Unity Center

We were blessed with a delightful opportunity in January to travel to California to celebrate a wedding on a cliff overlooking the Pacific. What a beautiful spot it was, with the sun shining warm, reflecting off the waves, and a circling hawk celebrating the oncoming sunset.

However, there was something hidden among the trees or grass. Because it was winter, its leaves didn’t show, and I brought home an extra souvenir: a case of poison oak all over my ankles and calves. First lesson: something can harm you even if you don’t know it’s there. Ignorance does not protect you! To quote my high school’s motto: Scientia est potentia – Knowledge is Power.

Now, I’ve been lucky most of my life to be only mildly allergic to poison ivy. I’ve only had one real case – thinking I was not allergic, I spent several hours pulling it out by the roots with bare arms. I learned that you can develop an allergy by overexposure. Now I am cautious, and only rarely do I get a bump or two.

But although they are said to have the same active ingredient, urushiol, poison oak must be a slightly different toxin! Yikes! Did I ever itch... and it spread and lasted for about 3 weeks, in spite of every home remedy and OTC medication known to humanity.

As you probably know, scratching doesn’t help. Oh, sure, you get a few seconds of immediate gratification, but then it immediately gets worse and itches even more because now you’ve stimulated all your skin’s nerve endings. Even though every fiber of your being wants to scratch, you must resist the urge... or you will pay dearly for giving in to temptation!

The lessons here can be widely applied. For instance, we dieters can remember that it’s not our best interest to give in to every urge to put something in our mouth. When I have an “itch” to eat chocolate cake, it might be better not to follow that urge. And lack of knowledge won’t help. Some foods will put on weight whether or not I know how many calories or carbs they contain.

In the world of finance, we can see the results of people who give in to unwise urges - to shop or to gamble excessively, or to invest foolishly. When Katie says, “Why don’t you buy that, Mom?”, I often say “Just because I like it doesn’t mean I have to buy it.” I can choose what to bring home and live with.

But perhaps the most important application of this lesson is in the world of the mind. I came across this quote:

“Meditation is watching the itch instead of scratching it.” -Ram Dass

Ram Dass is talking about one of the most useful aspects of a meditation process: training the mind, so that you choose which thoughts to entertain, and which to send packing. Everyone who’s tried to meditate experiences how busy the mind suddenly becomes when you first try it. The thoughts come raining down like a spring thundershower. But the essence of meditation is to just watch them rather than get sucked into them, and return your attention to whatever centering device you are using (mantra, candle, sound, chant, watching breath, etc.) Practice makes perfect... and meditation is mind-training, teaching yourself to take control in a safe environment, so you have practice at taking control when you go out in the world.

There is an old joke: Dreamers build castles in the air. Neurotics live in them. And psychiatrists collect the rent.

We all have thoughts that don’t serve us well, that poison our relationships, that push us deeper into suffering, and that cast a dark cloud over this wonderful gift we call life. The first step is knowledge: learn to recognize the poison as it pops up in your mind. Then choose to refuse: I won’t go there!

Ram Dass has also talked about how he’s still just as neurotic as when he first started his spiritual trip... he just doesn’t give in to it anymore. We don’t have to act on every impulse. And we don’t have to live in every reality we create in our heads. We don’t have to move into our personal castle in hell and start paying rent.

Itches and urges can be strong. The choice is not always easy, but we do have the power to choose once we are armed the power of knowledge. We can resist the urge to scratch the itches that life brings us.

OK, let’s face it. Sometimes you’re just gonna scratch anyway and pay the price. Maybe that’s just God trying to get your attention. If you suffer enough, you will seek a remedy... and that might be just what you need to grow along your spiritual journey. Forgive yourself, and move on! Berating yourself for falling off the wagon is just another form of poison... so treat it like poison oak, and don’t roll around in it!

The last lesson of the poison oak is “This too shall pass.” Life will roll along, and circumstances will change eventually, even if God’s timetable moves it along a lot slower than you might like. So do your best to enjoy the ride!

