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The Reasonable Fear of God

“Let all earth fear LORD: let all the inhabitants of the world stand in awe of him.” -Psalms 33:8 KJV

“He telleth the number of the stars; he calleth them all by their names. Great is our Lord, and of great power: his understanding is infinite.” -Psalm 147:4-5

“But he that doeth wrong shall receive for the wrong which he hath done : and there is no respect of persons.” -Colossians 3:25

Moses throwing down the Tablets

Of all the many well-known ideas of the Bible, perhaps nothing offends, perplexes, or just galls the ordinary person more, or stands as a greater barrier to the practice of Christianity, than this idea, that we must fear God. Why in the world should we fear God?! Of all the religious ideas, I think this one caused me more doubt than any, and it kept me away from God as a result.

My reaction to the phrase is understandable, I think, and I’m sure many will agree with me: Our natural reaction to this is to question loudly, if I am a child of God, why should I fear my own creator, my own father? The whole concept, the whole tenor of it, sounds and feels so “Old Testament”, so fire and brimstone, so angry God, so much the capricious and dangerous LORD of bloody sacrifices on desert mountains, Moses throwing down the tablets in anger. The “Fear of God” strikes just about any modern person as archaic and childish. Really, it makes very little sense to us. Now, of course, God is all powerful, and he can snuff us out like snuffing out a match between fingers. Ssssst! But that’s the angry God of the Old Testament, isn’t it, not the God of Love of the New?  God is Love, isn’t He, so how does it make any sense whatsoever to fear Love?

The law of karma, embraced as a central and driving concept in certain Eastern philosophies and religions such as hinduism and buddhism, gives us the clue. First, a definition. Simply speaking, karma is the effect of our actions on our lives. Karma itself is not bad or good, it is simply a law of effect. Our action is the cause to which there is an effect. That is simply speaking. Cause and effect, more or less, but not quite…

A more nuanced view of the law of karma reveals the power we have over our own destinies, for it is not only what we do (our action) but our intention in doing so. Therefore it is as possible to kill someone with intention as it is possible to kill the same someone accidently. Just as the courts of law would judge us according to the intention, the effect of the law of karma concerning the act itself and the attending intention will determine the lasting effect. (See Karma on Wikipedia for an extended discussion on the law of karma.)

In the practice of Buddhism, it is believed that it is possible to bring an end to the effects of karma by living a life in which one’s actions are done so selflessly that no karmic effects are produced whatsoever. Gautama Siddartha, the Buddha, is one who achieved this and so at his death was not reborn, but vanished utterly into the stateless state called nirvana. The blessed state of Enlightenment, a state that all Buddhists understand is within reach of every human, if only we can get it right, precedes the final annihilation that is nirvana.

One of the obvious things about karma is that every action creates an effect. So every act, every thing, is subject to, and is apparent to, this law. That is, the law “sees” every action, or, the law of karma is invoked in every movement, every action, every thought. God created, and continues to create moment to moment, the world, you and I, and everything in the world. It is not that God created the world long ago. He creates it always and continuously and so is there at every point in space and time creating, overseeing, more to the point, seeing.  Remember, and we know this from quantum physics, the smaller particles that make up atoms, flicker into and out of existence countless times per second. That flickering is God creating continuously, creating everything, always, and so always present and always and ever conscious of His creation.

And so, God sees everything. No, let me make this clear: God sees everything. Oh, we’d like to think He’s in His heaven surrounded by angels with His Jesus at his right hand, or maybe He’s in the shadows in the other room, or looking the other way while we do something, or, better yet, we just pretend He doesn’t see us, doesn’t exist. But, no, honestly He is fully conscious, fully present in every place, seeing every action, directing the consequence of every action. He is the only one who is fully conscious. God, the creator of everything, including the law of karma, sees all, every action every thought.

What is worse than this frightening fact that God sees all and every little thing we do is the fact that for every little thing we do there is a consequence. Cause and effect. The law of karma. God sees all and for every thing there is a consequence. Notice that I said “worse than the frightening fact that God see all…”. “Frightening” it is that God sees our every action and that for our every action there is a consequence. Frightening, because now we see that what we do is seen,  has meaning,  has a consequence.

So we have discovered our reason to fear God, and it is a reason, and it is reached by reason. It is a reasonable fear. God sees all and for every thing there is a consequence.

