The vineyard (Matt 21)

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Today it, the reading, the burden, it was the story of the vineyard's owner who with a deliberate and divine foolishness left the vineyard in the hand of servants who then abused their stewardship. The reps who were sent back, one by one, they were abused too, even killed, and their blood was thrown into the vat so full already!

Oh Matthew, is this really a story about the kingdom being handed over from its original stewards, the Jews, to the Gentiles? Wait a moment, my love, how well are the Gentiles tending the vineyard today? Have they deserved this stewardship? Is the same tragedy recurring over and over like a wash cycle?

God is ever patient or at least has been up to now. Meanwhile my friends, sick of organized religion, get enticed by the smorgasbord of yoga and zen. Is Jesus speaking through these disciplines now, trying to reach the ears of people who can no longer hear the undiluted Gospel? It would be like him to try. But what if they (what if we) should abuse yoga and zen too? When does the patience of our leaf-folded maker finally reach its everloving end? Today roses are shaking in the summer wind like an old woman's cigarette smoke, hot and tremulous, very Faulkner. Everywhere Bougainvillea party favors, doggy poop on the petals, and my heart feeling ready to stop on a dime. To stop.

Then start again, with I hope a deeper awareness.

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And with this the meditations of June 2004 come to an end.

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the feeling of feeling used has an inauthentic feel...

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Because in the US, I think 99.99% of people approached by an evangelist feel exploited and used. It is a transaction having to do with the statistical shadow they cast (in other words, their ghost) but not with them.

In places that don't suffer so much from the disease of wealth, such as El Salvador, it seems to be different.

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God doesn't need me in order to up the count. God doesn't precisely "need" me at all.

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Is there a need for evangelism?

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And does the world "need" what we now accept as evangelism? Hey wait a moment, wasn't the point to bring people into the kingdom of justice, love, and respect, which is to say: reality? Do you accomplish that by using advertising techniques and then counting bodies? ("Well, we saved 3,000 souls last night." "No, you forgot a hundred shipped overnight from Poughkeepsie.")

Even a spider knows to look out for what's inside the body, not the shell. And even a spider hunts only one by one.

If the kingdom is something that actually defines one's whole being and existence, you don't talk about it being "needed", like an add-on or an option on a car. You don't sell it, you don't foist it. The kingdom of God is not a "need". Doesn't God call for something better than evangelism? Something about showing and being, not saying.

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Story: O reason not the need for spiders

So there you have it, Goneril or was it Regan saying, We don't need spiders. Let us kill all the spiders. And the royal directive went out and was implemented in spades until the gardener and the gardener's wife raised a gentle protest. And the courtiers turned around and said: Who are you to say what we need and what we don't need in this world.

And finally the question of "need" was laid in God's soft lap, not because humans wanted God to decide -- heavens! these were humans like us, after all -- no it was because everybody just collapsed with exhaustion, and couldn't fulfill the "need" to decide who got to decide "need". So it was left, like all difficult things, to God.

And God turned out to need spiders. Need? Well, God turned out to want spiders, very much. God took pleasure in spiders and still does today. And how do we know this? Well, look around. This is God's domain, after all. And everywhere you look.... spiders. So reason not the need for spiders!

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Why not be at least as good as a spider?

A wonderful sentence from the Philokalia (St John of Karpathos): A spider "has no possessions, makes no journeys overseas, does not engage in litigation, does not grow angry, and amasses no savings." (I guess the shells of flies hanging from the web don't count as savings.)

He describes the spider as gentle, still and helpless.

Well perhaps. Anyway perhaps closer to God than some of us, and do I hang (immobile, upside-down) in the middle of that "some"?

Whenever I stare at a spider I feel an involuntary and horrible hunger for flies.

But that is me, not the spider.

Stillness maybe.

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Estranged

If I am so interested in being God's friend, why do I backbite other people all day? Why do I submerge myself in envy (this sort of green and slimy substance like a seaweed knotted on my leg)? And why do I treat envy as my real God? Why is my practice so dark?

There is no rational answer to such a "Why" so I myself must not be rational. If God is real, all the cliches about our being brothers and sisters are actually the simple truth. Surely I can't envy someone whom I love and know like myself (assuming I either love or know myself, both propositions doubtful -- and now the seaweed stretches to cover me like ivy).

