There was a kind of community Christmas sing at the home of singer and songwriter Athena Burke Sunday afternoon, the Cambridge High School Drama club, past and present members sing Christmas songs for several hours. It was sweet, lovely music and sounds, and there was a very strong feeling of connection in the room.
Maria and I stayed for a couple of hours,and then went “Darkest Hour,” the Winston Churchill movie starring Gary Oldham. We both loved it. But the sing-in set the tone for the day, and for Christmas, the spirit was very strong in the room. Come and see some very genuine people sing from their hearts and souls, the singing brought a couple of people to tears.
It always seems curious to me that a Jew turned Quaker would write so much about the search for God, and the spirituality and compassion of Christ, but this is Christ eve, what better time?
I admire the true Christ about as much as a non-Christian could, and the thing about writing is that you never question what it is you want to write about, you just go for it.
I am reading a new and compelling book by a religious scholar named Reza Aslan, he writes about the history of God and human beings, and about the almost universal need of human beings to have a very human kind of God to worship, an idea that seems to help people find comfort and make sense of a chaotic world.
Aslan is an influential spiritual writer for me, his book The Life And Times Of Jesus Of Nazareth reinforced my idea of Jesus Christ as a political radical who passionately fought the rich and the powerful on behalf of the poor and he vulnerable. The real Jesus is almost the exact opposite of the way so many political and religious leaders portray him now and exploit him.
Like most people, I’ve often though about the idea of God. Does he or she exist?
And if so, in what form? I think I realized years ago that I would never have an answer in my lifetime, but the search for God is a spiritual goal in and of itself, and like most people, I think I will never stop looking.
The search is in itself nourishing and enriching.
The idea of God is a very individual and personal thing, and even thought many people try to push their idea of God down the throats of others, I am not comfortable with that.
You believe whatever you wish to believe and do me the honor of doing the same.
We all have our own idea of God, and no one else can tell me what he is or how I should interact with him.
The idea of a superhuman and all-seeing deity – Aslan calls it the “humanized God” – has been around as long as human beings could think or write or gather.
The idea of God led to our earliest theorizing about the nature of the universe, and the role of human beings in it. It offered the first notions of ethics and empathy known to people. It informed our first physical representations of the world beyond ours, and it also divided and inspired and terrified human beings.
Throughout human history, people needed to have God.
Even contemporary Jews, Christians and Muslims seem compelled, writes Aslan, to envision God in human form and speak of God in human terms. People humanize God in the very way that many animal lovers humanize dogs. Since we don’t ever really know what they are thinking, we assume they must be thinking what we are thinking.
We cast them – and God – in our own image, since we are not advanced enough to know how to do more.
“Studies performed by a range of psychologists and cognitive scientists have shown that the most devout believers,” writes Aslan, “when forced to communicate their thoughts about God, overwhelmingly treat God as though they were talking about some person they might have met on the street.”
Believers described God as good or loving, cruel or jealous, forgiving or kind, judgmental or empathetic. I never related to the Old Testament and Jewish idea of God, he struck me as an enraged avenger who slaughtered the first-born children of those who defied him, I could never see the justice or holiness in that.
There is an almost schizophrenic dichotomy in the way organized religion approaches the idea of God. This utterly superhuman and nonhuman force seems to trigger an almost existential need to project our humanity onto him – our capacity for love, our empathy and compassion, our violence and greed, our bias and bigotry, our ancient tendency to despoil the earth and conquer and kill one another.
But when we endow God with human attributes, writes Aslan, we essential “divinize” those attributes: every thing good or bad about our religion is merely a reflection of everything that is good or bad about us. Our actions become God’s actions, only without consequence. We seem to need to create a superhuman being endowed with human traits, but without human limitations.
If God is like us, we can justify anything we do in his hame.
This could explain why throughout human history, religion has been a force for boundless good as well as staggering evil and cruelty. Look at our world: the bloodshed caused by people who call themselves religious and act in the name of religion is impossible to even measure, let alone comprehend.
Every kind of greed, savagery and barbarity is evoked in the name of God, perhaps because it is so easy to see ourselves in the God we need.
People evoke the name of Christ or religion to justify their very human, non-divine desires, from the Inquisition to raging genocides to political campaigns. No wonder polls show the young as seeing religion as overrun with hypocrites.
God, he writes, should be pantheistic, not a literal manifestation of human beings and their emotions.
