MEDITATION

The songwriter penned these words: “Let the words of my mouth, and the meditation of my heart, be acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, my strength, and my redeemer.”

The bible assumes we all have a meditation of the heart. I think the bible is wrong on this, at least, when it comes to us people living some 3,000 years after that song was written down. Moderns like us don’t have meditations of the heart, no, we have ruminations and preoccupations, anxiety, dread, and busyness. We live hurried lives, rushing from experience to experience, always seeking to be pleasured or thrilled. It’s no wonder we’re all dopamine-fried and corn syrup-sick on the superflavors of life and culture all around us. Over-stimulated.

In this post, we’re going to transform such unhealthy fixations into a meditation of the heart.

Meditations of the heart can be deeply emotional, or perfectly boring. It can be the thrum and beat of a heart crying out for something deeply missed and most desperately needed, or just the happy lil song of a heart most perfectly contented.

Sometimes, the meditation of the heart has to be forced. This is shown over and over and over throughout the bible in what’s called exhortation, like when the Psalmist sang words like, “Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits.” What he is doing there is commanding his heart to respond to his own highest-order ideals. We see that hundreds of times in the Psalms: “O, my soul! Get with the program!”

You might have read all the stuff about Jesus in previous blog posts and said to yourself that all that is too good to be true. I also thought I was undeserving of his grace. Understand that I have no confidence in myself. Within my own faith-tradition, I was taught from birth that I'm a worm, I’m a ‘dirt-person’ and made from dust, that every inclination of my heart was evil all the time, that the best of my righteousness is a thorny hedge which chokes out new life and growth and kills otherwise fruitful gardens, or that the best of my efforts was nothing more that a filthy period-blood rag to God. Yeah, and that’s a verse in the bible, too. I was told that I was same as bloody rags before I even knew what a ‘period’ was. I was taught that I am desperately wicked above all else and totally unable to come to God on my own terms, totally dead. Spiritually, totally dead.

I was told these things as a six year-old boy. I was told to subordinate myself to men I didn’t trust. Obedience was drilled into me.

You know what that means? It means that for over 30 years, the meditation of my heart was: You’re not good enough. No one loves you. You are nothing. Everything about you is wrong. You’re taking up too much space on this earth, you’re dead-weight. You are a vessel of God’s wrath purposed from the beginning for destruction, you’re his crash-test dummy, like, he literally created you to send you to hell with no hope unless somehow you figure out that you are one of the chosen ones.

This is the height of bad biblical interpretation, taking a few verses here and there totally out of their proper context and making up a wild and fantastic back-story about the human condition based on them. This type of teaching (which is so prevalent within evangelical fundamentalism) comes from a preacher or teacher who hears from demons. If anything is satanic, if anything is demonic, then telling a child that he is nothing to God when Jesus Christ himself said, “Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven” is surely the teaching of demons.

I have read much on this doctrine of man’s nature as totally depraved. It is a fruitless and godless argument abusing Holy Scripture in effort to align oneself against God’s love (much more clearly stated throughout the whole of the bible), and with all of the enemies to truth, goodness, and beauty. Men are corrupted, no doubt; we do some horrible things. But each man, every man, all men are dearly loved by their Creator, who made them wonderfully, perfectly capable in this very moment to seek him and find him and love him forever. Seek God, cherish God, love God forever!

It is this satanic doctrine that inspired all of my many suicide attempts throughout my adolescence. I cannot state this more clearly enough: It is the doctrine of demons to call into question the love of a God who is love, a God who introduces himself in the first pages as, "The LORD God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, and that will by no means clear the guilty."

He is a just God in that he punishes humankind’s blatant wickedness, like, there are consequences for murder and for theft and for perpetual meanness and for anyone who goes against what we all know is right and true.

