Not for Sissies

When I was in college, around my second year, I didn’t really know what I wanted to pursue. I was a re-entry student. That means that I was in college right after high school, like most folks, and then I quit for a few years. I was offered a good job, or so I thought, at my tender age, as assistant manager for a dime store, at a salary that rivaled my father’s. I was engaged to be married, so I thought it would be a good idea to choose making money instead of earning a degree. Besides, I was bored with school. So worked hard and built a life with my wife and kids. I worked hard and became a manager in a couple of years. I went from managing a small store to a larger one, and then to a larger one.

Then, disaster struck. I injured my back. The company fired me almost immediately. And it wasn’t long before my wife asked me to leave the house. Things were pretty bad. After a time, when my disability insurance ran out, it became clear I would have to go out and find another job. So I went to work for Bank of America, and went back to school at night. But I had no idea what career path to follow. I remember chatting with my typing instructor at school and mentioning that I didn’t know what I should study. He suggested that I should go into journalism, since I was so good at typing. I couldn’t help but find that an odd thought. Fast typing made me a good candidate for journalism.

Well, I enjoyed my typing class. I was good at typing. I was fast and I made few errors. That was probably because I had plenty of time to practice in those days. I really didn’t have any special talent for typing. I just had a lot of time, so I spent a lot of time practicing at school. There was nothing magic about it. I’m still pretty good at it. And I have to say that it was one of the best classes I ever had. I can honestly say I learned a lot about how to use a typewriter and how to format various documents. Of course, most of that is obsolete now, since the advent of word processing.

In the movie, Iron and Silk (which I strongly recommend), a young English teacher is talking to one of his Chinese students about what he really wants in his life. He says that he really wants to be good at something. All his life he had been mediocre in all he tried to do. His student tells him, “But that is really simple. All you have to do is to work hard.” And that is really the truth, isn’t it? There’s no special magic. It doesn’t require any special talent. You just have to work hard.

People often tell me, after hearing me play guitar, that they wish they could play as well as I do. I tell them they can. All they have to do is practice for a long time. I’ve been playing almost forty years. It just takes practice, time, and determination. One time, after having been on a diet for a few weeks and having lost nearly 100 pounds, a woman who had not seen me in awhile asked me how I had lost so much week. I told her that it was simple. I simply counted my calories and exercised every day. You should have seen her face fall. I guess she was hoping that I would give her some secret magical method of weight loss that would enable her to lose a lot of weight without having to do anything special. But there is no such thing. It all requires hard work.

I think a lot of people think of religion the same way. They practice it that way, too. They go to church every week. They say the required prayers. They observe the holidays. They do everything they are supposed to do. But that doesn’t make them spiritual. That just makes them churchgoers. They have their children baptized. They send them to Sunday school, or even spend the money to provide a religious education. They get married in the church and when they die, they have a priest or minister say a few words over them before they are consigned to eternity. But in spite of all that, God, or whatever you want to call that power, has no real part of their lives.

They go to work each day where they screw people over. They walk past homeless people and even complain about the lazy bums who ought to get off their asses and get jobs. They have little or no sympathy for unwed mothers and drug addicts and declare that they made their beds, now they must lie in them. They cheat on their taxes and complain about corruption in high places. They cheat on their spouses, and then they preach that allowing homosexuals to marry threatens the sanctity of marriage. They go to church and talk about love and then bomb abortion clinics.

And when they pray, if they pray, they ask God to do them some special favors. Maybe S/He could help their basketball team win the championship. Perhaps God could get convince the boss into giving out with a raise, or provide good weather for the picnic this Sunday, or provide some assistance in passing that big exam. Mostly, when times are good, they don’t pray at all. But when times are bad, when somebody is sick, or in danger, when human solutions seem out of the question, they turn to God. Then they bargain. Just makes things better, Lord, and I promise to go to church every week. For these folks, God is sort of like some great concierge in the sky.

This was the type of God in which those people back in first century Judea believed. They believed in a God that gave a long list of rules to follow and rituals to perform. Each part of life was ruled by laws and rituals. And you better do everything just right. Otherwise, God might get pissed off and you’d be punished. Because God was up there, right there in His heaven, just waiting for you to fuck up, and when you did, He’d be ready to open a whole big can of whoop ass on your soul. God was up there, all right, watching every single thing you did.

Then Jesus came along and said that we needed to change our way of thinking, to change our way of seeing the world, and God. He said that God loves us and wants to take care of us. He said it was the very nature of God to take care of us. We didn’t have to talk God into doing what was God’s nature to do. He told us we were all a part of that divine spirit and that we could let go of our fears and worries. He said the more we reach out to one another and comfort one another, the more connected to that divine spirit of love we were. That was what faith requires. It requires us to act on that belief in a loving God and reach out to one another, to serve one another. To help one another on that life journey we all make.

A lot of people believed him, and they took his message out to the world after Jesus died. They set up churches, small communities of believers. And it wasn’t long before those churches fell into the same habits as all those who came before. And that was because most people didn’t hear the whole message. They heard the part about heaven and eternal life and happiness forever. They didn’t hear the part about taking care of one another and loving one another. And Jesus must have seen this coming, because at the end of that Sermon on the Mount, in The Gospel According to Matthew (chapters 5-7), he says:

“Take care to stay away from religious imposters. They wear sheep’s skin, but underneath is a ravenous wolf. You will know them by their fruits. Do you pick grapes from thorn bushes or figs from thistles? Just so, good trees grow beautiful, good fruit: bad trees grow hurtful fruit. Good trees do not grow hurtful fruit and bad trees don’t grow good fruit. Every tree that doesn’t make good fruit is cut down and thrown in the fire. So by their fruits, you will perceive them.

