THE CASE FOR ACCEPTANCE: An Open Letter to Humanity, Part VII

a work of fiction by Robin Reardon

FOREWORD

This blog entry is the seventh in a series of monthly installments that present the rationale behind Thinking Straight. The series is written from the point of view of a gay man—which I am not—so I'm labeling it as a fictional open letter to humanity, addressed to anyone who will read it and consider its points. My hope is that it will further understanding and acceptance.

The installments will be presented in logical order (Part I and the full list of installments was posted in April), and I encourage readers to start at the beginning and proceed through. The series will be highlighted each month on DREAMWalkergroup.com in the DREAMScene newsletter.

VII. THE BIGGEST CARD: Intro and Objective (See I-Beam Strategy)

THE GOD CARD

Remember virtual cards? Those things that homophobic bigots will flip up at me to prove how disgusting I am because I'm gay? Before anyone starts worrying that I’m going to show you how to shred a card that has “God” on it, let me tell you what the holders of this card are saying when they hold it up to me: Damned. That’s what we’ll shred.

Examining this card is going to be very difficult for some people. One reason could be that most of us never think about religion. We might think about being nice to each other, or about forgiving each other, or about going to church, or about what we’ll wear to this year’s Easter service, or whether perhaps we have a calling into the ministry. We might even indulge in a little textual examination of scripture. Our own apologia, our own exegesis. But how much to we really think about what the ultimate goal is?

The more troublesome reason—that is, the one that’s more likely to make people choke on an examination of this card—is that our minds are closed. Somewhere along the line, someone convinced us (and some will say it was Jesus who did the convincing) that the Bible is not to be questioned. That it contains the sacred, inerrant, and immutable Word of God. In my experience with many of these individuals, there’s nothing rational or logical that anyone can say to them that will shift them off of this position. Even this exchange doesn’t help:

Me: What is the Bible?

Disciple: The sacred, inerrant, immutable and inspired Word of God.

Me: How do we know?

Disciple: The Bible says so.

To these individuals, and to anyone else who feels uncomfortable approaching religion the way I’m going to do it, I say this: If the Bible is right, then it will be right when you’ve heard what I have to say. If it’s immutable, I’m not going to be able to change anything about it.

So open your mind, just a little. It might not be easy; it might actually be scary. But you have nothing to lose. I can’t hurt you or the Bible or God. Furthermore, I'm not even going to say that anything in the Bible is wrong.

Surprised?

So. Ready? Here we go.

This is the really creative application I promised you of that very simple business model. It might look ridiculous, at first blush, to try and apply a business model to the God card. But think of it this way: the concepts of faith and religion (not the same thing, by the way, because you can have faith without religion, but religion without faith is meaningless) are not based on fact. They don’t depend on reason, or proof, and one person’s experiences usually don’t resemble another’s exactly, even if those two people belong to the same church. These factors make this particular card the most powerful one of all. We can’t dissect it. We can’t define it so that even two people agree on what it is.

So how are we going to deal with this card? Trying to wrap our cerebral cortex around something that isn’t based on reason is rather like trying to snatch a fish out of moving water with your bare hands. Or like trying to locate a small object somewhere on a very large field. We need a model, such as the rope grid that professional searchers would place onto that field to help them eliminate areas where the object wasn’t found and move to new ones.

Fortunately, we have a model. The I-Beam Strategy. (See Part VI.)

The religion I’m going to apply the model to is Christianity, partly because it’s the one I’m most familiar with, and partly because most everyone who’ll read this will be able to follow along, even if you’re not Christian yourself, because it’s pretty much all around us in Western culture. But I want to be clear that this model could be applied to any religion. Its very simplicity allows it to move into some very unusual areas, for a business model. And in fact, it’s really not just a business model. It can be used as a model for life. The lioness and the Thompson’s gazelle do exactly that.

So. Let’s apply.

Objective

Before we start, I want to apologize to agnostics, non-theists, and atheists, because in working through this, I’m going to speak as though we all believe in God in some way. Bear with me, and I’ll show you later how it can apply to you, too.

What is our objective, in terms of this entity called God? What’s our goal in achieving the ideal relationship with God? What must not fail?

Some people will say “Getting to heaven.” Remember when we were working out our objective in building the office tower, and I said we would know the objective was clear when the question “Why?” wasn’t bringing any more clarity? When “Getting to heaven” is given as the objective for our relationship with God, I’m going to ask, “Why? Where is this place, and what makes it so wonderful?” If we explore this avenue, we’ll probably decide that what makes heaven so wonderful is that God is there, and all the people we love, and we have everything that makes us happy. The next question is, “What makes us happy?” I mean, what if one of those people you love turns out to love someone you can’t stand, and that third person is right here in heaven with you? Will that make you happy?

