“For behold, I create new heavens and a new earth; and the former things shall not be remembered or come into mind. Isaiah 65:17

But according to his promise we wait for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells. 2 Peter 3:13

Anyone who knows me knows that I’m not a pie-in-the-sky-when-you-die sort of person. But every once in a while, it’s helpful to use the image of Heaven for a thought experiment that reflects upon our current conditions.

The other day an online friend shared a post where a woman, who’s a professor of sociology, was being rabidly criticized for making a video where she discusses her futuristic novel. In the video, she describes how the novel, which takes place in the mid-twenty first century, paints the picture of a world without nation states in which everyone’s needs are met, work is shared, resources are shared, and there’s no money. Apparently both people sharing this video seemed to think she was proposing the worst possible thing ever.

My friend is a pastor and theologian and my first thought was: isn’t she just painting a similar image to that which you paint every week and call Heaven?

As far as I can tell, heaven is a place with the following characteristics:

- no money

- everyone’s needs are met

- we can do whatever we want (and not all of us are going to want to sing Amazing Grace repeatedly for 10,000 years)

- there is peace

- there aren’t any political, ethnic, racial, tribal divisions

- there is no injustice

So that’s what we want and we have invented the idea of a ‘new’ reality bearing the characteristics of the world we’d like to inhabit. Yet somehow, when someone talks about such a world, such a reality, existing here she is a dangerous communist radical. Why? It’s almost as if we are conceding that in our current state that which we want is impossible and so it’s dangerous to even consider it.

If it’s true that arriving at such a state is currently impossible, we can wonder what do we imagine changes in us such that we are, magically, able to exist in this new reality? Does it have to do with not having a material body and so we are no longer afraid of death? Does it have to do with a vision of God being so amazing that we are changed into automatons who can do no wrong? Does it have to do some magical enforcement capability in Heaven that makes us do right no matter what? Does the ego process simply vanish on our way to the pearly gates?

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One of the worst aspects of religion is that it can become extremely disempowering for the average believer. The idea that we can go from a world where children are firebombed to a world of peace and justice, but we can’t make this change happen and we simply have to passively wait for it to be done to us, is a sadistic theology. Yes, we must allow ourselves to be transformed by the Divine, however by engaging in the spiritual life we also participate in and activate our transformation. We are not passive agents.

Thus, would it not be valuable to consider, quite seriously, what we would need to change to make the new world a reality? If we religious folks are asserting that such a change is possible, then why not try and figure out how to do it? And this advice should apply to those who are non-religious and are working for a better world as well. We know that when considering some action, our greatest limitation is our vision or imagination. If we immediately say ‘no’ to some option, then that option is closed to us. We can never get to a destination we’ve labeled a non-starter.

It is easy for us to forget that things like that nation-state, capitalism, money, and private property are all very new inventions. They aren’t ordained by God. Humans have spent thousands of years without them. Why do we hang onto them as if they are sacred? And why do we label any thinking about them not existing evil?

Looking at the phenomenon of YouTube is instructive. Every day millions of hours of video get uploaded to this site. And the vast majority of people who upload never make a dime. They just want to do it. As a result, at this point, there’s a YouTube video about almost every possible human activity. Anything you want to learn how to do, or get advice about, you can. And it’s free.

The YouTube experience tells me that people want to share and also want to create and do things in the world. The idea that if there weren’t wage jobs then people would do nothing is preposterous. We are creative, active, meaning making beings. We love doing what we love. What bogs us down isn’t laziness; it’s the control exercised by the demonic systems of the world that seek to extract and steal and enact violence upon the world. I think it’s pretty obvious that if everyone knew that their basic needs would be met, and could relax into their lives, we would have a world full of amazing activity.

The image of Heaven is instructive in that it reveals our true desires for creation. But rather than taking those desires seriously, Imperial religion tells us that our desires are impossible and need to be postponed until God can work some magic and make them happen.

The spiritual life encourages us to take these desires seriously and ask what we need to do, and change, to make them happen.

May it be so.

Woe to those who join house to house,
who add field to field,
until there is no more room,
and you are made to dwell alone
in the midst of the land.

Isaiah 5:8

I took the above picture last week in central Washington state.

Spend some time with it.

What do you see? What do you notice?

The land is covered with wheat stubble, the only crop, as far as the eye can see. In the far distance are two buildings, the only farms visible for miles. The air is thick with smoke from the numerous fires burning throughout the northwest.

Behind this photo is about a hundred years of failed farm and climate policy which sees the natural world as a way to make money rather than support flourishing communities.

I wish that urban Americans understood what our “Farm Bills” really were about. But they don’t, and so corporate interests have been able to destroy our rural communities, and our land in silence and in secret. And the truly ironic and tragic part of it is that the politicians who get elected in these rural districts will say, with a warm handshake and a smile on their face, that they care about farmers.

Well if they do, why are there over 20 million fewer farmers on the land then there were 60 years ago?

The equation is pretty simple. The Farm Bill directs federal money towards farming activity, supposedly to support agriculture. But the real question is: What sort of agriculture does it support? Only one kind: commodity farming. For those who don’t understand that term it means the sorts of crops that are grown, shipped, and sold in bulk on the commodity markets: corn, wheat, soy beans, sunflowers, and a few others. Because these crops are priced on trade markets, you have to grow more and more of them to make any profit; and this is the focus, how much money you can make. But the more you grow, the more there is, the lower the price, the more you have to grow. The fields are joined together again and again. And the amount that the farm bill pays you is based upon these prices and thus you can never make a living from a small commodity farm. Finally, these are crops that leave the area and never actually feed anyone near where they are grown.

And if you want to do a small, mixed produce operation that might help the community, feed people, create a vibrant society? You get nothing from the Farm Bill.

This process, which is as old as Isaiah, is just another technique used to kick the people, the peasants, off the land. It is no different from clearing the commons across Europe in the 14th-16th century, or moving Indigenous people’s onto reservations, or taxing people out of their neighborhoods as part of gentrification.

And the process is also then connected to climate change, because it takes more and more oil to feed the commodity, industrial farming system, and the land, as it becomes more and more ill from pesticides, herbicides, and synthetic fertilizers is less able to sequester carbon and produce oxygen and support any sort of healthy ecosystem.

I’ve written about these things before, and there is a part of me that thinks, why write about this again? But I think we need to talk about it over and over until we get what’s happening and shift, or continue to shift, our focus to another way of life.

I am happy to see that there are more and more communities of faith, and non-faith, that are doing gardens, that are supporting direct to table farm produce. This needs to continue, to accelerate, because it is still a tiny minority of the potential that’s out there. If you are part of a group that has money, are you talking about buying land and helping people grow food there? Are you having active conversations about ripping up the communal lawn and having a garden? And is your community becoming more educated about our farming system so that it might advocate for another way?

And what do you imagine?

I look at this picture and here’s what I see:

A Farm Bill that supports small growers who produce food that people actually eat. Green fields full of a mix of crops surrounded by eco-villages of appropriately sized houses, communal buildings, people living in walkable, bikeable mini-towns that dot the landscape as far as the eye can see. High speed internet and high speed rail that connects these villages to communities far and wide. A blue sky, fresh air, healthy soil.

I believe this is what creation desires as well.

When Isaiah wrote his words thousands of years ago, he was saying that God despises an economic system of extraction and accumulation, where money is loved more than humans.

God still despises these systems.

Let’s make different ones.