It doesn’t take a rocket surgeon to figure out what is and isn’t a sin: If anyone involved feels as though they were hurt, a sin was committed. We get so hung up on this and it is so stupid. Love your neighbors and look out for their needs. That is the one and only command of Jesus Christ. If you are doing that, nothing you do is a sin. How do I love my neighbors and look out for them best? Jesus gives us a clue: Treat them the way you would want to be treated. You have a level of care that you require from attendants, a standard of excellence or of efficiency from the things that you purchase or services you solicit (you either want it done extravagantly and luxuriously or you want it done fast)... put short, for everyone you meet, meet your own demands of the situation and be kind.

You hate it when someone holds you up at a red-light, so, don’t hold anyone else up at a red-light. Right? Simple. You hate it when you go to a new place, a new church or a new group, and no one greets you or asks your name. So, be a nice person in your church and go greet someone and ask their name! Simple.

This one’s trickier: You hate it when you’re sitting there at the table for what feels like forever and your drink is empty, but, you can’t treat your waiter how you’d want to be treated because you’re the diner and he’s the waiter. He’s supposed to bring you more water, but you’ve been waiting; he’s clearly not doing what he’s supposed to do. Let’s say for the sake of argument that you even see this waiter standing in the back playing on his cellphone. Are you going to explode and rage and go all Karen on the poor kid? In moments like these where you’re inconvenienced and pissed off, treating others the way you’d want to be treated means don’t stress them out and don’t piss them off. So, follow the implications: You don’t want to stress the rest of your table’s guests out or embarrass them by blowing up; you don’t want to stress your own self out by becoming a fool and having to deal with the consequences of that; you don’t want to stress the owner of the business out, who likely has a problem with getting staff anyway; you don’t want to stress out the waiter himself, I mean, who knows but that maybe he’s on his cellphone getting updates about his grandmother’s surgery or something. Handle the situation like a nice, normal person, handle it however best you can, and if you feel you didn’t handle it appropriately, be the quickest to say, “You’re right, I was wrong, I’m sorry.”

It doesn’t take a brain scientist to figure out how to be cool and not hurt anyone. Generally speaking, what you take for yourself, you take from another. So go about your life receiving by giving.

But we get so hung up on, is it a sin. Is it a sin? Pastor, tell me, is smoking a sin? Well, does it hurt anyone? Yes, it hurts me and my lungs, it offends those in public who clearly have diminished breathing ability, and secondhand smoke hurts my kids. The cigarette industry puts glass in with the leaf so that your lungs get all cut up, so more nicotine gets into your bloodstream, so you get more hooked. Then they mass-market it in your area to make it look cool, and then they make it cheap. Next thing you know, kids are smoking them. That is a sin against humanity.

But is smoking a sin? You might be laughing, but, that’s a question we would ask ourselves often in the evangelical fundamentalist communities among whom I grew up. Cigars are natural and don’t contain that glass; the act of smoking with buddies around a camp-fire is a ritual bonding experience; the smell and taste is wonderful; and, nicotine is a natural chemical and an organic medicine; there are traditional, cultural and historically-significant or cultural, anthropological reasons why a particular person might smoke. Those things don’t hurt anyone. Smoke in your lungs, yeah, ok, that is a little bit of particulate matter in your lungs which can eventually hurt you, but... when you poop you’re also inhaling particles too so, I mean, you’re welcome for that.

This is a silly, and perhaps too-lengthy discussion of this topic so I’ll get back to my point. My point is that, yes, God does have to punish sin. He punishes sin. Sin is something that hurts yourself or your neighbor, when God told you to love your neighbor like you love yourself.

Let’s say you didn’t do that. Instead, you flipped your neighbor off and you told him you’d take him to court if he didn’t keep his trash cans on his side. You lost your cool. Loving your neighbor now means owning it and letting your neighbor take another shot at keeping his trash cans on his side. Politely ask him to do that. If you’re not too inconvenienced, move it back yourself. If you’re not too inconvenienced, let it slide. God watches all these things and he’s watching from above going, “These people over-complicate everything. All I said was, ‘Be cool.’”

