Connecting some dots on this New Year’s Eve: I’m with a gift card I purchased Karen Armstrong’s “The Lost Art of Scripture” in which she says that the modern age as lost this art of interpreting scripture through the lens of the Zero. (I added the zero)

Let me explain. Last night I was watching a documentary on the history of mathematics and it was India that first discovered zero as a number. Up until then all the number systems of Egypt, Babylonia, Greece and China were based on countable forms. But the zero was empty, so whatever number it was attached to, that number was liberated from its form. 

So here we are the last day of 2019. Tomorrow will be 2020. are we going to be liberated by adding zero to 22? We have been in Catch 22 for the last 50 years, and now we are just going to add zeros to the two. How do we get out of Catch 22? Just add zero. 

So what does zero mean in my crazy mind. Zero is emptiness in Zen, or transcendence. The unnamed, unknown God. God is Zero. Getting back to Armstrong, modern mind has lost the zero in scripture. God hs become just a thing, a big number. But God as zero is not at the end of numbers but part of every number when you add zero to your mind. 

Form is emptiness; emptiness is form is the Zen equation. When zero is forgotten, form is just form. Everything is just what it is, what it is defined to be, a fixed form. When everything is fixed, everything is set and defined, and the infinite dimension of your life is lost. We feel trapped, contained, and defined to the past and the known. Zero is the unknown potential in our life. 

Armstrong is saying (I’ve only read the first chapter) that modern man locked in a material world of numbers without zero, cannot transcend himself, for his God is locked in there with him. 

The literal interpretation of scripture is a modern deviation, a cul de sac, from scripture as art. When scripture becomes merely history, God has no zero. There is no window in the Bible. Everyone argues about what they already know. God has left the house. 

Like ancient India, we have to discover the Zer0

My Shell station has new gas pumps I noticed yesterday while filling up my car. Pumping gas has been a respite from my goal-driven day. Before you get on the road you must pause and pump gas. It’s very Zen. You just pump gas.

But now the new pump had a video screen. LOOK AT AD, it demanded. The pure functional act of pumping gas, my rest stop from the driven mind, had been invaded.

What will be next? Will refrigerators come with video screens with running ads? What about toilet time? Is our consumer culture, now liberated from TV and print, going to consume our private spaces?

LIke pond algae, advertizing is looking for new clear spaces in our lives to fill that last bit of solitude we have left.

Pumping gas used to be just pumping gas. Now it’s pumping ads into me. How much can our minds take? 

Commercials create dissatisfaction so they can sell you satisfaction. I remember when pulling up to a gas station was being treated as royalty coming to visit. One guy pumps gas, the other one washes windshield and checks oil and tires, all done with a smile and appreciation. Consumers used to be treated like kings and queens for shopping or flying. 

Now the consumer is just an object to be consumed, a being not to be served but something to be squeezed from the last nickel. We live in a culture where everything is just another IT. The Sky People of Avatar.

There has been a gradual shift in our society aways from treating the consumer with respect and extra service to a society the consumes the consumer. Advertising shifted from just telling you about the product, to telling you how dissatisfactory your life is, that you need something, and then the ad tells you what you need. This has created a fundamental dissatisfaction with modern life, with ourselves. We always feel something more is needed.

“At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;

Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,

But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity, 

Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,

Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,

There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.” (TS Eliot)

That still point for me is Zorba, the still point personified, dramatized as a metaphor. Zorba is the Still Point. 

The Still point is also Zen where form is emptiness and emptiness is form. This is a dynamic point that is neither this or that. There is no division in the Still Point, nor does the still point as the center have any circumference. The still point, therefore, is everywhere, but it is a laser dot on the floor of time that we cannot catch. 

In the author’s hands, Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba is a Christ metaphor. Just look at the outstretched arms in his dance. You can imagine a cross supporting him, no he has left the cross, so the dance is the resurrection, but not after the death on the cross. 

The dance is the life in death, and the death in life. The dance is dynamic, not fixed states of either dancing or not dancing, either the crucifixion or not the crucifixion (resurrection). There is no time in the dance, in the Still Point. All existence is compressed into the still point of the dance, the joyous dance of liberation from death through death. As the Buddha taught, the liberation from suffering through suffering. 

“The only hope, or else despair

Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre—

To be redeemed from fire by fire.” (TS Eliot)

The Protestant response to Trump is that moral character matters for God’s grace to flow through the President and trickle down through the society. The Catholic response (to speak generally) is that the Office of the Church is the conduit for God’s grace, so it doesn’t matter if the officeholder is flawed. Just keep the Office sacred.

