FYI. ILY.  SYT.  JTW.

-----Original Message-----
From: clarencekerley [mailto:Bill@bkspeaks.com]
Sent: Monday, February 04, 2002 1:23 PM
To: ordinarylife@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [ordinarylife] Is The Story You're Telling The Truth?


ORDINARY LIFE - Thoughts and Ideas to Help You Live a Happier Life

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Summary of February 3, 2002

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Dear Folks ?

   First of all thanks to all of you who responded to the need for
financial help in our medical work in Bolivia. I can't recall
experiencing such generosity. We are going to be able to give them more
than they requested. Plus, several people are already on the list to go
down with the next work crew and one person is going to help arrange
getting medical supplies to the clinic. Wow! Thanks.

   The material I offered focused on how our Western approach to "the
truth" and how modernity have had destructive effects on our religious
and spiritual well being. We have become "fact fundamentalists." I also
deal with the perplexing question of what Jesus might do in dealing
with terrorism. The lesson ends with a telling of an ancient story from
Ethiopia about the battle between Truth and Falsehood.

   What follows is a full text of the presentation.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Is The Story You're Telling With Your Life the Truth?

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

   A boat docked in a tiny Mexican village. An American tourist
complimented the Mexican fisherman on the quality of his fish and asked
how long it took him to catch them.

   "Not very long," answered the Mexican.

   "But then, why didn't you stay out longer and catch more?" asked the
American.

   The Mexican explained that his small catch was sufficient to meet
his needs and those of his family.

   The American asked, "But what do you do with the rest of your time?"

   "I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, and take a
siesta with my wife. In the evenings, I go into the village to see my
friends, have a few drinks, play the guitar, and sing a few songs. I
have a full life."

   The American interrupted, "I have an MBA from Harvard and I can help
you!

   "You should start by fishing longer every day. You can then sell the
extra fish you catch. With the extra revenue, you can buy a bigger
boat. With the extra money the larger boat will bring, you can buy a
second one and a third one and so on until you have an entire fleet of
trawlers.

   "Instead of selling your fish to a middleman, you can negotiate
directly with the processing plants and maybe even open your own plant.
You can then leave this little village and move to Mexico City, Los
Angeles, or even New York City! From there you can direct your huge
enterprise."

   "How long would that take?" asked the Mexican.

   "Twenty, perhaps twenty-five years," replied the American.

   "And after that?"

   "Afterwards? That's when it gets really interesting," answered the
American, laughing. "When your business gets really big, you can start
selling stocks and make millions!"

   "Millions? Really? And after that?"

   "After that you'll be able to retire, live in a tiny village near
the coast, sleep late, play with your children, catch a few fish, take
a siesta, and spend your evenings drinking and enjoying your friends!"

   Ordinary Life auditor Wayne Herbert sent me that and it is just a
wonderful story about the kinds of things I want us to be about.

   I sometimes refer to what wants to happen in here with the phrase
"Journey Into Wholeness." It is so easy for those of us in the West to
think that that journey is out there somewhere, in the outer world. The
goal of spiritual work is to become a "self." Or, to become aware of
the Self. I can't adequately explain to you what this self is. It is
the center and, at the same time, the circumference of the personality.
It embraces both consciousness and unconsciousness. The Self is known
as the Christ in Christianity.

   Journey into Wholeness. The root meaning of the word "holiness" is
this wholeness. Wholeness involves finding the missing parts or the
faculties that are lacking in our natures and restoring them to a
dignified place in our personality. Usually for those of us in the
Western world our need, as reflected in the story of the Mexican
fisherman, is relatedness; relatedness to ourselves as well as to
others. This is the principle of equality I've spoken to you about so
often. We who speak English are limited to one word for "love." In
Sanskrit there are ninety-six words for love. We are highly specialized
in technology yet quite primitive in terms of feelings.

   Jesus, and other Eastern spiritual teachers, saw the outer world to
be of little importance. The place where the kingdom of God was was
inside and among us. For us, however, reality is in the outer,
material, physical world. One of the ways this has affected Christian
theology is the emphasis on a belief that we are so unique, so
distinctive that even our bodies persist on the other side of death.
The religion out of which we came, Judaism, thought that after death
what happened to us was much like what happens to a dewdrop after the
sunrise. Yes, it has individuality while it exists as a separate
entity, but it is destined quite quickly to flow back into the great
primal ocean of existence and to lose all individuality. Does a drop of
water cease to exist when it falls back into the sea? Well, yes and no.
Nothing is lost but its individuality is no more. Jesus knew that the
ego was a great troublemaker for us.

   We cling to everything that we think defines us as individuals. To
threaten this notion of who we are is hell. We protect what we call our
individuality at all costs. Death is bearable only if we are guaranteed
a life after death containing all the characteristics of our individual
human life.

   You can see how this would affect the way we go about living our
lives and making choices about who we are and what are we to do. Those
were the questions that shaped, by the way, what became our Bible.
After every great cultural upheaval the community of people raised the
questions: Who are we and what are we to do?

   e.e. cummings once wrote, "To be yourself in a world that is doing
its best to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle
any human being can fight, and never stop fighting."

