Sunday School Hooky

I was raised Christian by a pair of agnostics. Each Sunday morning I tried to say in bed until the family left without me, but my parents preferred the late service (or perhaps they thought I did). As a result I had to lie in bed doing nothing for hours, which for my ten year old temper was worse than church, but not by much, so ‘try’ became the operative word.

Once seated in the temple, there was another agonizing wait that was probably only fifteen minutes, but seemed like days. Finally, after the minister mumbled something about Heavenly Fathers and ghosts, and everyone stood and sang some incomprehensible song, we kids were excused for Sunday School.

There was no escort – we were trusted to find our own way – a situation I took full advantage of.

About three times the number of paces it would have taken for me to arrive at the class for my age group was the distance to where I held my own personal Sunday School on the banks of the creek that ran behind the church property at the edge of a small eucalyptus forest in a suburb called “Northridge”.

There I communed with nature, hippy style, feeling the energy of the trees, delighting in the sway of algae and the gurgle of the water, and witnessing the cycle of life as I discovered frog eggs, then pollywogs, then little leaping frogs.

I was a pre-teen on the verge of puberty. It was the mid-sixties. And, like I said, though I didn’t know it at the time, I was plugged into the whole sixties peace and love revival. I was a one member commune, a child of the Earth with tree hugger tendencies, who was dismayed by the “establishment” and as a result, was generally treated as a pariah by the general public.
I still have to remind myself that I’m not “wrong” or ‘bad” because my views are so different from “the norm”. That it’s ok to believe that Love is for everyone and not just for members of whatever religion believes it has the favor of whatever God it prays to. That it’s ok to think that there’s more than just one “child of God” – that, in fact, we are all “of the creator” – isn’t that what Jesus was trying to tell us?

Should I be damned for thinking that Jesus, Buddha, Abraham, Krishna, and Lao-tzu, just to name a few, were all of the same ilk – that when Jesus said “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”, he was speaking from the context of the christ, and not from his ego self.

It is my conviction that Buddha knew himself as Christ, as did Krishna, Lao-tzu, and perhaps even Abraham (though I haven’t studied him all that much). I believe that a connection to The Christ is possible for all of us, from many different paths, by many different names, and that The Christ doesn’t give a flop how we do it, but that we do. It’s my view that The Christ is simply a channel to the oneness that we all came from – that it’s the “yellow brick road” back to our true home. That we’re all wearing ruby slippers and don’t know it. And the great master teachers through time have just been trying to tell us that!
Am I such a bad guy for believing that?

Maybe my beliefs would be more in line with the society that I live in had I not played hooky from Sunday School, and maybe my younger social life wouldn’t have been as miserable, but looking back, I like myself for doing it, so at least somebody likes me.

Before It Mattered, It Didn’t Matter

If current science is correct, since the beginning of time some tens of billions of years ago, stars have exploded, galaxies have slammed into each other, and comets and asteroids have rained down on planets turning their soil to blazing liquid and their oceans to vapor.

But, until matter developed the ability and impetus to scream “Oh shit!” [translation] – none of that mattered.

Our bodies are made of the same stuff that merrily roasts, freezes, collides, boils, melts, vaporizes, explodes, tumbles through the vacuum of space and spirals into the oblivion of black holes. So why does this stuff suddenly care?

Because of nerves – those long cells that wire the sensory organs to the brain. It’s the nervous system that has a problem with all the commotion in the Universe. Suddenly, all that banging about became dangerous. Suddenly pain became a consequence of exposure to the extreme. Suddenly conditions became important, and worry was invented.

It hurts when the body is injured. It hurts when it needs more food or water or air. It hurts when the opportunity to make more little bodies is thwarted. It even hurts when it thinks any of the above is going to happen.

So how do we vindicate this discrepancy between life’s fragility and the Universe’s hostility to life? I mean, think about it – here we are, these little blobs of gooey stuff that are so easily squashed, poked, suffocated, invaded, cooked, poisoned, and frozen, sitting in a Universe that, on a regular basis, squashes, pokes, suffocates, invades, cooks, poisons, and freezes things – how is that a reasonable state of affairs.

Most babies that I have encountered don’t seem to be worried about it at all. They just gleefully charge after whatever tickles their fancy – often, to the utter horror of some doting guardian. It isn’t until the fire burns – or the little hand gets slapped away – that they begin to equate the world with danger.

Are babies wrong to fear nothing? Is our grief, should something happen to that baby, warranted? What is lost when life ends? How are we different from, say, a rock? What is it that experiences pain as unpleasant? Does a rock feel pain?

Life’s preoccupation with survival, when compared to the events in the Universe, truly seems to be trivial. But then, is everything as it seems?




In this blog I intend to explore this and many other aspects of life, happiness, and the perplexing nature of existence.