And the bible makes this abundantly clear: When a person is not cool, then realizes they were in the wrong, then goes to the person they wronged and makes a sincere apology, then goes to God to make an offering, all is forgiven. But the offering part is already done for you, according to the bible. It used to be that Hebrew men would offer goats and rams and also bring grain into the storehouses at the church, for the purposes of feeding the priests and the poor. Offerings of gold and silver were always welcomed, to purchase one of the church’s goats or rams which would be given to the church so that the priest could cook and eat the meat and spill the blood and ask God to strike out your sin. That changed when Jesus died as an offering once for all, the perfect lamb sacrificed for all humanity. This is all abstract and religious and poetic and weird but all it means is, Christianity teaches that because of Jesus, all you have to offer to God in response to your own sin is just this: Offer yourself to the process.

You weren’t cool, so realize it, make it right as best you can. Punishment for wicked people happens because of chronic uncoolness. Who gets punished? People who mess up, and they realize it, and they don’t care, and they would even do it again some day. God does not like a person with that level of meanness and entitlement.

Check this out, too. God is so loving and so merciful that, he doesn’t punish those who mess up without realizing it. Sins of ignorance. King David prayed and asked that God remove the sins that he was committing even without knowing, and that’s a fine prayer to pray. But the apostle Paul makes it abundantly clear in his writings that the conscience provides the criteria for what constitutes a sin. To one person, in Paul’s day, eating meat offered at a pagan temple was a sin.

Oh, yeah, so taking meat to church for the preacher to cook it up and eat it himself as a means of wiping away your sin wasn’t just a Jewish thing. Today, basically every ‘church’ in town is Christian, and then you might have one mosque (temple) and one synagogue (temple). By church I just mean place of worship, but there’s a cool teaching on why they call theirs a temple and we call ours a church (a word which, in original German where the protestant reformation began, means house). Put short, the bible says that you yourself are a temple. You’ve heard the phrase, “Your body is a temple.”

If that’s all that is required, is that you realize the trouble you’ve caused and you go to your neighbor and then you go to God with an offering, but the offering is already given, then in the apostle Paul’s mind, there are huge theological implications of all this. It means that each person’s own conscience governs this process. But one man might have a different idea than the other above what is and isn’t a sin. In cases like that, Paul says that he brings himself under the conscience of that other person while he is with that person. So if someone says they think drinking is wrong, Paul would advise you not to drink around that person. What you do by yourself is up to you and your conscience. Only, according to Paul, some people have weaker consciences which think every little thing they do is a sin. In that case, Paul says to take heart because if your conscience condemns you, God is greater than your conscience. Some people have stronger consciences and exercise much more of their liberties in life. They’re louder and prouder people. If their conscience doesn’t condemn them, and no one was hurt, they’re in the clear. But Paul says that a conscience can become ‘seared,’ that is, a person can so totally come to identify with evil that they are too far gone. Hitler. That type of person doesn’t think he’s sinning, but he’s sinning and will be punished.

I’ve spent too much time spelling this out. This is all found in your bible, particularly in the letters to the churches at Rome (book of Romans) and Corinth (first book of Corinthians, or 1 Corinthians).

But I went on that lengthy discussion just to make it abundantly clear that the bible is not telling little boys that everything about them is evil all the time! That’s ridiculous! I was a sweet little boy. I loved my mother. I obeyed my father. I was the kid who brought the apple to class for my teachers. I was thoughtful, sensitive, emotionally aware, maybe a little wise for my age even. I was well-read, yes, even at like six years old, I was dedicated to my studies. I was a friend who shared my toys and a buddy to the marginalized schoolmate, perhaps sitting alone in the corner of the cafeteria.

