BITS OF WISDOM from others

GREAT TRUTHS THAT LITTLE CHILDREN HAVE LEARNED: 1) No matter how hard you try, you can't baptize cats.. 2) When your Mom is mad at your Dad, don't let her brush your hair.3) If your sister hits you, don't hit her back. They always catch the second person. 4) Never ask your 3-year old brother to hold a tomato.5) You can't trust dogs to watch your food..6) Don't sneeze when someone is cutting your hair..7) Never hold a Dust-Buster and a cat at the same time. 8) You can't hide a piece of broccoli in a glass of milk. 9) Don't wear polka-dot underwear under white shorts.10) The best place to be when you're sad is Grandma's lap.

Just relaxing in the tub is a favorite contemplation method for me, and today was no exception. Thoughts about exercise, it's benefits, and my lack of, made me think, if I only would create a habit of exercising all would be well. That led to other musings about habits, obsessions, and addictions, needless to say, the habit of not exercising prevailed.

Life is a field that needs tending

Life is a field
It seems that Sundays always bring short bursts of insight. It wasn’t always the case but insights are more frequent as one confronts physical mortality through aging. My own insights seem to be prompted by the catalyst of someone else’s ponderings. In my case it is frequently the homily at mass or something heard via television. Yesterday the prompter was a homily about the creeping insidiousness of little missteps. In the New Testament Jesus warns us about the relationships of anger, hatred and murder; sexual imagination to adultery and coveting. The progression is undeniable. We all have the human proclivity to mull and grow small thoughts into consuming thought patterns and eventually into some form of action. This is quite similar to another simple teaching that tells us the power of faith as small as a mustard seed. Wrong thought, as small as a mustard seed, can become giant in our lives.
Life is like a field a farmer leases. We are given the freedom to plant and nourish whatever we wish. Eventually we will see the results of whatever seeds we have decided to give the most care and nourishment too. Each seed of thought produces its own particular fruit and it makes sense to be diligent in our choices. The New Testament gives us so many teachings of Christ which warn us of the pitfalls and advise us of best direction. His parables intertwine giving us a guide for creating crops that nourish our lives and our souls.
When I was growing up in Eastern Oregon the farmland we made our living on was very fragile. There was very little water, used up soil and we had to fight to create a living in this part of the country. We learned how to increase the nutrients in the soil, how to conserve moisture and how to stagger the use of the land giving time to build its strength. We took care in protecting the seed that we planted into this unwilling land by treating it to prevent sickness of the crop it was to produce. The most ardent of all labors that went into prize of a decent crop was that of eliminating the weeds. Christ also gave us the parable of the farmer whose fields were reduced to worthless value by thorns and weeds. Our field of life is the same. If we allow ourselves to be assaulted by seeds of thought which are harmful in our lives we stand to lose.
Throughout the Old and New Testaments we have been given a training manual for creating a fruitful life, all we have to do is pay attention. The Ten Commandments give us a basic straight forward directive regarding things that are vital to life as a society and as an individual. There has yet to be a better set of guide posts put in front of us. The temptations to circumvent or to ignore these commandments are stepping stones to disaster. We can see this in our own lives, in our neighbors and in our countries. From my own view I see the Old Testament as a book of warnings and examples of just how important it is to stay away from certain tendencies of the human condition. In the beginning Genesis starts with warnings about disobedience, the dangers of our inquisitive nature, anger and jealousy as seeds culminating in the act of murder. Most of the Old Testament is involved with showing us what happens when we shove aside the directions supplied to us in order to satisfy our basest noxious thoughts and actions. The New Testament takes an entirely different approach in using the example of Christ’s life, teachings and actions to show us a more positive approach to nourish our lives. Christ’s teachings give us direction on things to do, more so than the things to avoid.
Looking back on my own field of life it’s pretty evident which thoughts I nourished to create action and culminated in results that could have been predicted. Hindsight is always so much more prudent than prediction.

