Wisdom?

Perhaps my 68 years of dealing with this life’s challenges has enabled me to render a helpful opinion on an important question: what is wisdom?

Wisdom is knowing what to keep and what to throw away.

Wisdom is throwing away whatever is not useful, but disposing it in such a way that you do not make a mess for someone else to clean up.

. . . unless they are being rewarded for cleaning it up.

Wisdom is knowing what to accept, what to reject.

. . . and knowing when to wait until you've decided which of those two categories is appropriate in any given situation.

. . . and knowing that sometimes we don’t have time to decide . . .

good luck with that!

Wisdom is using what you have acquired to improve your own life and the life of those with whom you are in community.

Wisdom is listening;

it is also discerning, when the appropriate time comes, to suspend listening and speak.

Wisdom comes in noticing that the world is not a perfect place—there is something wrong with it.

So wisdom then requires discerning the good from evil.

. . . while understanding that there is a purpose for the presence of both in this life.

Wisdom calls us to identify what it wrong, and resist it.

And even to defeat evil when that is necessary.

Wisdom may be conceding that different persons, different people groups, have different definitions for what is good or evil.

And so therefore, in some cases, the grace to forgive wrongness may be more appropriate than judging evil with punishment,

Sometimes even defining what is really good  should be re-evaluated.

Wisdom is realizing that the complexity of this world is largely—though not totally—unexplainable, and there may be—there just may be— a God who operates at a level that is beyond our power to comprehend or measure.

. . . a God Who, at the very least, set it all in motion, as the ancient purveyors of wisdom have insisted.

There will always be someone who knows more than you do. Get used to it.

Wisdom is finding people to love.

Wisdom requires responsibility for those we love. 

'. . . and sometimes accepting responsibility for those we are unable to properly love.

Without love we are lost forever.

Love requires sacrifice.

Wisdom means being thankful when someone has made sacrifice for you, because you have not done all this on your own.

You were getting help even when you didn’t know it.

PS. It’s not all about you.

Glass half-Full

What Joe said . . .

Ponder what he said, long ago. This lesson pertains to forgiveness, and other truths . . . destiny, injustice, endurance, faith and human nature.

“Then Joseph said to his brothers, ‘Please come closer to me.’ And they came closer. And he said, ‘I am your brother, whom you sold into Egypt.’ “
“ ‘Now do not be grieved or angry with yourselves, because you sold me here, but God sent me before you to preserve life.’
“ ‘For the famine has been in the land these two years, and there are still five years in which there will be neither plowing nor harvesting.’
“ ‘God sent me before you to preserve for you a remnant in the earth, and to keep you alive by a great deliverance.’
“ ‘Now, therefore, it was not you who sent me here, but God . . .’ “

For more about Joseph and his brothers, read Genesis 37-48.
Also, consider Peterson’s lecture on this subject:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7V8eZ1BLiI

King of Soul

The Teacher

Over there in the middle of the world there seems to be a controversy about who is in charge of the place.

There are some people who will not accept the fact that the Jewish people have a very long history there; their ancient saga originated in the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River. So now that the Jewish people have crowbarred their way back into that land strip, which they call Israel while many Arabs and Muslims call it Palestine, we do have a problem.

It is a very old problem, and yet it is new every morning.

On this morning, I contemplate the words of a Teacher who claims to have been king over Jerusalem several millennia ago. This king/teacher is known by the name Solomon; he is reported to have been a very wise man.

Solomon's notes reveal that he wrote down such thoughts as this:

"That which has been is that which will be,

and that which has been done is that which will be done.

So there is nothing new under the sun.

Is there anything of which one might say,

'See this, it is new'?

Already it has existed for ages

Which were before us."

Now this wisdom is somewhat of riddle, because as I tap this musing, and my own musing along with it, out on this keyboard, I realize that there is some contradiction here between what Solomon intended to say way back in the mists of time, and what I experience here and now in the world as it exists in 2017 c.e.

Because this laptop could not have existed during the reign of King Solomon. So, there is something--this laptop--which I can say is, in fact, new.

Electronic devices did not exist in Solomon's time.

So, does this discrepancy call into question the validity of Solomon's message to me? Is the Wise king contradicting the obvious truth of technological development? Is he flat-out wrong about my silly little MacAir being "nothing new" under the sun?