None of those qualities in me were celebrated as much as it was taught to six year old me that I was a degenerate sinner in need of the mercy of Jesus Christ, or else I’ll get hit by a bus on my bicycle and go to hell. Sharing wasn’t rewarded, it was expected. Instead of thanks and congratulations, I had expectations, and these ‘doctrines’ were used to cut a good kid to pieces. I was expected to play the game, to say all the right things. And so I became a rebellious teenager because, in my mind, I had played the game, I had been a good little boy, and it got me... hell, it put me into a very dark situation for which my little body was totally unprepared. What I am describing is religious abuse which led to and was tied to physical abuse, which takes doctrines and rituals and practices and creeds and goes nuclear by creating sexualized associations to those things within the body of a child. I was sexualized to the idea that I was a piece of shit and God didn’t love me. Work that out in your head. This is fundamentalism plus abuse equals an intense experience of masochism.

When things like these take root at such an early age, though they are not sweet meditations, they, in effect, become the meditation of our hearts. They become that obsession, that fixation, that rhythm we continually sink back into as the beat of our lives. You might have had a dad who cut you down constantly, or a mom who was verbally abusive. You might have had the shit kicked out of you all through childhood and came away from it thinking you’re nothing more than a punching bag. You might have sat under the teachings of bullies in the pulpit, of molesters in the common church, or of the maniacally possessed and deranged false teacher drunk on his power. These are adults sinning against children.

Or you might have grown up having no attention whatsoever from adults, which is another type of sin, the sin of neglect. You had to raise yourself, coming away with a rumination like, “No one wants me, no one loves me, I gotta go it alone.”

This is child abuse. Make no mistake about it: I am saying that evangelical fundamentalism attracts and rewards abusers. Early childhood development requires time and attention from loving, patient, protective mommies and daddies who cherish their littles. It does not require a handsy Sunday School teacher.

In his book Lost Connections, Johann Hari hypothesizes that so much of anxiety and depression has to do with what’s missing: Disconnection from others, missing connection from meaningful labor or a sense of purpose, loss of reputation, that kind of thing. The meditation of your heart is most often about what’s missing, like this.

For me, the meditation of my heart revealed how greatly I needed love. I was love-starved. There’s a quote I once saw on social media, that hit me like a bullet: “People who didn’t grow up getting love from a silver spoon learn to lick it off knives.” Little wonder, then, that I grew up to seek the approval of others and to enter into toxic relationships for the sake of time and attention. Some of you who thrive on drama with your lovers, you know all that drama is them spending time with you and paying attention to you, so you dial up the toxicity and through it you get your little fix.

Be quit of all that right now. Here’s how:

You must understand the nature of your Creator, your Father who loves you. I have a complicated relationship with God as loving Father, myself, but it’s not my own father’s fault. That one’s on me. It’s just hard for me to see God as Father. Sometimes, when I refer to my Creator, I’ll say he or she. Like this: “Your Creator lovingly fashioned you and did so unerringly, 'cause all he or she does as Creator is perfect. I'll say that more plain: Your Creator--he or she made you perfect.” I wrote that in a draft several days ago.

This sounds like blasphemy in a few ways. Perfect? He or she?

My former evangelical faith-community would absolutely cringe at the thought of God himself as a girl... but that’s because women and girls and hairless little boys are nothing but objects to them.

But this is absolutely biblical and totally true: Your Creator has no form and thus no human genitalia and, if the bible is to be believed, then he (or she) also has a kingdom wherein there is 'neither male nor female, but all are one.' And now, I’m not totally competent with the ancient languages the bible was written in, but I have heard along the way a teaching about how God’s Spirit is expressed as feminine.

I can tell you one thing, I believe this for sure: ‘Lady Wisdom,’ the wise woman from the book of Proverbs, is a picture of Jesus Christ. Bible teachers (of which I’m not one) call this a christophany, a mysterious appearance of Jesus Christ in another time in history.

It's an assumption on my part that the Creator made you lovingly. I don't know what was going through his or her mind when that happened. But I, myself, am an artist and creator. I work in television for a very large media company, making TV commercials. It’s a cool job.

