Regrets

Come on over by the fire and sit down. We resume the story, the Story of God. You might think this is about us, about the two-leggeds of the earth. This is the way we are. We always think it's about us. No, no. This is about God.

After Eden, the man and the woman went out and multiplied and divided, became numerous. Time went by. The story says that God "saw that the wickedness of man was great on the earth, and that the thoughts in his heart fashioned nothing but wickedness all day long" and that he "regretted having made man on the earth, and his heart grieved."

He decided to kill them all, wipe them out, murder them, man, woman, and child. Drown them. While he was at it, he decided to kill the "animals also, reptiles too, and the birds of heaven." Once again, the sea creatures are not mentioned. They are not targeted. Drowning would not affect them.

You know the story. This happens more than once with God. One man is seen as worthy. Only one. He and God walked and talked together. Buddies. The man's name was Noah and Noah was "a man of integrity." What does that mean? Integral. A man of interflow, able to relate to all with no barrier while keeping his core, his center. Noah sat in the seat at the center of his soul. He radiated outward from there.

So listen up, children. If you don't want to piss God off, grieve his heart, make him regret that you were born, do likewise. Be a person of integrity. No separate compartments that ulcerate, stagnate, fill with puss. Sit in the seat at the center of your soul. At your core. And open outward. Like the sun. Shining your light on all that is.

And God will float your boat.

But everything about you that is puss-y, is mean-hearted, is separated in greed and anger and just plain ignore-ance will be destroyed. Drowned.

It's just the way it is. God wants it this way.

But God doesn't do right either. He has shown his anger once before, back in the garden of Eden. He cursed the man and woman, kicked them out. Now he is going for murder. Wholesale slaughter.

I know. I know. We are not to sit in judgment on each other or on God. I'm just telling you what the Story says that has been passed down since forever. God repented of having made his creation and wiped it out. Except for one man and his household and the creatures they saved.

Stir up the fire there a little. It's getting cold.

The Story Teller

Lean and strong, chocolate skin, with deeply lined face etched from decades of watchful and active living on the plains, tall with splayed feet from miles of territory covered each day in his ministrations to his tribe, his group, his people, the Story Teller sat at the nightly fire, his cape of warmth slung loosely on his shoulders, his staff bespeaking his status resting angled from the earth to the crook of his shoulder ready for his grasp now and then to make a point. I saw him, felt his presence, heard him speak as I began to read (and hear!) his accounting of the story of Creation in the first three chapters of Genesis. A surprise. Yet he was there each morning of my reading and my writing. He is here now smiling approvingly of my announcing of his presence, his life, his art. Story Teller: shaper of the consciousness of his people.

Note to the Reader

Though I know there is and has been for some time strong movement to renounce patriarchy in any form (I was the only male member of a group of women in 1964 who met regularly to discuss Betty Friedan's "The Feminine Mystique" and its application to American society beginning with our immediate surrounds), and though I love and appreciate the appellations of Mother, GrandMother, She Who Is, and Goddess, confronted with the only choices (in English) of she, he, and it to refer to God, I choose "he." In the past I have experimented with s/he, which quickly gets awkward, especially when moving from subject to object (her/him).  To me, our Source, the Wellspring, is beyond all gender. Our Source is neither he, she, nor it while encompassing all three. I have no gender axe to grind here. 

cast out

God now pronounces judgement and sentence on each of the trio that went against the rules that he set up. We do not know why he put the trees there if he did not want the man and the woman to touch them. We do not know the mind of God, the one who brings everything into being.

The story is so human though. And it is said that we ARE made in God's image, so we are easily led to interpret God's actions and emotions as similar to our own. Parents put things out of reach of their children and say do not touch them. The children will explore, however, and especially when reaching a certain age will seek out and experiment with whatever is there. What is forbidden becomes familiar.

God comes home and finds his liquor cabinet raided and his children drunk, their virginal consciousness irrevocably changed. What is he to do? He locks up his liquor and puts a guard on it, angels who never sleep with flaming swords. The message is clear. You two may have fallen into dualistic thinking but you are not going to gain access to the tree of life. No eternal life for you.

The man and the woman are banished from the garden. But first, God takes care of the serpent. The somewhat amicable relationship between the serpent and the woman is destroyed. They will now be enemies. The serpent now has to crawl on the ground and "eat dust" every day of its life. Its offspring and the woman's offspring will naturally look to harm and destroy each other.

