Prodigal Prophet

I have an app on my iPod called “23,000 Quotes.” When you open the app, a daily quote is randomly displayed on the screen. Today’s was attributed to Lao-Tzu, a Chinese philosopher who lived about 500 years before Christ. This “quote of the day” was one I’d heard before:  “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”

That’s straightforward enough for me. What I think about when I read it is that no matter how large the goal, the task, there is a time when thought must cease and action begin if we are to accomplish something of substance.

From another vantage point, I read it as a comforting statement. The thought of a thousand miles is a lot to me, overwhelming even, especially if you’re walking. But if you break the “giant” into small pieces, a step at a time, it seems less insurmountable, whether you’re talking about recovery from a major illness, grief over the loss of someone close, or a life goal. All good thoughts we can take into our hearts and remember when facing a mountain of sorts.

As a matter of habit, after reading the daily quote, I usually scroll through other quotes by the same author. I flipped through a few more of Lao-Tzu’s and landed on this one: “The journey of a thousand leagues begins from beneath your feet.”

At first glance, it seems to be the very same quote, but at second, not so. In the first place, leagues are greater than miles in distance; we’re not sure exactly how much longer, however—it depends on what country of origin the person who submitted the quote is from and when in history the quote was first translated into English. The term “league” has been used to describe a range of distances, from 1.5 Roman miles to the current estimate of 3.8 miles, if you go with the 5,280-foot version.

But that doesn’t change the meaning of the original quote as much as the last part: “…begins from beneath your feet.”

The latter quote suggests nothing of action to me—it speaks instead of heart, of motivation, of courage—not of the journey itself, but the journeyman. It speaks of intent to act, the decision to act—not the action itself. It speaks of the push of God, not the pull—the nudge from within, not the attraction from without.

Which did Lao-Tzu set out to communicate? We don’t know—we can’t even be sure that he said it. One thing is clear—he would never have said it in English. The language didn’t exist when he lived. And the quotes were obviously submitted to the company who owns the iPod app by two different people, with two different takes—two quotes that traveled independent 2,500-year paths. I wonder if they’ll ever get together just to argue over which of their quotes was most true of Lao-Tzu or if they’ll go on with their lives, with no thought of the other, certain that each knows what Lao-Tzu was really talking about.

You know, Jesus didn’t speak English either, didn’t write anything down himself, as far as we know. Next time we tell someone “what Jesus said,” perhaps we should keep that in mind.

Been thinking of the Arizona immigration debacle.

When I’ve traveled abroad, I’ve carried my passport everywhere I’ve gone and submitted to the immigration authorities when I arrived and when I left. I attempt, if I don’t know the language, to learn enough phrases to maneuver. I don’t have a problem with trying to preserve our safety in general and the privileges of citizenship in our country. I don’t even have a problem with establishing English as our national language.

But I do have a problem with the idea of accomplishing any of those things in ways that remove or restrict those privileges without cause on the basis of something I can’t control, like the color of my skin, or my gender or my age or my political or religious preference, all of which at one time or another has stirred great emotion and hatred in some other citizens of our populace.

My problem is the same as the one discussed in my opening blog, the one I have with the contention of the Bible’s inerrancy. We humans, with all our frailties, do not have the perfect knowledge of good and evil. For me, that is the sin, the original sin — that we raised ourselves to believe, like God, we could evaluate absolutely, without fail, the behaviors and motivations of others and deem them good or evil, just or unjust, moral or immoral. And on top of that, we could and should PUNISH others for those behaviors and traits WE deemed evil. We’ve made some rather public mistakes in those judgments. I think of well-known incidents in our histories — big ones like the Crusades and the Salem witchhunts, the Japanese-American internment during WWII — and then I think of little things, like the fact that I’ve been advised in my internet job hunt not to put in the date of my college graduation because it will “give away” the fact that I’m over 50, a crime for which I stand guilty.

The problem for me is that the judgment of others makes us prone to keep secrets. And those secrets make us sick. I know that well, from personal experience, and from the years I spent as a psychotherapist, confessor to some of those secrets, and I know that if we are forced by judgment to spend the majority of our time guarding those secrets, we are prone not to notice the sheer privileges of life and love and relationship and the satisfaction of working hard and working well and seeing our efforts result in something good.

The writer Fritz Buechner has spent his prolific life writing about, in one way or another, the effect on him of keeping his father’s suicide a secret. The opening quote in the popular book Eat, Pray, Love, is simple but profound. “Tell the truth, tell the truth, tell the truth.” This isn’t new — Shakespeare’s plays are filled with lines about secrets — “This above all, to thine own self be true…thou canst not then be false to any man.” and the final line of King Lear, “Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.”

