Interview with Mary, Mother of Jesus.

I know my blog readers are looking for inspiration at this Christmas season, so I thought I would step into my time capsule and go back to Jerusalem to interview Jesus’ mother, Mary, for her unique perspective on the mind-blowing experience of mothering God’s Son. Here is my report.

Doug:
I want to thank you, Mary, for your consenting to share with us your thoughts about your son Jesus at this season for commemorating his birth. We know that you have the reputation as one who ponders things of spiritual import; you must have had much to mull over as Jesus grew into manhood and left home for his public ministry. Tell us, was he a divine baby?

Mary:
Now don’t get me confused with your theological puns. If you mean was he a good baby—yes and no. He certainly was all baby. I mean he was my first, and what did I know about babies. Joseph wasn’t much help either. He had a good heart—after all, he stuck with me during the pregnancy. But would you expect a man who took me on a long donkey ride at full term to be of much practical help later?

Doug:
You mention that Jesus was your first. How would you compare him to your other boys? James, for example. You knew Jesus had a special role to play, but did you expect James to become a leader too?

Mary:
Yes, I was privy to the secret that Jesus would be the Messiah, but James always seemed to have the more traditional qualities of leadership. He always knew how to take charge and how to enforce conformity. With Jesus you never knew what he was going to do. We never doubted his sense of certainty. But I think he kept a lot of things to himself in his early years. I mean the things he would say sometimes you wouldn’t believe. I should have kept a notebook, but I didn’t understand half of it. I think it frustrated him sometimes that he didn’t have anyone to talk to that understood him. You remember the temple incident at age 12.

Doug:
Was Jesus well-liked as a kid? Did he get along with people?

Mary:
Mostly yes, some no. Jesus had a reputation in Nazareth for his good behavior and pleasant disposition. My closest friends always asked me how I did it—he never caused trouble; he was polite and considerate. That’s why it was such a shock to everyone later when he got into trouble with the authorities and became so controversial. But I should have seen it coming, because with all of his considerateness and graciousness, he had a way of making some people uncomfortable. I don’t know whether it was jealousy because his friends didn’t see any reason for him to become so renowned or they thought it inappropriate for a carpenter to become a spiritual leader. But certain people seemed to sense that Jesus was a threat of some kind—that he was not your ordinary guy, that if he had his way with things the world would be turned upside down and we’d be left scrambling for our places. Jesus was a beautiful person with a special touch, but he didn’t use the old approaches or work through the system; so some people did not trust him.

Doug:
It has been only a short time now since Jesus’ humiliation on the cross. If his reputation rests on what is being bandied about concerning him now, will you want to show yourself in public?

Mary: First of all, we Jewish women aren’t accustomed to “showing ourselves in public.” But as for Jesus’ reputation, don’t believe all the things you hear. Right now those who are talking are the ones who don’t understand. Jesus’ ministry and message had little to do with temple worship and hierarchy of leadership. The disgruntled voices will dim to the extent that we begin to realize that Jesus was the answer, not the problem. I have a dream of how the love that Jesus practiced and shared will take hold and be an eternal inspiration, and it won’t need an official stamp.

Doug:
But Mary, you are waxing eloquent. How can you have a dream? Wasn’t just being Jesus’ mother all that God should ask of you?

Mary:
You’re right. Mothering was a big job. But my kids are raised, and I’m not dead yet. Jesus did something for me--a human just like you--that I cannot repress. He showed me and some of my best friends what it is like to be loved by God. I am not the same girl to whom the angel appeared 33 years ago. Then I didn’t know what to think. Sure, I tittered about it some with my cousin Elizabeth, but I mostly just “pondered’ it all, as you say. But you just watch. Some of us have been talking, especially since the angel’s appearance by the empty tomb. Something is going to happen. Keep your eye on Peter too—despite his blusteriness and his recent sense of shame. Jesus spent a lot of time building a new personal awareness in him too. Love will carry the day!

Doug:
It seems Jesus was quite a puzzle—not the kind of person to be neutral about. Thank you, Mary, for your insights. You should have kept a notebook.

Mary:
Would you have read it? People (other than Jesus) don’t pay much attention to women these days.

Doug Good

Why Oswald Shot Kennedy

I have no headline for tomorrow’s newpapers, but I have some thoughts on “why” Oswald killed Kennedy. We may never be able to sort out all the conflicting reports and conspiracy theories. But withal, you are free to decide for yourself what you think actually happened. I’ll give my answer after I lay some groundwork. In a halted sense, as long as we don’t know what really happened, the truth of the matter holds no candle to what you personally think happened.