Did his successors go online to discover his wise sayings?

Did Jeroboam use Windows? Was Rehoboam a Mac guy?

Is that what they were fighting about after Solomon died?

No, no, no and no.

Nevertheless, I am reading the wisdom of Solomon as it has been passed down through the ages in the Bible. His wisdom-seeking questions and pronouncecments, as found in the book of Ecclesiastes, arrive at my historical doorstep as a book of the Bible.

Now we all know the Bible is controversial. Many people consider it to be the Word of God, while many other people think it's just an old history book with a lot of errors and contradictions.

I say it is a valid history of our Creator's plan to bust into human consciousness during a certain period of time, with ecclesiastical wisdom that is applicable for all time.

Modern folks who disdain the Bible often think that we believers are just naive, gullible, and subject to the manipulations of religious leaders who want to use us sheepish believers for their own financial gain or power.

Bible-believers generally accept the Bible in faith. What they don't understand about it, they just chalk up to the possibility that we cannot figure everything out, so at some point, for the sake of getting on with life, we just need to believe the revelation that we accept as a basis for navigating the challenges of this life.

Smart people, cerebral people, on the other hand have to get everything figured out. They generally analyze our ancient fuddy-duddy faith proclamations to death, and relegate them to the realm of mythology, tall tales and wishful thinking.

But here's the real deal: What smart people call cognitive dissonance, people of faith call "faith."

Believers understand that they can't figure out this whole thing called "life" so they are willing to submit themselves to the legacy of faith that has been presented to them since childhood, or since crashing at the bottom of their own sinful limitations and cognitive confusion.

We'll never get the cosmos all figured out: at some point out there in this never-never land, we have to believe in something, something "out there" that can carry us through the mountains and valley's of this life.

Now maybe smart folks don't need faith because they think they've got it all figured out.

Whatever.

I think that, somehow, this is what Solomon is getting at. Consider this observation that Solomon wrote:

"Also, the sun rises and the sun sets;

And hastening to its place it rises there again."

Okay, so Solomon obviously had jotted this ditty down before Copernicus and Galileo came along and proved that the sun does not move, but rather it is the earth moving around the sun that produces our daily sunrises and sunsets.

Does Solomon's ignorance about the actual machinations between sun and earth negate the quality of his wisdom?

No.

That is my statement of faith about Solomon's wisdom. We know what he's saying; it's not rocket science. The Hubble had not been invented yet, but wisdom is as old as the hills of Judea.

So I'm not going to analyze a thousands-of-years-old nugget of wisdom to death, simply because Copernicus and Galileo figured out our solar system and subsequent scientific data has confirmed their observations.

Solomon was a wise king, even if he did have the sun/planets physical relationship turned around backwards.

We all have our blind spots; not a one of us sees the whole picture.

So, as I explore further in Solomon's Ecclesiastes, I see that, a few sentences later in the first chapter of Solomon's Ecclesiates, he writes this:

"All things are wearisome;

Man is not able to tell it."

I mean, I'm tired of thinking about it, y'all.

Which is to say, we'll never get it all figured out. At some point, we just need to stop trying to decipher the DNA and the Cosmos and the Pangeatic records etcetera etcetera, and just go with life itself.

Here's an example from the conclusion of the 2nd chapter of Ecclesiastes:

"There is nothing better for a man than to eat and drink and tell himself that his labor is good (even if it contributes to climate change -ed.). This also I have seen that it is from the hand of God.

For who can eat and who can have enjoyment without God?

For to a person who is good in God's sight, God has given wisdom and knowledge and joy, while to the sinner God has given the task of gathering and collecting so that (s)he may give to one who is good in God's sight. This too is vanity and striving after the wind."

And if you're still wondering what it is I'm trying to say here, I will release you from my wandering thoughts with this ecclesiastical proverb from cousin Bob, who is, with his 20th-century wisdom, not unlike Solomon:

"The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind."

My conclusion: Just Believe, and get on with the business of life, making use of what you find helpful and productive, because we'll never figure it all out.



King of Soul

Try to find Her

With all this jibber-jabber about gender,

'tis a conundrum for any attentive community to render

a consensus about who is who and what is what

and whether to swing bathroom door open or shut,

and wondering whether she's a girl and he's a boy,

and whether we can use reproductive assets as a toy,

as if genitalia are some useless endowment to be cast aside

like an appendix or a gall bladder, thus neuterizing gonad pride.