   I love the story of the Pentecostal man who wandered into, let us
say, a Methodist church. During the sermon, the visitor got so excited
that whenever the preacher made a point, the Pentecostal man would
scream out, "Praise God!" or "Hallelujah!" or "Amen!" The ushers were
so distraught about the Pentecostal's behavior that the head usher went
down the aisle and whispered to him: "You'll have to keep quiet? The
pastor's right in the middle of the sermon!" The Pentecostal man said,
"Keep quiet? How can I keep quiet? I've got the Holy Spirit!" To which
the usher said, "Well, you didn't get it in this church!"

   The Pentecostal man made a theological error that many of us make.
You see, he didn't have the Holy Spirit; the Holy Spirit had him! And
that's the problem with much of our theology. We wish he had the Holy
Spirit. There's a part of us that wishes we could keep the Holy Spirit
in the nice, neat, tidy confines of our categories and barriers. We'd
like to put God in a box.

   Get this: Nobody has the Holy Spirit; the Holy Spirit always has us
and, given our Western orientation, that scares us so that we resist
and repress and deny until we are spiritual dead as doornails. We want
a God in a box like we want everything else in our lives predictable
and controllable. We want a religion that is safe. A journey that is
predictable. There is no true spiritual journey that is that way.

   We modern people have been victimized by own modernity. Of course,
we've benefited - we have the sciences, technology, modern medicine,
even emphases on human rights come from our modern approach to things.
But it has had two deeply destructive effects on our religious and
spiritual life.

   For one thing it has made people skeptical about spiritual reality.
If God can't be proved by modern means, then God must not be.

   Second, modernity has led us to be preoccupied with factuality -
with scientifically verifiable and historically reliable facts. Modern
Western culture is the only culture in human history that has
identified truth with factuality. We are, as Marcus Borg calls us,
"fact fundamentalists." If a statement isn't scientifically or
historically factual, it isn't true. These two things are serious
mistakes and deadly to the journey inward.

   Let me point out that both liberals and conservatives can be fact
fundamentalists. Liberals try to rescue a few facts from the fire.
Conservatives say the Bible must be factually true in order to be true
at all. This is why they emphasize the literal and historical
factuality of biblical texts. They both agree - facts are what matters.

   If I had a magic wand that worked, one of the things I would do is
to get both liberals and conservatives alike to see how modern both of
these positions are.

   What we've got when it comes to having faith today for most people
is whether they can believe "iffy" things or not. That, to most people,
is what Christianity has become. It is as if what God wants most from
us is believing highly problematic statements to be factually true.
And, if you can't believe them, then you don't "have faith" and
probably aren't a Christian.

   Listen carefully: Faith has to do with your relation to God, to
Self. Not whether you believe the Bible to be true or not.

   I'm going to come back to this in the weeks ahead.

   Let me see if I can give you an example. One of the questions that
has persistently come up in the discussion group has to do with what
Jesus' view on violence might be. This has been raised since the events
of 9/11. What would Jesus have us do? Does professing to be Christian
mean trying to live as Christ might live? And if so, why aren't we
doing what he asks us to do?

   First of all, I confess I have not a clue what Jesus would do in
response to 9/11. My hunch is not much. His interest was not in that
sort of thing. Besides, he had little political power.

   If we went to him and asked, I think he would probably tell a story.
He might tell the story of the Good Iranian Terrorist. That's what the
parable of the Good Samaritan sounded like to the people of his time.

   "Who are you he might ask?" Then tell a story to us as we stand
there with our mouths open and scratching our heads.

   Maybe he would tell a story like this:

   One day a rabbi, in a frenzy of religious passion, rushed in before
the ark, fell to his knees, and started beating his breast, crying,
"I'm nobody! I'm nobody!" The cantor of the synagogue, impressed by
this example of spiritual humility, joined the rabbi on his knees. "I'm
nobody!  I'm nobody!" The custodian, watching from the corner, couldn't
restrain himself, either. He joined the other two on his knees, calling
out, "I'm nobody! I'm nobody!" At which point the rabbi, nudging the
cantor with his elbow, pointed at the custodian and said, "Look who
thinks he's nobody!"

   I'll tell you something that might be misunderstood. I think that
one of the numbers that organized religion has done on us is to
convince us that we are supposed to be like Jesus. What God is
interested in is saving human beings. That being the case what we must
do is be human. The Christian conspiracy, I'm going to call it, against
being human is to convince us that what we are supposed to do is be
like Jesus.

   A couple of years ago there was a popular slogan: WWJD. The goal was
to ask before doing any and everything, "What would Jesus do?"

   If Jesus were here today, would he have worked for Enron? Would he
have been on the board of directors? If Jesus were here today, would he
go to church? Which one? The image that I had of Jesus when I grew up
was that Jesus would not go to movies on Sunday but he would go
swimming because we had a lot of water in our town. Would he be a
Republican or a Democrat? Would he be involved in the political
process?

   The one thing that Jesus Christ was about was love and he did this
by the extravagant way that he lived his life. He wasn't married; he
didn't hold down a job; he didn't have to raise kids. The Roman church
has it that Jesus was such a guy that not only did he not have a sexual
dimension, neither did his mother.