Counter-culture

Kate was talking about how the world can be so full of competition, anxiety, stress, and rush, rush, rush, how it is often self-centered, harsh, and even dangerous in some ways. Kate often speaks to our group about the world and how we might live in it in a better way. This time she was reminding us of what she called our “counter-culture”. She was talking about our group, our little community of people who are trying to create an alternative world.

For most of my life I saw the world as dangerous, unfriendly, and ultimately a lonely place, a place where, in the end, you are on your own. Everything told me this. Or perhaps I should say, nothing, not my family, not school, not my friends, nothing told me otherwise. School was a nightmare for me. By the time I was 20 I had attended nearly 20 schools. Always being the new kid, impossbly left out of groups that grew up together, I felt isolated. There was no real culture of thought in my household either. No discussions of meaning or morals or lofty goals, no words of peace, no vision of a kind world. The culture was television and old gangster or cowboy movies where a guy had better be tough and get over it, stand alone against all odds. Well, perhaps I exaggerate a bit. There were glimpses of a kinder world, a little peek here, a scent there, but this alternative world seemed like a joke to a young cowboy…

Kate was saying that, on the one hand you have this big world with its good things, and with its many not-so-good things, like the stress and relentless competition and the sense that you are really “on your own” out there, loneliness. On the other hand, she said, you have us, us busy creating a counter-culture, if you like, a place, a world, a community, where inter-personal competition is frowned upon, where individualism gives way to group effort, where we actively and purposely help each other to succeed, where we mindfully practice love, compassion, and cooperation in an overt way while still remaining individuals, individual members. What a wonderful idea, creating a world as, perhaps, it ought to be. Who would not want that? But don’t get me wrong, we absolutely have no illusion that we are perfect. In fact, human imperfection is understood. Given that understanding and not cynically defeated by it, we strive for the vision of a kinder world where no one has to go it alone.

So, this very vibrant group of people that Kate was talking to, the “us” in her story, spends a lot of time, energy, and pooled resources, including money, on projects for people in and outside the group who are in need. Kate reminded us that, for example, in our little counter-cultural community we have projects for feeding homeless men and providing a place for them to stay now and then. We have a project for feeding needy families by distributing bags of groceries every week; lots of bags of groceries.  A small group of knitters in our group create beautiful woolen shawls at their own expense and give them away to elderly people who need a little extra warmth on a winter night. During the holidays, we try to pool our resources with other counter-culture groups, collecting presents for parents, who can not afford them, to give to their children. A larger project that we contribute our time and money to is disaster relief, not just in America, but around the world. Some of us were there after Katrina, rebuilding; others, including some of our youth, volunteered at a Native American reservation, making repairs on homes. All of these projects are done in a conscious spirit of love and mindful, selfless giving. In fact, that’s a requisite.

Kate pointed out that not everything our counter-cultural group does is charity. Some of it is just for the sake of beauty and the uplifting of the spirit, or just plain fun. For example, a number of our people spend extra time each week practicing songs that they later sing to us. We join in with them to the best of our ability and even if you can’t carry a tune, it’s okay. The music ranges from classical to folk and comes from many traditions and ethnic groups, but it is always beautiful and inspiring.

Though there are many meetings throughout the week and the month, small groups mostly, and little events like barbeques, beach cleanups, youth parties, movie nights, and fundraisers, we try to get together once a week just to celebrate the world we are helping to create and to be thankful for the vision we have and to wish each other “peace” and to re-dedicate ourselves to the task. Our meeting place, where we all get together at one time, is an old building built in 1878 in a style called Carpenter Gothic. That means lots of gothic arches and leaded glass windows. Everything is built of ancient redwood from trees culled over two centuries away. The old wood glows with a warmth of many venerable years of striving to create this world of peace and love.

The walls fairly speak of peace. In the middle of the week, on a hectic day, it is possible to enter into this dark and inviting room, with its romantic arches and its warm light slanting across the cushioned seats. It’s a good place to sit quietly, to step out of that big world out there, that world of stress and competition, gather your thoughts privately, and listen to that “still, small voice”.

