A Rest

I keep waffling about what to do with blogging and have decided I simply need to walk away from it for a little while.

I’ll check in on your blogs periodically.

My Interests

I’ve been trying to work through how best to approach future blogging efforts.

These are the five topics I imagine I’ll be most interested in 2010:

1. Integral Life
2. Female Spirituality
3. Education
4. Sustainability
5. Well-Being

Or, more specifically…

Spirituality

• ACIM
• Integral Life Practice
• Mysticism
• Christianity
• History of Methodism
• John Wesley, who is one of the few founders of a church (Methodists) who is also a mystic.  I think the only other Mystic was George Fox – founder of the Society of Friends.

(OK – wondering what happened to feminine spirituality?  I need to get some specific goals to make that happen!  Every year I say I’m going to learn more about feminine spirituality and somehow I stay entrenched in male spirituality.)

Education

–Homeschooling

• Biology
• Algebra
• History of Science
• Environmental Studies
• English
• Geography

–Autodidactic Enterprises (which tie into Spirituality):

• Robert Solomon: The Passions
• Dreyfus’s Berkley webcast on Heidegger
• Learning Company: Emerson, Thoreau and the Transcendentalists
• Ongoing studies in mysticism
• Cognitive Psychology on Happiness (which ties into Robert Solomon’s Passions)
• Film (I’d love to make my way through all of Ingmar Bergman’s films and then start on Woody Allen)

Sustainability

• Gardening
• Bicycling (which fits in with well-being)
• Whole Foods (No GMOs, eating locally, without packaging, etc.)
• Changing Family Habits

Well-Being

• Weight Loss
• Beginning Tai Chi
• Cooking
• Dr. Weil’s Optimum Health Program
• Psychology
• Gratitude
• Pescetarianism

To me, all of this fits in perfectly, together.  But it’s way too many interests for one, single blog.  So how do I break it up appropriately?

New Blog(s) for the New Year?

Hope everyone had a Merry Christmas!!

Our little family celebrated Christmas Day alone this year, although we were able to visit both sides of the family the week before Christmas, which was very nice.

We made a Tofurkey for Christmas which was actually quite good.  Goes to prove I’ve been away from meat long enough to appreciate a tofu substitute because I remember being totally disgusted by Tofurkey when first I ate it at a vegetarian friends house for Thanksgiving many years ago.  Either they have improved upon the taste, or my taste buds have totally changed.   I made a real turkey and stuffing dish just for my son who is the only meat eater left in our family.   He turned his nose up at the Tofurkey.  Maybe next year. 

I’m playing with creating a new blog.  Yes, again!!!  I get frustrated with Blogger and WordPress.com because both are so limited in terms of what you can do with them.  But I’m scared to death to host my own blog, again.  That was completely disastrous!!  I had 4 years worth of blog posts and somehow, both the actual file and the back-up file became corrupted.  I suppose if I knew someone who was website saavy, they could have recreated my blog for me.  But I don’t so I had to recreate it as best I could by hand.  I lost 100s of posts and the majority of the comments.  So, although self-hosting remains somewhat tempting, I really don’t want to risk going through something like that again.  Plus, now that I’m homeschooling, I don’t have the time for the learning curve.

But!  I discovered a really decent alternative.  Typepad has virtually recreated itself!  It has lots of new themes, free domain mapping, and also provides a free blogging format (the micro-blog).  So I’m half-way toying with moving to Typepad.  I won’t move this blog.  I’ll leave it here at mystikos.wordpress.com.  But I think I want to take my domain name with me.  I like it. 

So, if at some point in the near future you are unable to connect with this blog, it’s because I decided to steal the domain name from it.  It should be reconnected soon.  All links to arulba.com will resume.  But links to specific posts on Mystikos will not unless you used mystikos.wordpress.com.

Signs

I LOVE this short film!  My husband and I will have been married 19 years in February – together 21 years.  So I don’t quite relate to the whole dating scene anymore.   But I’ve watched my son navigate his way through it so could really feel for the young people in this video!!  It’s wonderful.

Cosmos: A Personal Voyage

My daughter and I just finished the entire series of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos.  It’s one of those series available at the library that you have to wait forever to get.  And no wonder!  It’s excellent.

For high school transcript purposes, we have to come up with various courses so my daughter and I decided to create a course called “The History of Science”.  The Cosmos series kicked it off and was a better choice than either of us had imagined. The series covered a multitude of scientific topics along with their historic origins.