A common remark I hear is, “I’ll believe it when I see it.” According to this proposed wisdom, our beliefs depend on what we see. This puts things backwards. To “see truly” we sketch our images by using the guidelines our beliefs provide. If, in contrast, our visual images give orders to our beliefs, we will be chasing our beliefs all over the lot. Even if we get a belief pinned down, we have no guarantee that we have seized “the truth.” Beliefs are not necessarily truth. I remember a girl I marginally knew in junior high school (I’ll call her Jane) who wrote me a note expressing her disappointment that things were not working out for us, so she announced she was regretfully ending our relationship. I did not know we had a “relationship.” Jane’s problem was that she saw what she wanted and made that the fount of her belief.

I suggest that it would be more realistic and honest to say our reality is what we choose to see. How carefully we go about it is the test of veracity. There is a famous video (now on YouTube) of an experiment where a group of participants formed a circle. Observers of the video were asked to count how many times a basketball was passed between the members wearing white shirts. When polled afterwards, a surprising number of observers had not seen the gorilla who walked through the circle amidst the passing balls. The gorilla was as real as the people passing the basketball. We “see what we believe.” But this reality is impure if it is selective --when beliefs serve our pre-formed purposes. Turning the phrase around is not just a semantic trick. Something more profound is at stake. (Stay with me, I’ll tie this in to Oswald/Kennedy in a minute. I’m laying groundwork.)

For example (as physicist Evan Walker explains), when we are driving down the freeway at 60 mph, we actually are eleven feet ahead of where we think we are on the road. It takes time for our brains to register the input. We “believe” we are eleven feet back, because that is the story our brain “makes up.” Our brain-store doesn’t “see” truth; it just compiles data, which takes a moment. We trust our brain enough to believe the sight it offers. But when I am asked about it, I tell what I selected to see—from among what appears to me from my raw brain data. So my belief yields to my selective criteria.

You would never say, “I see what I don’t believe,” would you? Don’t ever trust anyone who says that, particularly if he is driving a car in the lane next to you—he will cut you off. Believe me. That other driver may swerve into the eleven foot space in your lane because his brain hasn’t “seen” and told him about you yet. He is certain of what he “sees,” but he doesn’t see you because the beliefs he banks on are a step or two behind. He is likely to tell his brain to give the “swerve” orders with untimely consequences. If Jane happened to be that driver, I should be worried. The moral here is, don’t believe what you choose to see, rather see what is believable.

Life, though, is more than a collection of sense data. The "seeing of an understanding” too is something we individually sculpt. The neuronal connections of the brain are not up to this more reflective task. We each exercise the option to gather the material for our subjective beliefs as we please. I don’t “see” a winning lottery ticket as a gift of love as I run to the bank with the dollar amount in mind. But I “see” a Christmas present as a gift of love when I “believe” in the person who gave it. If we insist on leaving our beliefs unbirthed until they fit our invented images--when our beliefs are off kilter--our vision is necessarily skewed--as was the case with my junior high acquaintance.

What does this have to do with Lee Harvey Oswald? Well, Oswald killed Kennedy as the culmination of a lifetime of sculpting his vision of the world and his place in it. Any number of us could have killed the President, or at least we are free to try (God forbid). Why did Oswald do it? Because he could. This is patently unjust, but if Presidents had no need to be on edge, who knows what senseless things they might do (like ride in Dallas with the car top down). Every possibility has a potential counterpart. With no contrast, the landscape would lose its beauty. Life would ooze rather than vibrate.

With Nelson Mandela’s recent death putting the spotlight on his character and contributions, we might ask if he would be attracting his deserved veneration if he had not spent 27 years in prison. He might have learned lessons of forgiveness and courage under duress in other ways, but the egregious treatment by those who jailed him, because they “just could,” served to limn his life and turn his imprisonment into a workshop in saintliness, without which we would not have the lessons from the man to tap.

Some would point out that Kennedy did not have the spiritual depth of Mandela, but the masses (at least in America of the 1960s) venerated him comparably. I would suggest that Abraham Lincoln would never have risen to the heights of heroism if he had not experienced the unique agony of civil war leadership capped by assassination. (He was almost not re-nominated by his own party for a second term, so low was the regard for his leadership then.) Do we see what we believe (before the climactic moment), or do we believe only what is actually, fully there to see? Oh, if only we had hindsight ahead of time.

