For years now, I have avoided the mundane, the ordinary, the path of the common folk. Let me rise above the banality of living in the “real world,” as they call it, and find the magic of life.
Separation from the sinners. A retreat from the world into the monastery of the soul.
Let me find the truth that goes beyond waking up at 6am with an alarm clock, driving to work in the dark, eating out for lunch, paying a mortgage, raising a family, shopping at Walmart…you know the sub-standard suburban middle-class American dream
(I called it a nightmare).
There must be more to life than eating food and reproducing, right?
What is the meaning of it all?
Eternal Life
Jesus talked about something called the kingdom of heaven and this idea of eternal life. I thought it meant going church while I was alive and going to heaven after I died, but the meaning is actually much deeper.
The eternal life that Jesus came to reveal is the idea of life that comes from outside of the temporal realm of time-space that most of us are preoccupied with.
He said that it is worth finding – so much more valuable that anything else a human can search for in this world.
Finding, receiving, and opening to this life requires an active pursuit. We all know the famous words, “Ask and you will receive, seek and you will find, knock and it will be open…”. These are all verbs!
I have chosen to set my life in pursuit of a kingdom that is not of this world – a kingdom that is invisible. A value that cannot be measured in property, pleasure, position, or possession, but in peace.
But in doing so I made a mistake.
Anti-Christ
I repeated the same mistake that my parents made when they treated the community we lived in as the “other” people on the wrong path (to hell).
I made the same mistake that my pastors made when they pretended like the kingdom of God was the size of a church building or a Sunday ceremony.
I fell into the same trap that caused the prelates of the medieval church to encourage monasticism, a retreat from the world to the desert, the cloister, or the crusades.
We all simply exchanged one form of idolatry for another.
We rejected the structures of “the world” as we saw them…as though the forms themselves contained evil. We rejected the body as if it was nature herself that contained the root of sin.
We frowned upon commerce, money, sexuality, anything with material form…
Jesus himself would have been shunned from our wine-free circles where everything “impure” was banished – not realizing that the purity or impurity came from within ourselves.
Like the mythical Midas, whatever we touched, whether church or culture, transformed into the blessing or the curse we carried inside.
Love is not About Appearances
Paul tried to explain this in 1 Corinthians 13 when he argued that love is what gives meaning to our actions – not the other way around. “If I give all my goods to feed the poor and have not love, it counts as nothing!”
Love for God or for one’s neighbor might acquire an infinite number of forms – including those we might have once rejected.
The mistake that I made was to trade one outward appearance for another.
I rejected property, pleasure, position, and possession thinking that they were the problem.
As an educator I recognize the value of this as a transformational opportunity. By letting go of the lifestyle I saw around me, I was able to separate love from any expectation that it might look a certain way.
But after the separation I refused to come back. Why would my lofty soul descend into the cesspool of the modern human experience? Why would Christ come back down to earth?
I had to reject what I saw in order to continue on my journey – because I mistook the form for the reality. I gave too much power to the image and assumed that a certain way of life could be “wrong.”
Of course I want to avoid being trapped. I never want to go back to a day where where property, pleasure, position, and possession are the measure of a successful life.
But these were never the problem.
What Does it Profit a Man?
The problem of pain, suffering, and sin existed in the person who thought these things were worth the cost of life itself. “What does it profit a man if he gain the whole world, and lose his soul?” Jesus asked.
And just as there is no benefit to such an exchange, there is no benefit to acquiring suffering, isolation, poverty, and chastity at the cost of one’s soul.
As long as I must reject some particular form of outward appearance, I pretend that life in the kingdom requires me to maintain some other outward form of expression.
In so doing, I have fallen back into the original trap where I try to conform to some external law rather than coming to freedom of life the spirit.
Kingdom of God
God can speak through a donkey, he can speak through a preacher, he can speak through a fast-food restaurant server, he can speak through the forest, through the trees, through money, through anything.
He can even speak through outdated, stuffy traditions, rituals, ways of life, boring routines…all of it. Because nothing exists that the kingdom of God cannot touch.
Its power transforms everything it comes into contact with – changing it into life, peace, joy, and beauty.
The kingdom of God has nothing to do with accepting or rejecting any part of life. It has everything to do with transforming it.
When I fear that some external way of life would keep me from living in the kingdom, I am forgetting who I am and the power that I carry as a human being, as a son of God.
Jesus was not afraid to take part in the rituals of his day, nor was he afraid to challenge them. He did not go through the motions of life unconsciously but brought to every action the source and root of love that he carried within Him.
That is how I want to live.
Incarnation
That is how I want to return to the world that I made the choice to leave in 2018, in 2012, and even as a child before I knew it was a choice I could make.
I have fallen so far into this world of the invisible that I find it easier to be content with little than to create much.
When I have imagined an activity, my brain assumes it is already complete. Why should I have to type a sentence that I have already seen in my mind?
The only reason is love.
Love desires expression…demands it even! Love for the idea, love for the life that shares it, love for the one who might read it, love for the material world – and even the digital world.
Love for the writing itself, love for the reading, love for the creating process…and maybe even love for the editing.
This is why God created the world and continues to create within it.
Life is simply a form of play, and we all take it too seriously!
Because we have forgotten love.
Jesus came to remind us what love looks like, but even so it is a daily struggle to keep from giving it some definition of what is should or should not look like.
Coming Home
Does love look like releasing my book into the world? Does it look like sharing my innermost thoughts? Does it look like baring my soul to the eyes of others who may consume it without thought or reason?
Love may look like all of that or none of that. I cannot assume that it will take one form and not another.
I may become the very outward expression of the nightmare I ran from at the beginning of this essay. Maybe I will wake up at 7am every day and drive to a job and come home to a family, and retire at 65. Maybe I won’t.
Whatever form my life will take is acceptable because I can do it with love. Because I will choose it with awareness. Because I will show up for it with presence.
Because I will find a joy in it that does not depend on avoiding or performing, or hiding from, or pretending, or living in fear.
Ideally, I am already doing that, but the journey of letting the eternal life flow through me is one that has only just begun.
I am like a baby, learning how to live.
I am a wanderer coming back to the world,
Bearing the eternal flame…
Within
Lovely 😍