One cannot be accused of being indecisive if one has no real personal opinion.
One also cannot be accused of being opinionated if one has no real opinion to begin with.
We’re in a mess. It seems that those whose decisions really matter are indecisive, even silent, and those who are decisive have only one voluminous perspective – their own. And quite frankly they have relegated themselves to where their opinion really doesn’t matter at all anymore anyway. Mostly it’s just a lot of foul smelling hot air. It draws attention, yes, but only because a smelly decaying corpse does too.
This is not a new thing. We’ve been like this for a very long time. The problem has been with us right from our very beginnings.
The challenge is that we might never get out of the mess we are in until we make some sound decisions. We need to stand up and then take that stand. But clearly we need help. Many of us don’t think we do but I think we do. I’m sure we do. I even think that we need it badly, even desperately. We need some radical stuff to happen. And maybe that radical stuff is us.
Here’s how I see it: ~ God decides the only way to sort this whole mess out is to lower the playing field to the lowest common denominator and effectively take a stab at raising the game and even changing the rules from there. A huge risk with unbelievable capital investment demanded, but clearly not only a good shot, but the best shot possible.
So he does what we clever religious ones have called the ‘condescension’. An interesting label we give it because we seem to have totally messed it up and inverted its meaning and application completely.
Now the dictionary wasn’t really on the web in those days but these days it says:
Condescend = 1. To act graciously towards another or others regarded as being on a lower level; behave patronizingly 2. To do something that one regards as below one’s dignity http://www.thefreedictionary.com/condescend .
So, God gets his feet dirty, his hands, his torso, his head, everything gets utterly filthy.
And here’s the nuts and bolts of God’s idea ~ God is going to try beat the dirt at its own game, … and this from the bottom of the pit.
Actually it all starts with this injected metaphor of the creative power of concepts, ideas – ‘words’ to be practically specific. At first this is sort of spoken but then it is recorded in text some time later. The whole idea is made into a picture and is securely installed into the hearts and minds of men through oral tradition and then later in the first recorded textual stories of creation. It is reemphasised and redefined again right at the beginning of the final act when God’s becoming like one of us to do the dirty deed is done and recorded.
The idea is that the life taken up will be a sign. A sign filled with amazing power. Like a tiny seed that can be the start of a whole forest, this seed of an idea is sown. And as we know, seeds grow best in dirt. And this dirt is very dirty and the ground is smelly, rotten and ripe. But this seed is simply busting with potential.
This is an outrageous idea as the platform for this seed is not a beautiful and majestic social structure at all. It’s not a religious structure either – neither a political one. If anything the structure it is sown into and even the way it manifests in its structure is quite literally despicable (much like disgustingly filthy sand mixed with rotting, smelly refuse – decaying life and organic food scraps rejected and discarded from last night’s meal).
This seed, this idea, is inseminated into the stench of the dirt and some of it takes root and flourishes. Not all of it, mind you, only some of it. Most is trampled under foot by men or rejected – even stolen by birds or simply falls in strange, inhospitable places. But this is part of the calculated risk – no problem!
Well, it happened. The seed was sown. And yes, it was messy.
And the life it lives, it lives from the ground up, from the earth. From out of the stinky dirt it breaks out.
The ‘DNA’ of the seed is pre-determined, it needs no teacher, no supervisor, no controller and it doesn’t listen to the dirt around it. In fact when interference from such overseeing, meddling intruders comes along it only serves to block the flow and the natural growth processes.
These weeds block out the sun and drink all the water up, preventing the already dirty, smelly soil around them from decaying and thereby forming a conducive solution with the water to be absorbed and transformed into fuel for abundant life.
It’s these weeds which are the problem mostly. These weeds see things only from their own conceited perspectives. They, being aliens and hired hands, know only how to choke and even scorch the earth around them, poisoning it with their very presence so that they and they alone can thrive and that at the expense of the life around them. These weeds are in direct opposition to the seed and the sower of the seed (although they masquerade as friends and helpers and caregivers). These weeds make themselves look pretty and cover themselves with colourful coats. But these only hide the toxic intend that lurks beneath the extravagant linings. You see, pigs dressed in velvet are still pigs.
But the growing seeds also need to take responsibility and rise up. They need to stretch upwards and reach out for the sun. They need to respond to the voice of the DNA inside of them and not listen to the voices of the weeds who tell them what to think about themselves, what to do, how to do it, and why. The voices that confuse them, saying that they are only there to make the weeds look good.
The seeds need to become decisive, even opinionated about the life they see and feel cascading out of their veins bursting out of every pore on them. They need to open their own petals and make room for the voice of their own DNA – the sower of the seed – to fill the air with the fragrance of life and abundance.
So now it turns out that what the clever religious ones have done is that they have developed God’s idea by redesigning the condescension into a religious, socio-political structure where the equally dirty can rise to a position of superiority above the other dirties. This conveniently affords them the inalienable right, they tell us, to tell the other dirties how to get clean. However, the only way they can do this is not by also following the ways of the sower by going down below and beating dirt from the bottom of the sand pit. They do it by magic. They get a scientific qualification, frame it, and hang it on their wall. The title on the wall reads in extravagant, bold calligraphy, “QUALIFIED PASTOR” and they usually roll this up when leaving their study – sort of in a rolled up form of a common magicians wand. They step out boldly, flapping and swishing it about like a frenzied conjurer looking much like Don Quixote’s windmills. “In Jesus’ Name!!” they cry aloud!
This magical “alakazam!” they believe, bewitchingly entitles them to speak with an authority over the rest and hold onto centre stage and the all-powerful podium. That ultimate qualifier of all things spiritual in their religious economy. Not anybody is allowed to take hold of the bewitching podium, mind you. In fact this magical space is reserved exclusively for the physically qualified elite and only those whom they deem worthy to speak over the dirt, and about the dirt on the dirty.
Sadly we have believed it as well mostly.
However, the whole idea that God had in the first place was that the dirty seeds would discover that from the inside they have been, and are being cleaned and transformed and that the dirt around them, as smelly and putrid as it is, is actually the intended seedbed that they were always meant to be rising up out of. That they are seeds with a vibrant variety within them, that they are planted to display this according to the sowers unique DNA within each individual seed, until they all together make up an explosive, radiant, vibrant, aroma-filled jungle of life and staggering beauty. That each voice, fragrance, blaze of colour be heard, felt, seen, smelt. That the sound and presence of the toxic weeds is irrelevant, pitiful, fit only to be rejected and flung into the fire. That the seeds would grow up and displace the weeds and cause them to naturally choke in their own vomit.
And now, now it is time. It is time for the seeds to realise that this all was intended to cause the dry, rotten bones, once merged with the disgustingly smelly and offensive soil, to begin vibrating and quivering and begin to clatter and clang together again, and for the decayed sinews and flesh once long dead, to mysteriously start coming together and twang and snap back together almost elastically, causing the whole body to rise up, take form and start moving, walking, running, even dancing.
Man alive!! … this will top and overshadow any Stephen King horror movie scene.
So, will those standing please take a stand!!