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Climate change deniers used to claim that the climate wasn’t changing. They would point to a cold snap somewhere, or talk about how it was always hot in the summer when they grew up, or just say that the obvious shifts in climate were an illusion. In the US, this could sort of work, with a significant segment of the population, while the effects of the climate crisis were still a bit on the subtle (to those not paying attention) side. However the past several years have brought enough climate disasters and changes that such a stance is no longer possible.

You might think that this would help people engage with reality, see that they were wrong, accept the truth of the climate crisis and join in movements to make positive changes to our way of life on earth.

Silly you.

Not only has this not happened within the climate denial movement, but what I’ve noticed is a shift in rhetoric that is even more dangerous because it is weaponizing a true statement for the purpose of climate denial: the climate on the earth has always changed over time.

This past weekend we were camping on the Olympic peninsula and we happened to meet a family from Houston who were vacationing here. As we talked about where they were visiting, and the current fires and changes in rainfall in WA I mentioned the ‘new climate’ to which the mom of three - nice looking white folks from Texas - said, “well we were reading about the glaciers here and you can just see that the climate changes all the time.”

There it was.

This is of course a true statement: the climate on earth has changed often over its 4 billion year history. So now, rather than being labeled ‘climate change deniers’ these people can be seen as reasonable and educated and understanding issues of earth science and climate. And, they can assure you that there is nothing problematic going on because, well, the climate changes all the time.

Let’s review just a few of the serious problems with this approach and the truly horrific agenda behind this mild mannered rhetoric:

1) It ignores issues of scale and cause. It’s one thing for the climate to change over several thousand or hundred thousand years. Such a time frame gives creatures time to adapt, to move, to respond. It is quite another thing for massive changes to occur over a decade or two. When this happens, the results are catastrophic for life on earth. We are in the midst of the second type of change, not the first type.

2) By not discussing cause, it abdicates any form of responsibility for the change happening now. The vague comment “well the climate changes all the time” makes it sound like this is, literally, an act of God. Climate change comes out of the blue, it comes and goes, and because most of these changes happened when humans were not around, it has nothing to do with us. This approach is perfect for those who wish to deny any human complicity in what is happening right now and this allows all of the policies that are working to accelerate climate change to remain in place. Under such a view, the climate crisis isn’t happening because of our human way of relating to the world, it’s just ‘happening because it happens’. This is obviously a lie and wrong, but you have to uncover the lie to name it.

3) By naming some general reality of ‘change’ people are able to ignore the fact that sometimes these climate related changes have resulted in the death of much of the life on earth. There’s a reason there are no more dinosaurs walking around. Climate change is not benign. I wondered as I looked at this woman’s beautiful 9 year old daughter if she ever considered that the ‘change that always happens’ could result in her daughter not having a life to live or a habitable planet to live on. The idea being propagated here is a pure fantasy which may be an understandable coping strategy in the short term, but it ignores all of the realities of our current situation and creates paralysis when it comes to activating solutions.

4) The Venn diagram of those who take this approach and those who align with fundamentalist Christianity are almost a complete overlap. Such a view of the climate crisis is a perfect fit for those who think, against any rational intelligence, that Jesus is going to come out of the sky and just fix things when they get too bad. The ‘give it over to God’ crowd would of course love the idea of God guiding the changing climate and if things get too bad He (it is of course a He) will just whisk the good people off the planet right on time. Such a view can only be described as completely delusional, and delusional states are very dangerous, even as they may be compelling to some who are seeking ways of dealing with their fear and anxiety.

5) The other overlapping Venn diagram is with the various ‘ism’s’ that are associated with the oligarchic take over of the world economy and resources. These people, and their various Nationalist, Nativist, minions (and here is the US, as in Europe, it is White Supremacy) know that the climate is changing as a result of human activity and their response is a desire to adopt a genocidal approach which sees eliminating billions of people as the way to survive on earth. If Bangladesh goes underwater and 250 million poor brown people drown, this is not of concern to them. The rich of the world who survive in their shelters and private spaces will be just fine and can crank up their air-conditioning. Of course, many of the current supporters of these regimes will die off too, but their denial of this reality is stronger than their will to do anything different.

So the answer to this particular ‘argument’ is really very simple: yes the climate on earth changes and right now it is changing because of us and it’s headed in a direction where our survival is increasingly at risk and if we care about the current life on earth it would behove us to do something different.

The problem with this of course, is that we all feel very powerless to ‘do something different’ in the face of powerful interests to the contrary. However this is really what the spiritual life is all about. Every spiritual tradition has been very honest about the power of a few humans to change the Empires of the world. They have specifically pointed to ‘giving up hope of fruition’ as part of our life of practice.

In embracing powerlessness we find our power. But this requires stepping into reality and not finding dangerous delusions within which to lose ourselves.

The climate is changing and it’s high time to find other ways to live together.

One of the funny phrases I’ve taught my grandsons is that you need to ‘wake up and smell the coffee,’ when it’s morning time. So now, on days when we are around for breakfast, they love smelling my coffee once it’s made and we are sitting down together. They don’t yet understand the non-literal meaning of the idiom: that you need to wake from your slumber and figure out what’s going on once something new is happening. But us adults understand that idiom and folks: when it comes to our institutions, it’s way past time for us to wake up and smell the coffee.

Whether it’s the Democratic Party, our educational institutions, our medical institutions, our religious institutions, there is not a day goes by when I do not hear about, or experience directly, the almost total missional breakdown of the organizations that we have come to count on as forces for good in our society.

Right now, in Seattle, it takes about a year to establish care with a new doctor. Yet just a few days ago, one of the biggest healthcare organizations laid off 200 providers because they are ‘too expensive’. This is at the same time that another healthcare organization has added 6 vice-presidents whose job is to go to meetings.

Then over the past several weeks I’ve had an experience with a church body that I can only describe as something straight out of a Kafka novel. They had asked me if I wanted to help with a very tiny church, for which they had no pastor. I said I was interested. This began a journey where basically they wanted me to reenter the ordination process and the journey ended (because I bowed out) with me being berated by some midlevel church official because I was ‘being hostile’ because I had some questions about their process and because, and this is absolutely true, I had submitted a video, with written transcript, in place of a written response and “I had better consider what I wanted to do here” (would you like mint or rue with your meal?) So here we have a job no one wants, with an institution that almost no one wishes to attend, and someone with my resume wishes to be of help, and somehow that’s a problem.

This is no different from what we see nationally regarding the DNC. Candidates who are incredibly popular (I thought elections were about voting and people choosing who they wanted right?) being trashed by the party establishment, who clearly has no interest in platforms that people want.

If all of this sounds eerily familiar to those of you who read the New Testament, it should because it’s exactly what Jesus says about the religious officials of his times who had become mired in bizarre rules, minutia, and concern about their own welfare; all of this at the expense of the people they are supposed to serve.

Meanwhile, outside of our organizations, the general environment of the world only becomes more and more problematic. The poly-crisis and the rise of the global oligarch class with their desire to control every bit of wealth and every resource on the planet is only gaining speed, crushing more and more people around the world. So just when our institutions are most needed, they are the least effective.

Mathematically, this is the state we formally describe as chaos.

Sociopolitically we could say that we are in a state where no one is coming to rescue us.

Of course many of us have been saying this sort of thing for awhile now. But it is one thing to say it, and quite another to live it.

It makes me consider the experience of both the immigrant and the oppressed. When my great grandparents came to the US, as Jewish refugees, they came from a situation where their worlds had literally been burned to the ground and they were in a new country where they were in the minority in terms of their religious heritage. Many other people and groups have come here in similar circumstances.

