I’ve been living across the street from a black man for a number of years. Everyone in the neighborhood fears the man. He owns two houses side-by-side, does nothing but sit on the front porch all day whistling, irritating everyone… with the radio on, babequing his supper, and having his kids drive up onto the front lawn to park, since they live next door.
He’s a big man. You can tell he doesn’t take crap from anyone. People worry he’s lowering property values. The big old Lincoln in the driveway is held together with duct tape.
My last day of work was last Friday. Now I have to rely on God’s Promise, and I have to get to work on the job he asked me to do. As a boy I listened to the Bible being read by my dad before breakfast. The worst job I think God could give anyone was to be a prophet. Its hard enough just to be a Christian, let alone tell people stuff they don’t understand, or want to accept. But those Old Testament prophets probably had some of the worst jobs around. Yuck.
When God came to me in 2001, He showed me a little and said, I’ll show you the rest, if you want the job. My curiosity got the best of me and I said ‘sure, what you’ve just shown me so far seems obvious. What could it hurt?’ I had no idea how deep His revelations were going to go. It was startling and amazing. And I had the luxury of having a guided tour into all its wonder and complexities. But it took some time, a lot of courage, and being healed at the same time. Experience coupled with wisdom and knowledge to create a whole picture. Most of it complemented Christianity. But it contradicted some key assumptions of the religion that are hard to swallow unless you went down the road I did. That’s fine. But how do you communicate this, not only to Christians, but to secular civilization, let alone to other faiths? It is only dawning on me now that I have got the equivalent of a prophet’s job. Lovely. Well, without money, I just may be going down to the Niagara River to eat bugs. Hmm, if I had six-pack abs, it would be good training for the TV show ‘Fear Factor.’
The last thing I want to be mistaken for is a door-knocking evangelical. They’re fun to talk with, personally. But they are the equivalent to annoying phone marketers, the hard-sell interruptions that are deeply resented for their attempts to manipulate us. So how do I begin to talk with people about something ‘new’ from ‘God?’ Most of its not new, actually, just ignored. Such is the slicing and dicing of everything in mind culture.
Not being a bold American, but a classic polite Canadian, this makes it doubly difficult. I have to fight myself to get people’s attentions. And yesterday was a good lesson in that. In my searching I asked God to give me some guidance, because the stress was making me lose my focus.
On the porch a few moments later, my wife out-of-the-blue said we are probably looking in the wrong direction. The prosperous are the hardest to talk with of all. They don’t feel these questions. They are in control of their lives. Whereas the poor have many questions about life.
She pointed out the black man across the street. The one thing my wife has is a radar for powerful men. She was married to a CEO once, and was the executive secretary to bank chairmen. ‘That man across the street,’ she said, ‘is a very powerful man. More powerful than any CEO.’ So we went over to talk to the man that the neighborhood feared.
His name is Cornell, a big man in his fifties, barbequing his steak on the front steps listening to hip hop on the radio. We introduced ourselves. The wisdom that flowed from that man knocked my socks off. I thought I was talking with a Native elder, yet this man was Christian, with a depth of YHWH understanding that rivalled any Jewish rabbi worth his salt. Nothing was coming from theology out of his mouth. The gritty life experience spoke of an experiential bond with God that cut through complication and saw modern life for what it is from God’s perspective for civilized humans.
Being so spiritual, and so Christian, he spoke of the devil at work. Of course, this is out-of-fashion. But it was dead-on as far as it went. Who can argue that what God gives you fills you with energy? What the devil does is take from you, leaving you empty. Consumer society in a phrase.
What an amazing topic. The devil, fear, pain, the need for control as civilized humans, the need for freedom, the hatred of domination and submission. Contemporary theology wrote-out the devil part because of society’s rejection of all those issues, even without the devil, that it wishes to ignore. It is part of the spiritual disconnect that is found even in mainline Churches. God is only Love. Men make their own pain based on their choices. God’s Grace will correct them if we ask. There is no need to go into arcane fears about other spiritual things we don’t understand. Just focus on what we can control. Bond the theological interpretation with your experience of God at work, and let’s keep everything positive.