The woman is next in line for judgment. Her punishment is twofold. God says her pains in childbirth will be increased. Plus "your yearning shall be for your husband, yet he will lord it over you." The gender battle begins.

The man no longer has easy pickings. Work is introduced. He can only get food from the soil through hard labor. This is a life sentence, says God. It will be so until the man returns to the soil from which he was made. "For dust you are and to dust you shall return."

Death now enters the garden. Up until now, no mention has been made of any animals being killed. It appears as if the man and the woman are vegetarians. Before they leave, God makes clothes for them "out of skins." Something has died so the man and woman can have protective clothing (the earth now has "brambles and thistles"). Fig leaves obviously won't do. The man and woman don the skins and step outside.

hiding out

The man and the woman, both as yet unnamed, were hiding from God. Their consciousness had changed. They had moved out of simplicity of flow into a rugged splitness. Their world had divided into the realms of good and evil. Their previous world was smooth. Now it was friction. They saw that parts of the world were against other parts. They had become like gods. Not as much fun as they perhaps thought.

They now saw themselves. Part of themselves stood aside and looked at the other part. They did not like what they saw.  Their genitalia were particularly disturbing. They decided to cover them over. When they did, they appeared less like the other animals and more like gods.

Judgment and blame also came into the world through their actions and through their new consciousness. They had already judged themselves as "wrong" by hiding. They had not done "right." They were convicted. The evidence was there: the fig leaf clothing, their new evasive manner. Hiding was not possible. Guilt must have also come into play. Judgment, blame, and guilt, the new world order.

They heard God coming. God called out to the man, "Where are you?" (God was either not omniscient at this point or was acting as if he was not.) The man said, "I heard you coming and I was afraid because I was naked, so I hid." (If the fig leaves had not already fallen away, the man was certainly naked to the gaze of God into his soul.)

God played the game on through. He asked two questions. "Who told you that you were naked?" "Have you been eating the tree fruit I told you not to eat?"

Now blame is born. The man says "the woman gave me the fruit and I ate it." Which was true, but did not answer God's two questions. The man did not say, "Yes. I ate it. And when I did I knew I was naked." The woman follows the same path. God turns to her and says, "What is this you have done?" She blames the serpent. "The serpent tempted me and I ate."

Both of them are telling the truth. But perhaps because they had very little experience at being an "I," a separated entity, an encapsulation, they did not know how to say "I" did it. In any event, from the viewpoint of an "I," they pointed the finger and cast blame elsewhere.

the serpent asks a question

Our storyteller comes back with a third story.

If you remember, the garden that God created had a relatively small cast of characters. We are told of the man, the woman, the cattle, the birds, the wild beasts, and of course God. One of the wild creatures, the serpent, was "the most subtle of all the wild beasts that Yahweh God had made." It could reason and it could talk.

So far in the story, only God and the man have talked. Now comes a conversation between the serpent and the woman. Rather than making a statement, the serpent asks a question. A statement does not necessarily require an answer. It can be ignored, left standing there all alone. But a question insinuates itself into the mind, requires an answer, gets thinking going. The one questioned is now in movement and more easily unbalanced.

The question implies doubt from the start. "Did God REALLY say…?" (Did God really say that to you? I can't believe he really said that!) It then follows through with false information requiring clarification from the woman. It has a hook. Are you "not to eat from ANY of the trees in the garden?"

The woman is now put in the position of being (supposedly) wiser than the serpent. She hastens to educate him. No, no, we may eat the fruit of the trees in the garden. It's just the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden that we are not supposed to eat or to touch or we will die.

The serpent says, Nah, that's not true. God has told you a lie. God knows that if you eat fruit from that tree, your consciousness will expand, your eyes will be opened. You will be like gods yourselves. You will know the difference between good and evil.

The woman thought that was a pretty good thing. She found the fruit was good to eat so she shared it with the man. Bam! They became self-conscious, especially of their genitals, so they made themselves loin cloths and hid from God.

the second story

In this second story of creation, we zoom in for a finer look at God's creative process. Nothing was growing on the earth nor was there any rain. An irrigation system was in place: water was rising up out of the earth and flowing over its surface.

God is not saying anything is good. He is at work. He takes some "dust" and molds a man. Perhaps a mud man. God then breathes life into the man by exhaling into his nostrils. The man is put aside for the moment while God plants a garden of fruit trees. The garden has a river running through it for the convenience and necessity of watering the trees.

In the middle of the garden, God plants two trees: one is the tree of life, the other is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. These are the trees of forbidden fruit.