What these groups all have in common (and we see this around the world) is that they come together to create the things their community needs because they do not assume that anyone else is going to do it for them. The experience in their homeland of ‘the government’ was that the government was trying to kill them, not help them; and so if something good was going to happen, it had to come from their initiative.

The ‘assimilation’ process is then about various ‘out groups’ trying to ‘get in’ because they desire safety and care and support, and for awhile, or for a few, it works. But at the heart of every institution is the ego process and eventually, and especially in times of stress, this takes over and self-preservation becomes more important than whatever the mission of the institution was to begin with.

And so the process of death and destruction repeats with no in-breaking of self awareness to slow the devolution.

A brilliant colleague and friend, Rev. Dr. Twanya Anderson, when recently posting about this issue in relation to HBCUs, spoke to what is needed in these times saying, “I’m talking mutual aid societies, donating to endowments, hell... selling plates if we gotta!”

Our deepest theological yearnings are, many have said, a yearning for home. One of my teachers once said that we are like wolves in a snow storm that just want to sit by the fire for awhile before we have to go back out. And every once in awhile we confuse the fires of Empire for the hearth of home, and this confusion simply results in our being burned.

But it’s time to wander again. And it works a lot better if we have companions for the journey.

In the US, there are certain societal myths that govern what we can speak about and what we avoid. One is that there is no class structure in society: we are all just equal good ‘ol Americans. This is blatantly false, and we are finally starting to get that, but we can see, in political conversations about billionaires and #M4A, what a grip that myth has on our populous.

But there is another myth that is even more powerful, and thus even more problematic, and that is the myth of equal intelligence: everyone is our society is equally smart. And if someone doesn’t appear to be equally intelligent it’s the fault of education or upbringing or some other mysterious factor. To suggest otherwise is to invite a landslide of criticism and negativity, as if we have made a moral judgement about our fellow citizens.

Unfortunately this idea of equal intelligence is just a myth. Because intelligence is a biological property like any other and thus it exists in a probability distribution like any other property. We all know that things like height, blood sugar, jumping ability, eyesight, etc etc etc occur in a distributed manner. Some people are tall, some are short. Some can jump forty six inches and some can barely get off the ground. These are ‘god-given’ realities and we don’t moralize about them. This is way biology works, all the way down to the cellular level.

But when it comes to intelligence, we pretend this biological reality doesn’t exist. We have somehow gotten it into our collective consciousness that everyone is the ‘same’ when it comes to intellectual ability and anything, like an IQ test, that measures difference is somehow wrong, or biased, or ‘not really’ measuring anything. (And yes, there are tremendous problems with, and inequalities in, our educational systems. And yes, there are many types of intelligences and many ways to assess intelligence. And none this changes the reality of biological distribution)

However, this denial is not only incorrect, but it is outright dangerous when it comes to things like politics and social transformation. What do I mean?

Well, what I have noticed is that the people who hold most strongly to this myth are good, well meaning, intelligent people! But this is where the problems start. Because when it comes to things like convincing people about social policy they act as if everyone is as smart as they are. So they write brilliant articles, and they think deep thoughts, and they put forward complex, wonderful propositions.

And that article on post-modern eschatological ontology? At least 50% of the population has zero idea what you are talking about.

That position paper on immigration? Same.

That discussion about why God loves everyone? Same.

That lengthy discussion about multiple sexualities? Same.

That brilliant analysis of the science of vaccines? Same.

And not only do they not understand these things now (and this is the key point): THEY WILL NEVER UNDERSTAND THEM.

Now right wing sociopaths, although they will never say this out loud, they get this issue of intelligence distribution. And what they also understand is that people who are on the lower half of the distribution curve are more susceptible to fear. The world is more scary when you are less intelligent; because you know less of what’s going on, you are more overwhelmed by ever task - especially as the world becomes more and more complex - and a part of you knows that you don’t know and you may never know.

So rightwing politicians then gear their message to the 50% of the population who are below the mean. And what do they do: they simplify and they scare. Make America Great Again and the immigrants are coming for your jobs. That is something that a person with less intelligence can understand, even if it really has no meaning and isn’t true. But it scares and the solution sounds positive.

Good intelligent people do not seem to grasp that it’s ok to admit our biological limitations. The healthy response to our reality isn’t denial, rather it is trying to understand what leadership means when we acknowledge reality.

There is a great story from the Buddhist tradition about a simple monk who wasn’t smart enough to understand the complex teachings of the tradition. So his teacher, recognizing who he was, gave him a broom and told him to sweep the temple floor. It was through this practice that he became enlightened.

You see the goal of a just, good, peaceful society isn’t to make every one the same in every ability, rather it is to create environments that are good and just and positive so that everyone can be the best human they can be. It is to create environments that are free of fear. Where everyone can sit under their shade tree and not be afraid: as Howard Thurman said, a peaceful people under a peaceful sky.

We who see ourselves a positive teachers, helpers, spiritual leaders, should not be afraid of simple slogans, or down to earth language. And we should know that if we are we will always be leaving at least half the population behind. This is what we have seen with our current mistrust of experts and institutions. When we make things so convoluted that people cannot understand what is going on, AND their lives do not get better, but rather get worse, they are going to, rightly, begin to distrust those who are smarter than them but who also begin to appear unhelpful.

It is ok to know that not everyone is as smart as everyone else. We do not need to all be the ‘same’ to be good human beings. And everyone, irrespective of any level of ‘ability’ in any measure, can be fully human and a wonderful part of society. Rather what we need are environments of sanity and care that help us all become free.

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“Don’t read the comment section” has been pretty standard internet advice for as long as internet comment sections have existed. Why? Well because they tend to be full of hateful, racist, misogynistic, homophobic, and just plain dumb comments. The advice is sound.

But sometimes, reading the comment section can be instructive, can give one insights into our society. Such is the case with Elon Musk and the recent SpaceX IPO. This is the financial event which made him the world’s first trillionaire; an amount of money that is incomprehensible.

For me this event harkened back to the era where societies were organized around a concept called the ‘divine right of kings.’ Basically this meant that the king owned everything. God had given the king rights over all creation. So while ancient kings and emperors may not have been literal trillionaires, they were effectively that rich because they controlled all the resources in their kingdom. They could do whatever they wanted with whatever, and whomever, they wanted.

If you are a trillionaire, you pretty much own everything because you can buy anything you want. The comment “cost is no object” truly applies. And for those who might say, “well not everything is for sale,” I would say you don’t understand much about human nature. Because for the vast majority of people, if someone showed up and offered you an outrageous price for something you owned, you would take it.

Now I, and many others, find this situation abhorrent. I don’t like the idea of the divine right of kings and I don’t like it that someone is a trillionaire. Many share this opinion and lots of people have been writing about this over the past couple of weeks.

However when you read the comment sections from these articles, you find a very different sentiment coming through. (And as a quick aside, I am aware that many of the comments these days are generated by bots, but not all are and in some threads very few are.)

Millions love that Musk is a trillionaire. In these comments you find themes related to appreciation of success, reward for hard work, contributing to society, and the fact that many who work in this company also got rich off of this IPO. The fact that others in the world are struggling, that capitalism requires some to be underpaid so some can get rich, that there is no equitable sharing of resources; these ideas are either nowhere to be found or they are firmly rejected.

In these comments we see the particularly American toxic brew of colonialism, individualism, and the Protestant work ethic. It’s the prosperity gospel on steroids. But it’s also about something else: it’s about desire.