I have done the same thing. And there is truth in it. Traditional Christianity built-up a fear of the devil to almost make it as powerful as God. I found it odd that wisdom cultures, such as Native Americans, had a healthier perspective. That entity is merely referred to as ‘trickster.’ All of Creation is good, even pain, which brings wisdom after the storm. Everything is part of the Creator, everything is spirit, everything has consciousness therefore, because God cannot create inert matter. Its accepted concept in theology too, but takes a lot of effort to break through our objective-matter paradigm we have inherited from Genesis, to actually live it.
Having long realized that evil is the smallest wisp of Creation, looking for a host of fear and ignorance to feed off of and grow, I have always put the issue on the backburner. After all, anyone can see the choices we make objectively. If we have the will to do the right thing, then good things happen. It is part of our struggle to make things whole, as God is, from the circumstances we find ourselves in finite existence. We can figure it out with God, the Bible and good theology.
We have come to a near-equivalence in mind culture of what wisdom cultures have always known. The main thrust in our lives is our interpretation of reality. We can be lead astray, and though there may be a spiritual component leading us there, it is not overwhelming. We have the power to discern and decide. So stop blaming something else, because you’re responsible for your own decisions. Let wisdom be your guide. And with the amount of knowledge in modern society, the tools of discernment are not in short supply. Our minds are in control like never before. Just connect it to the heart and live a good life.
With fundamentalist marketers reinforcing Christian stereotypes in today’s society, our tools for deconstruction can come in handy. I know that sounds strange. Sun Warrior saying something positive about mind culture. But the thrust of mind culture is the need for control. That need comes from a base of fear. No one wants to face fear, let alone pain or death. Theology is lead by secular society’s aversion to these subjects. Let’s get the solution. Let’s focus on the positive. Those three categories are negative. We have the knowledge. We can conquer those negatives. Its a control thing.
The devil thing shows how mixed up we are about our relationship to our finite existence. Christianity has inherited a negative approach to earthly life that our modern theology is subconsciously fighting. Sex is now good. Gays are getting good. Even capitalism is good in some circles. Cornell, my neighbor, reintroduced me to the wholeness of our past conception of the interaction between spirit and earthly life, good and evil. We’ve come a long way. But if we turn around and reconsider where we come from it can show us many things.
One is amazed at how much spiritual knowledge modern theology is still straining out of itself. Devil-talk is taboo. God has been redefined since the Holocaust as only the God-of-Love. He does not bring pain. We create it ourselves. There is a ton of wisdom in pain that we ignore in our pain-allergic society. Jesus told us to stop the suffering, not understand it. So both Christianity and secular society are mainly interested in pain relief, not why the disease was Given by God in the first place. We don’t understand the broader nature of our life story, and how the events were created by God. We are only focused on the goal-line. Stop the sin, stop the pain, be happy, and get to heaven. And in the process we are returning the devil to a wisp, and focusing on our personal responsibilities. Cutting to the essence to promote the benefits of love.
This is part of the process of creating a pure mind culture. We are in charge. We are human-focused. We seek the services that Spirit can provide to our needs as mind-man. We can figure it out with our dominant minds choosing to listen and interpret the wisdom coming from the atrophied civilized heart. We choose from the disparate information in such wealth and abundance that post-modernity has to offer. With the complexity of present theology, you would think that the Church is already post-modern itself! So what’s the big difficulty in connecting with the secular?
Hmm. I went back and faced the Old Church. I faced the devil in the Old Church, through a Christianized African soul, whose genetics holds the wisdom of slavery, who sees the modern dilemma so plainly in his connection with God. My, how far we have come to be congruent with pure mind culture’s parameters.
Credibility is not in the concept. Credibility is in the wisdom. It is tough making our robust minds submissive to the dominance of wisdom. Is it possible to stop thinking conceptually? Scary prospect. We’re convinced it is an evolutionary benefit. Adam’s choice of living by knowledge, writ large. Wisdom is simple. Meaning in the mind is a whole other matter.
Blessings,
Brock Shaver
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