Not all who say to me master, master will enter into the kingdom of heaven (literally, the sky), but those who do the will of my father in heaven. On that day many will say, “Master, did we not make prophesies in your name and cast out demons in your name and make miracles in your name?” And at that time I will declare, “Go away from me, you workers of lawlessness!”

Everyone who hears my words and acts on them is like a wise man who builds his house on rock. The rains came and the rivers came and the winds came and fell upon the house, but it did not fall because its foundation was upon the rock. And everyone who hears my words and does not act on them is like the stupid man who built his house on sand. The rains came and the rivers came and the winds came and great was the fall of that house.”

There isn’t much difference today between the church, any of the churches, and the temple leaders back in the first century Jerusalem. They’re still giving us lots of rules and rituals. And most people want nothing more than to follow them. It’s easier that way. They don’t have to think. And they don’t really have to do anything that is too uncomfortable, like talking to homeless people, or visiting sick people in hospitals and nursing homes. All they have to do is go to church and say a few words and drop some money in the collection plate. Jesus said there would be a lot of people claiming to be his followers, people who claimed to be holy, but wouldn’t understand shit about God. And he said we would know them by the things they did, or didn’t do.

Consider, for example, the matter of weight loss. Most people don’t want to eat healthy. They want to find a way to lose a bunch of weight so they can look good, and then go back to eating crap again. And they don’t seem to realize that after they do go back to eating crap, they will just get fat again. Shouldn’t life be about eating healthy to start with? Then the weight issue will take care of itself. But that isn’t what we want. We want a quick and easy solution. We want a pill that will make us lose weight so we can eat whatever we want.

People feel the same way about God. They don’t really want to be connected to God unless something is wrong. Then they want God to fix things. Oh, they want to go to heaven. They are very concerned that if they don’t do everything right, they won’t get to go to heaven. And they are quick to point out that a lot of other people won’t be going to heaven, people like gays, and drug addicts, and liberals. That’s why they go to church. That’s why they go to confession (if they are Catholics).

But it isn’t supposed to be about going to heaven. Heaven was not a new idea to those first century Jews. They already believed in an afterlife. They believed in an eventual resurrection. It is about finding your way to God, or, to be more accurate, to recognize that you are already with God. Jesus was just telling a lot of worried, anxious, frightened people that they didn’t need to feel that way. Jesus was just telling us that God is. God is, whether we accept it or not. If you know the parachute will open, it shouldn’t be scary to jump out of the airplane. There is no need to be afraid. God will take care of you. And when it comes to an afterlife, God isn’t up there trying to keep people out of heaven, whatever heaven might be. As the writer of John put it, God did not send Jesus into the world to condemn us.

Jesus says right there at the end of his sermon that you don’t connect with God by making miracles or praying or trying to be some kind of holy Joe. You connect to God by doing those things that are Godly. That is, you do what God does. You take care of people. You comfort the sorrowful. You feed the hungry. You spread peace and love. It isn’t at all about following rules. When that young rich dude asked Jesus was to do to have eternal life, Jesus answered to observe all the commandments. That young man said he had always done so. Then Jesus said to leave behind his wealth and follow him. And that was too much to ask. That required real work.

If your faith is build upon the idea of some kind of fairy-tale God that sits up in heaven and listens to requests, then your faith is bound to fail. Because you will ask for shit and you won’t get it. You will follow all those commandments and bad things will still happen to you and the people you love. You will ask God to heal someone you love and they will die anyway. And when all that happens, your faith will fall apart. You will have built your faith on sand, and life will wash it away, until all you have left are those rules and rituals, empty and meaningless.

But if your faith is based upon the teachings of Christ, on reaching out to those in need, on trying to be the hands of God here in the world, then your faith will grow and be strong. Jesus never promised that bad things would not happen to those who followed him, just the opposite. What Jesus promised was that you would have what you need when you need it. He said you don’t have to be afraid of anything, not even dying. And you don’t have to do anything at all to earn the love of God because it is God’s nature to love you. You are a part of the divine spirit. Everybody is.

So when you look for a church, don’t look for the place where they say all the right things because that’s all bullshit. Miracles, healings, it’s all bullshit. Look for the place where people are doing things. Look for the people who are making things better, trying to lighten the loads of people who are burdened. That’s who you will know they are followers of the teachings of Jesus. You know the tree by its fruit. And remember that a church is just a group of people. If you believe there is a God of some kind, really believe, then you don’t just go to church on Sundays, and figure you’ve fulfilled some kind of obligation. If you believe there is a God of some kind, then that God is a part of you every hour of every day, every moment now and forever. Going to church is just one way of bringing everything back into focus, back to center.

Just like anything else in life, faith takes work, hard work. Faith requires taking chances. Faith requires stepping out of your comfort zone. Faith doesn’t change reality. It just helps you deal with it better. Faith doesn’t get rid of the things that worry you. It just helps you not worry so much. I learned long ago that the best way to learn something is to teach it. I have also found that the best way to find comfort is to comfort others. It all requires work and practice and patience, and time. But then, nobody said it was easy. If they did, they were lying. Faith is not for sissies.