What I was most drawn to in these comments were how many are about the workers who became millionaires because they got some of the SpaceX stock. People in our society want to ‘strike gold.’ We want to get rich quick and therein lies a paradox. Because while these comments were, on the one hand, lauding hard work and success, they were really cheering on ‘hitting it big:’ making a ton of money without having to work.

This I think is what keeps the vast wealth inequality machine churning: the hope that someday I will get close enough to a billionaire that some of that wealth will rub off. It is the desire to get mine.

Twenty five hundred years ago, the Buddha identified that desire, grasping, was the root of all suffering. This desire arises out of the fear of death which in turn triggers the struggle to accumulate. The contemplative traditions that followed this ancient insight claimed that liberation from suffering could only happen when we realized and lived a life which arose from the knowledge that ‘less is more.’ This understanding pertains to both individual and collective liberation.

But, reading the comments, you quickly see that we haven’t, as a species, learned much in twenty five centuries. Desire, grasping, accumulation, still rules the day; and so this example shows us the connection between spirituality and economics.

The truth is that we cannot legislate our way out of the inequality that causes so much suffering when millions are still enthralled by vision of getting more and more and more.

And I have encountered this not just in comment sections but also in the event planning for ‘spiritual’ gatherings. For decades I have always tried to convince planning committees that less is more; that we do not need to fill every second of time with another lecture, another activity, another cool process. But it’s always an uphill battle because the desire to fill space is closely connected to the desire to fill coffers.

Thus, since you aren’t likely to become a trillionaire any time soon, I would suggest that you consider the practice of less is more. Where are places you practice this in your own life? Where can you let go of the desire to accumulate so that you might find the ‘enough’ of the Spirit? Where can you help create communities of care and sharing and realize that this is where true fulfillment is found?

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One of my Tibetan Buddhist teachers had a favorite phrase: “Never forget Hinayana.” The community even made a teeshirt sporting this quote, which is, admittedly, insider language. What does this mean?

Like Christianity, Buddhism has many different branches, sects and lineages which arose over time in the various places Buddhism flourished. The three major branches are Hinayana, Mahayana, and Vajrayana. Hinayana is the oldest and thus the most fundamental of the three. Like all religions, as Buddhism grew and developed it became more complex and involved. This is reflected not only in the teachings but in things like art, architecture, and organizational development.

Tibetan Buddhism is a branch of Vajrayana Buddhism and is incredibly complex in all aspects; far removed from the Buddha sitting by himself under the Bodhi tree. You might compare this to the difference between the Vatican and Jesus by himself on the mountain top.

When religion becomes very complicated it is easy to lose the forest for the trees. It is easy to become lost in arcane theological reflections, to become lost in the minutia of procedure and rules and aesthetics. Your practice becomes another ego project.

In Hinayana Buddhism all complexity is stripped away and there is only your meditation practice. Everything is projection; every piece of mental content is part of your ego formation. In this system, your mind is drawn into spaciousness, into emptiness, for true enlightenment is found only in pure groundlessness.

This understanding is very similar to the apophatic tradition in Christianity. God is beyond all our ideas of God. Anything we say about God is immediately understood to be not God.

“It (God) is not kingship. It is not wisdom. It is neither one nor oneness, divinity nor goodness. Nor is it a spirit, in the sense in which we understand that term. It is not sonship or fatherhood and it is nothing known to us or to any other being. It falls neither within the predicate of nonbeing nor of being.” - The Mystical Theology (5th Century author unknown)

Times of chaos and dis-equilibrium produce great churning of our mind and of the collective mind. Today people regularly talk about the endless stream of crises, upheaval, junk content, and rage-bait. There are wars and rumors of wars. Such is the nature of apocalypse.

It is natural to try and meet this churn with our own stream of activity. Every comment must be ‘called out,’ every outrage must be challenged, every bit of bad theology must be met with good theology. But these reactions only feed the chaos.

The admonition to never forget Hinayana is a balm in Gilead. It is a reminder to return to our most basic practice, to return our focus to the source of our spiritual life: that which is beyond the conceptual storms of humanity.

Of course we continue to do whatever work we are called to in the world; this is not an admonition to ‘give up’ or ‘disconnect.’ Rather it is an ancient reminder regarding what most of us know today: that the rage dejour is most often a distraction: here today and gone tomorrow.

Those of you who’ve ever done wilderness hiking know one of the core rules of the outdoors is to never start running through the wilderness when you are lost. This only makes things worse. Rather you are to stop, and stay where you are until you are either rescued or reoriented.

So in the current wilderness of a world in chaos.

Stop.

Return to your practice.

Never forget Hinayana.

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This week I finally decided to shut down my online teaching platform account. As the pandemic has receded in our collective rearview mirror attendance has declined and I have felt the pull to let this go. Looking over the list of courses I’ve taught these past six years, I am impressed and heartened by the content I’ve put out into the world. There’s a lot of good stuff there.

And then I think about how much ‘content’ is out on these internets.

Millions of words, billions of videos, more and more each and every day. Sure a lot of it is junk, but a lot of it is very good too, like mine. But even the good stuff is often repetitive and can be found in a million other places.

When I first got into the contemplation field there was a lot of talk about slowing down, about rest, about sabbath, about how we do too much. This is still a huge issue. Only now much of the extra activity is content creation, this endless online buzz.

As with our other activities, this constant production is often driven by the need to make money. I am paid for content; either directly by users or, if I was more tech savvy, indirectly by advertisers.

Two summers ago, the publisher of my book on spiritual practice and climate change was interviewing authors who were writing on the climate crisis. I contacted him to suggest I do one of the interviews. He responded that he wasn’t interested because my book was already 3 years old, had been released during the pandemic and hadn’t sold well. No one wants to pay for ‘old’ content.

So we make more. “What’s new?” people ask. As a book author it’s always struck me as odd that people ask about my next book project even before they’ve read my most recently published book.

And of course all of this content, all of this activity generates heat. I mean this literally. Motion, whether it’s electrons or large bodies, creates heat, largely from friction, and that heat moves off into the world. Climate change is a reflection of our incessant motion.

So what if we could count on care? What if we could count on food and shelter and help when we needed it. Not excess, not anything our hearts might desire, but enough. Enough mana for today.

Could we stop? Or at least slow down? There’s more than enough content already out there to keep us busy for a dozen lifetimes.

But here’s the interesting thing: I’m not sure we could slow down much. We are so trained in endless motion. Stillness makes us anxious, makes us feel bad about ourselves, causes shame to arise. And when we see someone who isn’t in a frenzy, we are often angry, or become judgmental, or insult them. This is how we are trained.

This meditation shows one way in which our inner world and the outer world are connected. In order for there to be less heat in the atmosphere, there needs to be less motion, less friction, less over-functioning. But it’s a paradox isn’t it: here’s some new content to discuss not making new content.

And this points to another reason for what we do: connection. Although I loved the content of my classes what I loved more was the community, the connection with likeminded people, with people I cared about and loved getting to know better. I write these short essays as much to think about those who engage with them as I do to put my ‘brilliance’ (ha ha) out into the world; and I know that if I stop writing these connections will slowly atrophy and vanish.

We are aware that people are yearning for the connection with human beings I’m describing. Loneliness is at an all time high and so we churn through content wishing to connect. Because, like old content, connection itself doesn’t really land as a reason to get together. I doubt that many would come to a class about nothing.

Our task then might be this: Can we cool ourselves beside the still waters of our mind and can we create communities where that stillness will not cost us our life and will also provide us with the connection we so desire?

Every contemplative tradition contains teachings about praying in graveyards. They also contain admonitions such as, “Remember, when you enter chapel, that death strikes without warning.” or “Meditate on the decomposing body of your loved one.” or “Go to the place where the bodies are burned and sit in the charnel grounds.”