The weekly meeting, though an important part of what we do, is only a fraction of what we do, a smallish part, that is much less important than the projects we foster. From the outside, I’m sure that this is not clear to the casual observer. I know it looks different from the outside because I once stood on the outside and saw only a cartoon glimpse. The meetings are what the world sees of us, and from a distance at that. But get up close and you see us reaching out into the world, smoothing it here, wrinkling it there, encouraging it, challenging it, feeding it, listening, being with. That’s the real work. Its the part that the casual observer never sees.

Kate, or Marcia, or Richard, or one of the other leaders of our little counter-cultural movement, speaks to us in our weekly meeting about the vision we have, and reminds us of just who we really are at heart, persons of peace like our founder, and of how we are required to serve the world in precisely these ways. We respond to Kate and to each other, renewing our commitment, extending our hands to one another in peace and saying it all out loud. Then we set out again, out into that big world, ready, once again, to polish off a few more of its…and our…rough edges.

The Last Day of My Life

Be dressed ready for service and keep your lamps burning, like men waiting for their master to return from a wedding banquet, so that when he comes and knocks they can immediately open the door for him. -Luke 12:35 (NIV)

Just Now

I lay face down across the bed, happily drifting in an afternoon nap, stolen from a frenetic day. Even in my dreamy state I was aware of him entering the room, felt him lean over me, sensed his breath, but I wasn’t afraid. He lay his hand on my shoulder. I felt its warmth and heard him say, in a very gentle but firm voice, “Get up…It’s time.” I roused myself and turned to see him standing now by the door in a shaft of sun that slanted through the curtained window across his white clothing. His kind eyes pulled at me, his body poised for movement, drawing me to follow him out the door. I did not know him and yet he was oddly familiar, like a good friend I had known only over the phone or in letters. A slight smile. A mere turn of his head beckoned. I knew what time it was…

San Francisco, 1968

Poster by Robert Lewis

I walked down the carnival street named Haight and came to the intersection of Ashbury, swimming in a fantasy parade of scores of young people who were dressed, no, decorated in clashing colors and patterns, tied with scarves and tassles, bell-bottomed in jeans dragging along the sidewalk, leather belts tooled with “Peace”, hair, hair, hair curling down over shoulders, nipples edging out of blouses, and dreamy music floating on the incensed air. Until my first moments in Haight Ashbury of 1968, I thought I was “hip”. I wasn’t hip. They were hip. I was clearly the right-wing ultra-conservative idiot in this beautiful, flowing sea of humanity, despite my long hair and my bell-bottoms. Next to me, as my head swirled, taking it all in, a young man was hawking his goods: “Grass, hash, acid!”, he called out as if selling fruit from a stand “Grass, hash, acid!”. The entire scene seemed impossible.

I came to San Francisco because something big was happening

My Invisible Friends

So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.
(2 Corinthians 4:18 [NIV])

The Seen

My Best Friends

Howdy Doody

We were out on an errand in the car, my mother, my stepfather and me, heading down the road. As I sat in the back seat, pressing my 9-year-old face against the window that reflected the freckles and crew cut features of a typical boy of the mid-50s, I was watching with an intensity that somehow I knew my parents could not sense and certainly would not have understood. What I was watching was thrilling, amazing, vivid, and wonderful; it was Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and Howdy Doody sitting in a little Tonka Toy pickup truck, careening down the road beside us, holding on in fear at the speed, laughing and talking, and winking and waving at me. They went everywhere we went in those heady days and I loved to watch them driving alongside us. I want to make one thing very clear: I could actually see these characters. They were dimensional. The sunlight played off of them like off of any object. They threw shadows. They were vivid.

Back at the house, in my room, I had set up a cardboard box on its side.

Mindfulness, Now and Every Moment

In Buddhism, the most important practice is mindfulness, a difficult thing for us monkey-minded creatures. In the practice of Buddhist mindfulness, we are to constantly remind ourselves to be aware of the world around us, of our breath, of the birds singing, the grass growing, the cars grumbling by on the frantic streets, and even the taste of the food we eat. Imagine actually being aware of our dinner as we eat it. It’s almost laughable. Oh, yes, we are aware in the first minute or so, then it’s just more of the same and our mind, our internal monkey, leaps from that branch to another branch, and dinner becomes just so much material shoveled in.