   What Jesus was about - and still is - is Love. The extravagant way
that Jesus lived his life was to communicate the overwhelming love that
God has for us. Boundless love. Inexpressible love. It is like God
comes down and puts arms around us and says, "This is how much I love
you. Now love yourself like that." This was the thing that marked the
ministry of Jesus. So Soren Kierkegaard writes, "To will to be that
self which one truly is, is the opposite of despair."

   How do you do that? Well, to be the self you truly are is to have a
particular history and it is to aspire to go beyond the limitations of
that history and it is to be frustrated when you realize you can't. To
accept this humanness means to be passionate about our aspirations and
compassionate about our limitations. It is like you get up from where
you're sitting and come up here and stand beside me physically and look
at the person who is seated in the chair where you are and you have
compassion for that person. It is that kind of acceptance.

   We are not to be like Jesus. We are to be Christ-like. There is a
world of difference.

   Jesus went around kicking self-esteem into people. All of the
stories that you find in the New Testament are like that. Look at the
stories of his ministry. If a man can restore sight to a blind man, he
gives that person a new lease on life, a new self-confidence. If a man
can absolve a prostitute's guilt in lasting forgiveness, he gives her
the gift of self-respect. The crippled, the insane, the leper, the tax
collector, the beggar - a motley assortment of humanity desperately in
need of self-esteem and he extended it to them.

   The same dynamic was at work even when he was chasing the
moneychangers out of the temple. It may be temporarily embarrassing to
be kicked out of your accustomed place of business, but it has been
known to lead to self-respect. The message is: You're made for
something better than this. You are loved by God. This self-compassion
is foundational for the abundant life and I'm sure that the response
Jesus would have us make to the terrorist situation as well as the rest
of life is this kind of love.

   He would tell a story. One of his central teachings was: You shall
know the Truth and the Truth shall set you free. (But first it's going
to mess with your life and upset you!) So, let me tell you a story
about Truth to ponder. This story is from the Ethiopian culture.

   Long ago, Fire, Water, Truth, and Falsehood lived together in one
large house. Although all were polite toward each other, they kept
their distance. Truth and Falsehood sat on opposite sides of the room.
Fire constantly leapt out of Water's path.

   One day they went hunting together. They found a large number of
cattle and began driving them home to their village. "Let us share
these cattle equally," said Truth as they traveled across the
grasslands. "This is the fair way to divine our captives."

   No one disagreed with Truth except Falsehood. Falsehood wanted more
than an equal share but kept quiet about it for the moment. As the four
hunters traveled back to the Village, Falsehood went secretly to Water
and whispered, "You are more powerful than Fire. Destroy Fire and then
there will be more cattle for each of us!"

   Water flowed over Fire, bubbling and steaming until Fire was gone.
Water meandered along, cheerfully thinking about more cattle for
itself.

   Falsehood, meanwhile, whispered to Truth. "Look! See for yourself!
Water has killed Fire! Let us leave Water, who has cruelly destroyed
our warmhearted friend. We must take the cattle high in the mountains
to graze."

   As Truth and Falsehood traveled up the mountain, Water tried to
follow. But the mountain was too steep; And Water could not flow
upwards. Water washed down upon itself, splashing and swirling around
rocks as it tumbled down the slope. Look and see! Water is still
tumbling down the mountainside to this day.

   Truth and Falsehood arrived at the mountaintop. Falsehood turned to
Truth and said in a loud voice, "I am more powerful than you! You will
be my servant. I am your master. All the cattle belong to me!"

   Truth rose up and spoke out, "I will not be your servant!"

   They battled and battled. Finally they brought the argument to Wind
to decide who was the master.

   Wind didn't know. Wind blew all over the world to ask people whether
Truth or Falsehood was more powerful. Some people said, "A single word
of Falsehood can completely destroy Truth." Others insisted, "Like a
small candle in the dark, Truth can change every situation."

   Wind finally returned to the mountain and said, "I have seen that
Falsehood is very powerful. But it can rule only where Truth has
stopped struggling to be heard."

   And it has been that way ever since.

   I think what Jesus would do if we asked him what we are to do is
that he would likely tell a story. And then he would remind us that we
ourselves are telling a story with our lives. After saying that,
perhaps he would ask, "Is the story you are telling with your life the
truth?"

   No matter where you go this week, no matter what happens, remember
this: You are carrying precious cargo. Watch your step.

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Ordinary Life is a gathering that provides an opportunity to develop an
enlightened heart and an awakened mind to the reality of the present
moment.

The gathering meets on Sunday mornings at 9:45 am in Fondren Hall at
St. Paul's UMC - 5501 South Main, Houston, Texas and is taught by Dr.
Bill Kerley. If you would like more information -

Contact

Bill Kerley -

E-Mail - Bill@bkspeaks.com
Web - www.bkspeaks.com
Voice - 713-663-7771
Fax - 713-663-6418
Mail - 6300 West Loop South, Suite 480 Bellaire, TX  77401
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