We are witnessing a new Protestant Reformation where CT, like Martin Luther, is nailing the moral condemnation of the Pope President on the internet wall. The GOP has become a secular political church with an infallible Pope as president.

The true teaching of Jesus, like Zen, is a question, not an answer, but a question: That’s the truth here? I don’t know, but I’m intensely curious. So I come to God as Not Knowing. I cannot ignore this thorn, this nail, yet I do not flee from the cross where death hangs in waiting. I joyously participate in this question; What is the truth here? Who am I? I don’t know, but I am absolutely, intensely interested. I surrender, Lord. 

In this open question, I make myself ready for Thy grace to flow through me, knowing that it is not I but you who brings knowing to my not knowing. 

In this open question, I hold myself in the open window of wonder at Thy creation and its mystery. As a child, I look with open and clear eyes, for in my surrender the cataracts of the known have been removed. 

In the open question, I release the shackles of time, old age, and death. No longer will I walk head bowed and back bent in the chain gang of political conformity. No longer will I shuffle, nor now I run with unbounded grace. My heart is released from the confusion, doubt, frustration and anger of the imprisoned mind. 

Jesus does not offer the answer, nor does he tell me what to do. Jesus gives me the question. I must do the rest. I do not follow Jesus, I participate in Jesus as Jesus is being Jesus. 

The Cross and the Resurrection is not back in time, a historical event, but this present moment. The Cross is the Question. What is the truth here? I don’t know….I don’t know. What is the answer, Lord?

The Lord said: The question is the answer. The question is the dance.

Here it is Christmas Eve, the moment of darkness before the Christ is born, not in history but now. Jesus Christ is always already about Now, not yesterday. On Christmas, we celebrate the surprise of opening up a wrapped gift What is it? What is it? OH…..Oh….how wonderful. How wonderful. 

Christmas is about opening the heart that is wrapped in time, in the fears of the mind, but now the mind is bright and colorful, and we tear through the bindings of time, through the resistance of the box to open the vulnerable heart of our innocent inner child. 

OH…how wonderful to see the world, my old house, my family fresh as if for the first time. Oh..how wonderful. My heart is the infant Jesus born in the manger of the bare and unadorned moment. 

The Christ, my face before my parents were born.

The magazine created by Billy Graham is questioning the leadership of his son Franklin. Billy Graham created a Great Evangelical Awakening before the internet and televangelists created the electronic church and Jesus as an emotional entertainment, a feeling you get at a rock concert. The old Holy Ghost revival now had a huge electronic tent, and money poured in, making it grow bigger and bigger. Coming to Jesus became to mean belonging to a special salvation club, and membership was sending money. 

This Electronic Club was defined as being God’s hold out against the encroachment of scientific materialism, consumerism, and hedonism, most certainly the domain of Satan, the Bible said. 

When the Evangelicals with their electronic Revivals were invited to join the GOP by Nixon, they brought passion and hope for the redemption of history through a political party, redemption and return to the lost Garden through political action and blind obedience to the party. Obedience and God and Party were conflated. 

Billy Graham’s son Franklin has taken his father’s kingdom farther than Billy ever imagined. But is it the true kingdom? Has Jesus Christ been hijacked? Is Jesus held hostage by a political movement? Will the Republican Party and its president usher in the Kingdom of God? 

Christianity Today questions where the son of Billy Graham has taken Jesus? Can a morally corrupt leader usher in the incorruptible Kingdom? What are the means to that end? Have the means been separated from the end? Has Jesus been crucified again?

When you enter a room and forget what you came in there for, go back to where you started and see if you dropped your intention there. There is a logic to this. When we go through a portal of any kind there is a shift in the center from one location to another, and quite often during that transition, our intention, that idea that had centered us and caused our journey was not packed properly. We left it behind.

So go back and see if you dropped on the floor when you snapped your bag.

My most famous example of this was when we packed to go to my mother’s burial in Arlington where my father’s ashes lay. I got to the moment to begin the walk to the gravesite and my son called: “Hey, Dad. You forgot Grandma.” I had forgotten her ashes.

Looking back I can see why. Our mother centers us, and when we go through a portal to a new life, we leave what used to center us behind.

Every intention is an idea that centers our mind and directs our will into the future. Beware of portals, these doors to the future that makes us forget who we were.

Forgetting is like the backdoor of the hospital gown. No matter how fast you turn around, you cannot find out where that breeze is coming from.