To people in a death denying, death avoiding culture, these teachings, these practices may seem bizarre, macabre, disgusting even. Why would we want to do this? What might we have to gain through such practice?

In order to understand these ancient impulses, we must first remember that, much as it’s become fashionable to romanticize ancient societies, death was far more common and present in the ancient world than in our own. The average life expectancy for most of human history was around 40 years, childhood mortality was high and common - as was maternal death - and any cut or bruise or winter season could bring fatal illness seemingly out of nowhere.

I imagine that if someone from our time would have appeared in the middle of such a reality to proclaim that a majority of humans were living until almost 80, that many people went their entire lives without seeing a dead body, and that we were spending billions of dollars trying to live past 100, it would have created a state of confusion and utter disbelief.

Therefore, as we consider context, it is perhaps not surprising that spiritual practice, those things which seek to connect humans more deeply with the life-giving energy of the cosmos, would include meditating in places of death and decay. Such times of practice would allow people to befriend death, loss, and grief. It would allow us to see ‘past the veil’ into the realm of non-material consciousness: the realm of God and the ancestors. It would arouse the courage needed to face the difficulties of a life that was both wonderful and incredibly fragile.

To pray in the graveyard would engender the paradox that in staring death in the face we find life.

Which then brings us to today. Currently grief and mushrooms are hot topics in the world of spirituality and psychology. I find this interesting. As our world and society becomes more tomb-like with the rise of the various poly-crises, sociopathic governments and technological systems, we appear to be called back to prayer in the graveyard.

As Empire crumbles, contemplatives throughout history have sought out some of the most inhospitable environments they could find to pray, to seek Wisdom, to form something new.

For if we find life and strength in the charnel ground, we can find life and strength to face whatever comes. Wisdom indeed arises out of the spaces of grief and emptiness, and such wisdom is needed to point humanity the direction of whatever comes next as things fall apart. When it becomes clear to us that Empire cannot be fixed or saved the only sane wise thing to do is to look at the ashes around us and see what might arise next.

So do not shy away from such practices. Rather seek them out and see what new thing you have the courage to discover.

Go and pray in the graveyard.

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A series of recent very high profile DV incidents these past two weeks, including a horrific one today, have reignited our debate about how we classify DV: mental illness or something else.

I want to suggest that the problem with this debate lies with the model we are using to discuss our states of mind: the medical model of illness is simply inadequate to describe any number of human problems and DV is one of them.

Most people, when they use the term “mental illness,” do not even realize that it describes a particular way to understand our states of mind; and they certainly don’t know that there have been, and are, many other models of human experience - thought and feeling - which are, IMO, a much more helpful frame for the conversation.

Basically the medical model looks at “illness,” which is some sort of deviation from the state of “health”. Interestingly, the medical model is very bad a describing what health is, it’s just sort of assumed. So, if you break your arm, the break is the illness, because bones aren’t supposed to be broken. So the broken bone is the illness and then we design ways to treat the illness.

Applying this medical model to mental states is a very recent idea in human history, it’s only about 150 years old, and it has been increasingly pushed because it’s then used to sell pharmaceuticals. You have an ‘illness’ that needs to be ‘cured’ and so you take a pill. Unfortunately this model has some very serious drawbacks when it comes to mental states, the two most significant are: 1) there is no definition of “normal” and 2) it is a highly individualized model that cannot account for the influence of social systems on our behavior and our interior life. (A third major problem is that the model may simply just be wrong and a bad one, but I’m not going to get into that here)

When we come to the reality of DV, we run straight into both of these problems, which is really why this conversation is so fraught. We are trying to describe a bug, using only the categories of a plant.

Other models of our mental experience largely arises from the contemplative traditions and use the concept of formation and habit as the cornerstone of their systems. The human mind in formed in certain ways by the totality of their experience in society and that formation develops habits, which then leads to behaviors. When we are assessing a particular behavior, or state of mind, we begin by looking at formation and habit and then, if the state of mind or behavior is problematic, we can look at how we create new behaviors and states of mind.

As you can see, this model is much more wholistic, can account for social influences, and gets away from the ‘normal’/‘abnormal’ dichotomy.

So let’s look at DV: If all people in a given society are formed by patriarchy, then, by definition, this cannot be seen as ‘abnormal’ from a medical POV. The medical model simply has no way of getting its arms around the issue: it is ubiquitous and it is systemic. So, from the medical model view, a man could, or could not, have any number of diagnosis, or no diagnosis, and still behave in the manner patriarchy tells him to when he feels threatened.

On the other hand, if we apply the formational model, we can certainly discuss how men, and women, are formed by society, what habits that formation produces, and what behaviors might result from these formations. Obviously DV is a very bad thing: patriarchal formation is not good for a society that seeks to be loving, caring, peaceful, just, or allow all humans to thrive.

Therefore we can look at these behaviors and work backwards to the formation and see how people get to be this way and how we can re-form people and society into loving beings and loving systems. This approach allows us to get away from the unhelpful spiral of the medical model and allows us to name the problem clearly and, hopefully, do something about it.

Of course, the techniques of this transformation are the techniques of all spiritual traditions.

Everyday, I wish that more people took these techniques seriously.

If you dug into the details of the Hungarian electoral system you know that Orbán has done just about everything possible, short of cancelling elections all together, to make ousting him as hard as possible. Yet even these moves couldn’t overcome one simple reality: 78% of the voting populace came out to vote and most of them voted against him and his party.

Here is a map of our 2016 presidential election with “did not vote” added as a candidate:

As you can see, Did Not Vote won by a landslide with 471 electoral votes. This has been the case in every presidential election since I’ve been voting, and probably before that as well.

Now we are hearing a lot about voter suppression efforts, and gerrymandering, and all the things Dump and the GOP are doing to keep themselves in power. And they are doing these things, and Orbán did all those things and far worse. And it didn’t matter because 78% of the people came out to vote.

My experience with these conversations in the US is the people don’t really want to confront our miserable turnout rates. I certainly don’t think that the two major parties care. Because beyond whatever attempts are being made to keep people from voting, there are millions and millions of people in our country who could vote, easily, but simply don’t. For example, in a recent election here in Seattle, where you have a ballot mailed to your house and all you have to do is fill it out and drop it in any mailbox or any ballot box, 23% of the electorate voted.

I think that the real problem isn’t organized attempts at voter suppression, it’s the fact that our political system isn’t doing the things that people want and so a huge number of people have simply decided that voting doesn’t matter.

Consider these facts: The vast, by over two thirds, majority of US citizens want (and I could make a much longer list):

- sensible gun regulation

- universal healthcare

- a living wage

- affordable pre-school and daycare

- immigration reform that allows anyone who’s working to be in the country legally

And our national government, of both parties, have steadfastly refused to do any of these things.

So at a certain point, people just say, “Why bother?”

I am not familiar with recent domestic Hungarian conversations, but I can imagine, given the results, that the people were just finally fed up with being ruled by an autocratic idiot.

Perhaps that’s the one thing that will get Americans to the polls in significant numbers. If we finally understand that the current administration is going to not only bankrupt the country, but is also going to ruin all of our international good will and is going to continue to make living in the US increasingly miserable for more and more people, maybe then we will see the harm reduction of voting as being worthwhile.

Of course that doesn’t fix the problem that got us here in the first place.

For me, the only way we get to the dreamlike 78% is if there is ever a party and slate of candidates who will do things that help people. Unfortunately, Empire doesn’t work that way, and this is our great conundrum.

