First, is there a difference? If you are convinced there is something wrong with your character and behavior, are you a convict? Not necessarily, it would seem.

To be convicted there has to be some kind of criminal charge brought and presumably a sentence that can be given; being convinced of wrongful behavior or thought can – and usually does —come way before any of that.

The crimes here are called “sins”. Sin is a concept that is of Judeo/Christian origin and before the successful proliferation of Christian thought it was only among a tiny tribal Mediterranean kingdom that it held any sway whatsoever.

“The wages of sin is death,” describes the punishment ascribed to transgression of the Law of Moses, according to the Bible; “The soul that sins it shall die,” is the Word the Lord spoke to the prophet Ezekiel. The concept was actually introduced in the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden – at least that’s the Christian take on it, calling the disobedience of Adam “Original Sin”. Most mistake the “death” that God promised if Adam ate of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil to be biological death. But God warned that on the “Day you eat of it you shall surely die.” Adam and Eve didn’t die physically for many decades, but the close familial relationship with God that they had enjoyed up until that very day ended rather abruptly, as the story goes. And so we should be assuming that the Judeo/Christian “death” that is the reward for disobedience is a living separation from God.

The positing of such a formula in the Kingdom of Israel was an integral part of the priestly sacrificial system. It was sin and redemption by ritual cleansing and animal immolation. But Jesus was (is) Prophet/Priest/Victim all-in-one. And habitual sin was never an obstacle for Him establishing an intimate relationship with anyone, according to the Gospel accounts. Two things were such impediments, however: attachment to worldly riches and a self-righteous/judgmental attitude.

The widespread concern about the eternal effects of one’s errant choices of thought and/or behavior is a particularly Christian phenomena, although, given the assurances of the words and actions of Christ and His Apostles, this should seem peculiar. In fact, the situation appears to have been completely turned on its head. A Christian pastor/confessor is likely to give great spiritual import to admissions of what general modern society would consider acts and thoughts of low level concern while the genealogical descendants of the hard-line judgmentalist Jews and Pharisees of Jesus day – i.e. modern Jewish rabbis – are more likely to respond, “So you messed up this time. At least you realized it. Do what you can to clean up the mess you made and do better next time.”

Of course, we get into the miasma of theological debates that have caused denominational schisms of varying proportions when we venture into the area of who gets Eternal Salvation and how. But, while none of us has any verifiable experience with God’s decision making on the fate of the immortal soul, we can see who gets saved now. We can call this temporal salvation “the healing power of God.”

The Gospel accounts show Jesus of Nazareth unhesitatingly wading right into the Israeli towns and villages healing every kind of disease and mental illness (the former called “having demons” back there). There were only two things that stopped Him: lack of faith in Him in His own hometown where they thought they knew all about this local boy, and lack of desire and knowledge of need because of spiritual pride.

In my own experience there is only one spiritual venue where I have seen this kind of indiscriminate salvation from mental illness. It is among anonymous 12-Step groups that spontaneous healings of this nature frequently occur in the name of God. Of course this is the generic “Higher Power”, aka  “God as we understand Him.” This “God of our understanding” is the only One who “can restore us to sanity” from the “unmanageable” chaos that the disease of alcoholism* has wrought on our lives. [*These days you can replace this particular addictive ailment identified as the guilty perpetrator in the first AA Step with just about any other human psychological/behavioral syndrome.] Later on in this step-by-step spiritual healing process the suggestion is (nothing is mandated within these spiritual support groups) that we seek “through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood him, praying only for knowledge of God’s will for us and the power to carry that out.” (Step 11)

The clinical definition of addictive behavior can be summed up thusly: Any behavior that is known to the actor as being destructive to himself and others that he or she doesn’t want to do but keeps doing anyway. There is no better prosaic portrayal of this than by the Apostle Paul speaking of his own experience with “sin” after his dramatic conversion to Christianity:

“So I find this law at work: When I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from the this body of death?” Rom. 7:21-24

There is an unfortunate chapter split after the next two verses that has somewhat obscured the tenor of the text as to what the Christian solution to this dilemma is as Paul experienced it:

“Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord. So then, I myself in my mind am a slave to God’s law, but in the sinful nature a slave to the law of sin.* Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, because through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit set me free from the law of sin and death.” [*The new chapter heading was set here.]

In the next line Paul refers to the “law of sin and death” – aka, the Law of Moses – as being “powerless” to accomplish what it seemingly was set forth to do – i.e., making us good, productive people. The Law of Moses relied on the individual human will which, having been “weakened by the sinful nature,” is bound to be overpowered by the psycho/spiritual maladies we acquire and pass on from and to each other. Admitting to being “powerless” to resist these devastating forces is the First-Step threshold to the healing “bridge over troubled waters” that 12-Step groups offer.