Be real, Jesus said. Get the barrel off your light and let it shine. Help others get the barrel off their lights. Don’t judge, cause you’re just gonna get judged back.

I get that. So, what, pray tell me, is more anti-Christian (or more illogical) than to, by our imperfect judgment, force others to withhold truths about themselves because they will be punished for the answer?

And how can we, with straight faces, proclaim to have a God-given right to draw lines in the sand on strips of earth that belong to us only in our misguided minds?

Just a thought.

I’ve been trying to figure out how to start this blog — not the “how do you set one up” question, but the “what does one say in the very first one” question. Then, of course, I realized that you have to jump in and just do it — choose a topic close to your heart that has risen into consciousness for some reason and say what you think about it. So here goes.

Though until late 2007, I hadn’t set foot in a church of any kind for over 30 years except as museums, or for weddings and funerals, I am a follower of Christ, and always have been. Raised in an old country Baptist Church in the deep South, the Christian tradition was mine by default. But, though I am now Episcopalian by technicality, I do not seek safety in numbers in a spiritual sense by lumping myself in with those who publicly profess any particular man-made creed or dogma. I don’t believe what any pastor, priest, rabbi or yogi says just because there are letters after their names, or a prefix denoting them as clergy, anymore than I believe that my masters degree in psychology trumps the wisdom of a lifetime lived. And I can’t say that I believe everything in the Bible or any other “holy book,” because they were written by humans.

As a former psychotherapist, and more recently an author and editor of other people’s words, I am too aware of the nuances of human motivation, the power of language, and the impossible task of communicating anything with these little man- (and woman-) made alphabetic symbols without the spectre of misinterpretation arising. I can’t bring myself to blindly accept the literalness of words written yesterday, much less those written two-thousand-plus years ago in a different time and context from that in which I am steeped, so I am left with the aspiration of doing the best I can, through the filters of my own experience, to interpret the meaning of a sentence spoken or written by another. In writing this blog, I venture out in trepidation for the same reason, knowing that my words are no longer mine once they leave my pen, virtual or otherwise, and they will be imbued with meaning and inflection and motivation that may or may not have been mine — projections from the experience of those who will read, and hopefully, respond.

I left the church because, though I longed as a child to see the principles I’d heard about — compassion, authenticity, life lived in abundance — applied in everyday life outside the church, I frankly didn’t. Born into what would become a “broken family” because of my father’s abandonment and our subsequent homelessness, I grew up in my grandparents’ home during the time of the civil rights movement, the equal rights movement, the assassinations of JFK, MLK and Bobby, the Vietnam war, and the resignation of a sitting President, and though I cannot say that I personally was treated with unkindness by church members there, I saw far too much cruelty displayed and disdain shown toward people because they were different in some way — skin color, denomination, gender. Feeling “different” myself because of my family composition, the problem was compounded when I was met in the first grade with the question “What does your father do for a living?” (I had no idea what to say) and the apparent shock that I was better at math than the boys in my class (I’m a girl). I hung in there with the church through my teenage years but eventually changed even my major in college from math to psychology in an attempt to reconcile the chasm between what I’d thought I read and heard and what I had seen well-intentioned, good-hearted people say and do to each other.

In one way or another, I’ve been looking to bridge that gap all my life. And I still am, even though I’ve fallen hard into the chasm more than a few times. I guess, though I will soon be 53 years old, I still believe with the naivete of that six-year-old that it is possible to close the chasm that renders us unable to embrace ourselves and each other as children of the same God, even if we don’t employ the same words to describe it, even if we don’t share the same political or tribal views, even if our life experiences are so vastly different that we cannot fathom what it is like to walk in each other’s shoes.

The fact remains that, as Simon, the Siamese cat who inspired my first book once said, “We all want the same things — enough to eat, a bed to sleep in, a chance to play a little, and a reason to raise our tails high.” Those inalienable rights of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” described in the Declaration of Independence aren’t affected by majority voting. They don’t apply only to the subset of Americans of which we are part — black, white, hispanic, asian, Republican, Democrat, gay, straight, rich, poor, you name it. They don’t apply just to Americans, period.

And, whether the idea scares us to death or not, they don’t just apply to Christians, either.

Remembering those things, let’s talk. Let’s argue, let’s pray, let’s do everything but filibuster….

Let’s live what we say we believe…and build a bridge.