The Camerado Chronicles -- Part One -- Chapter XIV

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24 June
nearing East St. Louis, Ill.

Well I got me some deep-dish pizza last night after all, and I’m
sure glad I did. I went back to a place I’d passed on the way in
called Gino’s East in Oak Lawn on US 12/20. It was very Chicago:
Cubs paraphernalia all over, classic black-and-white photos of
Italian families –children and old ladies and such—with color pizza
slices and Gino’s to-go boxes cleverly placed in the shot, Old Style
beer banners etc. Apparently you used to be able to write all over
the tables and chairs and walls, according to my waitress, but
they’ve curtailed that practice; probably too many cuss words
showing up.

The Cubs-Cardinals game was marvelous baseball. Both teams
made substantial comebacks without much dependence on the long
ball –only two homers in the game—and it was tied 9-9 in the bottom
of the eighth when the Cubs’ backup catcher failed to corral a high
fastball, and the runner on third came home for what became the
winning run. The ump was squeezing the pitchers all night (non-baseball
fans should appreciate that image), which accounted for much of the big
offensive output; its not like the pitchers were throwin’ cheese (that one too).

So yeah, the game was cool and the atmosphere was nice; the waitress was purty and the ice water kept flowin’; the pizza was
awesome –at least as good as Leona’s (cornmeal in the crust is what makes Chicago-style unique, not just the deep dish—and I’ve
got enough left for a decent breakfast. What more could a lonely truck driver want from one Chicago night?

“SKINNY BURGERS ARE FOR CUBS FANS.”
–billboard outside St. Louis advertising the new Hardees “Thickburger”

Now I am at the other end of the Cubs-Cardinals axis, near the center of a vast baseball empire that stretches from eastern Oklahoma
and Arkansas, across to mid-Tennessee, up into Indiana, through most of downstate Illinois and even up into Iowa. That’s the range
of St. Louis’ radio broadcast network, the Word of God for Cardinal Nation, and an area that I’d conservatively guess is home to
around 20 million people.

Numbers like that are what keep the Cardinals’ fan base on par with that of the beloved boys from the Midwest’s imperial city. If
you are a baseball fan from mid-America, this is your Yankees/Red Sox, Dodgers/Giants-style rivalry. It is just as fierce; friendlier,
because that is the nature of people here, but every bit as passionate. In fact, putting aside my East Coast bias, I dare say that
Cubbies/Cards is baseball’s marquee rivalry, especially since the McGwire-Sosa race six years ago. (Editor's note: events that occur
after this was written, namely the 2004 playoffs, have caused me to reassess this statement. It's still a Red Sox/Yankees world. --
HC)

Guess nothing’s happening repower-wise in St. Louis; dispatch wants me to roll toward Oklahoma so he can look for one along I-
40. So we’ll cross Missouri on I-44 for the third time, go see who’s winning the War on Porn.

*           *          *           *

For those of you who didn’t join us in the last section (Ch.12) –and now I’m really hoping you did; if you didn’t, unless you are
extra-sensitive to heavy Christian overtones, you might want to go back and check it out; by the time we’re done, I think you’ll agree
the message is meant for people of all faiths—I think I tapped into the second chamber of the heart of what bothers me most about
the Biblian faith. The first and most obvious, you will recall, applies to the church of antiquity as much as the modern church: the
doctrine which proclaims all non-Christians to be “spiritually dead.” My reaction should have made my feelings about this belief self-
explanatory, and I hope I put forth a satisfactory argument that it is dangerous for the entire world community, Christians and non-
Christians alike. I feel that I held back however, out of respect for my pastor at ACF who was a little too closely tied into the
discussion for my comfort. But addressing the church as a whole, there are a few other things I’d like to say about this doctrine.

What are some of the conclusions that a sane person could make based on the belief that non-Christians are spiritually dead? There
are many, but here are three off the top of my head.