What Paul posits is where he sees the real battle to be. The battle for the body is already lost for now, but the victory is in the minds of the believers.  If your mind is set on the things of God it no longer matters what you end up doing with your body – “… there is now no condemnation …” i.e., our own misbehavior cannot separate us from God’s healing and life-giving presence.

Good thing that, since we all need God to restore us to sanity after we have habitually messed up. And if the mere act of messing things up condemns us to the death which is the living separation from God – well then, we are certainly most screwed.

The first three steps of Alcoholics Anonymous describe the process by which we get “rescued from this body of death.” In 12-Step circles it is alternately shortened to “I can’t; He can; Let Him do it,” and ‘”I came; I came to; I came to believe.”

The “you” who is “not controlled by the sinful nature but by the Spirit” is the mind, not the body, according to Paul. And with the Spirit backed by the assent of the mind, we are to “put to death the acts of the body,” not try to control them. This is the task set forth in putting into practice the middle steps and going to meetings, as it is obvious from experience that God will not let us get better alone. We must accept and offer help and support. After all, according to the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, the Godhead Itself is a group of three and Jesus did not embark on His mission until He had a 12 member support group with Him.

My experience with the healing salvation is like that of my lifelong experience as a commercial fisherman. As I’ve heard from old-time Long Island baymen and their sons since I first got into this, “The fish are where you find them.” These are men who have been dragging and setting nets in the same waters for generations, and still they don’t know with any degree of certainty where and when the schools of their sought after prey will show. And the Gospels portray Jesus as having been the same way. None of the Apostles knew what He was going to do next and where.

All I have learned in my search for where I can be assured of finding the saving action of God is that He will be where I find Him – and that has most often been at 12-Step meetings.

While there are many kinds of addictions, perhaps the best one to illustrate the problem of dealing with them from the standard Christian sinful-behavior point of view is the habit of self-gratification with Internet pornography. At the very least it can be a colossal waste of time and at worst can drain finances, destroy relationships and poison attitudes. But from the viewpoint of “sin” as violation of Biblical Law, it is adultery as Jesus magnified the Law to cover: “But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” Mat. 5:28 This verse and that which follows — about gouging out the offending eye if it is the cause of the offense — are used to instill the guilt ridden impetus in Christian minded souls to get rid of personal Internet access as a way of ending the sinful activity which leads to Eternal damnation.

However, this does not address the fact that there are very real and very attractive beautiful men and women all over the place. (If the sin is just looking at them “lustfully” I guess I just revealed my own sinful nature, since I notice the sexually attractive members of the opposite sex around me.)

According to Christ Himself, obsessive use of Internet porn is not any more sinful than the one time lustful glance at a nearby woman. But the former is far more destructive. And in the light of the freedom purported by the Apostle Paul in Romans 7 & 8 and elsewhere, the addiction diagnosis is likely to be more curative. So rather than taking the standard avoidance/deterrence strategy advocated by many Christian spiritual advisors (and other codependent controlling enablers) the detached, safe, loving and supporting atmosphere of 12-Step groups where the suggestion is to “Let go and let God” seems much more appropriate.

Martin Luther began his journey of protest and reformation after being an overtly devout Roman Catholic monk suffering from a scrupulosity that caused him to frequent his confessor with every errant thought– an attitude now condemned by Catholic dogma. The theological line being taken herein might resultantly be identified with Lutheran teaching on sin and redemption. But I would go even further than that:

Some would say that God is dead – but I say this: Sin is dead – for Christ became Sin itself and put it to death on the Cross. And not only is Sin dead but so is Disease. In fact, Sin is a kind of disease since we catch it from each other and from our progenitors. The Cure has walked among us and still moves about the earth, healing whomever He wishes. It is not that physiological, moral and psychological maladies are no longer active; God has chosen not to heal everyone and everything all at once, but He is building His Kingdom piece by piece and with His transformative healing power killing all manner of human debility  in them and transforming the results of the ailments into life-giving attributes from the death dealing infections they once were.

Death, disease and destructive impulses still reign in the body for now, but by faith we can have a continuing conscious contact with and understanding of the healing, life-giving and loving Higher Power, transforming what was once seen as the effects of a wasted, sin-ridden existence to a life whose intrinsic purpose  has always been to show forth the Glory of God.