Me and God part One

Today in church it occurred to me that my relationship with God has been a long enduring search for understanding. There have been times in my life that I had no idea who or what he was yet feared the fact that He was going to burn my soul in Hell for eternity. There were times I didn’t believe in Him at all; times He was in everything, every molecule, and He was merely the energy that held the universe together; Times the possibility that our universe and all things were no more than a test tube experiment, or that we were one small cell in some giant body. Where I am today after all these years is back to where I could have been when I started trying to choose my life. I am still trying to understand something I believe in, I believe because of observation, study, and most recently because of a simple statement I heard someone else say, “I know there is a God because every day the sun comes up and every day the sun sets, because the tide of the oceans always come in and the go out.” I thought at the time that this was a simplistic poor example because everybody knows those things occur because of the natural order of the universe, the sun the moon etc.. The more I considered how this person could have picked many more astute reasons for belief in God the more I understood the reasons for my own belief. Not only the reasons but the how of that belief. The simple and the complex could not be one and the same as a result of random spontaneous action. There has to be a intellect of high ability to create such a model. The description of this intellect for most of us is God.
Faith is a slow creeping fact of life. We rely on it for a portion of our beliefs in all things that we don’t really understand, and God is at the top of those things. For a time in my life faith in God was absent in my life, partially out of choice and partially because those who were teaching me about God proved they were mere people the same as the rest of us. They all had warts of some kind, personas that were not true to that which they were attempting to push into the heads of their students.
I was raised Catholic. At the time I was growing up the Church was quite different than that of today. I was raised on a ranch near a small town in Eastern Oregon. My religious training for the first few years consisted of two weeks of summer schooling with the visiting nuns. What I learned was that I enjoyed meeting all the new kids from the surrounding towns and farms, and I liked the music, and the nuns and the parish priest were very special human beings far unlike the rest of us. I also found out that if I didn’t confess my sins and faults to the priest. and promise that I would never again be bad again, it was a trip to Hell for me. This is where and how I learned God was one to fear and it was virtually impossible to please Him all the time. My faith at this time in my life was that The Fire was basically inevitable.
As I prepared to become a high school freshman in my little town my dad had an entirely different thing in mind for me. His idea was that I would come to no good in my little comfortable high school so a nice Catholic boarding school some four hundred miles away would be just the ticket. Needless to say this was a shock to my system, which would be even worse than being a country boy who knew no more about city life than the small amount of time spent at school in his little home town. Larger shocks were in the making.
On my way to the school, the first time I had ever been on a four lane highway, little did I know that it would be one of many firsts. I envisioned the school as a kind of religious training camp with the students all packing the catechism books and bibles around, and groups of holy, holy priests to show us the things we needed to learn to be better people. My first eye opening experience occurred about three hours after my parents had introduced me to the principle, got me settled in with the dorm rector, and left me there.
For a country boy, in my little town, I had kept myself up quite well with fads of the time. I sported what was then called a Princeton haircut which was basically a crew cut on top with long sides combed to the back into a ducktail. I had also picked up the habit of smoking cigarettes ( that is another marble of life in and of itself). These two little tidbits were catamount to my first what the heck. As I was enjoying my first cigarette in the smoking area I was confronted by a guy about twice my size who grabbed me by the shoulder and informed me that I was in an upper classman area and my presence there would never happen again. He also informed me that only punks wore DA’s (referring to the back of my hair as a ducks ass). Needless to say my idea, regarding the bible packing student body, quickly evaporated into an awareness that little hundred and fifteen pound new comers were in a place of danger. The second situation informed my mind that priests were not just Gods men but they were capable of just as many faults as anybody else. Maybe even worse, because of their position as proposed holy stand ins for Christ. To this day I still have a strong and dangerous reaction to bullies and people who misuse position. It was at this school that my loss of faith began its trek.