If we are essentially brothers and sisters, why is it that approaching another human being is bound like a mathematical function to becoming estranged from God? Why are we so accustomed to being not brothers and sisters but enemies? Why is our practice so dark? That is another "Why" that could not possibly have a rational answer so it's not only myself who must not be rational. My "brothers and sisters" aren't either, so we really *are* brothers and sisters -- in practice. And we twist that seaweed into our skin until it's our skin.

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a different Lover

So...

Working all day in a distracted mood, unable fully to concentrate, anticipating the night. You listen to people but there is something between you and them, not the presence of your love, just memory and anticipation. All the buzz in the workspace seems so... unreal, you can almost measure it mathematically. The larger the distance from your love, the more unreal.

Will the day ever end?

But it does, reluctantly, the day ends and then there you are, at the garden gate or maybe your apartment door and if it's covered with grafitti, you don't care. Inside in the private space, there is nothing to block you from your dearest love, your God. Finally reality.

Because nothing else by comparison is real, no no not hardly, and no one manages to be real except to the extent that he or she also loves this one and approaches, fearfully, full of love that is 100% reflection. So deep that it can barely talk.

Take me.

* * * need? * * *

The God I worship is by no means "necessary" -- that God would be philosophy, not worship.

The God I worship is a friend I would love with a passion compared to which sexual passion is zilch nada nil, sex is a hallucination compared to this reality in fact.

A blog walks backwards

Like the young lady leading a tour on the Stanford campus yesterday, who walked backwards, knowing but never seeing where she was going. So the blog has that one moment of being present and meanwhile looks at all the "dead" stuff in front of it but really behind it. And lacks a long term vision, just walks and walks.

Poem: Praying like a child

Praying like a child


He prayed like the child who let its nightmare
run free, beyond control, luxuriating
in that desolation, knowing that next door lay
the grownup who could slay it with one word.

That awkward friend of yours

With God it's like being in the room with some fabulously talented, eloquent and important friend, some friend that you seem to be dependent on just to breathe. And when you have a friend like that how do you strike up a conversation?

I mean how do you talk about the weather with someone who is basically the air you breathe and the warmth on your face? No no, you're completely tongue-tied and scared. And since you're so afraid of making a fool of yourself by talking you make a fool of yourself by being silent. And the friendship can't even move because your own awe is blocking it. Your fear makes everything so musclebound that it's frozen. What kind of a friendship is that?

Who would want you to be a friend like that? Friends want conversation, want fellowship. Right but we spoil everything by being so scared. Not that there isn't a lot there to fear. But nobody wants fear except a dictator. We're talking about someone who has a dictator's power and more but not a dictator's moods.

We're talking about someone who wants your love and gets nothing but a stiff form of worship that seems to be addressed to somebody else. How come we can't just dissolve like the loving prostitute with the vase of ointment?

God beyond "necessary"

Necessary? Can worship go beyond? It is "necessary" to the people who grit their teeth and pray, who perhaps believe because they were told to. God is "unnecessary" to the people who don't care. They are fairly obvious, I guess.

But what about a third way?

What about a God that is the friend you always always try to be with? A God not "necessary" in some objective sense that you can prove, but much better and deeper and truer than that. Nobody tries to prove what a friend is, if you're lucky enough to have one that is true you just relish the privilege of friendship, especially with... such a one.

Of course deeply needed but not in the way that Christendom says.

The curse of blogging structure

Nobody ever read a diary backwards, last entry first.

Nobody ever read the last entry of a diary and claimed to understand the person or what drove her to write it.

Blogs are supposed to be a bit embedded in time but the truth is they hardly even have a history. All you read is the latest entry as though only it were alive and everything that led up to it, all the previous chapters of the story, were dead. Forget about understanding causes. It's like this week's top 40 annihilating last week's charts. Where is your story if you can't tell it patiently over time?

You can't understand the Gospel of Mark reading it backwards. You can't thread a needle backwards. You can't look one second through a slitted window and say you know what you saw. The Turing machine at least pretended to be continuous.

So... the blog format labors under a curse but it's still beautiful.

"From your ear to God's mouth"

If God were to speak right now... with a flesh colored tingle in the ear?

Maybe the first thing he'd speak in my ear would be: this is my ear.

There is a gracious feel to this...

A gracious feel to this
sense of unworthiness

No no, this has got to be freedom. No longer having to prove oneself because what is there to prove or better say, who is there to prove it to who doesn't already have the evidence?

