CHAIN OF RESPONSES TO “DO YOU BELIEVE IN GOD?” at
pepinsky.blogspot.com, May 8, 2013—
From Allen, who asked if I believed in God:
This is amazing! I
really believe the same... I have always
extrapolated from the laws of thermodynamics, particularly that matter cannot
be created nor destroyed...I have held firmly that this "energy" is
what we give off as creation and the divineness that is already there...and the
positive forms of energy like love, benevolence, grace and forgiveness are just
as impactful and contributive as hate, anger, agression, and apathy....I look
forward to this book and the others you are sending!
You are quite amazing Hal!
I cannot wait to talk to you with a nice cup of
coffee....you may find that I ask too many questions though ;-)
I love you Hal....
-----Pepinsky, Hal on 5/8/2013 3:51 PM wrote:
DO YOU BELIEVE IN GOD?
Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu, skype name halpep,
"peacemaking" at Pepinsky.blogspot.com
May 8, 2013
This
blog post is the text of an emailed answer to the question of a long-term
prisoner facing the prospect of release, with whom I have been sharing his
primary task of taking stock of our lives and facing our futures:
Dear Allen,
Do I believe in God? I think so.
I discovered my sacred text, Laozi s daodejing, in the fall of 1963, my
first semester as a declared Chinese major, the same semester that the last US
president I held as my hero was assassinated.
You might say it was the autumn that I discovered my ultimate refuge
from my sense of my own mortality.. I
have just ordered you a copy from Amazon.
Verse 14 is a direct answer to your question that suits me fine:
14. Mystery
Looked at
but cannot be seen - it is beneath form;
Listened to
but cannot be heard - it is beneath sound;
Held but
cannot be touched - it is beneath feeling;
These
depthless things evade definition,
And blend
into a single mystery.
In its
rising there is no light,
In its
falling there is no darkness,
A continuous
thread beyond description,
Lining what
cannot occur;
Its form
formless,
Its image
nothing,
Its name
silence;
Follow it,
it has no back,
Meet it, it
has no face.
Attend the
present to deal with the past;
Thus you
grasp the continuity of the Way,
Which is its
essence.
When my
mom started sending me at 6 up the street on Sunday mornings to Bible school at
the Methodist church just 3 blocks from where I now live, I soon reasoned from
my teacher that Jesus s love must be so great that he had no ego, let alone the
big daddy who had magically inseminated his mama, to whom Jesus turned to for
comfort and advice when the Romans convicted him of treason and used nails and
a cross instead of an electric chair the way we were doing in Ohio to execute
traitors. Now that I think of it, that
story--the way it came across to me from my Sunday school teacher (who was,
after all, the expert my mother had sent me to learn from) that taught me
everything I have ever needed to know and pay attention to confront what I now
call violence (including my "crime problem") and peacemaking (my version
of mediation in everyday relations). It
has taken me until now, 62 years later, to figure that out though. I generally call "the dao" the
force of love that flows through and binds us together these days, not because
"force of love" is any more or less a "right word" for what
English-speaking Christian faithful call God.
But I m satisfied that many who profess Christianity worship the same
force the force of love, of empathy, of compassion regardless of name live by
and preach the same "peacemaking" way or path (translations of
"dao").
In physics-speak, peacemaking is called "synergy,"
violence "entropy." The legend
is that the daodejing is a set of quotations from someone deemed so wise during
the chaotic "warring states" period right before the Qin dynasty
first political unification of China.
Anxious kings are said to have specially sought out his visits to help
them discover how to save their own skins, let along their kingdoms. I ll insert one more verse where Laozi warns
of the dangers of splitting people apart, of attempts to impose social
order. Since exertion of mechanical
power is, as Newton told it, entropic, laying down laws (including what today
are heralded as "best practices") inevitably tears social bonds
asunder, as into "warring states."
Laozi says:
30. Violence
Powerful men
are well advised not to use violence,
For violence
has a habit of returning;
Thorns and
weeds grow wherever an army goes,
And lean
years follow a great war.
A general is
well advised
To achieve
nothing more than his orders:
Not to take
advantage of his victory.
Nor to
glory, boast or pride himself;
To do what
is dictated by necessity,
But not by
choice.
For even the
strongest force will weaken with time,
And then its
violence will return, and kill it.
It is
not only that this is sage political advice for any age. It also explains me to myself. Inside me is a material void that I equate
with being alive: consciousness. I can
see material manifestations of consciousness in my own actions and brainwaves,
and in effects of my actions on all my relations, from the rock I pick up and
throw to nailing a capital offender to a cross to die. But I can t capture it with an MRI, and I use
the word "captured" advisedly.
My own
lot in life from moment to moment is what most deepens my faith in going with
the force of peacemaking as Laozi advises.
I thank God in my own way recurrently by acknowledging that the most
reassuring, most dependable, safest and most secure human relations are those
that happen to me, rather than those I have made happen. I can make a book by myself, but I cannot buy
beauty, loving companionship and peace of mind in retirement. Nonethless, my desire to retire when I first
became eligible to rejoin Jill, and the coincidence of collapse from alcohol
poisoning with Jill but in a safe hospital bed with quiet time to detoxify and
reflect, plus who knows what else, have left me here with Jill in my true home
at 519 Evergreen Circle. God s force in
my life keeps showing me results. I m
looking out the window at the cardinal pair building a nest for their
forthcoming family, while in the evergreen we planted at the edge of our
"front" yard behind me, the south pair of cardinals is building
another. On Sunday as I sat on the patio
watching a succession of groups of tiny to large sized bees take turns
gathering pollen from a dandelion below and the huge blooming honeysuckle
above, and birds visiting too, what I found out was a migrating Swainson s hawk
2 states east of its normal path from Argentina to Canada flew in from the
northwest, circled over my head, landed in the crook of a high branch on a dead
ash tree straight in front of me; we exchanged glances for perhaps 15 seconds
and when I dipped my head to blink my eyes and looked up again, she was flying
back northwest toward Canada and she was followed by 2 curious buzzards who
came to check out an ohio state graduation party in someone s back yard at the
top of the hill the hawk had just crossed.
I recognize I come across to many as a little nutso when I remark on the
"coincidences" like this I notice almost daily. Which amounts to saying I continually feel
the presence of God, not as some kind of being I can picture, any more than I
can picture Moses, Jesus, or Mohammed incarnate. My God doesn t punish people; people are
their own undoing when they try to put each other in their proper places or
categories, or to treat them as ingredients to be added in proper measure to a
recipe for a social pie.. The best
English-language term I have found for the political attitude my faith implies
is "anarchism" power sharing rather than imposing power on others.
How am
I doing at answering your question?
Thanks for asking. Love and
peace, hal
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