But this ole boy was reading in a bible a little while ago,

which is, I understand, a dubious activity if I must say so

because many think that ole book aint hardly worth a dime

because those folks therein were livin' so far back in time

before there was internet and social media and trash TV

and folks was so bound up in ignorance and primitivity.

And you probably think you know what I'm about to say

about what adam and eve did on that fateful day.



But really I was a-ponderin' about something other than that--

the teachings of a man who as an ancient king had been begat.

Of Wisdom, he wrote: "She will honor you if you embrace her,"

as if there's something feminine about wisdom that we should infer.

So, if wisdom is so honorable, as Solomon presents it to be,

why did such a royal chauvinist call wisdom a "her" instead of a "he"?

For such a misogynistic polygamist king to so advise--

why, he had no business issuing such a sexist proverb to the wise:



"Take hold of instruction; do not let her go. Guard her, for she is your life."

But everybody knows this utterance, by modern standards, is just rife

with chauvinistic, sublimated predatory sexist implication

as if the lusty old king would entrap Wisdom for a coital conjugation.

But really, ole Solomon was like any decent, honorable man

who puts his lady and her wisdom on a pedestal stand.

So it's good that Wisdom is associated with the Womanly side,

so that Man can proliferate in his brawny, line-of-scrimmage pride.



And this has been going on for a long, long time, y'all.



Glass Chimera

The Two Trees

It's no accident that the first human story in the Bible is about a man, a woman, and two trees. One tree is referred to as the tree of life and the other is called the knowledge of good and evil.

Here's a pic, so you'll a have visual to help you visualize the scene. Images are, as you know, so important these days on the internet, because it is generally thought that text is boring and doesn't really get the point across like images and icons do. So here's a pic of two trees; you can get an idea of what the man and woman might have been dealing with:

You'll notice that this image is a little faded, but that's okay. The photo itself is over 5000 years old, so I was quite lucky to obtain it for this presentation.

As you go through life you will come across many different people, places, things. Sometimes you know what to think about them; other times you don't quite know what to think. So knowledge itself can be a sketchy thing, especially when it comes to knowing the difference between something that is good and something that is not good. Occasionally you may come across something that is so "not good" that it can be classified as "evil."

Death that results from a car accident, for instance, is a bad thing, but not necessarily evil. On the other hand, if some jerk runs you down deliberately on the street and kills you, that would be evil--both the act itself and the person who did it.

If someone gives you an apple and you bite into it and it tastes good, then you know that it is good, so to speak. This is knowledge that comes from tasteful experience.

If someone gives you a mushroom, will you just bite into it like you would bite into an apple? I hope not, because some mushrooms are poisonous, while others are not. To be able to identify a poisonous one from a nutritional one would require knowledge. If a friend of yours grows a portobello mushroom and gives it to you for your dining pleasure, that is is good. The mushroom is good in your salad or some other prepared dish. You could even say the person is good because of their generosity to provide this tasty proteinous food for you.

If, on the other hand, a person knowingly gives you a poisonous mushroom, this is evil. The mushroom itself is not evil, because it has no evil intent; rather the person who knowingly gave it to you is evil. So to know the difference between good mushrooms and bad ones is knowledge; not only that-- it is useful knowledge.

Now, understand this: there is a difference between knowing something and believing something.

If you wake up at 5 a.m. and it's still dark outside, you still know that the sun will rise and and day will come. This is not a matter of faith; what you believe about the sun coming up has nothing to do with whether the sun actually does come up. The sun rises to a new day, every day, whether we believe it or not. We know this.

If, on the other hand, you believe that the day will be a good day-- that is a matter of faith. Because your believing that it will be a good will probably make a difference in whether you do have a good day or not. Furthermore, it you believe that there is a God who is good and can make any day good even if bad people are trying to screw it up for you, then that is a matter of faith.

And more furthermore, if you believe that a good God can give you good instruction about how to discern between good and evil, that is also a matter of faith. And you can believe it if you want to, no matter what anybody says. And if someone comes along and tells you there is no evidence to support the existence of God or the tree of Life or any other good thing that you believe, you tell them to go jump in the lake.

