COMING BACK AROUND

A friend of mine, haven’t seen him in over a year; he called me the other day. He’s been in a long term, drug addiction rehab program. When addicts go off the tracks they take others with them and I was onboard that train wreck. A lot of the emotional, financial aftermath funneled through me and I’ve had to wrestle with it. I’ve loved him like one of my own children all along, from when they all were kids raiding my refrigerator. 

     Forgiveness is easy for me but it can be misunderstood. Biblical hyperbole would have it that forgiveness erases the fact and you go back to like it was before. Forgive and forget. But it doesn’t work like that. The forgiveness I understand is to jettison the negative baggage; you just let it go. It lets the offender off the hook. That's not why you forgive but that's alright. It's like letting go of a hot rock. But you don’t forget, you remember. With or without troubles and hard times, things change, people change and life neither slows nor looks back. Forgetting serves no purpose. The victim in that miscarriage lets go the burden, for the sake of self. If the damage cannot be repaired then all you can do is to let it go. Otherwise it's the hot rock in your hand and you are the one on fire. Once you let it go you can both start over. Reconciliation is about balance and new beginnings, make something new, something positive, Good Samaritan. 

His rehab program was Christian centered and the brain washing seems to have worked. He talks about God and prayer with the conviction of a Big B Believer, something he never did before. I’m glad for his sake, otherwise I’m afraid it would be,‘Second verse same as the first.’ Better a slave to Jesus than to alcohol and heroin. After all, a religious addict has traded one drug for another but the latter is neither deadly nor illegal.

When I sat down to write this piece I didn’t know it would bring me here but, here we are. I am reminded how thoroughly religion is hard wired into our culture; you can't escape it. Even doubters, pushing back, it’s like swimming with dolphins: you don’t turn into a dolphin but certainly you experience buoyancy and you get all wet. I've been swimming with Christians all my life. I am comfortable with religious language I think, because everybody embraces one fiction or another and mine can accommodate the born again rhetoric. I can talk the talk; "God" and being blessed and allude to the sacred or being spiritual because it's all metaphor and I don't concede to an omnipotent, omniscient, super-dude. If you need religion you should have it; no different than antibiotics or chemotherapy. 
     When I need guidance or insight I look to the written word, but not the self serving schemes of 4th century War Lords who gave us the bible; canonized to consolidate power in the Holy Roman Empire. I prefer Joseph Campbell or Khalil Gibran. Campbell - ”God is a metaphor for that which transcends all levels of intellectual thought.” Simply said, we attribute what we can’t understand to something mysterious and call it God. Gibran - “Yesterday we obeyed kings and bent our necks before emperors. But today we kneel only to truth, follow only beauty and obey only love.” I get to make that distinction and am no longer bound by religion's Obedience clause. 

I don’t want to sound preachy but at the same time, I want some say in how I am perceived and remembered. I was never done wrong by my parent's church and I have no axe to grind. Loved ones pray for me and that's good, that kind of energy doesn't have a down side. Sometimes I lift one up, high hopes at best, unaddressed; but I am off the leash. My spirit yearns to know more about this journey but human nature and Western Religion's myth-fiction fall way-short. Mark Twain cut straight to the chase, “Faith is fine but give me a map and compass.” Seeking a safe, comfortable niche for my psyche, I default to Bertrand Russell. When he was challenged to declare either as an Agnostic or Atheist he answered, “That depends.” His logic was, if you want a theoretical position, the absence of evidence cannot prove anything. So, lacking tangible evidence to disprove the existence of a God, he would stand with agnostics. In a practical sense, he had no reason to believe in a God thus, he behaves/lives as an atheist. 

I like the concept of Karma. How we live creates an energy that reciprocates; what goes around, comes back around. We create for ourselves our own heaven and our own hell, here in the present. I take comfort in Campbell’s; “Participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world. We cannot cure the world of sorrows but we can choose to live joyfully.” So when Grace (metaphor) lifts me up, I concede to it. When I see the chance to be its instrument, I pray (metaphor) I will rise to the occasion: God’s Grace-Good Karma, coming back around.