenue, you can buy a bigger boat. With the extra money the larger boat will bring, you can buy a second one and a third one and so on until you have an entire fleet of trawlers. "Instead of selling your fish to a middleman, you can negotiate directly with the processing plants and maybe even open your own plant. You can then leave this little village and move to Mexico City, Los Angeles, or even New York City! From there you can direct your huge enterprise." "How long would that take?" asked the Mexican. "Twenty, perhaps twenty-five years," replied the American. "And after that?" "Afterwards? That's when it gets really interesting," answered the American, laughing. "When your business gets really big, you can start selling stocks and make millions!" "Millions? Really? And after that?" "After that you'll be able to retire, live in a tiny village near the coast, sleep late, play with your children, catch a few fish, take a siesta, and spend your evenings drinking and enjoying your friends!" Ordinary Life auditor Wayne Herbert sent me that and it is just a wonderful story about the kinds of things I want us to be about. I sometimes refer to what wants to happen in here with the phrase "Journey Into Wholeness." It is so easy for those of us in the West to think that that journey is out there somewhere, in the outer world. The goal of spiritual work is to become a "self." Or, to become aware of the Self. I can't adequately explain to you what this self is. It is the center and, at the same time, the circumference of the personality. It embraces both consciousness and unconsciousness. The Self is known as the Christ in Christianity. Journey into Wholeness. The root meaning of the word "holiness" is this wholeness. Wholeness involves finding the missing parts or the faculties that are lacking in our natures and restoring them to a dignified place in our personality. Usually for those of us in the Western world our need, as reflected in the story of the Mexican fisherman, is relatedness; relatedness to ourselves as well as to others. This is the principle of equality I've spoken to you about so often. We who speak English are limited to one word for "love." In Sanskrit there are ninety-six words for love. We are highly specialized in technology yet quite primitive in terms of feelings. Jesus, and other Eastern spiritual teachers, saw the outer world to be of little importance. The place where the kingdom of God was was inside and among us. For us, however, reality is in the outer, material, physical world. One of the ways this has affected Christian theology is the emphasis on a belief that we are so unique, so distinctive that even our bodies persist on the other side of death. The religion out of which we came, Judaism, thought that after death what happened to us was much like what happens to a dewdrop after the sunrise. Yes, it has individuality while it exists as a separate entity, but it is destined quite quickly to flow back into the great primal ocean of existence and to lose all individuality. Does a drop of water cease to exist when it falls back into the sea? Well, yes and no. Nothing is lost but its individuality is no more. Jesus knew that the ego was a great troublemaker for us. We cling to everything that we think defines us as individuals. To threaten this notion of who we are is hell. We protect what we call our individuality at all costs. Death is bearable only if we are guaranteed a life after death containing all the characteristics of our individual human life. You can see how this would affect the way we go about living our lives and making choices about who we are and what are we to do. Those were the questions that shaped, by the way, what became our Bible. After every great cultural upheaval the community of people raised the questions: Who are we and what are we to do? e.e. cummings once wrote, "To be yourself in a world that is doing its best to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle any human being can fight, and never stop fighting." I love the story of the Pentecostal man who wandered into, let us say, a Methodist church. During the sermon, the visitor got so excited that whenever the preacher made a point, the Pentecostal man would scream out, "Praise God!" or "Hallelujah!" or "Amen!" The ushers were so distraught about the Pentecostal's behavior that the head usher went down the aisle and whispered to him: "You'll have to keep quiet? The pastor's right in the middle of the sermon!" The Pentecostal man said, "Keep quiet? How can I keep quiet? I've got the Holy Spirit!" To which the usher said, "Well, you didn't get it in this church!" The Pentecostal man made a theological error that many of us make. You see, he didn't have the Holy Spirit; the Holy Spirit had him! And that's the problem with much of our theology. We wish he had the Holy Spirit. There's a part of us that wishes we could keep the Holy Spirit in the nice, neat, tidy confines of our categories and barriers. We'd like to put God in a box. Get this: Nobody has the Holy Spirit; the Holy Spirit always has us and, given our Western orientation, that scares us so that we resist and repress and deny until we are spiritual dead as doornails. We want a God in a box like we want everything else in our lives predictable and controllable. We want a religion that is safe. A journey that is predictable. There is