God puts the man in the garden and tells him to take care of it. But he says, see those two trees? Don't eat their fruit or you will die. Why did God make those two trees? What was their purpose? Did someone other than man eat their fruit? If so, who? Such questions appear beside the point, the point being that man was NOT to eat from them. This is the first NO in the cosmos. When God made the two trees of forbidden fruit, right and wrong were born. Morality came into existence.

At this point, other than the trees and God, the man is the only living being. God thinks it is not good for the man to be alone (How does God know this? Because he has been alone himself?) so he creates animals and birds. No mention is made of fish or sea creatures. This is an inland project.

The first roundup begins, complete with branding. God tells the man to name all the creatures ("all the cattle, all the birds of heaven and all the wild beasts"). And the man does. But nowhere amongst them was found "a suitable helpmate" for the man.  None of them did the trick.

God had an idea. The first surgery was performed, complete with anesthesia. God put the man in a deep sleep, removed one of his ribs, and made a woman. When the man woke up, God said, look what I have for you.

The man was so happy, he sang a little song.

"This at last is bone from my bones,
and flesh from my flesh!
This is to be called woman,
for this was taken from man."

The story teller, who we may forget exists, cannot resist adding a little aside here to educate the listeners. "This is why a man leaves his father and mother and joins himself to his wife, and they become one body."

The story teller adds one more tidbit of information before completing this part of the story. Both the man and his wife were naked but they felt no shame. Self-consciousness had not entered the picture.

the power of story

Let's pause a moment in our story. What is a story? We may think of a story as a flight of the imagination, that we (or someone) makes up. Consider the obverse: stories make us up. Stories create who we are.

You have your story. Your story of where you came from, of who you are, of where you are going. Yes, you say, but my story is real and true. It is not just a story. And here it is once again, the eternal bifurcation. Your story is real and true. Mine is suspect. Our story is real and true. Theirs is suspect.

You object. "My story is backed by data. I can prove it." Yes. You can prove it to your satisfaction (or it would not be your story). But you may not be able to prove it to someone else's satisfaction. That does not matter, you say. It is my story and I experience it as real. Exactly my point.

The story we experience as real creates who we are. Our story makes us up.

The story we tell ourselves is who we are.

Each of us has the power of changing our stories, of transforming who we are. The story we told ourselves at age 10 is probably not the story we tell ourselves now.

Some of us change our meta-stories, the large stories of the origin of the cosmos and its unfolding. We shift from Christianity to Buddhism or from Vedanta to Wicca. We may change our story yet again. Many believe the Science story for its power in producing tools for transforming matter. Some on the Zen path believe in the story of No Story.

I remember changing my story. I opened beyond my birth family and the realm of small town society. In the cool night air by a running river, I claimed the Sun as my father and the Earth as my mother, the wild foxes, the trees, the planets, the galaxies as my siblings and my cousins. The story claimed me. My life transformed.

Now back to our story. The Story of God.

Interlude

"Stories are what the history not made of time is made of."
(John Crowley, The Solitudes)

When the story opens

When the story opens, only two characters are present: the story teller and God. The story teller begins telling of the beginning and God. Though I do not know the gender of the story teller, I will use the masculine form, he. If you wish to argue with me about that, step into that room over there. We can argue until the cows come home. Meanwhile, we go on with our story.

The story teller says that what is before the beginning is without form, formless, a void. Completely empty. He does not say where God comes from. The implication is that God comes from the formless, that God himself is formed.

(in later perusings and musings over this story, some call the formless the Godhead. I call it the Source or the Wellspring. But now we start to get into theology or story interpretation and I guarantee theology will make your head hurt, though it can also make your heart sing.)

God begins to make things. First he gives himself some light to work by. Next he clears some space, some working room, an "expanse." In doing so, the Earth and Seas and Sky were formed. Then, he creates vegetation ("seed-bearing plants of every kind" and fruit trees of every kind) and the sun and the moon (thus creating time). The light from the sun and the moon are different from the light that God gave himself.

God keeps nodding in satisfaction. After each thing he does, he sees that it is good.

He then creates the Sea creatures, the Sky creatures, and the Earth creatures. He is pleased.

The stage is set. Now he creates something he begins to regret. "And God created man in His image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them." This is the first version of the story. "Man" included both genders. This also implies that God is both genders.

