"In the Belly of the Beast"

Dear Hearts & Gentle Friends. . .

Autumn Greetings!

I trust this connection finds you all getting a little closer to 20/20 in your quest to "spiritual-eyes" the way you look at that ever changing flow of form and circumstance we call our "lives." Mastering the spiritual art of keeping the eye "single" in the spirit of the Jesus tradition has got to be the ultimate workout in this exercise called "waking up." The way I understand it, that aspect of His teaching challenges us to refine our capacity to first notice and then cease the fool's game of evaluating life's flow of events and situations with labels like "good" stuff and "bad" stuff . . . "right" stuff and "wrong" stuff, etc., etc., ad infinitum . . . ad nauseum.

The legendary Indian sage, Krishnamurti, invited us to explore the grace of “observing everything, while evaluating nothing.” Sounds a lot like Matthew 7:1 doesn’t it? Remember Jesus encouraging us to “Judge not that you may not be judged.” And reminding us that we’ll measure (evaluate ourselves) with the same measure we evaluate others. Learning to capture the vision of Life as a flow of pure, undifferentiated "is-ness" rather than a series of desirable/undesirable episodes takes a tremendous dedication to the discipline of remembering. Remembering, first, to notice exactly what we are telling ourselves about this moment. Then, remembering to inquire if that sense of things rings true with the Truth you know.

One of the commonest fairy-tales we treat as fact, for example, is the truly foolish notion that there is a definite, singular way everything in our material world "should be" at any particular point in time. We determine the specific form of our "preferred universe" by deciding that a wide variety of material objects and experiences are "extremely desirable," thus establishing them as vital to our happiness. This is the process Jesus referred to as "laying up treasure on earth." "Don't do that," He said. I think of it as His “Prime Directive.” He understood that our tendency to attach too much significance to earth stuff lays the groundwork for every instance of human frustration, disappointment and violence.

Being stuck in an ego oriented, materialistic value system inevitably leads to measuring many life situations with a rigid yardstick of irrational demands and expectations. Our Unity community is not immune to that influence. We've all experienced some degree of the emotional drama inherent in every instance of unfulfilled demand and expectation. We’ve all struggled with frustration. Most of us know what it’s like to be caught in an episode of resentment and hostility. Many of us have been to the brink of the blind, cold rage that gives birth to human tragedy. And, there may even be a few of us who have stepped over the line into the same kind of darkness that, for a terrible moment, convinced a young ghetto kid that a gold Camry was worth a human life.

Dateline: March, 1996 - Bethesda, Maryland . . . "She was a 45-year-old special education teacher, a wife and the mother of a 6-year-old boy. He was a troubled teenager who 'desperately' wanted a gold Toyota Camry for his 17th birthday. Their paths crossed at a shopping center in Toms River, N.J., where the teacher drove her 1995 gold Toyota Camry to buy a sandwich on her way to a college exam."

The article went on . . . "That ‘chance encounter’ ended both their lives. The teacher was buried last week. The boy sits in jail awaiting trial for murder and carjacking."

“Chance encounter?” I think not. Far more than a "chance encounter" was at work in that tragic drama played out on a shopping center's parking lot. What is it that motivates a teenager to kill an innocent stranger? And, is there anything we can do to prevent such mind-numbing tragedy? For the past twenty years the answer has been tougher laws, more policeman and more prisons. But, tougher laws and enhanced enforcement didn't help Kathleen Weinstein, or her husband, her son, her students, or her friends who are all now doing the hard, painful work of adjusting to an earth life without her.

And they obviously had little impact on a single-minded kid lost in his teen-aged lust for his own special brand of “earth treasure” . . . a hot set of wheels.

This isn't about not having enough jails, cops or draconian sentences. Something else is going on here. The way I see it, our culture should be asking itself some very heavy questions if even one of our kids gets as lost in callous disregard for human life as this 17-year-old named Michael. But there's more than one. There's a lot of Michael's of all ages out there who seem to have lost their capacity to feel or care. What kind of influence does it take to separate a human being from his humanity?

Michael doesn't quite fit our image of a killer. Yes, like the vast majority of young men who commit violent crimes, he comes from a single-parent household, and he lives in public housing where crime and poverty is a daily fact of life. But his mother works in law enforcement, and his family is described by friends as God-fearing church-goers. He had been in trouble with the police before, but nothing about his record suggested he was capable of such cold-blooded violence.

What is known about Michael is that he was obsessed with owning a shiny new car. He talked about it incessantly to his friends, describing how he was saving to buy his dream. He had to have a gold Camry. He even bragged about how he was getting one for his birthday. It is a fantasy that consumes many teen-agers, reinforced dozens of times a day by TV ads equating owning a new/cool/status car with freedom, power, popularity, and being "somebody." And it's not just cars, it's all manner of material things and human experiences we're told we must have if our life is to have meaning and purpose and value. That's a real tough call for a young man growing up in the projects where coming of age can, so tragically often, be little more than a passage to nowhere where life is played out on the razor's edge of sick and tired... sick of being scared and tired of being poor. But is that enough to separate a kid from his humanity?

I don't know, but after reading what Charles Johnson observed about the impact of being poor you could have a shot at making a case. Consider this. "If you've never been hungry, you cannot know the either/or agony created by a single biscuit - either your brother gets it or you do. And if you do eat it, you know in your bones that you've taken the food straight from his mouth. This was the daily , debilitating side of poverty . . . the perpetual scarcity that makes the simplest act a moral dilemma."

In our modern culture, young and old alike are susceptible to the seductive invitation to "lay up treasure on earth." Typically, few of us have had the good fortune to encounter someone clearly and powerfully debunking the seductive myth of the Gospel of Get and Grab. Someone like Jesus Christ, Buddha, Mohammed, Lao Tsu, St. Francis, Mother Theresa, Ram Dass, Wendell Berry, or Martin Luther King.

If we could somehow expose the root cause at work on that shopping center parking lot, what are the chances it might turn out to be the failure of our religious institutions to teach the benefits of non-materiality as an inspired way of life in a voice powerful enough to convince 17-year-old project kids to hang on to their humanity in spite of their poverty and serenely pray with Joseph Pintauto, "All we ask, oh Lord, is to be safe from the rain, to be just warm enough in winter to watch the snow with a smile, to have enough to eat so that our hunger will not turn us into angry beasts." But is that enough to connect a kid with his humanity?

The article ended . . . "All we know for sure is that in one young man's case the situation was clear. He had to have a gold Camry. He bragged he was getting it for his birthday. It boiled down to the tragic fact that her last few minutes weren’t enough for Mrs. Weinstein to inspire Michael to embrace the Golden Rule.

Consider for a moment an alternate point of view. What's the possibility that things went down the way they did because Michael's culture, far from failing, succeeded admirably in teaching him the lessons it wanted him to learn. The consumer's mantram . . . "More is better, now is best. Get it while its hot!" He wanted more. He got it. A gold Camry for Mrs. Weinstein's life. The tragic commerce of a lost soul. Is he an aberration or the predictable product of a culture so absorbed in self-gratifying consumerism that it no longer hears the "songs of silence" or sees the words of the prophets etched on subway walls and tenement halls. I pray for the day when every Michael out there has enough sustenance for the body and food for the soul to keep them full of humanity and liberated from the belly of the beast.

And I pray for the day when every Mrs. Weinstein out there can drive gold cars wherever they want, secure in the knowledge that Michael's humanity has been preserved by a culture that cares and a Love that will not cease.

Praise God...

Enjoy the Grace!
~ Chad

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