John 20: The Influence of the Enlightened

The story of the resurrection event concludes in the gospel of John with Jesus visiting the disciples in an exalted form. As we see in John 20, the post-resurrection Jesus character passes through locked doors unhindered, and a week later the Jesus character returns to convince the skeptic among the disciples that he is real. Remembering that this is a story, we know that it would be missing the point to ask where the resurrected Jesus might have gone for the week in between these visits. Instead, we can follow the rather ancient practice of interpreting the text metaphorically.

If the Jesus character is representative of us, then the resurrected Jesus character is representative of a fully alive, fully self-differentiated, best possible version of ourselves in complete alignment between our deepest values and our actions in the world. We might equate being "exalted" with a state of being unhindered by fears and anxieties, acting with complete integrity, sensitive to others without allowing ourselves to be restricted by other people's opinions and beliefs. Just as the Jesus character passes through locked doors, when we are living into a best possible version of ourselves, there are fewer obstacles that can keep us from being the people we most want to be, full incarnations of our deepest, most noble selves.

The resurrected Jesus character is not only able to be in complete alignment for himself, but he also influences the well-being of the people with whom he interacts. In the same way, we nurture others toward wholeness when we act in accord with our deepest values. Specifically, the exemplar in the story empowers others to live with integrity and purpose, particularly with regard to reactivity and shame. If we interpret sin as the reactive result of anxiety -- what people do when they allow irrational fear to be in the driver's seat -- then we recognize that we have some influence on other people's anxiety and the shame that they might feel after letting their anxiety run away with them.

When we show up as less anxious, more at peace, and in greater alignment with our deepest values, we influence the people around us. Just as anxiety is contagious, intentional calmness can be contagious, too. This means that our ability to act in alignment with our deepest, most noble selves has the potential to influence people away from reactivity. Even when people are reactive and act thoughtlessly on their anxiety, our principled intentional presence can influence people away from useless shame after the fact. We can acknowledge that being anxious is human, and reacting to our anxiety is natural. Yes, there are consequences to our actions and messes to clean up, but we are capable of facing those consequences and seeking reconciliation when things go sideways. Shame doesn't help us with these tasks. When we influence people toward greater wholeness by our own integrity and purposeful behavior, we might allow them to place limits on the influence of their anxiety and shame, and learn to cast vision in their own lives.

Now, the story about Thomas seems to be thrown in just to silence skeptics. Pronouncing blessing on people who believe things without evidence is a way of credentialing nonsense. When readers take the implications of this story at face-value, it affirms everything that is dangerous about religion. Believing something just because someone wrote it down two thousand years ago is naive at best. It lacks integrity to believing what spiritual leaders say just because they say it with conviction or wear special clothing or have authorization from a larger organization. Some things proclaimed on the basis of religious doctrine are quite simply false. Not only is there a lack of evidence to support some of the things people believe on the basis of religion, there is actual evidence to the contrary. Yet some people believe that they will be considered blessed or righteous for believing nonsense, because they read a passage like the story of Thomas and interpret it to mean, "ignore reality; believe what your preacher tells you."

Although it's probably easier just to dismiss this passage as a piece of early Christian propaganda to legitimize faith, we could also interpret this story to suggest that there are always things we do not know. We can guess with some reliability that the things we don't know will be congruent with the things that we can prove about reality, but there are still things that we don't know. In embarking on any journey of personal growth -- one might say personal transformation -- we must take some steps without knowing what lies ahead. To characterize growing into greater integrity and authenticity as vulnerable and risky is a profound understatement. When we build our lives with confident alignment to our deepest values, we may not see all that will be as a result of that intentional act. We move forward with as much clarity as we can have about our deepest values, but there are limits to our clarity. At some point, we have to trust ourselves to step forward into something we can't see clearly in order to become more fully alive -- more closely aligned with our vision of a best possible version of ourselves. If we take anything from the story of Thomas' skepticism, it should be this, rather than an admonition to believe nonsense and call it enlightenment.

The author ends the book of John with a statement of purpose. It's clear that the author has an agenda to convince people to accept his own religious position. The agenda of this commentary has hopefully been equally clear: to position the fictional character of Jesus in this ancient text as a metaphorical exemplar of what we might be if we choose to embrace our potential to radically love ourselves, the people around us, and the world we all share.

The goal of our lives is only determined by us. There is nothing outside of ourselves that compels us to outgrow our anxiety and our irrational fear. In some ways, society prompts us to remain anxious and reactive. However, if we choose to move toward being fully alive incarnations of our deepest, most noble selves, we are capable of embarking on that journey. We have within us the potential to act with integrity and intention. We have within us the ability to influence our lives and the lives of people around us toward greater wholeness. If this is not a compelling message of hope, I don't know what is.

John 20: Our Resurrection and Meaningful Hope

We blew right past a lot of the mythological details in the passion narrative. Some believers focus much more on the details of John 19, and there are legendary tales regarding the mystical powers of the spear that pierced Jesus' side. Since this is rather like spending time dwelling on the actual powers of a harp played by the Norse god Bragi, we've quickly arrived at John 20, which is a somewhat altered resurrection story than what we find in the synoptic gospels. Again, we need not worry about comparing the details of who arrived where first and who said what; these are authorial creations intended to tell a story a certain way. We can turn our attention in other directions.