"Life does not consist mainly, or even largely, of facts and happenings. It consists mainly of the storm of thought that is forever flowing through one's head."
~Mark Twain

"Anger or hatred is like a fisherman's hook. It is very important for us to ensure that we are not caught by it."
~Dalai Lama

"We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."
~Viktor Frankel, "Search for Meaning" 

"The Distraction Called Fear"

Being less allergic to it than my husband, I figure that poison ivy control is my job. The other day I took my annual walk around the yard with the Round-Up (our one exception to being organic.) After an hour of searching and spraying, when I came inside I found that I saw poison ivy every time I shut my eyes. A strong image of those threatening “leaflets three” was imprinted on my mind.

When you are afraid of something, that negative image can dominate your reality, in spite of the fact that it's an illusion. A fear-based fiction can be a powerful distraction, and if we are not awake, we will miss the graces and wonders that actually are in our lives.

Katie had an interesting discussion in the 7th grade lunchroom last week. One girl said how scared she was about next Tuesday. Curious, Katie asked why. She said it was because the date was 6/6/06... 666, the number of the Beast... and the devil might come and get all the Christians and drag them down into hell, until Jesus came back and took them up to heaven. Katie said, “Do you actually believe in the Devil?” The girl's answer really struck me. “Well, of course. What else would I believe?”

Never exposed to any other way of thinking about her world, this poor girl has only been fed a mental diet of fear-based fundamentalist theology, a set of “beliefs” that were taught to her as “facts.”

One tragedy is that this focus on the devil, the afterlife, the second coming, and the rapture is so imprinted on the fundamentalist mind that the beauty, grace, and wisdom of Jesus' teachings go all but unnoticed. In a world of glorious flowers, they see only poison ivy. Minds clouded by fear, they wait for Jesus the man to come back to earth... when we still haven't digested the spiritual food He left us the first time.

And if perhaps, Jesus does come back, I think it will be as a black woman... probably gay... and I think She will NOT be pleased... at the way we treat each other, at the mess we've made of our earth, at the way the teachings have been twisted or ignored. We wait for some Soul Train to take us away and “save” us... when we should be rolling up our sleeves and working on cleaning up our act, on actually practicing some of those messy and difficult Teachings.

Currently, there's a movement to ban same-sex marriages, both at the federal level and in the NC Constitution. But this “issue” feels more like a smoke-screen... a way to blind our eyes with visions of poison ivy so we don't notice other truly important things that are happening to our country. A gay friend put it this way:

“I think most in power don't give a hoot about the issue except that they know it's a hot-button topic, can shore up a conservative base, help divide the country, and serve as a distraction to more urgent issues. Deplorable. Jeff Ganon attended the White House Press briefings for months, clearly showed bias in Bush's favor, and it turns out he's not an accredited journalist, but is a gay male prostitute!!... Cheney's daughter is gay. There's gay stuff woven through all over the place in this administration, and the anti-gay stance is purely political, I believe, not from some "moral" calling.

“Peoples' fears are being exploited. Why are people afraid of gay? The prejudice against it is so deep, and many are afraid they might have tendencies, so they lash out against it with extra force. Cosmically, the union of two people who look similar to each other seems to symbolize self-love. And maybe that's the bottom line. People are afraid of loving themselves!

“Once we do that, we'll celebrate nature's diversity, and accept all as we accept ourselves.”

The word “anthropomorphic” means giving human qualities to something that is not human.... like picturing God as an old white man with a beard, sitting on a throne, making rules and passing out judgments. Tell me this: if you were an all-knowing and all-powerful being, is that how you'd spend eternity? Or locked in a superhero comic book fight with the devil?

Why do we make God in our own image? Because we weren't taught anything different. Because we can relate to the King and Daddy models of authoritarian ruler that so many of us grew up with. Because we don't have a vision large enough to encompass what God must truly be.

So Jesus tried to teach us that God is unconditional Love, peace beyond our limited understanding, acceptance of those who are different, and forgiveness for those who make mistakes. Jesus called God “our” father, and that makes all of us family... ALL of us... and showed us that our heritage is divine.

When our minds are open, our hearts can open too. Fear shuts the mind and the heart to the endless possibilities of what it can mean to be human. Take the blinders off, and see past the poison ivy.

"It is far more delightful to be fond of the world because it has thousands of aspects and is different everywhere… for every divergence deserves to be cherished, simply because it widens the bounds of life."
~Karel Capek (1890-1938), writer

“But who prays for Satan? Who, in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most?”
~Mark Twain

"Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so."
~Douglas Adams

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