Because knowledge can only take you so far in life, in liberty, and in the pursuit of happiness, while a little faith fan take you a lot farther. In the days ahead, we should remember this. All the humble people of the world whose well-being is founded in faith should retain, no matter what happens, their right to believe.

And the people who think they need to make everybody conform to some proven facts and the big data--they don't know what they're talking about. To hell with them.

In this picture, see if you can guess which one is the tree of life and which one is the tree of knowledge.

I'll give you a hint. Both of them are growing on a planet that has survived very long ages of warming and epochs of cooling. As you ponder and choose among the trees of life and the many branches of knowledge, try to cultivate a warm heart with a little faith, while still keeping your cool and being wisely analytical. And it will go well with you.

Also, watch out for snakes.

Glass Chimera

Oh, Give Them

Oh give them some land to work with

and some water to make stuff grow.

Give them some tools to turn the earth over

and push all that dirt around,

productively.

Teach them to Plow it and disc it and

tend it and harvest it

and ship the Fruits of it out so folks can

Eat.

And give them some Water; we need

water.

Oh yeah let 'em eat drink and be merry.

Yeah, let 'em do all that

in this our promised land.

Let 'em slice it and dice it and

multiply, divide it.

Let 'em add this that and the other

and subtract what they think they don't need,

let 'em Seed and Feed.

Let the wise lead,

and hope they've chosen wisely.

Let the simple be fulfilled,

and not by their leaders be killed.

At the Wonder of it all, let us be thrilled.

Let us carve the earth and marvel at it all--

what we've done and what

we've made.

But hey, please don't let it go to our heads.

Instead, help us

Try to keep it in perspective with

some eyes on the big picture,

eyes on the prize

not obsessing with the size

of all this stuff.

Give us some Air to breath

and help us put on some wings and fly

Oh yeah

but help them limit our negative effects; let them

temper their intrusions, boost our inclusion.

We need to regulate it and yet we need

to deregulate it help us

figure all that part out that

delicate balance

sensitive valence.

We gotta prioritize it and sensibly control it.

Let 'em have a firm hand, a steady hand,

but, yeah, a gentle hand.

Let them take care in what they do with the earth

and the air.

Let them share;

and yes, be fair.

Yeah, let us be fair to one another,

and make sure there's enough to go around

for everybody. I'm not making this up.

Let them prosper and proceed

with their plans

but let them pray

today.

Yea, Let us pray.

Hey God. . .



Glass half-Full

Allies in History

The Charger rides out upon a cusp of history's advance

with zeal that flashes in his hand,

brandishing our great weapon of destiny

that had earlier been forged

upon the anvil of progress.

He's duty-bound on pushing the envelope of change

through yonder canyon of chaos, or mountain of

justice, whichever comes forth first.

His steed, chomping at the bit to yank upon the seams

of troublous times,

rips out the evil twins of lethargy and lies, and

by opposing ends them

for a while.

Yon Paxateer, on the other hand,

is methodical and principled.

He summons forth coalitions of belief,

taming methods of madness,

crossing rivers of patient sadness.

His armature has accumulated in the crucible of time

from the residue of our Charger's blood,

and the aggregate left behind when women toil

and men do sweat

for all the progress mankind can get,

although we are not there

yet,

if ever shall we be.



Together, between them,

among them and in spite of them,

the wisdom of the ages settles in,

if there is such a thing.

For history is not yet written,

nor the evils that beset men smitten

until the sands of time

are deposited on this body of mine

and yours.

King of Soul

Life way down deep

The life was new.

The life was hidden, withdrawn, but stirring beneath the surface

of man, restless

feeling incomplete, as if he were only half

of something and where pray tell is

the other half.

Oh but the life

the whippersnappin' life was young and foolish, darting out in

spurts, random, irresponsibly.

Lonely.

The life was at a loss.

Meanwhile,

the wise was keeping vigil, watching protectively, counseling gently

in the stirring of the wind:

Wait. Focus. Control yourself. Learn. Prepare. Use what you've got.

Use.

Not abuse.

Love.

Not shove.

Love.

Not thrust.

Trust.

Don't throw it on the ground;

don't cast it out when you're in town.

Find a place that's safe and sound

and slightly round.

There is a place for you if you will seek, if you will

wait upon her, 'though mishaps there may be,

'though dark days you will see.

