Yahweh or a Roll of the Dice Down the Alley Way: A Universe of Justice or Chaos (Atheism, Buddhism, Bull Conner, Christianity, Equality, God, Hinduism, Justice, Martin Luther King, Myanmar, Pain, Suffering and U2)

 A gloriously wet day after a good rain

It is a gloriously wet day after a good rain.  The lawn mower hums; Lloyd, my brother, has come down to mow the lawn at the trailer without me asking, which is great as I'm not able to do it myself.

Pain is a hard burden to bear.  Idleness isn't easy either.  Earlier, I tried to get out in my garden, right out the sliding glass door, but after placing three flowers in the ground, it became apparent that I needed to return to my recliner or bed.

At first, I chose the latter.  I put on U2, hoping to slide into sleep.  But, instead I found despair.  It had been lurking in the big, showy irises by the pond, along irrigation ditches bubbling through the oaks in the front yard, under the suds in the sink full of dishes, under the pile of clothes on the bathroom floor--all the things, I'd like to do today, but can't.

Illness is a hard thing to write honestly about.  It's not uplifting.  I guess with humor it could be entertaining, but there's something dishonest about that--like putting makeup on a corpse and placing it in a suit.   I know we do that at funerals, but I've never been too fond of it.  When my dad died, I preferred taking a drive up the Oregon coast, stopping at the Devil's Churn, enjoying the things he enjoyed showing me.

It wasn't easy.  I sobbed deeper than I ever thought humanly possible.  But it was beautiful, and it was honest.  I'm not suggesting funerals aren't.  Each must deal with loss in his or her own way.  But personally, nature is my way of working through life's difficulties.  About a year before Dad passed away, I'd written a poem while imagining my own death:

Hope!

My granddaughter refuses
to look in my casket
at my pale, plastic
flesh,

after my soul has sucked      out.

She sits in the corner on the floor
to the dismay of her mother,
headphones on, tuned out
from the horseshit

they dream up to make me
their vision.

She is totally tuned in
to a song like camphor,
sees a steep hill where wind
blows ferns between
tall trees that seem
to climb out of the sea
churning below,
green.

Somehow, there must be a way to write about illness like that--tuned out from the horseshit, neither wallowing in the pain nor ignoring it.

Life is the Grand Tetons, but it's also a wasp devouring a tarantula, as I found out while working in my garden last summer.  I watched and filmed with horrid fascination.  


Life is only fair in two ways--we all are born and we all die.  Everything in between is a unique experience, an individual path, and only part of that experience is due to individual choice.  The rest, whether by random act or by divine design, or perhaps a combination of both, is not in our hands. Bono is right, where you live should not determine whether you live or die, but it does.  It decides your freedom, your liberty, your wealth. I don't care how good you are at pulling yourself up by the boot straps, you would not be living the life that is currently yours, if you lived in Myanmar (Burma) .

And yet place is just one small factor to the equation of "I."  Parents, genetics, health, the spirit I came to earth with, also contribute, as do what seem to be random occurrences.

Atheism has always been easy for me to believe.  Often, chaos does indeed seem to be king of the universe. Injustice is everywhere.  You don't have go far to find it:

Oh that Rococo Life

Slowly breaking apart
a cranberry muffin,
sucking down the sweet morsels
with over-creamed coffee.

Palm trees sway beyond

the marble-floored lobby
and empty sunken bar
through great Venetian windows,
beyond a great red-tiled patio
and heavy white balustrade.

I read Pictures of the Gone World
by Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

Says here, poem 25 (quote)
The world is a beautiful place
                                           To be born into
If you don’t mind happiness
                                           Not always being
                                                           So much fun.

What the hell, I’ll try it.

The kids are with Grandma.
Marci is in class.
the room is paid for
with one week’s salary.

Nothing to do

but hang out at the pool
and read Lawrence Ferlinghetti,
look at beautiful
lotion-glowing bodies
from ages 5 to 70,
weighing between 30
and 250 pounds.

Yes, this world is a beautiful place

to be born into.

Though yesterday

when we got lost
in that neighborhood
of duplexes
and run-down apartment complexes
that didn’t quit qualify for a slum
but was part of the working poor world
that I knew for so long,

and I went in that 7-11

to find some way out
of the hell-mood
I’d sank into
and I saw myself behind the counter
in a stupid dehumanizing uniform
with a stupid name tag on it,
smiling back at myself
knowing I’d always be here,
behind some convenience store counter
working eight hours a day
to get nowhere,

I got to tell you

I thought again
the world
is nothing
but a great big turd ball
with all of us swarming over it,
pushing and shoving
for a chance
to bite right in.