When I woke up this morning my head was filled up and roaring down the road. It’s spring 2010 and I’m staring at things personally I would have never thought possible when I was in my 20’s. I’m seeing things coming to fruition, in my society and country, which I have feared. Seeing them as probabilities since my 40’s and did nothing but grumble and complain (two very ugly marbles). In keeping with my analogy of marbles, there are a multitude of marbles involved, in both my personal bag and that of my country, that have brought myself and country to their respective situations. The marbles involved in both are: Love, Ethics, Morality, Honesty, Commitment, Trust and most of all Prayer. There may be some more but if I think of them I’ll add them to the mix as we go.
Much as our bodies are made up of cells and the health of our body is determined by the health of the individual cells as they combine together. The health of a society is made up and determined by the health, actions and perceptions of the people in the society as a group. If the marbles of Love, Ethics, Morality, Honesty, Commitment, Trust are not polished and cared for bad things can happen. Most generally these marbles become cracked, tarnished and chipped away because we continue to go through time on a series of slippery slopes, thinking “just this once won’t hurt or matter in the overall theme of things”. Wrrrrooooong! Just as the body can become increasingly ill through lack of proper nourishment, ingestion of wrong foods and putting it in position to accept illness from other people, our society or Nation can react and become ill for the same reasons. Fortunately, or not depending on what you believe, when we don’t know how to fix our circumstance we can use the bigger marble (PRAYER) to Hope things can be repaired. The more Faith and Intensity of the faith, the more likely you are to attain results and answers.
Personally: It’s much easier for me to look back in the face of time to see what happened to my marbles and why things are, and to some extent the what and why of today. With the passage of time, to help clarify the importance of decisions made and the ripple effect of acting out those decisions, we can learn. If it’s too late in the game to really affect our own circumstance we can perhaps help someone else. If I have a huge regret in this life it is not doing something about all the other things I wish I had done differently.
To find one’s self in the last few years of life without the means to care for the physical needs of myself and my wife is a devastating situation to say the least. Lacking the health of body I would like to have, in order to put up the good fight to fix things, is equally frustrating. Believe me when I say, even if I were someone who did not believe in God, I would be praying.
There have been so many junctions, in my seven decades; I might have taken different turns for better results. The beauty of retrospect is that we can only surmise what the outcome may have been. That view is only helpful if a similar situation occurs again in our life. The fact is that when we make a choice to act, it is the best we can do at that particular time. If we knew better we would do better. Most of our decisions are based on what we really believe to be true not on what we think might be true. Occasionally we act on false thinking, hoping for results that will work out.
We can’t and don’t always act on fact as we know it, sometimes when we act on what we think maybe possible, great things can happen. If mankind didn’t have the ability to use his imagination there are a lot of good things the world would never have known. That is a fact that keeps adding to our pile of mistakes as well as our heap of rewards. I believe God made us in his image and to this day we as human beings try to create new things. I believe that God must be a curious God, even though I was taught that He was omniscient. I believe that, at times, when He looks upon mankind he has to say,”Self what was I thinking”. The fact that He gave man a free will can be viewed as a blessing or as a curse, but that’s how he made us. Free will was a gift allowing us all the ability to be surprised by the outcome of our choices.
My results have been very mixed throughout my life. Retrospectively, I have found that the worst were caused by selfishness and a desire for immediate gratification, two more damaging marble wreckers. These two wreckers have led to circumstance that have cursed and blessed at the same time. These traits are very difficult to overcome if they are not acknowledged and one should use them as a filter in making decisions. The blessings from them are quite accidental and occasional while the curse of them is general and without fail will occur in some form or another. The curse of these bad guys, in my life, took the forms of hurting people I love or loved, the loss of relationships with friends and family, the loss of self respect and the respect of others. They have caused me to lie, cheat, and steal in one form or another and to move away from being who I wanted to be as a person. These traits are erosive to one’s life course and should be watched for with absolute diligence. Vice’s very seldom are solitary in one’s life. We make the mistake of thinking a little mis-deed won’t hurt anything or anyone, but they do and almost always lead to forcing one bad choice after another in terms of good ethics and standards. The correction of these situations are most generally going to cause you a lot of pain, and that is inevitable when you finally see the folly of your actions. In my life I have lost contact and relationship with family, children primarily, whom I still love but don’t have the energy to reach out to. I am, I guess relying on the hope that the truths kept hidden will be shown to all in the afterlife, another one of those belief structure deals base in faith and hope.