Destiny, providentially so-to-speak, whispers

in those dark hours of the night,

but also in the clarity of the bright light

and in the very horned beastly midst of your fight

for peace of mind, and fulfillment,

self-actualization, what we use to call

holiness.

Project not yourself into any old hole; cast not your pearl

to front, nor to rear.

You, my precious life, are too dear

to sputter in the rear.

Oh, wipe away your tear.

Train your sorrow to flow;

direct your milky force to go

into something worthwhile, like . . .

work. I don't know. Think about it.

Don't jerk.

Don't be a jerk,

and please don't twerk. But rather,

Wait. Watch. Focus. Learn. Prepare. Believe. Use what you're given.

Be just a little driven

but not obnoxiously so.

Just go

and do the best you can,

and when she comes, your half will become

whole.

Like I said, in not just any hole.

Whole.

For the sake of your soul,

and the soul of them who are to come

when you are done.



Glass half-Full

What's a Vacation For?

Now that we finally got to July and being on vacation, I have at last gotten around to catching up on a few personal projects that I would like to have undertaken long ago.

One project is learning how to actually make best use of the Macbook Air that I've been blogging on for two years now. Two and a half years, actually. Micah gave me the laptop at Christmas 2011. I've been stumbling around on it ever since, managing every now and then to get a word or two that made some sense out on the 'net for all the world to consider. haha.

On this vacation, my brother-in-law John, the Mac guy, has been very helpful in this personal proficiency-improvement project, especially with utilizing the pictures from iPhone that I've been snapping to elucidate our Costa Rica vacation.

In the midst of this steep learning curve, a picture popped up on one of the Mac files, a picture that I had forgotten about, thought I had trashed forever, except that lo and behold it is still rollin' around in the Mac and so I managed to pull it out of the trash. Pat took the pic exactly two years ago on Maui, Hawaii, at the Sun Yat-Sen park, which is a small memorial to the founder of modern China, Sun Yat-Sen. Here is his statue, with me standing next to it because I think Mr. Sun was a great leader:

A little research I've done today uncovers the impressive fact that both the major factions of modern Chinese liberation--the Mao-led Communist party and the Chiang Kai-shek-led Kuomintang-- claim Sun Yat-Sen as a major contributor to their initial movements to wrestle the governance of China from the dying Qing dynesty, because Mr. Sun led the revolution that knocked the Qing out of power in 1912.

Another reason I think he was a great leader relates to a quote from him that I discovered on this very same statue-base in Hawaii two years ago. The quote is carved into one face of the statue's base:

"Search into the nature of things, look into the boundaries of knowledge, make the purpose sincere, regulate the mind, cultivate personal virtue, rule the family, govern the state, pacify the world."

This principle(s) have been bopping around in my mind for these last two years. When I saw the pic pop up in my Mac wanderings today, the profundity of this wisdom suddenly came back to me. So I spent a couple hours today trying to find the source of the quote, which turns out to be not Sun Yat-Sen himself, but rather Confucius, in an old classic called The Great Learning.

I learned this when a google search finally led me to a pdf from a biography of Sun Yat-sen by a Stanford scholar, Marie Clare Bergere. http://books.google.co.cr/books?id=vh7M1u4IGFkC&dq=sun+yat+sen+%2B+nature .

The idea of "searching into the nature of things" is one that Mr. Sun made a central part of his own way of relating to the world and trying to make it a better place. I like that strategy, and it is the essence of my writing projects, the blogging as well as the novels.

Here is another pic from that Hawaiian adventure two years ago, just to illustrate what I mean by looking into the nature of things. This pic reveals just how everything, including the earth itself is just kind of. . . stratified:

Glass half-Full

Parabola

Neither life, nor anything in it, is just a simple straight line. Even crystals, which grow along straight mathematical forms from the elements and minerals of this world, have to be cut before we value them.

There's nothing really simple out there. It all confuses. That is why, I suppose, people have such trouble accepting the idea that there is some kind of absolute truth in the universe.

Nothing in this life ever just jumps on a straight-line path and goes forward, without vectored influence to push/shove it to the right or left. In experience we are, like, all over the place. Here one day, there the next, trying to make up our minds about what to do, how to approach this or that person about something-or-other problem, or how to solve this problem and ignore that other one, hoping it-he-she-it will go away.

