Standards and Dreams

Our fathers really are our models for God: they teach us who we are, how to be men, how to be humble, how to be a steward, how to accept grace, how to draw the line, how to love. Your father never gave anything away; He taught you how to question everything, and to do so, but he didn’t give you anything to stand on and no sense of self. To build your life around arguments, pushing one way and then the other, is to be forever on unsteady ground because you construct a ‘best-of’ sort of existence, if you construct one at all. Without a line, something sturdy to stand on or measure from, an absolute, everything is arbitrary and relative. People say nothing in life is sure, but  speaking with you these last days, looking at how my life of learning to see absolutes speaks for itself, I have no problem saying ‘you might be absolutely right’ and be done with it. God’s ways are higher than man’s and they cannot be figured out. They must be heard and received; they must be walked out and then scoured roughly for understanding; they must be walked out again and then polished; they must be applied and applied improperly so your idea of ‘getting a concept’ can be smashed. God is all in all: your ‘successes’ and ‘failures’ (set-up according to a world’s standard), your application and not applying, your love and hate and servanthood and ‘I’m a good person’ acts, your malicious intent and the murder in your heart - - God uses it all for your growth. So walk free from doing yourself into any worth. The idea is that you’re worthwhile regardless of what you do. When you can hear that, then receive it, then live like it, you’ll be something new, seeing the world with new eyes and a new perception. We change every day so we can see more clearly what is real. We’ve just been trained in the habit of telling others to see how we see instead of seeking greater clarity for ourselves.

I had a dream yesterday: we were Arab (thank you Aladdin), working and living in a palace, trying to overthrow a complex and lying “democratic” dictatorial government.  We tried to establish the collapse of the economy or some such nonsense many times and always failed, but this time, with the palace guards right on our tails, the plan we set in motion succeeded! I remember being exultant. We used the Japanese Yen as the standard against which the state of our economy somethingsomething was measured and just when the national news related our financial collapse (which would lead to reform), the phone rang, and one of our leaders answered it. His face fell. He looked at us ashen-faced and said ‘the Japanese Yen has fallen’, and this large LED board behind him illustrated that dramatic point with numbers that dwindled. It was instantly evident that the government had manufactured and somehow controlled this standard the whole time, and that there was no hope.

-Of course it was all cinematic and breathy, like a Bourne movie, all drama and lighting and running and suspense…and all that stuff told in just a couple quick scenes. Anyway, the whole measuring-against-a-mobile-standard thing applied.

We judge ourselves constantly because we see and remember all our mess-ups and wickedness. But God doesn’t remember any of it – he says our sin is cast into the sea of his forgetfulness.  So we can walk free right now into what we want to be or where we want to go. 

Who your dad was or is and what he did or didn’t do doesn’t matter – where are you at now? What serves you? You’re free to choose. That’s the point. You can argue all sides of an issue, pros/cons, merits/demerits, and come to some conclusion, but freedom lies in your heart, and you know with more than logic when you find it. Our choices are rarely based on logic, anyway.
 
Satisfaction is not circumstantial because circumstances change. Emotion is not satisfaction because it’s so elusive it’s often hard to name. Satisfaction has to come from some standard that does not change and can always be revisited. That’s why the bible’s a big deal: when you can say ‘I believe the bible is the final authority’ you have something that doesn’t shift like sand. We get in arrears about interpretation and blind reception, but that’s where faith in GOD and not in man comes in. So believing the bible could be a faith in anything if one is to believe it by faith in God. The thing is just the symbol, like a torch in a dark night: you don't believe in the torch, you believe it'll lead you the right way. But people believe in the things: money will make the way easy, or relationship will save them, or looking good will make the world know their worth. We all believe in something – the bible simply has answers and illustrates a WAY that, like God (go figure), is self-propagating. Once you’re on the way simply being on the way helps keep you there. And when your heart is set on the way falling off it isn’t such a big deal because the trajectory you’ve set yourself on brings you right back to it.

I have been hurt when I have held onto things that didn’t serve me. Pride, for example. I can have these conversations with you now when I couldn’t a year ago because I wanted and NEEDED to have an understanding of God, so I would have defended my stance and who I was sure He was and would  have told you you were wrong about this and that and that. But now I just have me and my experience of God, and it’s so light. It gets heavy again when I have an idea about who I am or how I stand or how to be in God or what’s good and right and all that, but it just goes to show me where I still think like the old me – then I can put that off and grow light again.

We make identities, like you said, by seeing people and determining ‘I am that’ or ‘I am not that’, and we find names to call ourselves and behaviours to integrate or maintain and when one day a friend kindly lets me know I’m ‘not acting like myself', the internal crisis in me comes to the surface: I am in conflict. Conflict is in me. We learn who we are because we were made for certain things – building relationships, understanding and becoming Love, walking free of the world (in it, but not of it). All of those are active things in process and to be done now. The bible says ‘Now is the moment of salvation’ because God is HERE RIGHT NOW and to recognize that is to come under something that doesn’t hold you down or torment you, doesn’t demand anything of you, but blows all the fowl of the air away so you can breathe again. Then, once you’re quite recovered, he teaches you how to shoot the damn things down, those violent and consuming thoughts. How to take them captive to something that doesn’t change and is proven true (all day long if you look for it). When everything’s relative, all these ideas that crowd your mind fight for voice and because everything has merit to some degree, there’s no reason to clear the air. So the murder of crows remains. And kills you all through the day and more so at night.
It is necessary to hold something True, whether it’s that God is, or that He is not, because to be in the middle is to be in chaos. The bible says be either hot or cold, that is, choose a side – you can always change sides, but to try-to-want-to-be or to think-you-ought-to-be or to try-to-act-as-if are all weak postures that keep you stagnant long enough for the carrion to come in. The idea of faith is movement, because what you have faith for is where you will move. You go to work because you understand that if you don’t work, you don’t eat. Your faith is that your work will provide for you, and more than that, it gives you something to be about all day long. Somewhere to test your energies in a different field, under the same master in a different form, to work out your salvation under the harsh, the hippie, or the yuppie taskmaster.
God's all one.