Which is why spiritually driven social transformation is, I believe, the only true way to peace and justice.

So let’s keep dreaming and let’s keep trying to create and nurture contemplative community.

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For those of us who are interested in Jesus as a spiritual teacher, this so called Holy Week is central to our faith calendar. And as we are in the midst of another war, as we are imprisoning people for moving about the globe, as we continue to imprison more people than any country in the world, as we deny healthcare, bankrupt schools, keep millions in poverty, and continue to label some as less than human; I thought it would be great to check in on how seriously we are taking Jesus’ teachings.

So this is the person who tells us:

- be peaceful

- love your enemies

- share your wealth

- heal others

- love everyone

- care for your neighbor

- be one of Wisdom’s children

-care for the widows and the orphans

- economically, and in terms of power, invert society

- do the things he asks us to do if we are ‘following’ him

I could go on and on but the obvious point is that we (the big society we, the systems we) have a very poor score card.

And my big question is: Do we think we’re fooling God?

Of course, one possible explanation for our continued refusal to be in the world as Jesus asks us is that we are truly atheists at heart. Perhaps, in the privacy of our own mind, we think “This God thing is all nonsense anyway so it doesn’t really matter if I’m following Jesus or not.” Or maybe we have some version of cheap grace running in the background: “Doesn’t matter, God will forgive us.” Or, of course, there’s always denial: we don’t really think about.

But if there is some version of God that’s real, then I have to think that Holy Week pretty much looks like an Un-Holy Joke to her. Like why bother. It’s a lot of work, we all know how the story comes out, and rabbits don’t lay eggs.

And next week we will have the same conversations about why the institutional church is dying. Why do you think?

Increasingly, as the various poly-crises of our time engulf us, I’ve been having conversations about the formation of new sorts of communities. Communities of care, mutual aid networks, spiritual communities; there are a lot of different names. I would say that every one of these, although many are not explicitly Christian, is interested in the Jesus list of behaviors. And everyone of them also seems to realize that the larger systems are never going to be interested in that same list.

This appears to be the paradox and conundrum of our human existence:

To behave in a way that might be named “fully human” or “just” or “peaceful” or “following God” or “you insert your term” then you must join with another small group and let go of changing the rest of human society.

This is where I keep coming back to the evolution idea: the teachings of the spiritual masters are for us but they point to a being that is not us.

And as for God, it is clear she will not force us to comply with the teachings, but it is certainly my experience that if we take the teachings seriously, she will help us make them happen.

May we continue to summon a different future.

For almost 25 years I lived and worked in ‘hockey country:’ far northwest MN. If you have never spent time in such a place it’s hard to understand just how all absorbing and cult-like hockey truly is. Hockey families put their kids on skates before they are out of diapers and the amount of money spent on travel and equipment requires a revolving loan that’s renewed every Fall. Grandparents will routinely drive hundreds of miles every weekend to see multiple games and you can forget about seeing these people at any other community function once the season starts.

The kids who grow up in this world do everything together, know each other from birth, and are often distant relatives. Hockey parents do business together, spend thousands of hours volunteering with their respective “Blue Line Clubs”, and of course sit in the stands at hundreds of games. If and when the high school team makes it to the State tournament, whole towns shut down and a caravan of cars miles long heads down the two lane highway to the state capital. This isn’t a game, it’s a culture and a society.

I thought about all of this with the recent dust up regarding the Men’s and Women’s Olympic teams and the difference in their post gold medal celebrations. It occurred to me that this situation provides a perfect window into how cultures function to both provide closeness and also to ignore deeper issues under the veil of shared experience.

Although it was said a few times that the men and women all ‘knew’ each other and were close, I don’t think that those outside the hockey world really understand what this means. These young adults have literally grown up together. When the boys and girls teams play they do cheer each other, they do support each other, they are part of the same tight knit world. This bond is very real and is the nature of any close society. The care and support are real. Hockey provides an identity, a place of being, a life.

And, as with any culture, any society, there are things we don’t talk about. Like the fact that girls hockey is one of the few places where queer girls can have a stellar place in society as long as they keep quiet about their sexual orientation. Like the fact that this society is incredibly sexist and ‘conservative’ and wholeheartedly supports the macho values of the MAGA world. All of these truths, some of which are at odds, are present, but as long as no one rocks the boat they simply float under the surface of the cheering crowd.

Of course, on the world stage, and on the US victory stand, the issues don’t stay quiet, they surface. They disrupt. They tear at the fabric of culture.

I no longer live in hockey country, but my guess is that there, the national uproar about the teams was either ignored or quickly brushed under the rug. Because in that setting, the people have to go back to selling hot dogs together, cheering at games together, and living together in community. And while it is easy to give cultural commentary and throw pot shots from outside a culture, from the inside such eruptions are painful and extremely challenging because they rupture the security and care provided by the community. I’m sure you can look at your own cultural setting and think of things which, if discussed, would cause similar uproar and fracture. These are the things about which we say, “We don’t air our dirty laundry in public.”

What we see in this example is how hard it is to change society. Where do we sit down to discuss deeper issues? Where do we find places of transformation? Where and how can we change deep habitual patterns which do give us positive experiences but could also use some reflection and change? The truth is that settings for deeper are almost non-existent in the average human society. Spiritual community is designed to be such a place of evolution, but as we all know, these are a minority report in every society.

This does not mean that the task of transformation is impossible, but it does mean that we would be foolish to underestimate the challenge of the work.

It’s almost as hard as scoring a goal in hockey.

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The start of yet another war in the Mideast is all the confirmation we need that we are NOT evolving. It’s also the perfect example of one of the key obstacles that I’d been planning on writing about even before I knew this latest catastrophe was going to happen.

When we talk about humanity evolving, whether this is in the spirituality world, the AI/Transhumanist world, or some other situation, there is often the implication that an evolutionary step requires some sort of change in who humans are: the idea of the ‘second Adam’ for example.

While this is certainly one option, another idea that I hear next to nothing about is this: what if instead of all humans changing, we just changed certain things about how we organized society?

Sociopaths, true sociopaths, represent a very small percentage of human beings: less than 5% of the population. However, if we look at rulers, especially the rulers of large Empires, we can see that they constitute a very very large percentage of the ruling class.

This makes sense because Empires fundamentally require the dehumanization of certain groups of people in order to exist. One needs to be able to slaughter children, enslave populations, burn towns and cities, and commit all manners of other inhuman acts in order to run an Empire. And only sociopaths are cable of doing this, especially to scale.

If we look at the current new war, and all the other wars both recent and historically, we can see the level of sociopathy needed to justify such behavior. Furthermore, sociopaths are needed to be able to do the lying, propagandizing, misdirection, and gaslighting necessary to encourage the rest of the population to support such evil social behavior.

One of the ways to describe the ‘stuckness’ of humanity in our endless cycle of suffering is that, on a population scale, we have not figured out how to prevent sociopaths from gaining power. Because really, these folks should be in locked mental wards rather than running the country.

What if human evolution looked like solving this problem?

What if we were taught from an early age how to identify and treat sociopathic behavior rather than being influenced by it and rallying behind it?

What would be needed for this change to occur?

One of the things that would be required is an intentional commitment to the truth and a commitment to consequences for such behavior. When someone ‘tells’ on a sociopath in our normal society, we find that either the truth teller isn’t believed, or the system rallies around the bad behavior to protect the person or both. This is a manifestation of our ‘fallen’ nature. We have not figured out another way.

War and violence couldn’t happen without sociopathy.