So if there is any truth in this life, in this world, universe, we access it only after discovering the nugget from some obscure hiding place, and then we are proud of ourselves because we've uncovered some precious truth, like treasure in a field. Eschewing the common good and beauty all around us, we prefer to dig for rare booty. Then finding something good beneath all the crap that goes on becomes a triumph of sorts, and we can feel good about ourselves for a while.

Jesus explained to his disciples that he speaks to the people of this world in parables, because they do not see really what something is when they are looking at it, and they do not really hear what's going on here, even though they think they are listening.

I think that's why writers like me like to veil our visions in allegory, metaphor, nuance, and literary B.S., hoping that the world will dig through our fabric of symbolism and story to discover some truth in it. We could say that, parabolically, we are a little bit like the master story-teller of all time--the one who spoke truth in parables. In truth, however, our vain musings can not hold a candle to his wisdom.

Glass Chimera

An Appeal to Mr. Moussa and Mr. ElBaradei

Amr Moussa and Muhammed ElBaradei may become the principal candidates for the Presidency of Egypt. I hope they will remember the precedent of peace and integrity that had been established by their former great leader. And I'm not talking about Hosni Mubarak.

Anwar el-Sadat, President of Egypt from 1971 to 1981, was a military man who had arisen from humble origins. His steadfast leadership was tempered by a rare humility that is not found commonly in the annals of human history and diplomacy. Mr. Sadat's evenly-tempered command of the Egyptian military led ultimately to an effective peace with Israel, and an appreciation for freedom that now contributes mightily to a budding legacy of responsible government.

Anwar Sadat was the man whose cautious fortitude took the Sinai back from the Israelis.

Hosni Mubarak was his air force commander and later vice-president. History seems to indicate that Mr. Mubarak's service to the Egyptian people was more favorably contributed in those two roles than as President after Sadat was assassinated.
In the 1973 war with Israel, Anwar Sadat's army and air force secured that swathe of dry Sinai land and put it back in the hands of the Egyptian people where it belongs. And yet Mr. Sadat's integrity and his deep desire for reconciliation among men ultimately produced a peace arrangement with Israel that is worth maintaining.

His autobiography, In Search of Identity, was published by Harper & Row in 1977. I'm hoping that Mr. Moussa, Mr. ElBaradei, and any other Egyptians whose heart is to lead that ancient nation will cherish these words of wisdom from their martyred President. Anwar Sadat wrote:

"In conclusion I must put on record that the Egyptian people differ from many other peoples, even within the Arab world. We have recovered our pride and self-confidence after the October 1973 battle, just as our armed forces did. We are no longer motivated by "complexes"--whether defeatist "inferiority" ones or those born out of suspicion and hate. And this is why the opposing sides met soon after the battle dust had settled to talk matters over. We did so when the first and second forces disengagement agreements were concluded, and again when I met Mrs. Meir in Israel. With the fighting over, we harbored nothing but respect for one another. Our civilized people know this; it is what induced 5 million citizens to come out to greet me on my return, and the armed forces to salute me in an impressive and quite unprecedented manner.

"Our cultural depths are there; our cultural roots are alive, as vigourous as ever after more than 7000 years. Those who are surprised by what we do cannot simply understand this fact. They cannot grasp the real nature of a people who are working for a modern civilization comparable to the one they erected thousands of years ago in freedom and peace."

During the most productive part of his lifetime, the President who had come from the village of Mit Abul-Kum lived near Cairo on Pyramid Road. I hope the people of Egypt will cherish the legacy of peace, integrity and strength that Anwar Sadat excavated from that memorialized base of operations.

Don't hold it against me that I, an American, suggest this from a distant perspective in a land far away from you. But there's nothing I can do about that. I am a citizen of the world, just as you are, and we need to coexist here on earth so that all hell does not break loose again, if that is possible.

Glass half-Full

The Abyss of Desire and the Mountain of Age

Every teenager discovers the abyss of desire, but during the first years of that lifelong encounter, he/she does not understand the insatiable nature of it. Desire, in all its worldly forms, especially the impetuous sexual kind, is a bottomless pit. While it does lead to intense pleasure and a lot of fun, desire does not lead directly to lasting fulfillment.

As a person travels, through this life, deeper into the bottomless pit of desire, he/she will experience momentary satisfactions, but they are always short-lived, sometimes only instantaneous. Periods of yearning or striving between sexual release can be very frustrating.