We could explore this for a considerable amount of time, but I think where we’ll end up is here: the Love that is God is the be-all-and-end-all (would that be the alpha and the omega?) of heaven. If this adventure that religion would lead us on ends well, then the love God has for us, the love we have for God, the love that we have for each other because of the joy that only love can bring, will transcend any differences that would make heaven less than wonderful. So it’s really about love. It’s that Love that passes all understanding that we’ve heard so much about. It’s that love that makes us feel like we belong, like we’re home at last, a feeling we wouldn’t give up for any number of office towers. And why do we want that love? I can’t come up with a response that explains that, other than the joy it brings. All I know is that it drives most of what happens on earth. Sometimes we’re driven to get it, and sometimes because of the lack of it, but always it’s about love. Even the lizard brain in us is acting out of some aspect of love of self.

Some people will respond to the question of the objective with something like, “Doing what God wants.” And what’s the model’s response? That’s right: “Why? Who is this God person anyway, and why is what God wants more important than what I want?” Again, we could go round and round for a while, but I suspect we’re going to end up at Love again—that surpassing Love that is God, beyond which nothing matters.

Some will respond “Glorifying God.” Um—why? Oh; because God loves us so much? Because of the joy we feel when we return that love?

Imagine having that love. No, wait; I think actually it would be more like being inside that love. Imagine that. I’ll give you a minute.

…

What are your feelings toward God? Toward anyone else in that place called heaven, if that’s where you see yourself? Does the love you’re inside of make you feel connected with God? With those other souls? With your own soul, for that matter? Just as that Love passes understanding, this connection passes understanding. And it’s love that creates and maintains that connection.

We could go through a number of these examples, and if you come up with one that doesn’t end in love, I’m going to suggest that you haven’t reached clarity yet. You haven’t asked “why” often enough, or you’ve gotten distracted and aren’t really talking any longer about what must not fail. So I’m going to say that our religious objective, our life objective, our objective vis à vis God, is this: loving connection. You may feel more comfortable phrasing this differently. If you’re one of the folks who said “Getting to heaven,” or “Glorifying God,” that’s fine, as long as you understand that it’s a deep, unfathomable loving connection with God that make everything so wonderful.

If we want some scriptural confirmation, let’s go to Matthew 22:37. This is where Jesus says that the first and greatest commandment is to love God with all your heart, soul, and mind. In other words, with everything you are, love God completely. This commandment has an interesting subtext to it. An assumption, really. In order to love God with everything you are, you must know what you are. You must know yourself. Know yourself, and love God with all of it. Jesus tells us this is the most important thing any of us can do, and we are commanded to do it.

The second greatest commandment, moving into verse 39, is to love your neighbor as much as you love yourself. Again, there’s a subtext. How much sense would it make for Jesus to tell you this, if you didn’t love yourself? So the assumption is that you love yourself. And then you are to love everyone else as much.

So in summary: Know yourself, and love God will all of that; love yourself, and love everyone else the same. This sounds to me like it’s getting us to loving connection. This sounds like the way to the objective. And if there’s any doubt, Jesus removes it in verse 40: all other laws depend on these two commandments. So if you’re trying to follow a law that prevents you from loving God with everything you are, or if you’re exempting or separating part of yourself from loving God, or if what you’re doing shows that in fact you don’t love yourself or your neighbor, you’re disobeying the two most important things Jesus told us to do. Everything we do must support these two commandments, if we’re to reach our objective of loving connection.

Those of you who know your Old Testament will realize that these two commandments do not appear among the famous Ten in Deuteronomy. But if you follow these two, the Ten will fall into place like so many well-placed dominoes. I mean, if I love you as much as I love myself, how can I lie to you or steal from you, let alone kill you? But even with all these commandments, we need to remember that they are TACTICS. (We’ll cover scriptural tactics later in more detail.) The Objective is still loving connection, or just Love if you prefer. So we know the commandments are tactics because—why? Well, because it isn’t not stealing that’s absolute; it’s loving each other too much to steal that’s absolute. This is the objective; not stealing is the result.

The next installment will apply Situation to this card. In the meantime, I encourage you to think about your own, personal relationship with God, or with Life. What is it that must not fail?