1) Non-Christians are subhuman (we cloak this in the word “fallen”), or
2) If not being spiritually alive is part and parcel of the post-Adam-and-Eve human condition, then Christians are superhuman (we
cloak this in “forgiven”), or
3) Having surrendered their lives to Christ, Christians have died unto themselves and now live as Christ, or as members of the “body
of Christ” (to use the concept Paul employed over and over again in his Epistles)

I assume choices 1 and 2 need no further discussion here, as I am sure that all my “Christian” brothers of the Ku Klux Klan, neo-
Nazi groups and the John Birch Society have long ago denounced me as a heretic and have left the building. We would like to think
that option 3 justifies this doctrine, that Christians are spiritually alive in that they’ve surrendered their egos to the greater identity of
the body of Christ (Paul wrote something germane to this somewhere, and it is useful in explaining the tenets of Christian
mysticism). But let’s face it: you can pick any church in America that you’d like to sample, and within five minutes you will see that
this great ideal is not being put into practice. Not even close. We Christians are as egocentric as any group, and more than
many. And history has also shown that professed and even devout Christians are capable of committing any sin that non-Christians
have committed in their alleged Godlessness, up to and including genocidal warfare. Given the body of Christian belief about our
relationship to God and each other, to hold to option 3 means that a lot of people were fooling themselves and each other when they
called on the name of Christ, and are not real Christians (a list that would include Martin Luther as well as many popes), or that the
body of Christ Himself does the work of Satan (which shoots right past heresy and into apostasy).

Or, let’s not forget, the classic tenet of Christianity, which you’ve probably seen before on a bumper sticker: Christians aren’t
perfect, just forgiven. Having accepted Christ as their Savior, Christians are forgiven (“cleansed” is a popular equivalent), receive the
Holy Spirit and become spiritually alive. OK, OK, we’re on to something. Christians are not perfect as the Father is perfect because
He is working in them gradually, and they’ve just begun to commit themselves to learning the Christian walk. Yeah, that’s right, OK,
I’ll admit that option 3 becomes a possibility when you understand Christianity this way. We are works-in-progress. Cool.

And now I have something to add to that: Doesn’t that also open up the possibility that everyone is forgiven? That everyone has the
Holy Spirit? That we are all part of the body of Christ? That we are all works-in-progress?

That we are all spiritually alive?

I mean, it is said in Christian theology that Jesus died for all of us (and as my pastor would say, “And ‘all’ in the original Greek
means…’all’). And when evangelists preach to the “unsaved” they do say, “Jesus loves you, and He died for you,” not “Jesus will
love you and he will have died for you if you sign your name right here.” And if God loves us, then God forgives us, for what is
love without forgiveness? A contradiction in terms.

The bottom line sorta looks like this: (in Christian terms) Jesus died on the cross to change our relationship with God, not God’s
relationship with us. I AM is the constant in a world of constant change. If God forgives our sin today, God forgave it yesterday
and will forgive it tomorrow; if I AM forgives me, I AM forgives my neighbor. If I live my life with faith that this is so, with
bedrock assurance in God’s mercy and forgiveness, and my neighbor doesn’t, then we have different relationships with God. But
God doesn’t treat us differently; in fact I AM puts it in my heart to share my faith with my neighbor –God says, “You who have
been blessed with abundant faith, offer this to your neighbor so that she may love me as well.” Nothing in there that says to me, “so
that I can forgive her as well.” It’s about changing our way of seeing God, and the potential that is created for reaching
outside of ourselves and doing I AM’s good work in I AM’s name.

I realize I am attacking another one of Biblianity’s sacred cows –its set-apartness, its belief in its unique relationship with God—but it
is important to me that you understand that this is not being done with meanness of spirit, but rather as the antidote for the
meanness that is all-too-often concurrent with this belief: the doctrine that holds that those without this unique
relationship are spiritually dead, or don’t know God.

And, as I promised earlier, this is not a scattershot approach to refuting mainstream, Biblian Christian belief; that has never worked to
anyone’s satisfaction. No one will ever refute 2000 years of scholarship and contemplative exploration by shooting from the hip.
There are sound reasons and sound godly principles behind this anti-doctrine. I’ll introduce them here, with the understanding that
we are not prepared for a full exposition yet, so this will be a little truncated. If you are a Christian, and your church and/or your
personal Bible reading has led you to accept the doctrine of spiritual deadness, this is meant as antiseptic for the wound in
your heart –a wound you may not realize that you’ve had, but that, if left untouched, will prevent you from having the kind of
epiphany that Thomas Merton and Mother Teresa had, and ultimately will prevent you from living in the fullness of what Jesus
gave as one of our two greatest commandments: “love thy neighbor as thyself.” Because it is antiseptic, it will, in comparison
to Biblical images, seem sterile, and it may sting, but I believe it will prove to be healing if you let it. Here it goes:

Our relationship with God is not like any that we have with fellow human beings. As we explored before, it is not an equation that
works both ways. God, who is infinite and eternal, and I –finite and temporal—do not have a relationship of equals, so there is no
analogy for it in my relationship with Aubray, or your relationship with your mother. When we use images that personify God in
order to convey our perceptions of God’s nature –the nurturing Father, or wrathful God we sometimes see in the Christian Bible’s
Old Testament—we create the impression of a finite being with mutable qualities. But this is only an appearance; we are mistaking
symbol for substance if we presume that these finite, changing qualities are God instead of descriptions or representations of God.
If we are honest, we could probably admit that these changing “moods” of God are more a reflection of our fickle temperaments
than of anything coming from God.

(What does it mean to confuse symbol with substance? Here’s an example I used in a letter recently: I am looking at a map of
Michigan in my road atlas. The map is accurate, drawn to scale, everything in it represents a concordant reality in the territory called
the state of Michigan, and therefore this map would be of great service to me as I try to find my way through Michigan on a trip. So
when I look at this map, I am looking at Michigan, right? If I put this map on the ground and stand on it, I am in Michigan. And my
toes are getting wet because they are in Lake Huron.)

Does this mean God disappears or ceases to exist when we do not attribute finite qualities to I AM? NO! and that is the whole point.
Remember Paul’s most encouraging words to we who seek God: “We walk by faith and not by sight” (II Corinthians 5:7). God’s
infinite qualities cannot be seen in the way that your mother’s or mine can be seen; they are infinite. That is why we
express them through symbols in the first place. We say, “God is like this,” because we cannot grab hold of I AM’s actual qualities
any more than we can hold a river in a bucket, or the sky inside the Skydome. God is not a subject for still life.

It is the unanimous conclusion of all who have undertaken serious exploration of the intangible realm of God, that one of
these infinite qualities is “love.” God is love. Every faith proclaims this. No one who lives by faith disputes it. It is probably the
closest thing we have on earth to a universal tautology regarding God: I AM is love. A love like one person has for another, which
can dry up and wither over time? become cloaked by baser emotions like anger? No. Infinite love. It blows our minds to think
about it, and it’s supposed to. God doesn’t want us to sit around thinking about it; God wants us to live in it! Bask in it! Share it!
Shout for joy because of it! Most of us tend to limit our concept of reality to what we can conceive with our minds and perceive
with our senses, so God’s love often goes unnoticed, just as when standing on the earth’s surface we don’t notice that our heads are
in the sky, or that we are hurtling through space at unfathomable speed. But God’s love is there for these people all the same.
They just need to be made aware of it in order to feel it.

Inseparable from God’s infinite love is God’s infinite forgiveness. As I said before, love without forgiveness is not love. How
disingenuous it would sound for a man to say to his wife of 50 years, “Honey, you know I have always loved you, but do you
remember that time just after we were married that I caught you making googly eyes at the mailman? I have never forgiven you for
that. And do you remember the time…”

I can’t find the verse right now, but somewhere I think it was Peter asks Jesus how many times each day we should forgive a
brother who sins against us. Seven? You can picture Jesus having a little fun with him answering this question. “No way, Pete –try
seventy times seven!” This is the heart of God. Forgiveness is constant, absolute, and it does not discriminate. To say that
forgiveness is something that can be acquired –like an executive pardon on death row, or a “get out of Hell free” card in Monopoly—
is to misrepresent God’s love. It makes God’s love conditional. If it belongs to any of us, it belongs to all of us.

What does this mean for you as a Christian, when you proclaim that your sins are forgiven? Nothing, as far as you’re here-and-now
existence is concerned. You’re right –your sin is forgiven. You are washed clean in the eyes of God, and you are welcome in the
Kingdom of Heaven. And so is your Jewish neighbor. And the nice Buddhist couple down the street. And that atheist who keeps
writing letters to the editor of your hometown newspaper that make your blood boil. All are forgiven. All are loved by God. All
are God’s children.

And that should change everything about the way you see your neighbor.