What might it look like if refused to follow such behavior?

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This past weekend we had one of our most interesting Lyft drivers ever. We were in Denver and getting a ride to see our daughter-in-law perform in two of her bands. The man had a dreamcatcher tied to his rear view mirror and he looked like he might be Native, which turned out to be the case. Soon he began to talk about how “it was all coming to an end,” an interesting comment. So I asked, “all what?”

For the next 20 minutes we got to hear all about the apocalypse, various Native prophecies, teachings about the end times, the importance of the fall of religion and the rise in spirituality, the value of the Epstein files release, and how things were going to be set right and into balance. Most of what he talked about was material that I am very familiar with; and we are hearing a lot of this sort of talk as our current time of great disequilibrium presses on.

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With the coming of the internet anyone can access this information and can compare notes from various traditions: cross referencing Native teachings, the Chinese new year, astrology, and the Bible. Such a thing was only possible for those with PhDs even as recently as 50 years ago and if you go back 150 years, it was impossible for anyone on earth. This is a fairly remarkable and notable acceleration in the field of comparative religions and spiritual teachings.

What is not new is the feeling that the apocalypse, the end times, are coming and coming soon. What is also not new is that each generation seems unaware of the previous moments of ‘massive transition’ and appears to firmly believe that this time is ‘it.’ Now is the moment.

I point this out not to denigrate these sorts of reflections, but rather to ask a deeper question: What is behind this ever present search for the signs of a new age?

Desire.

It represents our desire for something better. It represents our deep knowledge that things are not right the way they are and that there must be a way to do things differently. This is the essential issue and question behind my (perhaps annoying and/or boring) continued harping on “We Need to Evolve”.

You see, I don’t think that humans are fundamentally ‘bad’. This is not my understanding of the idea of original sin. Rather I believe that human are, as the Bible even says, ‘good’ but that there is a problem that keeps getting in the way of this goodness. Of course this problem is the ego process as defined by contemplative psychology.

But underneath this process, which churns out suffering faster than a factory can churn out widgets, there is a deep desire for the goodness to emerge, to be the thing that sets the agenda for human society. And that desire usually bubbles up from the bottom of society.

You see this guy, a regular guy from a tribe whose land was stolen, whose culture was stomped on so badly that he told us all his family have disowned him because they are fundamentalist Christians and think he is going to Hell for following their own Native ways, this guy has no power in the Empire. And he knows that. Apocalyptic movements to form a new world come from people who are disowned, rejected, who are unpopular, who reject the crumbs from the Imperial table. Few people are even aware of the fact that, historically, most contemplative communities are populated by people who were discarded as children; they are the lowest of the low.

But because they have no obvious earthly power, they need to find power somewhere else, and that power comes from the spiritual realm. Hence the prophecies, hence the hope in angels and movement of planets, hence seeking the power of the Spirit.

When liberationists talk about “God’s preferential option for the poor,” they are not talking about Marxism, but rather they are describing this apocalyptic process where by God is heard by the poor as they express and lean into their desire for a better society.

Yet as each disappointed generation learns, the time when “it all comes to an end” has yet to arrive. We haven’t evolved and it’s not even clear what that might mean or look like.

So in Part 2, I want to explore one of the possibilities.

Stay tuned.

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When I look at the response to the Epstein files situation, what I see is not so much a cadre of pedophiles, although I do see that, but rather I see an entire society that doesn’t want to admit and deal with the level of sexual violence that goes on every day. To me this is so similar to our conversations about racism where, despite overwhelming evidence of every possible kind, white people still want to talk about how they are not racist or how our society is not racist.

The idea that there isn’t ‘evidence of crimes’ in relation to Epstein is a statement so blatantly disconnected from reality that one can only maintain that stance with the most powerful set of social denial mechanisms possible. The novel 1984 often gets bandied about as an example of a world in which ‘peace’ is ‘war’ and yet we still do not wish to admit that we’ve been living in such a society forever.

That the statements of women, many many women, cannot and are not believed as evidence is the basic stonewall needed to defend our culture of sexual violence. Because if the women were to be believed then we would need to believe them about Uncle Bob and Boyfriend Joe and your dad. And our entire society and the nature of intimate relations would be upended and need to be reassessed.

We also see the defense of this denial when discussing Epstein and pedophelia because of those 53% of women who’ve been abused, half of them were abused in childhood. Which means you also know a pedophile. Let that sink in as well.

I grant that it is hard to face our monstrosity as human beings. It can be overwhelming to even consider the truth of who we are as humans. We hide behind platitudes like “there’s bad and beautiful all together” or “that’s just the way things are” etc etc. Mealy mouthed forms of denial hiding our abyss of pain are everywhere.

But the only way forward to a better world is truth and healing. Justice and repair. Do you want this to go on forever? This is the social version of Jesus’ great question to the man at the well: Do you want to be well? The man sat there for thirty years. I’m sure he had some good moments in that time. Not all was bad. He had a nice chat or two. But did he want to sit there for another thirty? This is the question we are always faced with.

Do we want to build a better world or do we want have more of the same?

Then last week, the UN declared that the world has entered an era of “global water bankruptcy” as water systems relied on by six billion people, and half of the world’s food production, are pushed beyond the point of recovery.

You would know none of this looking around at the news of the day.

Like DEI, climate change as a topic of national attention has quickly vanished from our national discussion and conversation; which makes me wonder: were we ever really serious about it? Or maybe the better question has to do with our level of distractibility.

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Recently I was in a conversation where the Peace Walk, conducted by a group of monks, was mentioned. These monks have been on their walk, day in and day out, and nothing has distracted them from this commitment. Even as Venezuela was invaded, even as ICE terrorizes communities, even as war continues to rage in numerous places around the world, they keep walking. They stick to their commitment. They maintain their focus. They are immune to squirrels.

This is a beautiful demonstration of the calling of the spiritual life, the calling of another way of being in the world, of another society. It requires a different kind of focus and attention. The kingdoms of the world will always rage, full of war and violence and planet killing technology. There will always be a new evil, a new distraction.

The question is: can we keep our attention steady? Can we keep the main thing the main thing?

The spiritual life calls us to create these different communities of being even though they will seem ineffective, insignificant, irrelevant. The monks could have easily said, “Well this walk isn’t doing anything to make the world more peaceful, and it’s cold out, let’s just go home and do something more ‘impactful’ (one of my most hated words).” But they haven’t, because they aren’t demonstrating for peace, they are being peace, they are living peace. And nothing is going to stop them from living this way.

So what are we focused on? How are we being a different way in the world? These are questions we can bring to our communities, whatever these are, however big or small, and they can guide us into that Beloved Community.

May it be so.

Hi all, I wanted to let those of you who subscribe to my feed know about this class. Would love to have you join in

4 weeks: Feb 2026

2 live one hour classes per week: Monday 2 PST,  Weds 10 PST (we will meet Tuesday the 17th and not Monday, presidents day)

This course is driven by two questions:

What is Spirituality?

Why have Spiritual teachings had such limited impact on human behavior?

The term spirituality is used with great frequency yet little clarity. Is it about God? Is it about being our best self? Is it individual? Communal? Is it connected to religion or independent of it?

Scanning our society, you can find a “yes” answer to any of these questions. So what is it?

Juxtaposed with this confusion, we have another issue, which is that spiritual teachings have been around and saying very similar things about the nature of humanity and suffering, and offering solutions to our problems, for thousands of years, with little to show for such endless repetition. Why?