No longer having to feel "entitled" and then bully other people for rights.

No longer having to judge others or oneself so incessantly. Becoming too broken to judge, instead just walking the faithful walk. Trying anyway. Moving upright and careful through the redwoods.

What one needs is not to focus on need anymore, because it merely blocks one's view of the source of need who first created it and then satisfied it -- or soon will. The need is for God and not much else. But people not only don't believe it's true, they don't even believe that I could think so.

Trees without standing

So standing in Marin among the redwoods my headache became a decal loosening off a body whose pain had disappeared in a terror called "the fear of God".

"Not one bit of this was given out of merit then? Not even the grooves on the trees?"

"Grace like rain"? Oh no, grace is the privilege of being rained on at all!

When I start to formulate my needs I get caught up on one question: "Why do I exist in the first place?" In other words, what is the rational basis for my own existing (rather than, say, my father, who was a better person than I am -- why is he dead and why am I alive?)

But there is no rational basis. I can't find one. I can't find a basis for my existing in preference to another being. I can't find an objective basis for my existing as opposed to ... not existing.

So it's all a gift then? It's not "grace like rain" falling on someone who is already there. The "grace" is that I am standing there in the first place, under rain or anything else. Merit doesn't enter into it. As far as merit goes I would not have made the cut. Existence is grace -- you can't give another reason.

This doesn't take away the needs I have but puts them into context. They are the needs of a creature that isn't necessary.

When what you need fails, the unnecessary will save you

When the things you need fail you, it will be the unnecessary that comes to your rescue and saves you.

What does that mean?

Well, what is it people need? (Judging from their behavior, not their words.) Must be things like power, money, friendship, love. I have to be honest and admit how much I go after the love of people I don't even know, maybe don't respect. So that is what my behavior says I need

Well then, what is unnecessary? Well.... most people treat God like a distant relative that they visit a couple of times a year at most. We think we do God a favor when we go to church. Or some don't even go because they don't think God is there. So if you judge behavior, not just words, then most people don't think a relationship with God is "necessary", at least not in comparison to the "things" they need, which are things.

But if God is "unnecessary" then it follows that maybe you can relate to God in freedom and spontaneity, through love, through choice, and thus experience the incredible gratuitous presence of one you claim is outside the realm of your need. Faith is like a wonderful holiday that will never come to an end! And then when all those other things fail (and even family love eventually fails) the constant faithful presence of the one you thought you didn't need becomes the one thing you still have. And it will be enough. At least Job thinks so.

Perhaps the realm beyond need is the realm of the true Sabbath, where faith swallows law. So it seems this morning anyway.

Did he need them?

So the daughters ask their aged father, why do you need so many servants?

Did he need them? Did he really need them?

His answer might be: I don't need servants. I need daughters. I need children.

Why we need to get past "need"

Why this title... O reason not the need!

It comes from King Lear, a scene in which the evil daughters are stripping their old father of his servants and his dignity. They ask him WHY he needs so many servants or perhaps any at all? His answer is: O reason not the need! Or in other words, need is not reasonable!

How right that old man is. One needs so much more than need, that is, we silly humans are in desperate need of the unnecessary! After all, as Lear points out, the "basest beggar" must have at least what he "needs" (or otherwise he would be dead). But what he "needs" is hardly enough, he either needs more than what he "needs" or needs more than to need.

I think that either our need is a fallacy, a hallucination, or, much more likely, our need is real but what we most need is the unnecessary. Like customers at our Food Closet who accept nutritious staples but most eagerly take dessert... though for nourishment it isn't necessary... or let me bite my tongue, it is the most necessary thing there but I don't exactly know why.

Except that luxuries and some small excess are needed to make us feel minimally human. This is the perfume from the alabaster jar, wiping feet.

After all, God doesn't "need" us, only loves us. And the people we love most are not the ones who contribute most to the economy.

I need to ponder this more. Bye for now.

Why do this? It is wonderful not to know why.

Why why why - por que, mi amor - the question Darwin cannot answer. (For instance, when the spider runs like mad to get away from a human foot, WHY does it so desperately want to live and not to die?)

I don't know why I am doing this and I love not knowing why. I will find out why in the process of writing it!

All I know for certain is that everything I write here will be free. I wonder WHY human beings think they should charge money to other human beings for the right to read what they write? Another WHY I can't answer. Do they need the money? "O reason not the need".