Pantheism is a doctrine that equates God with the forces and laws of the universe, it celebrates the worship of all gods of different creeds, cults or people. God is us, he or she is the universe. Panentheism, says Wickipedia, is the belief that the divine pervades every part of the universe and also extends beyond time and space.
These days, my faith centers around the teachings of the Kabbalah, the writings of unknown Jewish mystics dating back hundreds, even thousands of years. The God of the Kabbalah is pantheistic to me, he is a mystical mix of love and light and love.
He does not give a lot of orders, he celebrates the divine spark within all of us.
In this photograph above of my friend Ali (Ahmad Abdulla), and a young woman student at the RISSE refugee and immigrant center, I see God in the love that passes between them. I see God in the deep forest, in the creative spark, in the faces of people at the edge of life, in the good things we do for one another.
Every act of empathy and connection and compassion is a sacred act to me.
God is energy, says the Kabbalah. And Light. At one time, said the mystics, energy was the only reality. There was nothing else. Nothing, Just a pure, endless, all-pervading force of stillness.
I found my God in the idea that the divine is us.
A world of order, perfection and infinite Spiritual Light. A real of action rather than reaction. In the source and seed of the hidden origins of the physical world. A world of total fulfillment, infinite knowledge, and endless love and joy. A world of creativity.
it’s not that I feel these things all the time, it’s that I feel them at all.
it is not God’s job in my mind to give me all of those things, or to dispense them as he or she sees fit. They all exist within the inside of me, and it is for me to bring them to the surface, to honor them and free them, to give them light and life. It is not a perfect world that God has given me, it is a world with beauty and perfection within, seeking the light of life.
So where does this leave me on Christmas Eve?
Truthfully, back to Jesus Christ, where it often goes for me. The real Jesus found joy and fulfillment in speaking for the poor and the vulnerable, and bringing them comfort and hope, in standing in his truth, in chasing the greedy and false priests from the Temple.
That is where God is at Christmas for me. In me.
Right there at my fingertips, available to me at any second of any minute of any hour or any day.
Adapting to Megaesophagus: Photo by Maria Wulf (with my new Iphone X)
The vets call it “the dread Megaesophagus,” and Maria and I and Gus are learning to adapt to it.
The basic problem is that Gus’s esophagus is swollen, and is blocking the passage of food to his stomach. That causes chronic regurgitation, and can lead to starvation, pneumonia, and other serious side effects.
There are chairs called “Bailey Chairs” that force the dog to eat standing upright so that the food moves down through the digestive system, but we haven’t gotten to that stage yet. The things we are trying are working, at least for these past several days.
I’d like to avoid special chairs if possible.
One of the things I am doing is teaching Gus how to eat his food standing up, like the Circus Dog he is. Gus loves to eat, and loves to do tricks, unlike the border collies, who just love to work.
First, as suggested by the specialists (I’ve been doing a lot of reading about Megaesophagus), I take Gus’s new wet canned food and break it into small “meatballs” by handI sprinkle a touch of bread crumbs to give it some body, and roll up the meatballs. I give Gus one at a time, holding them waist high and giving the command “jump.”
Gus caught onto this quickly, he loves this game, and he loves to eat, so why not?
Frankly, I get a kick out of it too.
I hold up the food, he stands up and i drop it into his open mouth and he swallows it standing, just like the vets want. This enlists the help of gravity in the digestive process. Even the dread Megaesophagus can sometimes be fun, if you get creative about it.
I see my life with dogs as a kind of never-ending chess, they make a move, I make a move.
I wait five to ten seconds before offering each ball of food. I give him about three quarters of his food that way, and put the rest down in his bowl on the stack of art books where I put the bowl, so he has to reach up to eat it, not down.
I get a kick out of improvising – there are thousands of dollars of special chairs and stools and platforms to buy for people who want to do that – this is more fun and so far, it’s working.
In the past two-and-a-half days, Gus has spit up some food once, and that was soon after we switched food. In the previous three days, he spit up food eight or none times a day.
Gagging on his food is no longer a regular and frequent occurrence and I can tell from his stools that he is digesting the food, it is not all sitting up in his esophagus.
And if it were, he would be regurgitating it, as the vets say.
It’s only been a couple of days, but we are making real progress, I think. More later. Circus dogs are agile and bright and adaptable. Good reason for hope.