no true spiritual journey that is that way. We modern people have been victimized by own modernity. Of course, we've benefited - we have the sciences, technology, modern medicine, even emphases on human rights come from our modern approach to things. But it has had two deeply destructive effects on our religious and spiritual life. For one thing it has made people skeptical about spiritual reality. If God can't be proved by modern means, then God must not be. Second, modernity has led us to be preoccupied with factuality - with scientifically verifiable and historically reliable facts. Modern Western culture is the only culture in human history that has identified truth with factuality. We are, as Marcus Borg calls us, "fact fundamentalists." If a statement isn't scientifically or historically factual, it isn't true. These two things are serious mistakes and deadly to the journey inward. Let me point out that both liberals and conservatives can be fact fundamentalists. Liberals try to rescue a few facts from the fire. Conservatives say the Bible must be factually true in order to be true at all. This is why they emphasize the literal and historical factuality of biblical texts. They both agree - facts are what matters. If I had a magic wand that worked, one of the things I would do is to get both liberals and conservatives alike to see how modern both of these positions are. What we've got when it comes to having faith today for most people is whether they can believe "iffy" things or not. That, to most people, is what Christianity has become. It is as if what God wants most from us is believing highly problematic statements to be factually true. And, if you can't believe them, then you don't "have faith" and probably aren't a Christian. Listen carefully: Faith has to do with your relation to God, to Self. Not whether you believe the Bible to be true or not. I'm going to come back to this in the weeks ahead. Let me see if I can give you an example. One of the questions that has persistently come up in the discussion group has to do with what Jesus' view on violence might be. This has been raised since the events of 9/11. What would Jesus have us do? Does professing to be Christian mean trying to live as Christ might live? And if so, why aren't we doing what he asks us to do? First of all, I confess I have not a clue what Jesus would do in response to 9/11. My hunch is not much. His interest was not in that sort of thing. Besides, he had little political power. If we went to him and asked, I think he would probably tell a story. He might tell the story of the Good Iranian Terrorist. That's what the parable of the Good Samaritan sounded like to the people of his time. "Who are you he might ask?" Then tell a story to us as we stand there with our mouths open and scratching our heads. Maybe he would tell a story like this: One day a rabbi, in a frenzy of religious passion, rushed in before the ark, fell to his knees, and started beating his breast, crying, "I'm nobody! I'm nobody!" The cantor of the synagogue, impressed by this example of spiritual humility, joined the rabbi on his knees. "I'm nobody! I'm nobody!" The custodian, watching from the corner, couldn't restrain himself, either. He joined the other two on his knees, calling out, "I'm nobody! I'm nobody!" At which point the rabbi, nudging the cantor with his elbow, pointed at the custodian and said, "Look who thinks he's nobody!" I'll tell you something that might be misunderstood. I think that one of the numbers that organized religion has done on us is to convince us that we are supposed to be like Jesus. What God is interested in is saving human beings. That being the case what we must do is be human. The Christian conspiracy, I'm going to call it, against being human is to convince us that what we are supposed to do is be like Jesus. A couple of years ago there was a popular slogan: WWJD. The goal was to ask before doing any and everything, "What would Jesus do?" If Jesus were here today, would he have worked for Enron? Would he have been on the board of directors? If Jesus were here today, would he go to church? Which one? The image that I had of Jesus when I grew up was that Jesus would not go to movies on Sunday but he would go swimming because we had a lot of water in our town. Would he be a Republican or a Democrat? Would he be involved in the political process? The one thing that Jesus Christ was about was love and he did this by the extravagant way that he lived his life. He wasn't married; he didn't hold down a job; he didn't have to raise kids. The Roman church has it that Jesus was such a guy that not only did he not have a sexual dimension, neither did his mother. What Jesus was about - and still is - is Love. The extravagant way that Jesus lived his life was to communicate the overwhelming love that God has for us. Boundless love. Inexpressible love. It is like God comes down and puts arms around us and says, "This is how much I love you. Now love yourself like that." This was the thing that marked the ministry of Jesus. So Soren Kierkegaard writes, "To will to be that self which one truly is, is the opposite of despair." How do you do that? Well, to be the self you truly are is to have a particular history and it is to aspire to go beyond the limitations of that history and it is to be frustrated when you realize you can't. To