I can see why people who watched this series became atheists.  Sagan has an obvious love of the earth and believes strongly that had science been allowed to continue without interruption from religion back in the Middle Ages, we’d have a much better world today.   He says that, through science, “We are a way for the Cosmos to know itself.”

He’s got a point.  The Christian religion tends to be focused on that which is otherwordly rather than the world we inhabit.  Do the right thing and you get to go to heaven, wherever that is.  So why care about this world?  Now we have all of this technological capability thanks to science, but we still don’t have much regard for the Earth.  Things are absolutely crazy!   We eat an apple, but are we eating an apple, or a notion of an apple?  And what does that notion of an apple do to us?  Is genetically modifying our food a way for the Cosmos to know itself?  It seems to me it’s just the opposite!

Sagan’s main concern was nuclear war, because this show was filmed during the Cold War.  But he was also very concerned about Global Warming.  What I think he wanted his series to do was to put people in awe of the world around them, and to recognize how unique life on our planet is.  If we could just understand how amazing and irreplaceable humanity is, perhaps we wouldn’t be so hell bent on self-destruction.

I wonder, have things gotten better or worse since Cosmos was first filmed?  Most of us see ourselves as a global community, now.  But there are still a lot of bumper stickers on the road that say something along the lines of “In case of rapture, this car will be unmanned”.  Original sin is still built into the fabric of our understanding, be we religious or not.  And despite the consensus among scientists, the media and general public still resist the claims that the world is warming.  Or if they agree that it is warming, they excuse our bad habits and blame it on nature.

Anyway, excellent series.  My daughter really liked Carl Sagan and his approach to science.  The other night, she was having trouble sleeping and said she wanted to watch another episode of Cosmos!  (No – not because it would put her to sleep, but because she genuinely enjoyed the series.)  We both got a lot of out of it.

Tales from Outer Suburbia

My daughter and I worked our way through Tales from Outer Suburbia thanks to a recommendation from Kristen.  I’m very sad to have all of the stories in the book because now I have to give it back to the library!

The first story I read, of course, was the first story in the book:  “The Water Buffalo”.  At first, I didn’t get it at all.  I read it several times and then one, night, I had a dream, and woke up realizing that the water buffalo is the wilderness that still exists in suburbia.

The water buffalo lives in the vacant lot at the end of a suburban street – the lot with all of the grass growing on it.  If a kid would ask the water buffalo for advice, the buffalo would answer, but only by pointing in a particular direction.  He offered no particulars.  The older the suburban kids became, the more they wanted the particulars, and so they quit visiting the buffalo.  The water buffalo eventually left.  Which was a shame, really, because every time the kids did follow the buffalo’s advice, they were surprised and delighted with what they found.

Here you are in suburbia, where everything is always explained in detail.  No mystery is left unsolved.  And if you do happen upon a mystery, there are plenty of anti-anxiety meds available to help you steer clear from the anxiety of the unknown.  The water buffalo, for me, represents the wilderness of subconscious knowing.  It’s that part of us that can be trusted, but that we tend to disregard because it doesn’t provide the security suburbia and modern life demands.

Or imagine the government has asked you to keep a missile in your back yard and tells you to be alert, but not alarmed.  These rockets take up huge amounts of your back yard. Is it any wonder that kids turn them into play houses, birds into bird houses and that adults decorate them?   Of course, these alterations to the rockets may render them useless.  But how useful are they in the first place?

Or what if you took the idea of the standard holiday where people are given the gifts they want and turned it into a holiday, a nameless one, where people sacrifice the things they love?

Amazon says this book is for preschool and elementary school aged children.  While young children might enjoy these stories, I have a difficult time thinking they would understand them. The Tales from Outer Suburbia are clearly for teens and adults who at least have some literary and political savvy.

Shaun Tan grew up in Perth, Australia.  He claims Ray Bradbury was his favorite author in his pre-teen years.  That was true for me, too.  I was constantly getting caught reading Bradbury stories under my desk.  My mother caught me with I Sing the Body Electric under my covers, and thought it was a dirty book.  I got in tons of trouble for reading Bradbury!

These sorts of tales (fantasy) are among my all-time favorite.  Now 9th graders are forced to read Bradbury so sneaking him under you desk is no longer as necessary as it once was. I wonder how many kids read Tan on the sly?