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At the end of John’s Gospel Peter gets impatient waiting for the resurrected Messiah to show up with further instructions and goes fishing with the other Apostles. They catch nothing all night. In the morning they see Jesus on the beach grilling fish (where’d He get those?) He tells them to cast the net on the other side of the boat. They end up with over a hundred and fifty big fish. He tells them to drag them to the shore.  He feeds them with His fish while the ones  they caught with the Lord’s help are still flopping in the net next to them. He then repeatedly asks Peter if He loves Him “more than these.”

These what? — That’s a question that has perplexed theologians and Bible scholars for all these centuries. But I know the answer — “Do you love me more than these fish?” It’s a funny picture — cuts right to the heart of the matter.

I was just playing Judy Collins’ “The Fishermen’s  Song” on my guitar. My son Michael, who plays much better than I do, first strummed an acoustic to this song as a little white haired mischief maker while I sang and fingered the chords (“Our fishermen’s not greedy; they seem to take to live with the sun and the sand and a net full of fishes when the tide turns” — great lyric).

“Simon Peter climbed aboard and dragged the net ashore. It was full of large fish, 153, but even with so many the net was not torn.” John 21:11.

Regardless the symbolism we are told to take from the specific number of fish and that the net was still intact, the obvious implication to these hardworking men of meager means was this: if they just follow the Lord’s lead for the rest of their lives, they are sure to be very successful at their chosen professions. The “prosperity Gospel” was off to a very propitious beginning, it would seem.

But I just realized that he was asking Peter if he loved Him more than the earthly riches he could get out of Him. It’s the classic Father/son crisis moment — reiterated in the parable of the Prodigal Son.

According to tradition all the Apostles proved their love for their Eternal Father in that they chose faith in Him above liberty, the pursuit of property and worldly happiness and even life itself, each separately choosing to be killed rather than to renounce  belief in the resurrected  Lord Jesus  Christ.

And, as far as we know, Peter and the other fishermen Apostles never went fishing again — at least for fish.

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Lots of people claim to know what it is about human behavior that upsets God. But if we’re talking about the God who Jesus revealed, there was really only one thing that absolutely made Him wig out.

He came to a time and place when there was a lot of bad stuff going on. The Jewish leaders were oppressing the general Israelite populace; the Romans were oppressing everybody;  King Herod was in cahoots with the Romans and — by the way — imprisoned and beheaded Jesus’ baptizer cousin John for “outing” his adulterous murderous ways.

While Jesus of Nazareth spoke out against some of this, only one thing made Him completely lose his cool. It was the tables of the money changers.

Banking historians point to this kind of  practice by ancient religious authorities as the precursor to our current monetary system. The money changers were part of the Temple worship whereby only specially raised  animals could be offered for sacrifice, and only special Temple coins could be used to purchase the special animals. Also, every Israelite male had to “redeem” himself with a pure silver (some say gold) Temple  half-shekel piece. Not only were the animals overpriced, but the money changers charged a hefty “origination fee” for implementing this official monetary policy. And everybody had to participate.

Sound familiar?

FDR alluded to this in his famous 1933 “Fear Itself” inaugural speech:

The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.

The current crisis is a result of the undoing of Pres. Roosevelt’s “New Deal” restrictions on investment banks.

Should we be looking for God’s hand in what’s been happening? Has He once again overturned the tables of the money changers”?

see an excerpt from The Hidden Kingdom

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Made in the image of the Transcendent God, we are transcendent beings, albeit on a limited basis. We are in and of the natural world — our internal biological systems are semi autonomous, controlled from within our bodies as is the case with other living things. We are wholly mammalian, but unlike other mammals, in our psyches we transcend our animal limitations. Chimpanzees may show remote signs of abstract thinking, but they don’t imagine what it is like to be a fish and then tell each other fish tales. This ability gets us into as much trouble as it is freeing for us. We get lost in it and that quite frequently.

Unlike God we are not aware of and intimately and consciously involved in all the systems that keep us alive, internally and externally, although we imagine a day that we will be. That will never happen.

But as  for God — He made it all and maintains it all — consciously.

As for our “all important” universe, it’s as if it is all going on in the fleshy gap between two toes on God’s left foot — but for some reason He cares. It has a cancer residing in the human psyche  that threatens to throw the whole thing into chaos. He could lop His whole left foot off and make a new one, but He decided it is so important to Him that He made His Only Son into a left foot cell and injected Him right into the heart of the tumor. The other diseased cells attacked Him and killed Him, but this released the serum that will eventually dissolve the tumor and save God’s left foot, also eventually making it perfectly healthy and immune to all other diseases. The curing power spreads from cell to cell, each event a unique microcosm of the initial application.

