Fear vs Understanding

I go among trees and sit still.
All my stirring becomes quiet
around me like circles on water.
My tasks lie in their places
where I left them, asleep like cattle.

Then what is afraid of me comes
and lives a while in my sight.
What it fears in me leaves me,
and the fear of me leaves it.
It sings, and I hear its song.

Then what I am afraid of comes.
I live for a while in its sight.
What I fear in it leaves it,
and the fear of it leaves me.
It sings, and I hear its song.

After days of labor,
mute in my consternations,
I hear my song at last,
and I sing it. As we sing,
the day turns, the trees move.

Wendell Berry

Scripture vs the Word of God

I've been thinking lately about what scripture is, and how its role in my life has changed over the past few years. I came across a passage about Jesus' twelve disciples in another book I'm reading (I'll get to it in a minute) that made me realize that my personal view of what scripture is is probably not unique, and there are likely plenty of other people out there that see it the same way I do. So I'm going to try to put this into words and maybe it will be a useful new perspective to someone out there.

First of all, the word "scripture" comes with a whole lot of baggage. Just read some of Daymon Smith's work, about how a thing can become its label in people's perception until what it actually is becomes largely irrelevant, and you will go cross-eyed trying to sort out labels from reality. When we call something "scripture", we generally mean it is the "word of God", which implies a particular degree of truthfulness, as well as an obligation on the part of its believers to honor its teachings in certain ways.

Redescoperă Cartea lui Mormon

În ultimii doi ani, am lucrat la un proiect personal: o carte, în care îmi exprim iubirea pentru scripturi și studii spirituale. Nu mai știu de unde a venit ideea să scriu o carte. Probabil avea de făcut cu senzația că nu pot să transmit cu adevărat ce simt sau ce știu prin lecțiile pe care le-am ținut în calitate de învățătoare la școala de duminică la biserica. În 2014 și 2015 am mai scris articole pe blogul meu și în limba română, dar am știut că aproape nimeni nu le citește. Oricum, cine găsește blogul meu probabil nu va înțelege despre ce e vorba. Am aflat că, dacă vreau să zic sau scriu ceva ca să și fie înțeles, atunci trebuie să-mi adun gândurile în mod mai cuprinzător.

Și așa s-a născut „Redescoperă Cartea lui Mormon.”

Nu am nici un interes. Nu doresc să te conving să o citești, nu promovez cartea deloc, înafara că o să anunț la niște oameni că am scris-o și se poate citi dacă îi interesează.

Am pregătit două formate, ca să fie mai accesibilă:

• EPUB (carte electronică): poate fi citit pe smartphone sau tabletă. (Aplicația iBooks pe iPad sau iPhone, sau Google Play Books pe Android, sau altele.)
• PDF: pentru tipărit, dacă preferi să nu citești electronic. Documentul este formatat pentru A5 față-verso, deci formează o carte mică de 174 de pagini. Cu spiralare, cred că ar costa numai câteva lei s-o printezi. Poate fi citit și pe calculator sau telefon mobil, dar nu se ajustează textul pe ecran - probabil o să fie sau prea mic sau prea mare de citit comfortabil.

Source Prejudice

Today I found myself thinking about the ingrained prejudices we have that prevent us from listening to various sources. It has been very surprising to me the past couple years that I am now able to learn from sources that five years ago I would have completely dismissed as ignorant, silly, or irrelevant. I'm not exactly sure when I decided I would disregard my prejudices when it came to the possibility of learning something new; I just know that at some point I started seeing past them.

Let me give two examples. The first is Jake Steiner, the weirdo responsible for endmyopia.org. He has one of the weirdest senses of humor I have ever encountered, as evidenced by this photo, posted on his website: 

(There are several other memes like these, just as strange!)

Seeing stuff like this, you might dismiss the guy as a nutcase and move on. However, if you look past it and actually read what he writes, you realize that Jake Steiner really has figured out the "cure" for the modern world's myopia epidemic, and that if you master the principles and habits he describes on his website, you can actually reduce your lens prescription by degrees until you get back to the 20/20 vision you had as a child. As of this writing, I have successfully dropped a full diopter from my lenses as well as the astigmatism correction, and I see great. If I stay the course, I should be eyeglass-free within 3-4 years.

In a way, the weird sense of humor is an advantage - eyeglass prescriptions are not to be messed with lightly, so by not reducing his program to click-bait like "do these three things and fix your eyes forever!", Jake actually forces readers to dig deeper, pay attention, and learn the basics of the science so they are informed enough to guide their own progress.

My second example of source prejudice is Anthony De Mello. Alex introduced me to his writings years ago, in the form of short stories/parables about the teachers of a "master" that she had enjoyed reading since childhood. Fables and parables aren't my thing, so I listened politely, but didn't pay much attention.

More recently, she bought a new book of his, titled Awareness. She talked about it a lot, and many of the principles she described were in line with things I had been thinking about recently, and I was a lot more interested. So when she finished reading it, I picked it up myself. 

The writing is terrible. After a few pages, I realized that it wasn't a book he wrote at all; it was put together after his death from audio recordings of a conference he held towards the end of his life. He even acknowledges multiple times in the book/conference that he's talking in circles, that he isn't laying things out in any kind of organized fashion. 

So here's my problem with De Mello: he was a Jesuit priest who wandered so far from orthodoxy that the Catholic church had to officially disavow his teachings some years after his death because his writings had grown so much in popularity they were viewed as a threat to the church. So you have a rogue priest who clearly dabbles in Hinduism and Buddhism, who can't even write out his ideas in coherent fashion, and has to resort to fables or repetitive, circular philosophizing. 

Given how dizzying the first few pages of the book were, it's a wonder I kept going at all. We humans have this tendency to think that people need clear credentials in order for us to respect them, and De Mello clearly doesn't. (Which is ridiculous when you think about it, because at the same time, we consider diet and exercise advice from obese acquaintances, or business and financial advice from poor relatives.) 

Here's what De Mello has going for him: he doesn't need any credentials in order to have access to Truth. He also doesn't need to be part of some philosophical or spiritual identity I recognize in order for me to compare what he is saying against the larger picture I understand about that particular identity. Comparing what he writes to what I understand about Catholic theology would be a particularly useless exercise. Either an idea has value and usefulness, independent of whether it's a Christian, Hindu, or Buddhist thought, or it doesn't. And what I found is that once I decided to ignore the less-than-ideal composition of the book, it became the catalyst for some of the most important personal spiritual growth I have ever experienced.

The thing is, if you allow yourself to be prejudiced against any particular source because of its credentials, appearance, or associations, you will filter a lot of legitimate junk out of your life. You will also almost certainly miss out on some of the most important personal development opportunities life has to offer and limit yourself in some vitally fundamental ways.