Edward Hays ~ Author, Artist & Storyteller
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Eternity versus Now

7/30/2014

 

Eternity versus Now


Dear old and new friends,

    The creative artist Sister Corita Kent once said, “If Jesus was among us now he wouldn’t tell parables, he take us to the movies!” That’s a marvelous insight since good plays and movies are more than entertainment. So ponder the German film story of the Wings of Desire.

    In this movie an angel named Damiel is assigned to Berlin to observe and chronicle human activities and feelings. One day he confides to another angel how he longs to say to the humans he observes, “Now, now, this moment, forget about eternity and forever!” He also has this overwhelming desire to enter into history so to feel the simplest of things humans do even for the briefest moment. Damiel then falls in love with a beautiful circus trapeze artist and bravely chooses to plummet into humanity declaring, “Now or never!”

    His first act as a human is a common one he’s observed as an angel that humans do innumerable times—drink a cup of coffee. First Damiel holds the cup of hot coffee with both hands allowing it’s warmth to submerge sensually into his flesh and then slowly sips the dark invigorating liquid. Raising his eyes from the cup, he looks at life swirling about him in a kaleidoscope of vivacious different yet harmonizing colors. Damiel sighs and then smiles contentedly, even if he has given up heaven and eternity for this single moment.   

                                            Stop Reading Here!

    Pause and ask yourself what this German film/parable personally says to you. Take your time. A parable is a puzzle intended to disrupt your accepted wisdom and so may have several meanings. The most important is what it means to you. Now go to your brain cabinet and open the top drawer. What do you find?

    If you discover that first drawer is empty, pause briefly and review the story Wings of Desire. Don’t be in a hurry. Refrain from eagerly racing on to do something easier like checking your e-mail. After a brief reflection, open the second drawer in your mind cabinet asking what for me was the message.

    I’m in a hurry,” you complain! “I don’t have time to play puzzle games; I’ve important things to do today. Just tell me, what’s the meaning of this parable?” Sorry, I can’t and be faithful to the wandering Teacher of Galilee who never explained any of his parables!

    Oh, but you object because in the gospels a couple of times Jesus explains his parables. Those words, however, didn’t come from his lips. They were added years later by the early church and integrated into the Jesus oral tradition, and some fifty years later they were written into the gospels.

    Forget Eternity! Sink your teeth today into an ordinary moment.

Beware Schadenfreude!

7/23/2014

 

Beware Schadenfreude!


Dear old and new friends,

     Suffering abounds in each of our lives and throughout the world. While physical and mental afflictions are a part of the human condition, attempts to explain their purpose continues as a blindfolded quest. In previous ages pain and sickness were considered a visitation of the gods or God as a warning or punishment. A stoic theory proposed painful suffering was a teacher; whatever was the lesson became the patient’s responsibility to unravel.

    Today medical drugs that dull or remove pain are easily available. So imagine your physician prescribing you shouldn’t use them to escape your pain, but instead you should enjoy it! Medical madness, except for a condition of those who strangely get pleasure from suffering…of others! No single English word exists for this perverse pleasure, but there is one in German—Schadenfreude!

    In the first century C.E. crowds in Rome of over 50,000 jammed the giant Coliseum for public spectacles. They came to experience Schadenfreude as they watched the bloody slaughter of slaves, gladiators and animals. In just the Coliseum’s inaugural games 9,000 animals were slaughtered to entertain the carnage-hungry crowds. Lest today we protest that we aren’t so barbaric, ponder why gigantic sport stadium crowds cheer the often brutal or crippling collisions of players in football and basketball or the bloody body battering of prize fighting.

    Shouldn’t we find the blood-spattered injuring of others repulsive? Yet, we don’t. An unnamed cousin of Shadenfreude is the fascination for television or newspaper reports of disasters, murder, rape and massacre. News editors know our hunger and so operate on the editorial rule: “If it bleeds, it leads!” In this age of instant 24/7 news a spiritual necessity of an absolute imperative is that we must safeguard our souls and hearts from any delighting or fascination of the suffering of others. Daily vigilance is required to cultivate our compassion by frequent Holy Hurting Communion with any who suffer—spouse, friend, neighbor or the complete stranger.

