The Original Sin

It is common, and perhaps even an ingrained habit of the human condition to confuse symptoms with underlying causes. The real issues arises when you start exclusively treating/avoiding the symptoms and ignore the causes. Who ever heard of the black mold infestation in your shower going away because you just didn't go in there, or the check engine light fixing itself just because you stopped paying attention to it?

However, we do the same thing with much more serious issues all the time. We stay in jobs we hate because we lack courage to know what we truly want, and so we medicate the symptoms of our depression with all manner diversions. We stay in bad relationships, or avoid them all together because the status quo is less fear inducing than dealing with why we cannot love ourselves in the first place. We triangulate the pain and trauma of lingering emotional and spiritual injury away into surface conflicts with family, friends and the general public, or we medicate the pain away with whatever addiction so suits our fancy, preferably something that shadows the deepest longings of our hearts and deepest wishes of our psyches, which was what was injured in the first place.

The deepest human fear is not death. It is not being known. And yet to avoid the pain of disappointment at taking the risk to be known and possibly failing, we do all we can to avoid it in the first place, and instead substitute a shadowy approximation of who we think we are. We pose.

Because posing is ultimately an outgrowth of insecurities our deepest psyches cannot shake, the pain never really goes away and the need to medicate the symptoms continues. Apart from those who are simply and truly evil in that, due to brain damage, they have no moral compass, the vast majority of deviant behavior is nothing more than a symptom of the great divide between who we really are and our fear and shame of the same. 

The original sin is not the horde of external symptoms, and lascivious fleshly desires, whatever those are. The original sin is allowing false dichotomies to divide and fragment our living souls. It wasn't in black and white called the tree of the knowledge of good and evil for nothing. Of course there is good and evil in the world. I would not be writing if it were not so. However, the embrace of the same in favor of embracing life causes a fragmentation of our hearts and minds, which is only satisfied by either further fragmenting and  compartmentalizing the vast majority of reality to protect that which is seen as good, while that which is seen as evil seems never to fully disappear, kind of like the black mold infestation in your shower, or one can embrace life and thus address the underlying root cause of the issue. This however, requires courage and acceptance of who one truly is. It is only after this step is taken that whatever perversions have posed in your place can be corrected to their original form, which was is not perverse. 

We are ever presented with the option to stay backstage posing as players in some shadow of existence, or step out from behind the curtain and go live. 

How Abusive Relationships, Growing Up, Easter, And Red Dragons Are All Connected.

We in the modern world tend to have a hard time establishing boundaries. This manifests itself in several gradients of deviant behavior, ranging from not being able to take the keys away from your friend who is about to get a DUI, to staying in an abusive relationship way past the time when the significant other stopped caring whether it was your fault, or not, and just started taking advantage to no end.

Learning to make the distinction of where you end and another person begins is the foundation of all life giving human relationships. It's what happens when we can go our own ways from our parents. It's what happens when we don't give in to peer pressure and instead pursue what we want in life. It's what happens when we experience the best in committed relationships, both romantic and otherwise when we love people for who they are rather than what they do for us, and it's what happens when we are able to watch our descendants grow into their own independent selves.

The reason this is such a hard thing to determine and that it is such a source of friction in our lives is because it brings into question issues of core identity and insecurity that the modern social order does not at all help. Because we have been raised with a wholly western idea of moral relativism, we do not know what is up or down, what is right or left, or what is good or bad. We do not question that which we deeply want to, and only challenge those who do not conform to this ideal. Tolerance is only good to the degree that it makes people safe. Beyond this, it has resulted in a deep fear of questioning and conflicting over anything more substantial than those who are seen to be intolerant. Thus, in the absence of challenge, which, in this case, is the same thing as boundaries, we are left defenseless against the more malignants elements of, not only society, but our own personalities. 

One of these malignant elements is the need to belong. Like all perversions, it is nothing more than something that was, it its proper state, good. Finding your place in the world, and finding your place with other humans is good. However, doing so at the expense of your own humanity, and making sacrifices of your own identity to conform is not, and as has been mentioned before is the source of a vast spectrum of deviant behaviors. 