Today there are palms outside the window,

rich girls in bikinis,
rich daddy’s in loafers,

and it’s true—

                                The world is a beautiful place

To be born into
                                If you don’t mind happiness
Not always being
                                So much fun.

©Steve Brown, 2013

We think of God as Just, and yet injustice seems to reign supreme all around us.  Perhaps if we are born into or achieve wealth on our own we can pretend it's not so, but I don't think so.  At least in the United States, street crime stays pretty local.  Gated communities are generally a good distance from high crime neighborhoods, and yet they remain sealed off from the world.  At a subconscious level, perhaps the walls are as much for the psychological safety of the inhabitants as for home security. Perhaps they are not needed because of a fear of robbery, but because of fear of sight.  Outside those walls people have less--less goods, less services, less time, less life.

I don't blame the rich.  It's all relative anyway.  I live in a very nice 4-bedroom double-wide modular on 90 acres of forest and scrub land.  I use to drive through neighborhoods on the south side of Juarez, Mexico that were literally built from crates and cardboard boxes.  Compared to them, I'm wealthy.  Some isolate themselves behind gates; I isolate myself on a gorgeous plot of land near a nice Mormon community that has almost no crime and only very small pockets of poverty.  I might as well live in Mayberry.

But that's what makes Justice such an incredible concept.  It doesn't seem natural to the universe and yet we believe in it so profoundly.  All men are created equally--come on!  I know enough about Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bull Connor to know they are not equals.  Martin Luther King spoke like a prophet and Bull Connor was just a dumb bigot who had fire hoses violently turned against children.  Equals?  Forget the hind sight of history, forget being right or wrong, in less than 12 seconds Bull Connor clearly demonstrates he is rhetorically, linguistically, and intellectually inferior to King.  There is nothing equal about them.

And yet King's whole life and message are about justice and equality--a message rooted directly in Christianity, and indirectly in Judaism and Yahweh in world awareness, ultimately the god of law, justice and equality.

In our time, regardless of how hypocritical Jews or Christians may be at times, it is impossible to separate justice, equality, Judaism and Christianity from each other.  They are all bound together in the notion that the universe is not relative, that there is an order, a balance, and fairness, equality, right and wrong are part of that plan, and when that balance is destroyed by evil men, justice must be employed to right the wrongs.

And yet even nature, to a believer the handy-work of God himself, seems clearly cruel and unjust, everything living off the suffering of others in an eat or be eaten world.

How does the believer reconcile this?  Why even try?  Why not just accept that life is unfair, get on with it, enjoy what you have at the moment, and don't worry about the fact your mother can no longer walk, or that your child's one friend seems to have a lot of unexplained bruises, or that the homeless man under the interstate bridge where you park might not be an actor with a get-rich scheme after all?

The fact that even some of us worry about these things to me suggests there must be a God.  Why did Martin Luther King, Jr. go to the mountain top?  Why did Moses?  Why did Christ?

What makes some men and women care enough about justice to die for it--especially those who already have more than their peers?  Martin Luther King, though black, certainly was not at the bottom of the social latter.  He could have been content enjoy his privileged education and ministry. What about Moses?  Egypt wasn't all that bad for him.  And Christ--well, he was God, not that bad of a gig in the social order of things, and yet he was willing to sink below the most vile sinners that justice might be served while simultaneously, through grace, spiritual equality was maintained between small-minded men like Bull Conner and spiritual giants like Martin Luther King, Jr.  Why?

Things are not so complicated when we think outside our mortal shells.  Injustice and inequality are not so unbearable if life is a classroom and we are aware we signed up for certain lessons. Pain, though still unpleasant, gains meaning in this incredible riot of free-wills, from microscopic bacteria and viruses to the leaders of nations, when we feel in our fibers there is a plan.  With an omnipotent eye, even the class bullies, like Bull Connor or Adolf Hitler can be forgiven if we know each person is on an individual journey.  This is how men like Bull Conner and Martin Luther King, Jr. can truly be equals: they each have divine potential, each are fluid spiritually, learning as they go, both in this life and the next.  The Hindu and Buddhist concepts of karma are not that different from that of the justice Judaism and Christianity--somehow all human cultures have a concept of justice and equality intrinsic to who they are, despite it apparently not being natural to either nature or civilization.  For me, that is the greatest proof that there is an intelligence behind what to us often appears as chaos.

And it is that divine light that drives us, despite very real world knowledge of pain and suffering, to sing a new song against all odds.