When you can but you can’t but you can &

Daily Meditation: Following in Jesus’s Footsteps – After reading and processing a note from mentor Ron.

Ref:

Jesus told his disciples, “If any wish to come after me, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.” — Matthew 16:24–25

Father Richard Rohr reflects on how discipleship ultimately leads to the cross and identifying with the pain of the world:

My assumption is that Jesus’s totally counterintuitive message of the “cross” had to be sent to earth as a dramatic and divine zinger, because God knew we would do everything we could to deny it, avoid it, soften it, or make it into a theory (which is exactly what we did anyway). Yet this is the message of Jesus that cannot, and must not, be allowed to be pushed into the background. We believe in a Jesus-kind-of-Christ—a God who is going to the mat with humanity and not just presenting us with a heavenly, cosmic vision. If Christ represents the resurrected state, then Jesus represents the crucified/ resurrecting path of getting there.  

It is not insignificant that Christians chose the cross or crucifix as their central symbol. At least unconsciously, we recognized that Jesus talked often about “losing your life.” Perhaps the philosopher Ken Wilber’s distinction between “ascending religions” and “descending religions” is helpful here. He and I both trust descending religion much more, and I think Jesus did too. The primary language is unlearning, letting go, surrendering, serving others, and not the language of self-development—which often lurks behind our popular notions of “salvation.” Unless we’re careful, we will again make Jesus’s descending religion into a new form of climbing religion, as we have done so often before.

Although Jesus made this quite clear throughout his life, we still largely turned Christianity into a religion where the operative agenda was some personal moral perfection, our attaining some kind of salvation, “going to heaven,” converting others rather than ourselves, and acquiring more health, wealth, and success in this world. In that pursuit, we ended up largely aligning with empires, wars, and colonization of our planet, instead of with Jesus or the powerless. It has all caught up with us in the twenty-first century. [1] 

A spirituality of descent frees us to surrender our often messy lives to God. It is about honoring the human journey, loving it, and living it in all its wonder and tragedy. There is nothing really supernatural about love and suffering. It is completely natural, taking us through the deep interplay of death and life, surrender and forgiveness, in all their basic and foundational manifestations. 

Authentic Christianity is not so much a belief system as a life-and-death system that shows us how to give away our life, how to give away our love, and eventually how to give away our death. Basically, how to give away—and in doing so, to connect with the world, with all other creatures, and with God.

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I chose to think about this in my post today because so much of this is required and so much of it is difficult to comprehend.

We live in a world where we are born into stories. We are born into rules, boundaries, we are born into hate and love. These all live in the same place in our lives, in our hearts, and in our bones.

The truth is far more complicated than we may ever come to know. If the DMT people are right, there is a beautiful female mother like entity with machine elves constantly sewing and creating reality around us. Who am I to say they are wrong?

Maybe the Christians have it right, I don’t know. At this point, they had thousands of years of opportunity to have the world work within the boundaries, rules and opportunities they have historically and currently present.

What is true, is something I can promise for sure, it is true that if you give to the world, the world will take it. There is a very good likelihood that if you give to the world, the world will also give you something back.

What we know about this is that we do not know specifically or even if when you give, that you will get something back. What we do know for sure is that suffering is part of life. Life and suffering go hand in hand and we are all born to be ruled in one way or another and we are all born to suffer.

Most of us come into this world being born from a dark warm place where we can’t see or hear with great clarity. We come into this world through pleasure and pain.

When we get here, we are helpless and if we were left to be alone, we would die.

We are cared for, nurtured, we grow and in most cases, we start to become something composed. An orchestra of biomes and biomechanics. A living creature of creatures, learning, growing, becoming accustomed to a very large cage.

We are free in the cage but we are still caged. We are not free to think and grow without attention.

To what means? To what? To love as we are loved. To fear as we should fear. To do what else?

To build and to build and to build our sandcastles. We firm these up and we find love in other human beings and then we grow into understanding about our cages.

We pick our place in the cage and we build our castles. We build our places and we invite others (maybe) to share and join us.

We are still here, maybe someone is tapping on the glass watching us from afar?

When the devil tested Job, it was said that he (Job) was given back everything and more but the truth is more complicated than that right? Did Job get back the children he had originally?

Look this isn’t a test and I am certainly not a scholar. Here is the point, we live in a world with natural rules and human rules. We live in a world which requires ideology to keep people in some form of harmony.

If we don’t have ideology, we have what? If we didn’t have something to guide us to some form of rules of morality what would we have?

Human beings respond to suffering. They also cause it. Many humans take more than they give, these are insufferable monsters that will eat the world if they can. The only thing that stands between the monsters and the other humans is some form of rule.

So, in all of this, you can do many things, you can be many things, you can give many things. At the same time, you can choose to take and you can consume and you can be a danger to many.

The things you and I can’t do is beat the natural laws, the underlying rules of living. The rules of death.

In the case of the latter, it is good to live a humble life of gratitude, giving and sacrifice as the world will give so much back to you but in the end, we all are still in the bounds of the cage or the matrix as some would say.

It is what it is..