As for all the cells in God’s left foot, you are either being part of the cure or part of the disease. And always remember, as with the religious leaders in the Gospel account of this ongoing docudrama — the sickest, most disease spreading cells fully believe they have and are part of the only known cure.

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All knowledge is a category of consciousness, for what is outside of consciousness is, by definition, unknown. Man cannot, therefore, define consciousness itself, just as no one of us can fully know ourselves except through being known by others. In that there is a collective consciousness — shared human knowledge of the entirety of the human experience, as it were — this cannot be fully understood except by another — or, more perfectly expressed, an Other Consciousness. This, of course, is the Power greater than ourselves, in the language of 12-Step groups. It is God, to use another common term.

The times when each one of us becomes aware that we are awake and alive, that we are no longer dreaming but that this is real Life — we are in these moments experiencing the Other Consciousness. This Consciousness is unblinking and constant, welcoming, familiar, full of acceptance and hope. It was in such moments that Abraham heard God’s voice, that Moses encountered a tree lit by a Fire that did not consume, where Buddha Gotama stood his ground until the Truth revealed Itself, and where Jesus Christ walked with the Father as His One True Living Metaphor. We Christians celebrate the conception and birth of this Consciousness at Christmas, and it’s victory over darkness and death on Easter Sunday morning. All religions, in fact, celebrate these things on their high holy days.

And One Day we will all wake up and realize that the sorrows and sufferings of this world are over and the fearful dragon that threatened to devour us in endless trauma has evaporated like a nightmare does in the sound and light of a new day. We will then find each other and all hold hands and laugh and sing….

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At Work in the Garden of Eat and Be Eaten
By Charles F. Tekula, Jr.

On dry land nothing’s moving yet,
still dark and cold.
But in the watery fields the feasting continues.
Bluefish dart like lightning in and out of the pods of bunkers
that themselves still strain the tiny swimming plankton,
even as their brethren are themselves devoured. Spider crabs wait for the pieces to fall, and then crawl through the waving eel grass
into my awaiting net for what they think is another free meal.

The big bass know.
But they’ve had their fill of the shiny finned and oily delights.
Another aroma draws them in. The spiders are shedding now,
it being early autumn.
And the still soft ones are like warm buttered muffins right out of the oven  to these bright eyed and stealthy hunters.
The fish that hit early on in the night have attracted a bevy of crustaceans to
my webbing, there to return the favor.

We who trek the land with our shod feet don’t face the constant threat of being eaten alive by our larger neighbors –
At least not literally.
We don’t rationally worry that bugs and birds will peck us apart if we sleep a bit too soundly.
And so we consume ourselves with these irrational fears. Like
the impending collapse of life on earth brought on by
the likes of my little gillnet boat.
More sensible parents wonder what to put on the dinner table ;
Prudent chefs wonder what they’ll find at their seafood supplier to grace the specials card tonight.
And if I get in early my wonderful bluefish, or weakfish or bass
might be the prey that answers their prayers.

But at this point in my own journey the hardest work of the day comes first.
The roughest leg of the day’s excursion is the trip from the bed to the floor.
Raisin Bran, weather websites and a cup of hot tea.
A prayer for a safe and successful morning, and I’m off to witness another sunrise over the Garden of Eat and be Eaten.

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In the PBS Nature presentation chronicling the demise of the red knot population, which they said took place precipitously in the 1990’s, they blamed it on the supposedly coinciding drop of the population of spawning horseshoe crabs. It was said that commercial fishermen discovered in that decade that female horseshoe crabs with eggs inside them were great bait for their eel and conch traps. This is patently false. This knowledge has been passed down to East Coast fishermen for centuries. If anything, the use by commercial fishermen has precipitously dropped in recent decades by virtue of the fact that there are and were far fewer young men opting for this dirty, dangerous and physically and financially precarious lifestyle.

If, as has been asserted in this slick production, the fall of the red knot numbers is due to the allegedly falling density of horseshoe crab eggs on the Mid-Atlantic shores, it is most probably due to the collection of these prehistoric looking creatures for medical purposes. What is hidden between the lines of the Nature script is that, while there has been a total moratorium of commercial harvest for several years of the often crusty crustaceans, medical harvesters are free to take all they can catch. And even though the animals are released after they are emptied of about one-third of their blue blood still alive, they are harvested while they are gathering for their shore side spawning ritual, disrupting the spawn before the eggs have been dropped. And this is what was new in the 1990’s. As fishermen who hold the crabs alive for weeks and months for later bait use know, if you disturb the spawning females, they can and will hold their eggs indefinitely. Taking them out of the spawn just when the little birds need the eggs has the same effect, whatever that is, as taking them and cutting them up for bait, even if they are put back alive, even discounting the significant number that die after the bleeding process.