As an artist myself, I know the relationship I have with my own created things. So I just can’t see how a creator like the Creator, the Lord, the Most High God, King of the Universe, could make so intricate a world and so wonderful a population of inhabitants and then just... what? just, not have any kind of active or ongoing conversation with the work today? Makes no sense to me.

As an artist I am actively, presently engaged with all my works in the world. I get juiced up just talking about this. My work isn't much. I play a very, very small part in the making of nationally televised commercials right now. But some of my work was seen and commended by Steven Spielberg, which was a highlight of my career!

And if you're watching the NBA Finals right now, like me, you've seen the tiniest little touches of my work here and there throughout.

I’m not bragging--I'm sharing my joy.

It has been such a joy to work as I have, helping in very small ways to make some of these big advertising campaigns happen. Surely, the Creator of all things has a relationship to his work (or hers) similar to my own.

And I mean, everyone has a Creator, and we know it now, right? We're past debating whether or not this whole universe was created, aren’t we? We have tech bros in Silicon Valley espousing a form of creationism that'd make Ken Ham proud, in simulation theory. We have Richard Dawkins and the New Atheism going hold on, hold on, I'm not so sure we should abandon christendom just yet, because godlessness has turned out to be pretty scary of late. Sam Harris is even exploring his spirituality now.

And we have these beautiful, life-giving, healing conversations happening around hashtag deconstruction, and we are seeing a kind of re-enchantment of the world as postmodernism has fully failed us and we're entering the new philosophical epoch some people are calling metamodernism, which is a kind of philosophical breaking of the fourth wall where we're not only having the conversation about competing philosophies but we're doing so while providing commentary from history concerning the work and about the work itself and about the work's influence on our own lives and our own places in history. Stuff that’s a bit like what I’ve just done here in argument.

Then we're seeing psychology guys like Jordan Peterson turn to belief in God, and even Joe Rogan professing some faith now when he was like, king of the edgy ‘pop-atheists’ as I was growing up. He was such a dick about Christianity in the early days of his podcast, only to now be found saying things like, ‘this city needs Jesus.’

Everything's coming up King Jesus in the popular media post-COVID, too. In COVID, I think we saw human vulnerability and human ingenuity held in a frightful balance. We engineered the mess, I mean, that's not controversial to say, is it? But then we engineered our way out of it. And there was a lot of heroism to meet all that pain and suffering.

COVID had us asking where such virtues come from, given the human experience is such a confusing mix of virtue with vice, sacred with profane and the line of demarkation between the two has been subject to gerrymandering for some time. With COVID, we saw this, it was hilarious: It could be the worst person on the planet and they'd be on some, "We've all got to do our part." Whaaat? Where did that human capacity for empathy and mutual provision and trust come from all of a sudden?

Well, turns out, when faced with an existential threat we remembered from Whom our existence comes.

I needed to take a moment to argue for the existence of a Creator in that way. There are much better arguments, like the ones from design or from ethics or from beauty or from the coherence of reality or from our origins. Thank you for indulging me.

Not only must we come to understand the nature of our Creator as loving Father (or Divine Mother, I ain’t worried about that idea), but we also have to understand his or her nature as communicative. ‘He is there, and he is not silent’ as one author put it. The apostle John says that the great light which gives light to all mankind was coming into the world through our Creator. Each person has an experience of light. One evangelical pastor taught that light responded to increases light. Like, he taught that you might see the sun rise and think about your Creator for a moment, and then your Creator sees that small expression of love and he sends another communiqué of his grace, so like, maybe a Christian missionary arrives to your desert island or something. I don’t know about all that.

I just know he or she puts hella signs out there for you to respond to, to appreciate, and to enjoy. Get out in nature. Experience the beauty that is all around you, and you’ll see signs of creation everywhere you go. You’ll hike the Smokies, the world’s oldest range, and you’ll realize you’re as ancient and as natural as these. And then it’ll click.