    We begin to cultivate authentic compassion by rejecting that universal illusion, akin to the earth is flat, that another’s painful suffering is exclusively theirs! As our planet Earth is a sphere and not a flatten disc, so likewise each one of us is united as one with everyone else on this planet. So another’s pains or joys are always yours! While unattainable intellectually, this amalgamated fusion of all life is both a cosmic organic reality and a mystical spiritual one.

    You may find it helpful in deepening your compassion to whisper “Ouch” every time you see another suffering.

Who Are You?

7/16/2014

 

Who Are You?


Dear old and new friends,

    The primal source of religious worship is awe and wonder. Picture one of your prehistoric ancestors kneeling in awestruck worship as a gigantic lightning bolt splinters the night sky followed by thunder’s deafening roar. Or another ancient ancestor spellbound in astonishment as inexplicably his first infant appears out of his wife’s body. Temples and priesthoods follow later with sacred laws and ritual appeasement of the gods giving religion a new source not of wonder but fear!

    As humans we seem to have an embedded need to be religious, to experience the wonder-full. Yet today’s world of escalating electronic miracles leaves little if any room for us to be awestruck. Earth’s orbiting gigantic telescopes peer backwards in time to send us full color pictures of stars being birthed in the splendor of ten thousand sunrises…interesting, even beautiful, but yet not awakening real wonder. Or consider what you’re doing at this moment, my unknown and known friends in Arizona, Montana and Virginia or elsewhere on this planet, reading a reflection on wonder electronically written in Kansas. Yet, this space-time-traveling marvel along with e-mail and Skype doesn’t cause us to kneel gape-mouthed in awe before our computers for we are wonder-immune.

    To rekindle wonder, begin by taking small steps, and step one is to read this slowly:

                “You are the sum of everything you’ve ever seen, heard,
                        eaten, smelled, been told, forgot—it’s all there.”

    American poetess Maya Angelou’s words call you to be overwhelmed by the mystery of who you are. They call you to stretch your imagination to the absolute ultimate limits to conceive that every single sight you have ever seen since birth is a partial answer to your identity! Astonishingly, absolutely nothing you’ve ever experienced is lost or forgotten, everything you’ve ever tasted, smelled or heard is all still within you—and is you! Each victory or defeat, every sensual pleasure and agonizing pain, every act of love and friendship has become forever the bafflingly, inexplicable mysterious you!

    When drifting in the misty shrouded frontiers of sleep all at once a long forgotten event appears before me in all its vibrant colors and sensations like a swirling red golden leaf in the stream of consciousness. Surfacing to half-consciousness, briefly I’ve asked, “From where did that forgotten old memory come?” Now I know; it and other day or night remembrances are but the tip of the iceberg, an infinitesimal tiny fraction of the thousands of billions of permanently implanted memorable elements that make us the sum total of who we are.

    To awaken wonder and original religion, memorize Mary Angelou’s fantastically wonderizing words in order to repeat them upon seeing yourself in a mirror.

How Hot Is Hell?

7/9/2014

 

How Hot Is Hell?


Dear old and new friends,

    Hot as hell is a common summer remark, yet how hot actually is it? Does it feel like a scorching hot July day in Kansas or is it like the sweltering and stifling heat of a crowded stalled elevator? Atheists of hell denounce such questions as being ridiculous since it just doesn’t exist. In this age of air conditioned, comfortable churches, unlike previous times, sermons about hell are rare. Other than its use as a metaphor for an unbearable temperature, most today hardly ever give hell any serious thought. Yet there are some who often do wonder if Hell and Heaven really exist?

    Such a person was a Samurai warrior who came to visit the spiritual Master Hakuin and         began asking, “Master, is there really a heaven and hell?”

    “Who are you?” demanded Hakuin.

