I hope Arizona changes its mind about the new immigration law.
I anticipate being rounded up some day as being from an alien dimension dropped here to earth without proper documentation. Sure, the hospital my mother took me home from says I was born from her (Thank you, mom) and was therefore a legal birth (Thanks, Dad) legitimized by state and church (Thanks NY and St Athanasius Parish) therefore heir to all the demands and benefits (Thanks IRS and FDR) of this fine land. But, really, does anyone know exactly where I came from prior to the in-utero razzamatazz featured in National Geographic and Biology 101?
So, when I am able to establish myself in nothing, and nothing in myself, uprooting and casting out what is in me, then I can pass into the naked being of God, which is the naked being of the Spirit.
[Meister Eckhart, German sermon 7, trans M.O’C. Walshe]
Without clothes, without body, without name, and without privilege, what is it we expect God to be?
Nothing there. No documents. No permits. No green card. No fixed home.
When they arrest me they will have to arrest the nameless, bodiless, placeless Spirit that holds me in being and enlivens my very legitimate-less self.
Mark me well -- it is disconcerting to know that every church and mosque, temple and chapel will be turned over to the men on Wall Street who are betting short that God has been de-legitimized and de-commissioned and frocked with bright orange waiting to be sent to the holding tank of the People-In-Charge.
"The modern West is actually an intense combination of good news, bad news. The self or subject of rationality was deeper than the subject or self of mythology (...) However -- solely because of the collapse of the Kosmos -- the object of rationality (which was confined to sensorimotor flatland) was much less deep than the object of mythology (which was the Divine order, however crudely or anthropomorphically depicted). Thus, a much deeper subject confined its attention to a much shallower object. And there, in a nutshell, the combination of dignity and disaster that is the paradox of modernity: a deeper subject in a shallower world."
(--Ken Wilber, in The Marriage of Sense and Soul , p. 206)
It is a shallow deliberation trying to figure the worthiness and acceptability of human beings.
Same goes for God.
I've an idea: Let's start all over.
Now if only someone could make the determination where we'd start again, and who'd be allowed to start again, and how long anyone'd be permitted to continue in that place -- we'd all be grateful. Because, as you know, because we've been told, there's not enough room, money, food, or will to ensure everyone a basic, common, satisfactory life with the benefit of health care and education. Hmmm. I prefer to think that what's lacking is the ability to see truth and compassion and reality enough to go around.
If I share with you what I have I'll be ruined and reduced to nothing -- no clothes, no place to dwell, no body, no privilege to own what belongs to me alone.
God!
God?
Hello?