Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Spiritual Musings

All my dreams are not good dreams. Sometimes I feel like that all the questionable decisions of my life get distorted in my dreams and I get played back a version that is twisted and unfair. Can you believe that…these are my dreams and they are unfair. I know just before I wake up when my dreams are portraying me as a total jerk. This is not to say that I’m not a little jerky but totally jerky is a misnomer. Fortunately, and I don’t know what it is about dreams, but they don’t stay vivid for very long. Once I wake up they sort of lift off my awareness the way the dew disappears in the morning sun. For a bad dream that is fine with me…on the other hand it happens with good dreams too. Some mornings I wake up feeling good about myself but after I finish brushing my teeth, I don’t remember why…just that it was a good dream.

I don’t have to be asleep for something to flash onto the video of my mind and make me cringe. I have day dreams too. Every thoughtless, ill considered, and bad thing I have ever done is on a video in my mind. Inside me is a part of my persona that is hateful and delights in tormenting me. When the tape gets to a particularly bad or embarrassing part, the lights glare, the music gets loud and I cringe. My wife says, “I hate it when you do that.”

So sometimes the recollections are good and some times they are bad. I have both inside of me….Good and Bad. I think all people do. Christianity says everybody is a sinner and seems to spend an inordinate amount of time pointing that out. The logic is convoluted and if it wasn’t such a serious matter it might just make us want to chuckle…but don’t dare do that. This is religion…somebody’s belief system and everyone knows that God doesn’t have a sense of humor. That’s right ,he created mankind, but he doesn’t have a sense of humor.

Anyway this body of ours is corrupted by the elements that make it up. Evil drips off the wall like a malevolent condensation. Women are even worse than men because we all know they are nothing more than a rib, and were, after all, responsible for that damn apple fiasco. Then we have God who is perfect Goodness and the Devil who is unmitigated evil. And Mary was a virgin. And the Romans botched an execution. Finally if you manage to skate through life without getting jerked up short, you can’t duck eternity and that will be pay back time for God. That will be a day of reckoning for those of us who dare to ask questions.

Some of these concepts seem ridiculous. They sound like something that man cooked up and not God. There is an order to nature that is integrated and elegant. God was a part of that, you can see his stamp in all of creation and in life we see the cursive of his hand, and there’s truth there because what we see is alive and it wouldn’t be if it was full of holes and tied together by such loose threads.

Somewhere back a few thousand years ago we took a wrong turn spiritually. We handed off our spiritual well being to the Church and they have not led us to the Promised Land. Science has led us somewhere but religion hasn’t. Science has illuminated truths that are mind boggling and illuminated the secrets of creation in ways we never dreamed possible. Somewhere in the shuffle our spiritual development failed to keep pace.

We go to church and repeat these dogmatic phrases that over time have lost much of their meaning in a drone of monotonic voices. Its too bad because I believe in a sprit. I think we are all born with one. I think it resides in our soul and animates our very being. But as science has moved on and the Church has stood still, the credibility of the spirit has been severely compromised. What happens when we quit believing in it altogether. Will it hang its head and shuffle off like Puff the Magic Dragon? Will it become the figment of a fairy tale until like Santa Clause, the tooth fairy and the Easter bunny , it becomes something that adults tell their children but don’t really believe in any longer?

The real tragedy is it EXISTS! It is that thing a writer calls his/her muse. It is the sparkle in a child’s eye and the wonder we feel looking up at the Universe. I know I’m repeating myself, but I’m as certain of its existence as anything else I know of life. Everything hasn’t been discovered by science. There are forces in the universe that are invisible and pervasive and one of these days we are going to pin the tail of our spirits to the wall and say “ah Ha! Caught you….I knew you were there all along.”