This class will explore these questions by proposing a new, very simple idea: that spirituality is really economics: it’s about how we engage material creation. If we don’t see this, and put economics at the center of our spiritual life, then not only will spirituality always fail, but it can easily come to mean almost anything.

Come join us for this unique exploration.

Cost $100. All materials will be online for asynchronous use and you can join the live classes as you wish.

If you’re interested, please email me at micahprays@gmail.com.

Fast forward some five decades and we are currently traveling in Vietnam, beginning our trip in Hanoi. Lily, our beautiful host at the hotel tells us all the best places to visit, where we can find good food and clearly attempts to meet all of our needs. She smiles at us, she is incredibly kind, and her staff works hard to make our stay the best it can be. Too young to have been alive during the war, it is not hard to imagine that her parents lived through that horrible time, perhaps even fought in the conflict. And yet she clearly holds no malice towards us, towards people whose country was responsible for so much suffering in her country.

Everywhere we go we meet people like Lily: kind, warm, hard working, obviously at least as human as the white American ICE agents who are currently terrorizing people back home in the US.

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How do a group of people go from being your dire enemy to your hotel hosts? Does this transformation point to war not simply as being hell -so goes the famous saying - but as being the ultimate exercise in absurdity, in insanity.

A people, a nation, becomes gripped with confusion and terror and hatred, all the fruits of the spirit of evil, and then convulses in violence against their own projections.

Yet this cannot happen in a vacuum, rather it must be cultivated by the leaders of the people: those who should be seeking to lead with wisdom instead lead with greed and the lust for power. And when this happens destruction is the inevitable result.

At the same time however, leaders must have followers in order to succeed. Thus the great dance between the individual and the collective plays out on the stage of nations. “What if they gave a war and nobody came” is one question which points to this dynamic and to the truth that the ego process is both individual and collective.

Yesterday we visited Hanoi’s ancient University. Founded in the 11th Century the school’s curriculum was based upon the wisdom of both Buddhist and Confucian teachings and emphasized not only knowledge but also moral uprightness and the cultivation of a good and just society. Reading about one of the great leaders of the university, I was reminded of the Hebrew prophets when I read a story about how he challenged the king, requesting that the ruler remove the corrupt officials from his court as they were plundering the country and bringing harm to the people. The response: “The king refused.”

We can imagine how the king was also corrupt and how his cronies helped to enrich the ruler and the expense of the common people. Isn’t this ultimately what war is always about: the attempt to control others so that those at the top become materially wealthy at other’s expense?

Do we not see this happening today? Do we not see this happening over and over again throughout history?

Cain asks God if he is his brother’s keeper in a twisted attempt to conceal his evil deeds, but the answer of course is an obvious yes.

Seeing everyone as fully human is perhaps our greatest challenge. Clearing the confusion that creates the evil of war is our most profound task.

What if we all committed to never going when the king gave a war?

Isn’t hospitality and care and curiosity the better way?

I can tell you I’m having a much better time in Vietnam as a guest than I would as a soldier. The answers to the questions seem obvious; yet like everything about the spiritual path arriving at these answers is simple but not easy. However creating communities which commit to cultivating societies where the obvious answers arise naturally may be the only thing truly worth doing.

Let us engage that better way.

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Dearly beloved,

we are gathered to offer worship and praise to Almighty God;

to celebrate the life of our nations;

to pray for Charles, our King;

to recognise and to give thanks for his life of service to this nation, to the realms,

and to the Commonwealth;

and to witness with joy

his crowning and anointing,

as he is set apart and consecrated for the service of his people.

Let us dedicate ourselves alike,

in body, mind, and spirit,

to a renewed faith, a joyful hope,

and a commitment to serve one another in love.

Thus did yet another Christian leader not only pronounce God’s blessing over the head of the largest and most diabolical crime family in history, but he also admonished ‘his people’ to accept this order of things and be happy that they are spending billions of dollars to support those who are already billionaires and who still own serfs.

Four hundred years earlier, in the Virginia colonies, it was deemed a good thing that every week the new laws about the creation of whiteness and the inferiority of blackness were to be read in church to provide for the proper understanding of the sacred order of things. Then, once chattel slavery really took off in these same colonies, the churches became responsible for holding the fines levied on runaway slaves. Of course they took a cut of the proceeds.

The greatest and most successful con in the history of humanity is that Imperial rulers and their religious minions have been able to convince the common folks that religion is separate from politics. This con is so successful that even seminary professors will tell you that this is true and that those who ‘preach about politics’ are distracting from the faith.

The term politics originates in the West with Aristotle who wrote a book by that title. The literal translation of politics from that work is ‘affairs of the city’ which included everything that went on in the city and how the citizens of the city organized such affairs.

Of course these days our understanding of the term politics is often reduced to what candidate we are going to vote for or perhaps what public policies or activities are currently in place. But really, politics is everything: it is our affairs, it is our views on care for each other, it is our understanding of how the world should be organized and how our money should be spent, what are positive social relations and what are not.

It is literally impossible to go though a single page in the Bible and not find politics. From the Law, to the conduct of kings and kingdoms, to Jesus discussing the Kingdom of God, everything in scripture describes how human society is run and how God wishes for it to be run.

Then, as Christianity developed in the West, it did so hand in hand with the political entities of the time. In fact, the ‘establishment clause’ in the US constitution, which says that there will be no state religion, exists precisely because the state churches of Europe were so involved with Imperial politics; an involvement which included the important function of keeping the population allied with the kings and queens of the time.

It is only when religion becomes some sort of cosmic escape hatch to heaven after we die that we can enter the state of denial wherein religion has nothing to do with politics.

So the real question isn’t whether religion and politics are connected, but rather how are they connected and what sort of politics, what affairs of the city, religion is promoting.

All spiritual traditions make the claim that something is wrong with ‘business as usual’. This claim is made both for individuals but also for society as a whole. The kingdoms of world all function in a manner that is alien to God’s desires for humanity. In 1 Samuel 8, God goes on a literal tirade describing how an earthly king will rob, kill, steal, and oppress them and how this is not what God wants. However, the people, because of our internal malformation, do not listen and an earthly king is installed; with predicable results.

Because religious organizations are always being co-opted by the state, either overtly or covertly, their relationship with politics is either one of denial, ‘religion and politics don’t mix,’ or one of assimilation, some sort of nationalism or another. Thus you now have churches in America who either align themselves with Christian Nationalism or those who reject this right wing ideology but then often sound like DNC party affiliates.

We must understand that the politics of spirituality reject BOTH of these alignments. The politics of religion is the politics of a different city, populated by a different humanity. The policies of liberation, of hospitality, of care for all, of justice, of peace, are political, they are deeply political; and they will never arise from the Empires of the earth.

As I write this the US has just invaded Venezuela and captured its president. People who consider themselves liberal are doing their best “OMG, I can’t believe we are doing this,” and yet, without much effort I can count almost a dozen such actions taken by the US in the Western Hemisphere in my lifetime. What do the folks horrified by this think a trillion dollar war budget, a budget voted on unanimously by both parties year after year, is for?

The real issue with politics and religion is that a true politics of the spiritual life would empty most religious organizations in a minute. They didn’t listen to God about a king, you think they will listen to you? So for religious professionals this issue is really a covert issue about money and job security, something that few wish to discuss. This is why deeply spiritual movements are always minority movements and are also movements with an alternative economic strategy of self-sufficiency. Furthermore when these spiritual communities retreat from society it is often misinterpreted as a retreat from politics. Nothing could be further from the truth. Rather this move is the most highly political of all:

We will only work for a new kind of city.

I wish more would join in.

Peace,

Dan

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