True love, on the other hand, bears a sumptuous fruit called deep fulfillment. Our experience has shown that faithful lifetime union with one sexual partner provides the deepest expression of this fulfillment.

That spouse becomes, in fact, much more than a regular sexual partner. That person becomes, as life is lived, an invaluable partner in every avenue of life, not just the sexual one. In fact, the sexual union becomes, when healthily and regularly expressed, secondary in importance as the couple grows old together.

The sojourn of life, taken as a whole, is something like climbing up a mountain, and away from the abyss. When you are young, just starting out, you may be in a forest or some such occluded position, unable to determine your position in relation to everything else around. You are clueless and you don’t know where the hell you are.

Our experience shows that if you can find a life partner, the journey is much easier, and more meaningful, because you can share your thoughts and feelings along the way. Sharing burdens makes them easier to bear. The sharing itself is easier to accomplish if your partner is intimately familiar.

This climb up life’s mountain is strenuous; by the time you get to the top, you’re plumb worn-out. But guess what, when you reach that incredible height—with the life long lived in the distant environs behind you—the perspective is a broader panorama. You can see clearly where you’ve been and where you are; you can more accurately determine your location in relation to everything else around, and the wide world.

This is called wisdom; it is something you accrue as you ascend the mountain of this existence.

What about when you get to the top? I call that arrival maturity, or old age, or maybe, in some contexts, retirement. But guess what. You can’t stay up there forever; there’s not much to eat up there, and the only water is what falls from the sky, and it gets cold. So you have to walk back down. But hey, as you descend that mountain of life, you find the traveling to be less strenuous than the climb up was, and easier to manage because you know where you’ve been and you know where you’re going, and of course you have gravity working with you instead of against you. It’s all downhill from here.

That cliché could have a double meaning of course: it’s all downhill from here. The descent is not as demanding as the climb up, but it is degenerative, insofar as you discover that the old body, having ascended to the heights, ain’t what it used to be. In fact, it might be downright falling apart. So you need to take it slow and easy going down. Don’t get in a big hurry. Speed is for young bucks. Old folks can just enjoy a stoll.

Along the way, the abyss of desire has always beckoned, but together you’ve handled it well. If you haven’t handled it well—well, life goes on anyway, and you’re still kicking.

Our experience shows that having a community of support in the life expedition is quite helpful. But that help should be authentic, which means trustworthy, and consistent with our individual purposes, not diverting us from our chosen mission. In regards to the abyss of desire, that troupe of people with whom you’re sojourning must strengthen and encourage the faithful bond that further unites a man with his wife. The truly precious community honors the marriage bed and does not intrude upon the hard-earned bond.

That is very different than, say, other groups or entities (such as show business) in this world whose intent may be to titillate or distract faithful couples from their fruitful union. You know what I’m talking about—forces like tv or the internet or sketchy work situations.

Take Twitter for instance. It can be a fun little ditty; it can be a useful communication tool. But when an old fart like me get tweets from unknown women accompanied by suggestive pictures, it is a useless diversion; in fact, it’s damned dangerous, because it beckons me, deceptively, to answer the death call of the abyss instead of the faithful union that I and my wife have worked so hard to achieve. You may think, Freudian-like, that I’m repressing some legitimate desire to have sex with other women.

No.

I’m not suppressing any good thing; I am resisting, to use an old-fashioned term, the evil so that the good can continue to flourish. I don’t care what Janis sang before she od’d. You don’t necessarily do a thing because it feels good. The deceptive allure of those online women, or live ones for that matter, is as hollow and misleading as an empty wine bottle, as short-lived as Eve’s apple which disappears in the eating of it or is cast aside to rot after a few bites.

Sexual fidelity in this life yields what we Christians call the fruits of righteousness. They are delicious, nutritious, and very satisfying. Couples who learn to truly love one another, learn also how to utilize the sexual union in a way that intensifies and simplifies their life purpose together.

Here’s one last thought about that downhill walk from life’s mountaintop. These days, we have a multitude of man-made medical procedures and pharmaceutical extenders to keep us propped-up so we can keep the journey going, instead of terminating at a point that it might have ended in earlier periods of history. So with stuff like blood pressure medicine and Viagra and whatnot around, the experience of aging on that downhill stroll is in a kind of uncharted territory. Be careful how you handle surgeries and chemical substances. Don’t eat the green acid or whatever.

