Right
now, would you say your spiritual life is closer to a sunrise or
sunset? Is a new day dawning in your life? How so? (Serendipity
Bible 10th Anniversary Edition page 1104).
I've
heard the saying that prayer changes things...but prayer also changes
me. This gets to the kernel of why I will never feel I am approaching
a spiritual sunset – things are always changing and so am I. And
the change is not pointless and to no effect but opens up windows of
insight previously unattainable. Add to this the fact that not only
I change, but so does everyone else. Thus ever hour of every day new
revelations abound.
Humanity
is known as the tool-making species. Tools often are used to enhance perception--say that of a microscope or telescope. What is
sought for is heightened clarity. The Ten Commandments brought
clarity to human behavior in societies seeking abundant life. It is
difficult to see how any society could flourish if theft and murder
held predominant sway. Jesus came to clarify the nature of love
itself and the direct relation of love to abundant life.
Most
all human endeavors open their fields of study to multiple
viewpoints. Whether it be science or literature, it is held that
the more eyes that look upon a phenomenon the better hope we will
have of seeing what's there. I have often heard it said that the
Bible never goes out of date for when it is reread during one's life,
one always find something new as their storehouse of personal
experiences increases. Thus, as a microscope is one type of tool to
help clarify, personal experience also becomes a tool to enrich
perception.
But
as a new microscope might have hidden defects, the perception of our
experiential reality can also have hidden defects. Based on such
flawed perceptions, a majority can be wrong--popular vote is
certainly no guarantor of correctness. It is interesting to
speculate if the Ten Commandments would have garnered a majority vote
in Exodus or even now.
In
the physical world we can search for facts using the tools of the
scientific method. Identifying the proper tools to access what
should be (rather than what is) is a thousand times more
problematic. Jesus taught that it is spirit subservient to love
that is important here. For example, I can ask two children to play
fair--but how each defines “fair” can be a territory filled with
bickering. The tools we use for seeing the physical world are only
slightly helpful here. Rather we must have a shared sense of what
love means and hold it as regnant to have any hope of sharing common
perceived implications. Blatant stealing from one another is not
very defensible and is usually illegal. But the human mind can find
it an irresistible challenge to devise a way to steal without being
blatant about it. That is why Jesus shifted the criterion from rules
to spirit.
Overwhelmingly
what we need today is avoidance of promising the undoable for
fruition at some flippant future date rather than defining the
incremental doable at dates certain. We need to stop being pious
about our insufferable claims to fairness and spell out exactly what
a fair result would look like in concise specificity. It is time to
demystify epiphany with precision in the ethical as in the physical
world.
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