Saturday, May 21, 2005

DR. OMED’S LATE NITE SERMONETTE: APOCALYPSE A LA MODE NO FISHING   I am still stuck on this write-your-own-commandment idea—An idée fixe for me, but as infectious meme it would seem to be a flop.  Three fellow bloggers have responded with their own 10Cs, but in her comment Ms. Candide was doubtful, opined that the desire to make rules was a male preoccupation, and seemed to think that the construction of commandments was a dangerous business. I have, however, prodded her into a fuller response. Read it HERE.   I was trying to come up a fresh set of commandments today, but only got two written, because the second one got out of hand. The first is fairly straightforward:   (1) Thou shalt not defeat evil by doing evil to the evil. Evil + Evil = More Evil. As a moral precept it doesn’t get any simpler than that. Actually, the equation is more like evil plus evil equals evil times evil to the nth power of evil; it multiplies exponentially, like an unchecked breeding population. Read your Malthus. Human history is largely a study of the higher mathematics of evil.   (2)God is still speaking,* comma, thou shalt listen. I don’t mean the voices in your head. As a certified maniac with bipolar disorder, I can tell you that those voices give very bad advice. What I mean is that there are fresh sources of revelation and deep meaning easily obtainable direct from that unnamable, indefinable, unquantifiable entity/nonentity for which some people use the place-holder label “God,” the focus of our sense of wonder, fear and awe at our own mortal existence in a very strange, beautiful, and dangerous universe. Tres, tres joli, as Einstein whispered in the ear of the Catholic priest who came up with the idea of the Big Bang.   You needn’t resort to a hodgepodge of ancient texts, from the laws, songs, and mytho-heroic history of a tribal nation still emerging from the Bronze Age, written down by scribes with their own agenda; to the alleged doings and sayings of a Middle Eastern peasant who was interrogated, tortured, and executed as a terrorist insurgent by order of the military governor of the occupying army of foreign empire, written down decades after his death when the first generation of his followers began to age and die before his expected-soon big comeback; to the letters of a manic depressive poet-who-didn’t-know-it with a massive guilt complex who projected his own inner conflict on the world in unshaded black and white; and terminating in the let’s pretend baroque and psychedelic prophecies of an isolated religious fanatic, on the basis of whose ravings generation after generation of milleniumists and chiliasts have been pronouncing doom upon sinners and the end of the world the day after tomorrow for two thousand years.   The Kingdom of Heaven is all around you, in you, and through you. Have you the eyes to see it, ears to hear it, a nose to smell it, a tongue to taste it, hands to feel and shape it? Have you the wit and art to create it in your own image, and recreate yourself in its image? You have the key to this Kingdom of Beholding. Every sentient being can turn the key in the lock, open the cage of the mind, and step out into the open, blinking in the light. Every human being no matter how debased has the keys of this kingdom, and the opportunity to enter it. In this I retain a tenet of my Southern Baptist upbringing. We are all sinners. We are all capable of redemption. It is twined into our genes. We all have our own rapture and the apocalypse packed in our cellular luggage. But these things occur in kairos, “God’s time,” the eternal NOW where we really live, not chronos, the time we keep on clocks and calendars, and carve on our tombstones. Skip the Evangelical Cartoon version, because blessed child, you got your own.     *I kiped the initial phrase from the superb United Church of Christ ad. Go HERE to view it.   3:07:35 AM    comment []