The other effective change that began to happen in the ’90’s is global warming. Given this bird’s living quarters near the poles on both ends of the earth, isn’t this more likely to be the active principle here? But then again, these self-appointed red knot saviors wouldn’t be garnishing much attention away from Al Gore if they stated that to be the case, would they …..

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Just so you know, there are more fluke (aka summer flounder), more striped bass and more horseshoe crabs near our shores now than anyone alive has ever seen. But in New York the fluke season is closed for both sport and commercial fishermen, the horseshoe crab take is closely controlled and President Bush has moved towards making striped bass a game fish. All of this is largely because of the “green” movement’s new power and popularity, having little to do with reality or the rule of law.

In our representative government, the elected officials hold all resources in trust for the real title holders, i.e., all the people, especially those who want to make use of them. In the case of the fluke, while these large and succulent bottom hugging flatfish literally pave the sea floor off our beaches for much of the year, prices for local flounder fillet have soared to levels far beyond the reach of most wage earners. The Chinese fishermen are having banner years as US demand for their cheaper (but frozen) flounder fillet has skyrocketed, as it is one third the per pound retail price. And “Country of Origin Labeling” (COOL) laws have been rejected repeatedly by Congress so the consumers usually don’t know what they are buying. The horseshoe crabs are being protected through a stretch of environmental protection theory, as some biologists claim that the endangered non-indigenous-to-America sandpiper, the red knot, is in steep decline because they can’t get enough horseshoe crab eggs to eat. They only get the chance to eat these tiny green spheres for a couple of weeks a year, and as anyone who is privy to the shores when the mating rituals take place for these large brown horseshoe shaped crustaceans knows, there are literally millions and perhaps billions of them. There are only a few thousand of the pigeon sized red breasted shore birds left, and while we have to suffer under these draconian and far-fetched protective measures, the locals shoot them and eat them in their South American winter homes.

And now the striped bass. These fish are currently at population levels perhaps not seen since colonial days. And they eat everything. It seems useless to try and protect the populations of fish like fluke, flounder, blackfish and sea bass when these large and very intelligent predators gang up on them on every tide while they try to migrate in and out of our bay and harbor inlets and channels. But, alas, we are told that “natural predation” cannot be taken into account, so the bureaucrats cannot manage one species in order to effect the numbers of another. However, the first fisheries management law that many around here ever heard of was that any landed starfish cannot be thrown back alive as they eat a prodigious amount of shellfish. There is a similar law for conch (aka “scungili“) for the same reasons. Ironically, it is for conch fisherman that most of the horseshoe crabs are harvested, as they are the absolutely best bait to lure these delectable marine snails into specially designed traps.

And into this mess comes stumbling along our President, who out of the blue declares he wants to protect the striped bass by making them into a game fish, encouraging more people to indulge in this beloved pass time of his. It is well documented that under the current management scheme the recreational catch of striped bass coast wide far exceeds the commercial take. This already violates the spirit of the law in that the federal government has declared the fishery “fully recovered” and is pressuring the States to loosen up commercial restrictions. And it is already the case that, unless you live next door to a bass fanatic who catches far more than he and his family can eat, you have to pay close to twenty dollars a pound for the fillet. If President Bush has his way the former will be the only way you’ll get some, unless you have the time, the wherewithal and the expertise to go out and catch your own.

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The fact is that I know what I’m up against when trying to argue this point with people of the prevailing – nearly ubiquitous, in fact – mindset of the modern West. I’ve done my own “study” of this. When asked to draw a picture of the earth as they believe God sees it, people over childhood ages invariably draw a globe in space. Some will put trees and people, etc., on the sphere, but this modern cosmic view is how this question is answered by adult and adolescent Westerners. But the more you get into the childhood years, the more they will answer with sketches that are more like what they see everyday — a backyard, a playground, etc., from a “feet on the ground” viewpoint.

This leads me to believe that today’s meta-narrative is the scientific view. We give up our own points of view of life in deference to what science is learning. But science does not delve into the spiritual, and, spiritually speaking, the earth is not a planet — it is our home and is everything – and the only thing – the vast majority of us have ever known.

I know that when people are arguing for the scientific viewpoint of life rather than the spiritual, these people have been completely brainwashed as to experiencing life.

Life is Spiritual, not scientific ….

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