Sorry

As I turned off the daunting news, I barely noticed the ad to financially adept persons, an ad affirming, “A life well-planned.”

Not mine. 

I stumbled into college as part of the prereq for going to mortuary school.  An associate degree and a Certificate in Mortuary Science later, I liked it, so I went on to get a Bachelor’s in Psychology and Philosophy.  (Perhaps I disappointed the kind family at the funeral home.)  I stumbled further into graduate school, taking my interest in philosophy and human needs to seminary. 

Meadville/Lombard Theological School smelled and seemed like the Mortuary Science building in Detroit.  The University of Chicago was more esteemed than I knew.  They designed the bomb and the raiding of the middle class there.  Jessy Jackson’s church was nearby, so I went a couple of times.  A band in church!  The South Side of Chicago was more interesting than I knew, with Barak Obama organizing and Buddy Guy playing, both nearby. 

A life well-planned might not have gone to India with Dr. Vasavada, my dear guru/friend, only to have him tend to a death in the family, leaving me to transverse India alone to sit with the Blind Saint and get robbed and sick, to later stumble into the darshan of Sri Rajneesh, later called Osho.  (Later, he went to Oregon where a wild and wonderful ashram flourished until scandal and he was poisoned in jail.  I happened to know his physician, who knew of the murder.)

Nor would a life well-planned take me to Urbana, Illinois, Clinton, North Carolina, and Ashland, Oregon as minister.  I improvised. 

Tripling the congregation, buying a building, and helping found another congregation in a nearby town seemed normal, a fulfilling of my dharma as best I could as I went. 

But both are distant memories now, efforts towards The All, gone by, fulfilling then, vacant now.  The many problems of the world still persist despite my attempts to address them from the pulpit to a mostly intelligent, compassionate, and responsible community.  They couldn’t fix the larger issues any more than I could. 

Nor have I fixed them otherwise.  Nor have I earned a wider congregation.

I still see people hiding in their cars from the nice day, the engines running, pumping the worst pollutants an engine makes at idle, to run the air conditioning.  I still see people dismiss the increased heat, drought, hurricanes, tornados, dying forests, corals, and species, rising seas, etc. as a hoax, uninterested in the problem or the solutions.  I see massive funding promoting that attitude go unmentioned mostly.

I see Netanyahu’s armies slaughter twenty-six times the innocents Hamas killed, as if even one replication of that atrocity was justified or sufficient.  The point is, they aren’t Jews, not as worthy of sympathy.  They’re fodder, collateral damage, in the way.  Would Netanyahu similarly bomb innocent Israelis if Hamas operatives might be hiding among them?  He lashes out at his neighbors, provoking a regional war.  We’d have to ally with the “us” of that story, unmindful of the ancient “them.”  Iran might have one atomic bomb?  To say nothing of the hundreds Israel doesn’t admit?  To say anything about this is antisemitic?

Have I fixed this ancient rivalry?  No.

Nor have I rescued humanity from the needless heat death we’re doing to ourselves.  Overblown?  Hyperbole?  Not if you’re sweating to death with no night cooling. 

The brain imbalance, the national neurosis that afflicts my society, I also haven’t remedied.  Fear and hate motivate voters.  Desire motivates buyers.  The sexes are ashamed of themselves and suspect they might should switch.  We get jacked around on whether the Dow is going up or down, oblivious to whether the Tao is alive at all. 

I am weary of trying, of writing to an audience of a few, as if something I say might be pertinent or helpful.  Old sermons in a box say nothing.  Memories of tears and applause fade. 

Perhaps writing on another biography on Augustine, the crucial founder of Christianity, will reveal the original confusion of Original Sin, the foolery that has befuddled Western civilization since.  Like the other founder, Paul, he was a fanatic, determined to impose his theology on everyone.  Such is what humans are susceptible to.  Two thousand years of confusion, alienation, and unjust domination are our lot since. 

James O’Donnell’s interesting Augustine, a New Biography, has this telling sentence: “In the tens of thousands of pages about him, in the thousands of pages he wrote, a vast humorlessness stretches as far as the eye can see.” Fanatics don’t joke. That’s part of their problem.

A life well-planned might generate and explain a solution to the mess, and might put us on a mission to “replenish” the good earth and enjoy its bounty.  So far, I haven’t done this.  I write late at night evasions and excuses. I didn’t cause this. I can’t fix it.

Sorry.