God on Trial

Have you seen God on Trial? It’s fantastic.  I’ve watched it at least four times now and have tried to capture the major arguments…

There is a legend that God was put on trial by a group of prisoners at Auschwitz. The people involved in the trial were from all walks of life: a criminal lawyer, a law professor, various professors of other disciplines, a glove maker, a rabbi thought to be a saint, many other rabbis, a physicist and other scientists, Torah scholars, college students,  They are observant Jews, nominally observant, atheists, agnostics, etc.  They run the gamut.

The prisoners decide to put God on trial after a “selection” has taken place.  The prisoners know that many of them (the selected) will be killed the next day.  They are trying to make sense of their excruciating suffering.

God is charged with breech of contract.  The Jews have an agreement with God and God broke the deal.  In the desert, Moses made a covenant with God.  He said the people would obey God’s law, and God said for this obedience, the Jews would be his own chosen people.  “No enemy shall be able to outwit him, no wicked man overcome him, I shall crush his enemies before him and strike his opponents dead.”

Those in defense of God say that the prisoners are being tested by God and that they must pass their test.  Before they blame God, the Jews should look at themselves.  Perhaps it isn’t God who has broken the covenant but the Jews.  “Because of our sins.” It is in the covenant that God reserves the right to punish the wicked.

But why did he choose to punish good, obedient people rather than Hitler?  In law, the punishment has to be proportionate to the crime.  What crime can justify the sort of punishment the prisoners are experiencing?  What punishment does the innocent child who is sent to the gas chamber deserve?

In defense:  The mistake is to make it personal.  God does not act against the individual.  His covenant is with the entirety of the Jewish people.

But what use is a God who is not personal?  A God like that is nothing more than weather.

In defense:  Put aside the idea of punishment.  Instead, think of God as a surgeon who has to remove the entire leg to get rid of the gangrene.  It isn’t personal, it is a purification.

But is this purification in the covenant?

In defense:  The first purification was the flood, the second the destruction of the temple by Nebucadnezar when the Jews were driven into exile in Babylon.  The Jews took their knowledge of the Torah and the one almighty God out into the country.  If they had stayed as they were, they would have been a tribe in the desert, nothing more.  It was painful, but it was also beautiful.  What if some great good is to come of what the Holocaust prisoners are suffering?  Perhaps there is a reason why a good person is taken and not an evil man. The good person is a sacrifice.  A holocaust.  The suffering is therefore meaningful.  Man’s sacrifice is the most beautiful.  The suffering of the prisoners at Auschwitz is related to the story of Masada – rather than be taken as slaves, some of the best Jewish warriors decided they would rather be killed.  These Jews fled to Masada where the Romans surrounded them.  10 men were selected to kill the other men and one man to kill the last 10. After the 10 were killed, the last man killed himself.  Two Jewish women hid from the slaughter to tell the story.  The goal of the Romans was to take the Torah away from the Jews so they could be Romanized.  Today, the Jews and the Torah are still here, but the Romans are dust.  The conclusion:  Suffering is a privilege if it is part of God’s plan.  Those suffering are fortunate to be purifying the people through their pain.  People will die, the war will end.  But the Torah will live.

So suffering is God’s way?  Hitler is working for God?  Is that right?

It’s possible.  Going back to the gangrene metaphor.  You can hate the knife, but love the surgeon.

But if Hitler is doing God’s work, then logic says that to stand in Hitler’s way is to stand in God’s way. Is it wrong to take arms against Hitler?  Is that not insane?

In defense:  The fellow prisoner who has been put in Auschwitz because he is a criminal and has been placed in charge of keeping the other prisoners in line says he doesn’t know whether he will be killed or not.  But his sole criteria is to stay alive as long as he cans which means he has to please the people who can kill him.  He agrees that he is doing God’s work because if “the bastard” (the God of Abraham) gave a damn about the Jews, he wouldn’t have given the Jews to him.  He has no problem allowing others to die if it means a few more days for him.

So in the end, if the only people who survive are people like this criminal in command (the vicious, the cunning, the shameless, the pitiless), what kind of Israel would want these as their people?  And if God can do all things, why can’t he purify his people without gassing them.   If God is all powerful, then how can he be just?  Either he is all-powerful, or he is just.  He can’t be both.

In defense:  The answer is free will.  There is always a choice.

