It's timely that I went to Death Valley with my wife and middle son
last week, the week before Christmas, because in Death Valley you can see the
view from the level of time above us, in which our eras are nanoseconds, our
lives picoseconds, flashing by unseen while the Funeral and Black mountains
crash and grind on the turbulent surface of our troubled planet.
Religious icons, too, offer
windows into this level of time. When God asked Abraham to
sacrifice his son for a greater cause, some big picture, that big picture is
the one where the life and death of our planet is itself over in a flash, agony
and ecstasy combined and neutralized. When Jesus said, "For whoever
exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be
exalted," he may have referred to geologic time, where all human lives will
have equaled-out, become smooth and difficult to distinguish. I wonder too, when
Mohammed wrote, "The ink of the scholar is more sacred than the blood of
the martyr," did he mean that the martyr acts only in the present, where
emotions rule, while the scholar ponders the long view, in which the sum of
human endeavor is a momentary, hopefully at times corrective static in
space-time?
My grandmother told me when I was eight
years old that Jews do not accept Jesus as divine, that Jesus was a very good
Jewish man, but he was not a god or the son of God. This is how cultures
are formed. My parents were secular and did not assert doctrinal ideas
(other than the doctrine of withheld belief), but all it took to set my young
world-view was one remark from my grandmother, while at the same moment, all
around the world, millions of other children were undergoing doctrinal
instruction.
Forty years later I was standing
in a Catholic church in Oaxaca, Mexico, looking above the altar at a crucifix with a
striking aura. My family was up the street. No one else was in the
church. The crucifix became a window into stretched-out time. I saw
the human race diminish in stature and relevance, as it does in Jewish
stretched-out time, but then my grandmother's spirit came and said, "It
looks the same, but God doesn't want you to look through that window.
Because He has the long-view, and sees things we can't, He wants, for
some reason, for people to be separated. He does not want a communal,
Jungian consciousness. People should be divided now, seeking definition
through difference."
I wondered if I could tolerate this news.
And now, Christmas morning, when the world is being led into
religious war, I'm ready to channel my grandmother and ask if the message is
still the same. I'll be right back.
I'm back. I channeled my grandmother
and she said that all the world's traditional cultures and religions are about
to be re-written by a secular, scientific/corporate state, and a sense of this process is causing people to cling to their
familiar memes, even go to war over them. She said the moral re-definitions will at times be traumatic, but that God, in supporting (surprisingly) this new techno-secular state, is not looking for apocalypse per se,
that He will accept freethinking, the perception of common ground, as long as it doesn't
interfere with the fission of unity into opposites, the aroma of which has been known to please Him.
Given the alternatives, this news from my grandmother wasn't the worst Christmas present. Happy holidays!
