[14/40] Friend of God

Friend of God.

PLEASE NOTE: Some readers of The 77% Weekly have told me that they have a hard time when I use the word God as they don't believe in an external, ultimate being. That's cool. But, if you are one of those readers, I still want you to read this article and think about your answers. Remember, I’m not trying to convert anyone to have any particular God beliefs — the mission of Religion-Outside-The-Box is to help you find and be with (the) God (of your understanding). Thinking about God in the way this spiritual-religious exercise presents God can help you figure out what you do and don’t believe. -RB

Two of the dictionary definitions of the word friend are:

• Somebody who is not an enemy.
• Somebody with whom one has a close personal relationship of mutual affection and trust.

Now, think about your conceptualization of God. (Admittedly, this is a pretty difficult thing to do. After all, God is often defined as beyond comprehension and the greatest minds of all time have had a hard time doing so; all the more so you and I. Nonetheless, think about your understanding of God.)

Here are some spiritual-religious questions to muse upon:

Would you consider yourself a friend of God?

• Would you say that you and God have a close personal relationship of mutual affection and trust?
• Would you say that you and God have a relationship at all?
• Are you and God friends?

What is your relationship with (the) God (of your understanding)?

• Do you treat God the way that many people treat relatives they don’t like — inviting them to events and then ignoring them?
• Do you treat God as though God doesn’t exist?
• Do you think or believe that God wants a relationship with you?

If you think of you and God as friends, how close are you?

• Do you tell God that you would be there for God in thick or thin?
• Do you and God exchange cards for New Years or birthdays?
• Do you call upon God to help you out when you need help and do you help God out when it looks like God could use a hand?
• Do you feel, metaphorically, like you owe God a phone call?
• Do you frequently/sometimes/never invite God to meals?
• Do you call God's name when you are having sex with someone else?

An explanation and book-plug.

The point of this exercise is this: it is important for spiritual-religious adults to have an understanding of our relationship with (the) God (of our understanding).

A lot of people assume that “(the) God (of their understanding)” is the kind of thing they can keep track of in their head. To use a homework analogy, they look at it as though this is something that isn't going to be turned in for a grade and consequently that they don’t need to do a good job. This, of course, is shoddy reasoning. Your relationship with (the) God (of your understanding) is one of the most important relationships that you might have in your entire lifetime — so it behooves you to actively think about that relationship.

To this end, I'm glad to plug my book, now in it's third printing: How To Find Out What (The) God (Of Your Understanding) Wants From You. (The previous link will also help you to download an electronic copy.)

With love,

Rabbi Brian

And, if you care to, click here to see comments on the streetprophets site where this article also went up this week.

[13/40] A Simple Mistake

A simple mistake.

My friend Käthe did something recently that was so impressive, I need to share it with you.

Käthe had brought her son over for a play date at our house. Her husband, Jeffery, stopped in for a quick visit, and then he went to work. Inadvertently, Jeffery took both his car keys and her car keys when he left.

None of us realized this until Jeffery was already at work an hour and a half away.

Käthe left him a message telling him of his error, but she didn’t shame him, hold it over his head, or let it ruin her day.

Instead, she spent the whole day with Jane, Emmett, and me.

She didn't talk about him behind his back.

"It was a simple mistake," she said.

We should all give others (and ourselves) the dignity of not being perfect.

With love,

Rabbi Brian

And, if you care to, click here to see comments on the streetprophets site where this article also went up this week.

[12/40] Feelings + Thoughts

Feelings + Thoughts:

(A spiritual-religious chicken or the egg situation.)

We are all aware, at least on some level, that we ought to strive to be present — to be, in the words of Ram Dass, "here" and "now."

But so few of us do.

Here's a simple exercise — a sort of spiritual-religious mad-libs — to help.

Fill in the following sentence:

I am _______ (insert: feeling) that ________ (insert: apparent cause of the feeling).

Here are a few examples:

feeling ................................. apparent cause of the feeling

sad /angry / mad ............... yesterday I lost $5.

happy / joyous ................... today I found $5.

surprised / confused ......... yesterday I lost $5 and today I found $5.

The radical suggestion that I am going to make is that we investigate lopping off the second half of the sentence — in other words, that we ignore the apparent cause of the feeling and just allow ourselves to be in the feeling. (After all, feelings are to be felt, not thought.)

When I pay attention to the actual order in which things occur, I notice that some of the time the feeling comes first and then I seek an appropriate rational explanation as to why it is that I feel that way — and then I re-write history in my mind to convince myself that the later caused the former.

My belief is that often the feelings come first.

For example, about six months ago I was lying in bed, frustrated. Instead of allowing myself to just experience the situation — me allowing myself to be frustrated, I found myself going through a mental Rolodex of things that might have been the cause of my frustration. Eventually I found one and blamed all my frustrations on that event. However, I knew even in that moment that this apparent cause of my frustration was just a convenient, semi-logical explanation. Point of fact, I was frustrated before I “realized” what I was frustrated about.

I am certain you have had similar experiences. Have you had moments in your life when you have felt filled with anger or sadness but you just didn’t know why?

I think it behooves us to just be in our feelings when we are in them and to refrain from always trying to attribute causes to them.

Moreover, when we label our emotions — we categorize them. Something that starts to feel like sadness we call sadness and then we lose out on the actual experience of it. Maybe it wasn’t sadness after all?

So, what am I saying here?

Maybe — like infants laying in cribs — we should just let our feelings just wash over us from time to time?

Maybe we ought to just be in our experience of life as it happens...

I don’t think there is any better spiritual-religious advice than that.

With love,

Rabbi Brian

And, if you care to, click here to see comments on the streetprophets site where this article also went up this week.

[11/40] Was it better?

Was it better?

I don't know about you, but recently I've been hearing, over-hearing, and participating in a lot of talk about "the good ol' days."

People blather on about how the price of things used to be reasonable or how you used to be able to do this or that and it wasn't a problem, but now... well, now you just can't buy things like you used to and you can't just do things the way that you used to.

I wonder why this is happening right now.

Is it a spring-time thing or perhaps an election year thing? What has happened or is happening that is causing us as a society to LONG for a mythical past when the way things were better, easier, more honest...

(I don't really know the answer and would love your thoughts...)

All I can tell you is that the past always seems more comfortable than the present. The worries we had in the past don't seem as scary as the worries that we have today. From a logical point of view, this is because the future of the past is the present and therefore not as worrisome as the future of the present which is an unknown.

Seems like a good time to get comfortable with the spiritual-religious practices of faith (1, 2, 3, 4), surrender (1, 2), and acceptance (1).

With love,

Rabbi Brian

And, if you care to, click here to see comments on the streetprophets site where this article also went up this week.