Free will?  What about the Jewish father who is forced to choose which child will be killed or which one will get to live?  The father doesn’t want free will.  He wants his sons.  Where was his will when he was forced to choose between the lives of his children?  What choice did he have?  The officer who forced the choice had free will.  Not the Jewish father.

In defense:  The war will end.  Hitler will die.  The people and the Torah will survive.  And the father would like to believe it is somehow beautiful.  Even though the father doesn’t understand him, he knows God is here.  Maybe God is being gassed,  Maybe God is suffering with them?

But who needs a God that suffers?  They need a God who sends the enemy of death.

Defense:  Maybe God is not all powerful.  Maybe God needs us to be all powerful.  You can ask,
“where does all the evil come from”, but where does all the goodness come from? Job 38:12.  “Have you ever given orders to the morning? Or told dawn it’s place that it might take the earth by the edges and shake the wicked out of it?”

But God is guilty because in the covenant, he assures the survival of the people, but the survival of the people is no longer certain.  The Physicist among them tells them there are 100 thousand-million stars in our galaxy alone.  And God’s whole attention is focused on one little planet?  And not just on one little planet, but just on the Jews?  This God signed a contract just with the Jews?  And not all of the Jews, because certain Jews don’t count.  If he loved the Jews so much, why did he make so much besides the Jews?  The Jews come along and claim there is only one God.  They create a society in which all the powers are created in the hands of one king.  It’s an efficient society and it helps them to believe God loves them more than anyone else.  But then the Christians come along with a better idea.  Yes, there is only one God, but he loves everyone, not just the Jews.  People convert.  They conquer everyone.  One cult, one king.  It’s all about power and struggle.  Now Hitler has a better idea.  There is one God, and it is Hitler.

Defense:  Where does it get you to deny God?  What do you gain by denying God?  Those who claim they see a truth that those who believe in God do not see, what does it get them?  They end up in the same place as everyone else.  They are no better.   Even if God doesn’t exist, don’t let the Nazi’s take away your God.  He’s your God,  It’s your covenant.  Don’t let them take that away from you.

But be realistic.  The punishment that God laid upon the innocent – the children of Egyptian slaves during the plague, etc. were every bit as gruesome as what the Jews are suffering now.  God has never been good.  He’s only been on our side.  Why did he flood the earth?  What could human beings have done that was worthy of such a horrible punishment.  On the belts of the Nazi’s is written, “God is with us.”  So whose side is God on?  God has made a new covenant with someone else.

Where do you go with this?

At the end of the trial, God is found guilty.  The response?  Prayer.

And yet, good “exists”.  A father sacrifices himself for the life of his grown son and when his grown son realizes it, tries to sacrifice his life for that of his father’s.  A mother starves in order to feed her child.  We experience good, whether God exists or not.  And if he does exist, then good “exists” whether God is good or not.

So was their prayer answered?  The Jews are still here.  The Torah is still here.

Bouree

Because I can’t get this song out of my head lately…

This Ancient Love by Carolyn McDade

The choir sang this at church the other day and I thought the words (and the music) were absolutely beautiful…

Long before the night was born from darkness
Long before the dawn rolled unsteady from the fire
Long before she wrapped her scarlet arm around the hills
there was a love

this ancient love was born

Long before the grass spotten green the bare hillside
Long before a wing unfolded to wind
Long before she wrapped her long blue arm around the sea
there was a love

this ancient love was born

Long before a chain was forged from the hillside
Long before a voice uttered freedom’s cry
Long before She wrapped her bleeding arms around a child
there was a love

this ancient love was born

Long before the name of G-d was spoken
Long before a cross was nailed from a tree
Long before She laid her arm of colors ‘cross the sky
there was a love

this ancient love was born

Wakeful our night, slumber our morn
Stubborn the grass growing wooded lot
As we wrap our healing arms to hold
what her arms held

this ancient love, this aching love

rolls on

The “Bible in Five Statements” Meme

I was tagged by Kay who was tagged by Eileen who was tagged by Carl McColman

Summarize the Bible in five statements (fifteen words).  The first statement – one word long, the second two, the third three, the fourth four and the last five words long. Or possibly you could do this in descending order. Tag five people.

Challenging.
Good news.
Not journalistic fact.
Humanity’s understanding of God.
Protect the widowed, orphaned, poor.

I tag Kristen, Ben, Lindsay, Naked Pastor, and Dr. Beck.