With an understanding of what it means to have God’s infinite love and forgiveness, we can also discern some things about what it
means to know God’s infinite love and forgiveness. If you consider yourself a Christian and you are following this drift, you can
safely conclude that there was no point in time when God was moved to love you and forgive your sin and call you God’s child, for
this is a condition that is, will be and has been from the beginning of time. But you can pinpoint a very specific time, in most
cases, when you knew that to be, when you knew God’s love for you –not theoretically, not because someone tells you so;
because your heart is bursting with the Word of God and it is written all across the sky and that message God has been trying to get
through your armored skin all your life has finally pierced you. Does this sound at all like the moment you call your salvation, when
you knew that forgiveness of sin and eternal life was yours? When you began to walk by faith and not by sight?

(I will get way ahead of myself if I jump into explaining why, so for now I simply intend to put it out there, dogmatically perhaps,
that eternal life works exactly like forgiveness: you may or may not be aware of it at different points in your life, but if you have it
there can never have been a point when you didn’t have it, and if one person has it, we all do.)

So what is the role of Jesus Christ in the spiritual life of a Christian, if these blessings are not bestowed upon the believer when she
accepts Him as her Savior? Still the greatest role of all! Keep in mind that because of the way our minds work, to not know that
we have eternal life is, in a sense –in terms of our human experience—not to have it. This is because to wonder about it or
doubt it is to hold it out as speculation, or a fantasy from a book one doesn’t believe, but something that can never be fully
experienced. This is why we feel fragmented and alone in the universe: the tools that we’ve grown accustomed to using to
“know” our way through the world are insufficient to “know” concepts like eternal life and God (except through use of
symbols, which are not the real thing and therefore always subject to debate).

Jesus’ ministry was to bring experiential knowledge of these blessings, knowledge that would heal wounds, calm our fears
and erase those lines of fragmentation, within ourselves and among each other. He did not appeal to our tools of
knowledge; He appealed directly to the experiencer –to God within us.

This was a revolutionary message in a part of the world and a time where it was assumed that no one had eternal life unless it was
somehow earned, as if we could cajole God into dispensing his infinite blessings through the right sacrifice or the right prayer. Jesus
sliced right through all of that and spoke plainly to the people: trust in God, and all will be provided. All he asked was that we trust
his message, believe that he spoke the truth, that he knew of what he spoke from experience, not theoretical learning
(hearken back to the words of Walt Whitman: “Allons! the road is before us! It is safe –I have tried it—my own feet have
tried it well –be not detain’d!”) He pointed out that heaven is not a place “out there” for theologians to speculate about
and priests to buy and sell. The Kingdom of Heaven is within you, he said –all of you. Jew, Samaritan, Gentile: doesn’t
matter. It doesn’t have to be accrued or acquired; it’s there. Know it or not, you are spiritually alive.

Of course, Yahshua ben Yosef died almost 2000 years ago. Who was he? Where did he come from? This is theological fodder
that I don’t think he would have wanted to stand before his message. Men tend to believe what is given to them on authority,
so He claimed the ultimate authority for His teachings, but I don’t sense that He meant for His teachings to stand or fall based on His
claim of authority –a cart-before-the-horse arrangement for sure. If the teachings don’t resonate in our hearts, the claim of
authority is useless.

And this is why almost 2000 years later we as Christians can talk of the man as a “living savior:” not because His teachings and
exploits are preserved in a book, and not because He was pointing to Himself as the Way, but because, in short –and here’s the
exclamation point folks—because Jesus was a finger pointing to the Christ within us all. He identified Himself with Christ and
nothing less, and he asked us to do the same. Die to your life in this world --your ego-- and you will be able to know the Life --
what was translated in the New Testament Greek as Khristos. This was the only way to bring about the Messianic Age that His
people were waiting for (and still are). This is the way to know Life is eternal.

Sure, he said, “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life; no man cometh unto the Father, but by Me.” (John 14:6)   But for whom was
He speaking when He said that? Yahshua ben Yosef? He died to that man three years before He was crucified. (Remember the
“hath not where to lay his head” part?) So whom was He talking about?

Aw buddy, aw buddy. It’s Christ himself buddy, Christ himself. The Word of God in all.

© 2004 by Hermit Crab
a Fish Out Of Water production

Next -- Chapter 15