accept this humanness means to be passionate about our aspirations and compassionate about our limitations. It is like you get up from where you're sitting and come up here and stand beside me physically and look at the person who is seated in the chair where you are and you have compassion for that person. It is that kind of acceptance. We are not to be like Jesus. We are to be Christ-like. There is a world of difference. Jesus went around kicking self-esteem into people. All of the stories that you find in the New Testament are like that. Look at the stories of his ministry. If a man can restore sight to a blind man, he gives that person a new lease on life, a new self-confidence. If a man can absolve a prostitute's guilt in lasting forgiveness, he gives her the gift of self-respect. The crippled, the insane, the leper, the tax collector, the beggar - a motley assortment of humanity desperately in need of self-esteem and he extended it to them. The same dynamic was at work even when he was chasing the moneychangers out of the temple. It may be temporarily embarrassing to be kicked out of your accustomed place of business, but it has been known to lead to self-respect. The message is: You're made for something better than this. You are loved by God. This self-compassion is foundational for the abundant life and I'm sure that the response Jesus would have us make to the terrorist situation as well as the rest of life is this kind of love. He would tell a story. One of his central teachings was: You shall know the Truth and the Truth shall set you free. (But first it's going to mess with your life and upset you!) So, let me tell you a story about Truth to ponder. This story is from the Ethiopian culture. Long ago, Fire, Water, Truth, and Falsehood lived together in one large house. Although all were polite toward each other, they kept their distance. Truth and Falsehood sat on opposite sides of the room. Fire constantly leapt out of Water's path. One day they went hunting together. They found a large number of cattle and began driving them home to their village. "Let us share these cattle equally," said Truth as they traveled across the grasslands. "This is the fair way to divine our captives." No one disagreed with Truth except Falsehood. Falsehood wanted more than an equal share but kept quiet about it for the moment. As the four hunters traveled back to the Village, Falsehood went secretly to Water and whispered, "You are more powerful than Fire. Destroy Fire and then there will be more cattle for each of us!" Water flowed over Fire, bubbling and steaming until Fire was gone. Water meandered along, cheerfully thinking about more cattle for itself. Falsehood, meanwhile, whispered to Truth. "Look! See for yourself! Water has killed Fire! Let us leave Water, who has cruelly destroyed our warmhearted friend. We must take the cattle high in the mountains to graze." As Truth and Falsehood traveled up the mountain, Water tried to follow. But the mountain was too steep; And Water could not flow upwards. Water washed down upon itself, splashing and swirling around rocks as it tumbled down the slope. Look and see! Water is still tumbling down the mountainside to this day. Truth and Falsehood arrived at the mountaintop. Falsehood turned to Truth and said in a loud voice, "I am more powerful than you! You will be my servant. I am your master. All the cattle belong to me!" Truth rose up and spoke out, "I will not be your servant!" They battled and battled. Finally they brought the argument to Wind to decide who was the master. Wind didn't know. Wind blew all over the world to ask people whether Truth or Falsehood was more powerful. Some people said, "A single word of Falsehood can completely destroy Truth." Others insisted, "Like a small candle in the dark, Truth can change every situation." Wind finally returned to the mountain and said, "I have seen that Falsehood is very powerful. But it can rule only where Truth has stopped struggling to be heard." And it has been that way ever since. I think what Jesus would do if we asked him what we are to do is that he would likely tell a story. And then he would remind us that we ourselves are telling a story with our lives. After saying that, perhaps he would ask, "Is the story you are telling with your life the truth?" No matter where you go this week, no matter what happens, remember this: You are carrying precious cargo. Watch your step. ====================================== Ordinary Life is a gathering that provides an opportunity to develop an enlightened heart and an awakened mind to the reality of the present moment. The gathering meets on Sunday mornings at 9:45 am in Fondren Hall at St. Paul's UMC - 5501 South Main, Houston, Texas and is taught by Dr. Bill Kerley. If you would like more information - Contact Bill Kerley - E-Mail - Bill@bkspeaks.com Web - www.bkspeaks.com Voice - 713-663-7771 Fax - 713-663-6418 Mail - 6300 West Loop South, Suite 480 Bellaire, TX 77401 ============================== You can access the archives of these newsletters by going to http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ordinarylife You can add someone you know would be interested in receiving these on- line newsletters by sending that information to - Bill@bkspeaks.com I'll make sure they are added immediately! 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