And keep your sights set—not so much on yourself--but on the one for whom you have cared, and who has cared for you. Consider also those others whom you hold dear, and you’ll not stray too terribly far from the favorable course. Then lo and behold you encounter at the bottom of the mountain a valley of death that takes you, whether you like it or not, into the abyss that you were able to elude for so long.

You need fear no evil, but defeat it. Christ can help you with this.

From jellyhead to crowing glory

Knowledge is limitless as the universe, extensive as Hubble images of distant nebula, intense as the intricacies of DNA. It just goes on forever. A person could acquire knowledge all his life and only scratch the surface of all that is happening.

Human history is full of wise people who acquired copious knowledge: Moses, Socrates, Confucius, Newton, Einstein, and many more. But the world we live in requires limiting knowledge, because too much of the stuff overwhelms us. History is also full of smart people who were frustrated because the general tide of human activity is determined more by baser instincts than by smartness. Most people are more concerned about being fed and comfortable than they are yearning for knowledge.

In ancient times, the wisdom given to Moses compelled him to write a book about the origins of the human race. Many people today consider Genesis a collection of myths or Hebrew/Chaldean folk tales. I don't see it that way. I believe that the work of Moses was divinely inspired. If you can attempt viewing it, as I do, beyond the veil of time and evolving human knowledge, you will see that it is raw truth.

That's not to say that its revealed truth is necessarily congruous with our ongoing revelation of scientific discovery. When Moses did his research many millenia ago, he had no benefit of Hubble telescopes, the scientific method, libraries or Google. Because his treatise is not equipped with these contemporary intellectual supports, we jaded moderners tend to dismiss the Genesis account of creation as something quaint and anthropologically curious, and therefore of lesser value than scientifically established knowledge. I do not see it that way. Moses was, like, the Einstein of his time.

According to Moses, there were two trees in the the Creator's garden about which he had given humans specific instruction. Adam and Eve, first prototypes of civilized humans, were commanded by God to eat from the tree of Life, but not to eat from the tree of Knowledge of Good/Evil.This makes an awful lot of sense when you think about it, because knowledge is as limitless as the universe, whereas life itself--well, it must go on.

You see, Moses wasn't forbidding knowledge; he was putting it in its rightful place. Knowledge is quite stimulating, and at times very useful, but it does not sustain the spirit of God which inhabits the tree of life.

I'll tell you how all this rumination started. A couple of days ago, I heard on my nearby public radio station, WFDD, two very different perspectives that pertain to this conundrum, but they were right next to each other in time. The contrast between Dr. David Linden's mind-opening knowledge of neuroscience, and Ms. Gerry Patton's account of her lifelong struggle to find the right hairstyle, is quite stark. I've been thinking about the difference between their two perspectives for two days now. And yet both of these precious people, miles apart in their perspectives, represent together the great, fascinating spectrum of human experience. There is so much that could be written about this, you know, but instead of attempting to uncover all the nuances of truth from both sources I will simply supply two audio links and two quotes from these two amazing people whom I heard on a sunny Monday morning, talking about a little something they each have learned in this life.

Dr. David Linden, neuroscientist, talking about 600 million years years of evolution and how the life process had patched together, from disparate genetic parts, the human brain, said this:

"A miracle happens. You have enough neurons in this cortical circuit, massively interconnected, and somehow, what emerges from that are these amazing human traits - the ability for me to know what you are thinking based on social cues that you give me, other forms of observational learning and high-level cognition."

What I like about this statement from Dr. Linden is his use of the word "somehow," and that's what I've been contemplating for two days.
Meanwhile, in Winston-Salem, NC, an hour-and-a-drive from my home, Ms. Gerry Patton offered, after describing the lengthy quest for her optimum hair expression, this kernel of wisdom:

"After many years of searching and finally accepting that the good Lord knew what he was doing when he placed this hair on my head, I'm working with it and loving it...I'm growing locks...Now I'm happy and nappy...He gave me something extraordinary and beautiful, a head full of kinky hair and now I found a way of letting it be my natural crowning glory."

What I like about this testimony from Ms. Patton is her use of the phrase "the good Lord knew..."

And both of these extraordinary people I heard on public radio within ten minutes of each other. It takes all kinds to make a world, you know. Thank God for diversity.