So we must understand his or her nature as loving, and as communicative, but we also have to come to an understanding of his or her nature as transcendent, as outside of us and different from us, as ‘filling us by containing us’ I think Aquinas wrote. We are in God right now, as Paul quoted the philosopher Aratus when he said that this Creator is the one ‘in whom we live, and move, and have our being.’ We’re living and moving and having our very personhoods and identities inside him (or her--I’m sticking to this, for now!).

This is an abstract thought and it is confusing, I know. But you must come to understand this! Why? Because one outside of us, containing us, is not encumbered in any way by us. His attention on you never breaks. He never removes his loving, watchful eye off of you. He never closes his ears to your desperate cries. Never. Never, ever. Any Creator outside of us and unlike us enough to both fill and contain us must be, as they say, omnipotent, omnipresence, and omniscient.

I take great issue with those words. I do not like them at all. They’re big religious words not contained in the whole of Holy Scripture. They’re confusing words. I have to dumb words like that down for myself. Omnipotence means this Creator is all-powerful enough to make reality. Omnipresence means he’s everywhere at once, like the verse says that his spirit hovered over the face of our earth. Omniscience means he knows everything.

He’s not just powerful to intervene in human affairs, he was all-powerful make a human from scratch. He’s not just engaged enough to judge mankind and to punish, he’s so present that he literally is the breath in your lungs. His wind, his spirit, his ‘pneuma,’ you’re breathing him in right now. He is providing your being, and his Being is said to be the ground of all being. And he’s not just knowledgeable to play games with humankind or one-up a man. He knows all that would happen given the physical laws of the natural universe he created; he knows all that could happen, given an infinitely variable set of all possibilities in every moment; and he knows what should happen in order to bring about his perfect plan for his creation.

That last one is where we bible nerds get real tore up. It should happen, for example, that the Christ be betrayed. But was Judas his only betrayer? Or is it more true that Peter who denied could have as easily betrayed, Thomas who doubted could have as easily betrayed, all those who ran away and scattered as it says in Mark’s gospel that all his friends ran away... see, I’ve come to believe that any one of these possibilities could have taken place, and that God is divinely playing a kind of chess with all reality to extract from every free human choice and every possibility stemming from each choice in order to bring about what he wants to accomplish.

And string theory holds to a form of this too, of course I don’t pretend to know much about string theory. But there’s something to that idea that like, the Creator is actively engaged in the ongoing act of creation even today. An atheist once told me to listen to some Michio Kaku and I came away thinking, This guy believes in God harder than even I do.

It’s all in how you see these things.

And with this new and profoundly mysterious and cosmic understanding of your Creator, I want you to come to realize all its implications: If he or she is all these things, then his or her attention never breaks. He who holds me never rests. He keeps watch over me always. But because he knows all, and yet still chooses this kind of partnership with messy me, I can be assured that his watchful gaze is one of loving adoration and devotion; he’s not a peeping Tom. So he’s just always supporting and always loving me from his heights. This is a wonderful thing to preach to your own heart.

One writer said it was like God was firing love-arrows to pierce his heart as often as possible, and said he made it his practice to fire back.

When the meditation of your heart becomes loving awareness of his divine Presence in your life... jackpot. Because then in each moment of stress or of boredom or of fear or of loneliness or whatever, you can always let go and sink back into that loving.

When the meditation of my heart is on his very nature in this way, my Creator is honored, and I am deeply, emotionally rewarded with his peace. Over the past several days, if you’ve been following the blog, I’ve had you praying the Jesus Mercy prayer. Do you notice anything yet? Jesus is God’s nature, the physical embodiment of truth, goodness, beauty, and of power, knowledge, and presence. Mercy is his defining characteristic, it’s how he chose to introduce himself to us, as we read above, as gracious and merciful, suffering long with us and totally patient about it, abounding in loyal love for us.

Jesus Mercy reflects the heart of God and his willingness to receive you in all moments. Get into it! I promise you, the practice will reward you.