He is not done yet. He blesses the man and woman with fertility and asks them to rule the beings of the Sea, the Sky, and the Earth. He asks them to be vegetarians. "See, I give you every seed-bearing plant that is upon the earth, and every tree that has seed-bearing fruit; they shall be yours for food." The beings from the three kingdoms are also "given plants for food."

Then God takes a break.

"Such is the story of heaven and earth when they were created," says the story teller.

This is the end of Story One. It is quickly followed by Story Two.

the story of how God changed

A story is the recounting of events that happened to real or imagined characters. The events unfold or evolve. In the story of God as represented in the Judeo-Christian Bible, God is the main character. The events that unfold in this story of God tell of God’s interactions with the Earth and with all its inhabitants, especially humans. This is the story of God with which I begin, the story of the evolution of God, how God changed over time. This is the story of God and how God changed.

At least two ways exist of understanding a story. One is the linear depiction of events. Here is how the story develops. Here is the beginning, the middle and the end. The other is a description of the patterns lying underneath the events. What do these recurrent themes of patterns tell us? My focus will primarily be upon the latter.

I will look at the patterns that occur in God’s relationship with humans -- with Adam and Eve, with Noah, with Moses, with Job. After that, I will look at God’s relationship with Jesus.

Interlude

The hermit crab 

is continuing

continuously 

outgrowing

its shell.

Belief, faith, and dogma

Imagine a chair. You are standing by the chair. You look at the chair. You believe the chair will hold your weight, will seat you without fail, will seat you comfortably though you may need to shift your position every once in a while. This is your belief. Nothing happens unless you try it out.

You sit in the chair. This is faith. You have faith that the chair will hold you. Faith is action. The chair holds you. You grow. The chair grows with you. You and the chair have melded. You do not know where you begin and the chair ends. Once two, you become seamless.

Now you start to believe that your chair is the only chair, that other people’s chairs are false, unreal. If they do not adopt your chair, they are doomed to a life of false chair. You have the exclusive seat. Other seats are seats of error. You have the true and only seat. This is dogma.

Any chair can become dogma. The theist chairs of various kinds and genders. The a-theist chairs, seats of no theism. The materialist chairs which seat those who say that only matter matters. The chair of being that says only just be. The chair of nonbeing which gives rise to all being. And so on. Many chairs.

Many chairs exist because many humans exist. Each human needs a chair that fits. Both chairs and humans evolve, grow over time. "When I understood as a child, I sat in a child’s seat, but as I grew, I put away childish things." This too can become dogma. Your seat is childish. Mine is mature.

A chair is a vehicle. Our transport. We believe in our transportation, have faith. We refuse to exist naked and open in the cosmos, with no bounds. We need a safe taxi. So we take it.

Interlude

God and I have become

Like two giant fat people

Living in a tiny boat.

We keep

Bumping into each other

And laughing.

-- Hafiz

The Beginning

In the familiar lull that comes between the writing of books, the inevitable and welcomed morning came. "Focus on the Book of John." I said okay. I began re-re-reading John, always my favorite book in the Bible. I read the Prologue, which starts with the familiar "In the beginning was the Word" and ends with verse 14, which starts out with "And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us." John then continues with the story of Jesus.

Some days went by, weeks. John sat quietly at the back of my mind, present but unfocused. Then, within a three day period, John began flooding in upon me from various sources. From Eriugena, that great scholar / mystic / teacher / theologian of the 9th century, a man who continues to be ahead of his time and even this time. From Jack Miles, a former Jesuit, and brilliant and articulate writer on God and on Christ. From the Book of John itself.

These early morning readings and understandings (I arise about 2 a.m. and read and listen and comprehend while the rest of the world around me is asleep; a magic time) led me to announce a public lecture on "The Story of God." Eight people came. We sat in a circle at the Human Nature Dance Theatre, a delightful environs where, among other things, tango is taught and practiced. I told the story of God. Or at least one version. I found I had too much material (laughing…. in retrospect, no surprise).

The audience was attentive and the phenomenon that shows that something real happened occurred: everyone stayed around and kept talking to each other and with me after the event was officially over. The remarks were positive. We will meet again for further story (and with anyone else who wishes to come.)

I will keep you posted on the Story of God with the aid of this blog. In fact, I will follow the format I followed on my previous books (Jesus and Lao Tzu: Adventures with the Tao Te Ching; The Hidden Words of the Living Jesus: A Commentary on the Gospel of Thomas) and my forthcoming book, Zen Baptist, and write the book "live" here on this blog.