The Bible tells us to just believe—believe and thou shalt be saved. I expect so, but before we meet our Maker we have lives to live. Our ordained leaders tell us how to picture in our minds what we are living through, without help from our natural senses. The standard spiritual advice stresses that we “are not of this world.” Preachers want us to borrow their spectacles and not to wonder why on earth Presidents get killed. This is an argument for the uncurious who don’t have the strength (or information) to stand up to, or understand, negative events.

Christians tend to think of the “end times” as a period close to the final act of the play--when calamities will multiply exponentially. If we look around and in the right places (not the evening TV news matinee) things are multiplying with unmatched speed. The “understandings” of new quantum physicists and consciousness researchers are demonstrating this. In the last hundred years we have learned more, with new proven paradigms for guidance, than the human race has seen since life appeared on earth. I can point to a score of books that show this, and I have only tapped the stream. (By the way, I am told that the discoveries of front-edge scientists and thinkers do not reach the textbooks (college or seminary), not to mention the general public, until after an 8 to 10 year delay.)

It is a false truism that science and religion are incompatible passengers on planet earth. A very little googling can get you started on the fascinating awakening that science is the greatest supporter of biblical accounts. At the risk of losing your attention (I realize my Oswald/Kennedy hook did not promise a science lesson), I will mention just one example that is an undercurrent to the Kennedy assassination moment.

By opening up the subatomic realm of antimatter for inspection, physicists are learning how the creation of the universe could have, and did occur. Matter would simply not exist without its un-seeable counterpart antimatter. Life in the universe(s) is an interplay of positive and negative event-expressions. Our “seeing” this drama is limited by our physical focusing abilities. When we die, that apparatus quivers and flattens out. We say that time for us ends at that point. While we are alive we hear and read about the dead and wonder what will happen next. Meanwhile a stream of creation/annihilation in the form of time-loop experience expressions proceeds apace. Every possible vibration expression exists “unseen,” waiting only to be observed to take “form.” Oswald followed one path; Mandela followed another.

At the recent Thanksgiving Day gathering of my family and friends, I was asked at the dinner table, apparently at a lull in the conversation, what I had been reading lately (a dangerous question). I had to be an honest reporter and mention how physicists have found out that time, as we measure it, however real with all its necessary practicality for getting things done, is an illusion as we picture and chart it. A brave tablemate asked me how I dealt with this as a history teacher. At that moment I noticed it got quiet. The questioner may have thought he had me pinned down. Nevertheless I pressed on and stated that “time”--past, present, and future—is a simultaneous matter; that there is not an impassable wall between the three tenses. I made a further comment that laboratory scientists have successfully teleported subatomic material through an impenetrable barrier (beam me up Scotty). The person next to me soon turned and said, “You are serious aren’t you,” meaning it was dawning on her that I was crazy.

My reading is settling into the realization that all of existence—universes, planets, animals, trees, humans—is God expressing God’s Self. God exists because there is Not-God (so to speak), namely evil and anything negative. If God eliminated the dark forces, divine light would have no way to shine in all its brightness. The wonder of God is how God handles the contest, hands down. The wonder of God’s creation is how this competition plays out at every level, throughout the subatomic realm and in the “time” where we humans experience awakeness. Jesus was a perfect example of how humans can handle these defining realities when we realize who we are—vibrations of the Source. (God spoke the world into existence. Speaking makes a sound and sound is vibration waves.) New quantum science is joining with the scriptures to help us “see” ”now” in a non-linear panorama. Physicists like Fred Wolf and Amit Goswammi, among many others, are “believably” convincing.

What happened that November day in 1963 was the “now” of a sequence that spans the three tenses. Oswald was but a role player in one possibility pattern that the rest of us witnessed together that day. Let’s live with it all together “now” and feel the bright energy. Let’s visualize how the Bible and the new quantum physics agree—a Divine mind is creatively at play among us processing the dark forces that are its counterpart. We can have a part in it; what part, is our choice.

Don’t get hung up on the complex conspiracy theories about the Kennedy assassination. Look for the bigger picture to gain understanding of the world scene. Oswald’s murderous intent was a startling example of “antimatter” let loose. Killings are all around us, intentional and accidental. I don’t mean to diminish the deep sorrow of Kennedy’s family and his admirers. But don’t you see how we are all in unity in the interplay of matter and antimatter? Good and evil are siblings. That is why Oswald killed Kennedy, and why it shook us all so deeply. The thrust of unity from loving relationships is far more powerful than the time-reverse looping of negativity. But, stripped of the time-loop of the “past” (where antimatter parades), the future would have nowhere to go. The past actually is not gone, and the future is an unfolded now.


Doug Good