However, as with many things, there are second and third order effects to this deviant behavior. Deep within ourselves, we try to compensate for the violation of our spiritual immune systems because of our lack of boundaries by setting them up in other places. In essence, we triangulate our brokenness away because we cannot confront the root cause. 

The most profound and yet least obvious place we place boundaries is with any notion of something greater than ourselves, anything.......Divine. Believe or don't believe. The existence of God is something that cannot be proven, no matter how much the right wing types try, and cannot be disprove, no matter how ignorant the the Richard Dawkens followers' arguments get. It is not something that is debated intellect to intellect. It is something that bypasses the red dragons guarding our minds and snatches the perches right out from under their claws as it goes strait to the heart. Of course their is a God, and of course we all know this at some level of our psyches. And yet it is with the Divine that we establish the strongest boundaries, whether we believe or do not believe. We assume there is no God, or that we have killed God, or that we have to be good enough to be accepted by God, or that some are destined to Paradise and others to eternal damnation, whatever that is. 

If indeed there is a God, would the Divine not be anything other than the height of perfection beyond all that we heretofore see and the ultimate embodiment of all our deepest suspicions of what true love and beauty and good in fact are? Would God not in fact be the height of our greatest human ideals of good and compassion and acceptance and love and the ultimate expression of what we only grasp at when we admire great acts of selflessness? Would God not also be the ultimate expression of even the most natural love of a mother for her child or a father slaving to support his family? Could the truth in fact be better than we have ever imagined, even though our deepest psyches have supposed it for so long and driven us in search of it for as long as we have been who we are? At the same time, does not the suspicion of this at the same time cause apprehension, almost as if you don't want to look because you don't want to be disappointed? 

Today, many throughout the world remembered the destruction of the boundary between the Divine and the rest of reality, not that any such barrier ever existed, but the point had to be made clear. This is the essence of the Resurrection. The deepest longing of us all are there for a reason. They are there to be satisfied. Come into the great house where street dwellers, prostitutes, politicians, even pop stars, end even you and me become equals. This is the essence of salvation. 

Come home. The door is always open. 

Christmas

Good intentions are not the same things as good results. The actual result of something is more important than the form that thing took. Likewise, wisdom is vindicated by all of her children.

The modern world has a way of confusing ultimate and lasting good with what makes you feel good right now. Though there is nothing wrong with immediate pleasure and comfort, the experience is non-benign if divorced from deeper realities. It is this disaggregation of our surface experiences from deeper realities, and subsequent compartmentalization of different aspects of our lives that leads to many of our personal and relational problems.

At the same time, good results must be recognized for what they are. This is all a roundabout way of getting to the point, which is that despite all of the stress, chaos, confusion, and sometimes loneliness, solitude and depression that are a part of this time of year; despite the rampant materialism, political correctness, and loss of perspective as to the original meaning of the season, even if the original meaning was a week of festivities dedicated to the god Cronus, the ultimate result is what matters. 

The preponderance of us are drawn closer to those we love and care about, and are given cause to reflect on that which we consider meaningful. There is joy, there is happiness, even if there is sorrow. 

It is for this last point it is most fitting that some of us celebrate the coming of the Divine in human form on this day. In the midst of pain and suffering, joy and hope, not apart from the darkness, but in the midst of it. The light does indeed shine in the darkness and the darkness will not overcome it. It is beyond a name and does not require recognition to be vindicated in all of our actions, for all of our actions that are good find their ultimate source and meaning in It. There is only one circle of love, friendship, happiness, hope, peace, and joy in the Universe. That circle finds its form in what I call the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. It is on this day I remember this circle of all that is good taking on human form in the depths of human suffering and brokenness. 

It is still here. He/She is still here. The Divine came irreversibly into the world over 2000 years ago and remains present in all those who allow It to live through them. It lives through you and I if we allow it it to. That circle of good many of us find ourselves drawn into is a step in the right direction.