Mindfulness. It is the most important thing because in practicing mindfulness we experience our life as it happens. Many books have been written on the subject. Thich Nat Hahn has made a career of pulling us back to the now, and God bless him for it, too. He has written some of the best on the subject.

One day, I was painting at the edge of Plum Village,

The Apple Tree

There were many dark moments in my life. Moments of deep depression, regret, loneliness, guilt. I do believe that most people find themselves in this place of darkness. But perhaps not. I could be wrong; I’ve been wrong before. So let me just speak for myself. There were many dark moments in my life, moments of deep darkness and loneliness.

For now, I won’t go into the long and torturous path I took. Suffice to say,  all along this road I was always looking for something. Looking into the deep woods that lined the road, or looking into the sky above between the clawing branches, looking in books along the way, looking into they eyes of lovers, into the reflections in midnight pools and in the sparkling sunlight that glinted off the edge of the hill ahead. Always looking and always sorry for the things I’d done to ease my dis-ease. For it truly was a disease, this sadness, this longing, this grasping. Embarrassing too, this stereotypical behavior that told the world I was a lost soul and an idiot.

A life-long Buddhist, I nevertheless longed for the forgiveness of God, of Christ, and yet, as a life-long Buddhist, I didn’t believe in God. Or did I? I do remember things from my childhood. That time when I was 10 and the children were knocking at the door asking me to come out to play. No, I couldn’t; I was reading the Bible. Or that time I was in a little church all alone and a beam of light touched me and music swelled and I called out to my grandfather, who was outside doing some carpentry on the church, “Where’s that music coming from?!”. “What music?”, his reply. Or dozens of other times.

And so, it was Christmas, and I had been going to church with my girlfriend, exploring the possibilities of Christ. Was this for me? I had always thought that becoming a Christian would be the weirdest thing that could happen to me. Not afraid of new ideas, I was exploring this idea, that Christ was worth looking into.

I heard a beautiful Christmas carol that year called “Jesus Christ the Apple Tree” (see performance). The song talks about becoming weary of the world and especially one’s struggles in it. Of how we strive in the world and find so little satisfaction and how, in the song, Christ is the fruit and the beauty. But these words especially spoke to me: “I’m weary with my former toil, Here I will sit and rest awhile: Under the shadow I will be, Of Jesus Christ the apple tree.” ( read full lyrics). “Here I will sit and rest awhile…”.

When Nice is Not Nice

It is a good thing when people do good things for others. When asked why they do it, many might say “because it’s a nice thing to do” or “I’m a nice person”. This is a flimsy reason for doing anything and, worst of all, it completely relies on a person’s willingness to do a “nice” thing. In other words, if I don’t feel like being nice today then I’m not. If I do feel like being nice and I am “nice” then hurray for me, I’m a nice person.

But you see the problem. All of this niceness relies on one’s will and one’s mood at any given moment, rather than emerging from reason. Nice-ness, being nice, is unreasonable, an irrational whim of the human heart. So, what seems nice is not nice, it’s a convenience, a self-congratulatory stroking of one’s own ego. Niceness does not come from any universal value. It is entirely ego-based. Egotistical pandering.

Two Wells

There are two wells in this story. “….Jesus, tired as he was from the journey, sat down by the well. It was about the sixth hour.    ⁷When a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, “Will you give me a drink?” ⁸(His disciples had gone into the town to buy food.)

⁹The Samaritan woman said to him, “You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink?” (For Jews do not associate with Samaritans.^[a])

¹⁰Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.”

¹¹“Sir,” the woman said, “you have nothing to draw with and the well is deep. Where can you get this living water? ¹²Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did also his sons and his flocks and herds?”

¹³Jesus answered, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, ¹⁴but whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”"

The Prodigal Son

The dissolute son finds himself far away from his home and his father, debased, degraded, demoralized and defeated. At home in the mud pit of his own doing and yet not at home. A vague memory stirs. Home fires burning somewhere far away.  He pulls himself out and starts home.

His father, seeing him coming from afar, drops what he is doing and runs to his son and welcomes him back, treating him to all the good things he had walked away from. Of course, the father in the story is the Father. This is the beauty and the sweet message of this story, that though the son strayed so far as soon as he headed home his father ran, did not walk but ran, to meet him. For every turn we make toward our Father, He turns even faster, ready to meet us and take us back.