    “I am a Samurai warrior of the Shogun’s Imperial personal guard,” proudly stated the             warrior. “Nonsense,” replied Hakuin. “I think under those fine robes you are more likely         some village idiot! Or you’re a highway robber who stole those clothes off a wealthy             merchant.”

    Like pot of tea, the warrior began to be boiling hot. “You are too fat to really be a true         Samurai,” said Haukin, “and too dumb!” At that the Samurai angrily rattled his large sword.     “Oho,” laughed Hakuin. “Look, he has a toy sword. I wager it’s so dull it couldn’t cut             through a piece of soft tofu.”

    Insulted, the warrior could no longer restrain himself and drew his sword threatening the         master. “Now you know half the answer!” smiled the master. “You have just opened the     gates of hell.”

    Hearing that, the Samurai drew back, sheathed his sword and bowed. “Now you know the     other half,” said Hakuin. “You have just opened the gates of heaven.”

    Just as Hell or Heaven were within the power of that Samurai, so they are within ours       regardless the temperature. Hell isn’t a place of torture where we are sent, it is rather         easily self-constructed. Whenever you feel hatred, jealousy, anger or feelings of envy, suspicion, rejection and revenge, realize these are the doors of hell. Whenever you feel the touch of any of them realize your hand is on its doorknob…then instantly pull it away and wash it thoroughly.

    I cannot conclude this reflection about Heaven and Hell without speaking about the reality of Heaven but that would take more space than is remaining. So I will conclude with one of my favorite quotations of Mark Twain: “Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company.”

The Freedom to Love

7/2/2014

 

The Freedom to Love


Dear old and new friends,               

    A Fourth of July parable is a true Hollywood story about the film producer Samuel Goldwyn who wanted to buy the film rights to Radclyffe Hall’s controversial novel The Well of Loneliness. “Sir, you can’t film that,” a studio adviser said, “it’s about Lesbians!” Goldwyn replied, “All right, where they got Lesbians, we’ll use Austrians.”

    In the 1950’s and 60’s same sex love was never shown in motion pictures or publically acknowledged without direst consequences. Movie stars, sport athletes and the common person lacked the freedom to publically acknowledge their true sexuality or their love for someone of the same sex. The Fourth of July celebrates the 1776 signing of a draft of the Declaration of Independence written by Thomas Jefferson. It declared, “These truths are self-evident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Sadly those rights of liberty and equality then and for many years to come weren’t accessible to black African Americans, women of any color or anyone whose birth sexual orientation wasn’t heterosexual. Those freedoms declared so beautifully in 1776 were more a dream than a reality.

    Now 238 years later, this July 4th celebrates an evolving realization of that dream of liberty for all that includes the unalienable right to love whomever you chose, which is the heart of the on-going controversy of same-sex marriage. A wedding is first of all a joyous announcement to the community of a loving relationship of two persons as well as the ritual of their marital union. In the past ten years a radical cultural shift has occurred in America regarding sexuality and marriage. Now 19 states and the District of Columbia allow same sex marriage. Only 30% of Americans supported gay marriage in 2004, now ten years later it is 51% and growing. Today Episcopalians, Presbyterians and Lutherans allow gay clergy! How have such radical cultural changes been possible in only ten years?

    A possibility is the Hundredth Monkey theory. A study was made of a group of small islands near Japan when a few monkeys began washing their potatoes before eating them. Soon younger monkeys quickly adopted this behavior causing unrest among the old monkeys who grew agitated. In time, more and more monkeys began washing their potatoes, until the “hundredth monkey” did, reaching a critical level in collective acceptance. Then not only all the monkeys on that island, but all monkeys on the other unconnected islands began washing their potatoes!

    Instead of with fireworks, celebrate this July 4th with a fiery patriot determination to further the fulfillment of that glorious 1776 dream of freedom. Remembering the Hundredth Monkey, pledge in your thoughts and deeds to grant full equality to others, regardless of their race, religion, color or sexual orientation.


    Edward Hays


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    Haysian haphazard thoughts on the
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