Most importantly, there is a resurrection. We observed previously that the suffering of the crucifixion was a result of remaining self-differentiated and maintaining integrity in the midst of anxious people who allowed fear to drive them. Here we see that suffering was not the end of the story. The outcome of suffering for the Jesus character is that he rises and assumes an exalted status. Perhaps we too might expect that on the other side of our suffering is a sense of renewed life, not on the other side of the grave, but while we are still alive and walking around.

The persecution we might face for creating a life that aligns with our deepest, most noble selves is painful, but we also gain something greater than that suffering -- namely, the more fully alive life that we create. We gain alignment with our deepest, most noble selves, which is a way of being that allows us to be more fully alive -- as the Jesus character seems to be in the resurrection story of the gospel of John. He is barely recognizable to people who knew him well, just as our way of aligning with our deepest, most noble selves may be barely recognizable to people who knew us when we were less fully alive.

There are a few other details in the story from which we might also draw some meaning. For instance, Mary arrives at the tomb, sees something she doesn't expect, makes some assumptions (based primarily on fear), and runs off in reaction to those assumptions. She finds two other people, who hear her anxious conclusions and run off in reaction to her story. These two people make their own assumptions and -- without fully understanding what is happening -- go home, satisfied with the reliability their conclusions. At this point in the story, none of these characters know what is happening, but they all are convinced that they have a full grasp of the situation. They aren't happy about it. In some cases, they are overwhelmed with anxiety. But they believe that they understand the situation fully.

We don't ever understand a situation fully. We might understand things accurately in part, but we can't know all that there is to know about a situation. There are historical events that contribute to a situation and yet their connection might remain unnoticed. Each person in a situation brings their own perspective and baggage into it, and we can never know fully what goes on in another person's head. Before our anxiety carries us off into Autopilot Reaction Land, it's worth remembering that we don't know all that there is to know. If we can remain curious and ask questions, we might just short circuit our anxiety, even if we still fail to grasp a situation completely.

The second portion of this passage from the first half of John 20 has a lot of mystical implications, which were probably very important to the community for which the gospel was originally written. The dialogue between Mary and Jesus indicates that the community thought some very specific things about a post-resurrection Jesus. These ideas are not based on factual data, but rather on the assumptions of a community -- what made sense to those people at that time. We follow the same process too, often arriving at strange conclusions.

For the community in which this gospel was written, it made sense for Jesus to be unrecognizable and to say, "Don't touch me because I haven't yet ascended." They essentially made things up about what a resurrected person might say, based on their assumptions about the world. Some people today think it makes sense to conclude that wild conspiracy theories have merit, or that alien visitation is a viable explanation for some experience. These conclusions make sense to the people making them, even if they don't hold water under objective scrutiny. People today believe a literal interpretation of biblical stories, even though such an interpretation is incompatible with what is demonstrably true about the world.

Anxiety can make us forget things we actually do know. When we are anxious, our brains find it easier to latch onto any explanation -- even explanations that don't make a lot of sense -- because we want our anxiety to go away. When we think we understand something, we feel like we can have some control. We can put tin foil on our heads to protect our thoughts. We can amass a stockpile of resources in a fallout shelter to prepare for a societal breakdown. We can do something based on what we think we know, forgetting that there are pieces of contradictory evidence we aren't considering.

Sometimes, we hold two mutually exclusive competing ideas in our head without even realizing it. We think that our bosses hate us no matter what we do, yet we keep trying to find ways to please them. We think that our spouses love us, yet we behave as if they are our enemies. We believe that we are part of a religion founded on unconditional love, yet we pronounce hateful judgment on people who seem different from us. Somehow, these contradictions make sense in our anxious mind.

Our anxiety makes us forget what we know about people or about ourselves or about reality, and we go off on some fear-driven tangent without even realizing that we aren't acting in accord with what we believe most deeply. If we are willing to stop and think through our behavior, based on a deeper connection with our clear guiding principles, our actions might more often align with our vision of a best possible version of ourselves.

Now, there's no way to know what the characters in this story believed most deeply. One thing that is clear, however, is that there is some emotional volatility at play. Their anxiety is powerful. Yet, at the end of this particular passage, Mary's behavior is very different from the ending of the gospel of Mark, in which the women run away scared and tell no one what they've seen. Mary finds a sense of hope and runs to share that hope with others.

Obviously, hope is more uplifting than fear. Our hope can still be based on unrealistic or dishonest beliefs, though. In the story, of course, Mary accurately identifies a resurrected Jesus. This is just a story, not a historical account. In our own lives, we might be tempted to invest a lot of hope in things that we know aren't likely to happen. Hope in the impossible is not useful hope. In fact, hope in the impossible is most likely an anxious reaction in disguise. We feel powerless, so we place hope in something beyond our control.

An overwhelming majority of parents think that their high school athletes will have a career in professional sports, when it's obvious that only a minuscule percentage of high school athletes will go pro. Often, we expect that people in our lives are going to change into the people we want them to be. While we will surely influence people, we can't control how they will change as a result of our influence. We might hope for a mystical experience with something supernatural outside of ourselves, but every piece of evidence we have points to the conclusion that what we consider to be mystical experiences happen inside our own brains. We mistake internal chemical reactions that we don't understand for external supernatural experiences -- which we somehow believe we do understand.

It's important for us to share our hope with others, and it's important for us to maintain a sense of reality in the midst of our hopefulness. Realistic hope can prompt us toward actions that align with that dream of what could be. And it's important for us to share our anxiety with others too, if we're conscientious enough to share our anxiety with people who will help us shift out of autopilot and back toward a more intentional approach to how we manage our anxiety. Mary is a great example of connection in this passage. Everything that happens, she runs to tell someone. She isn't a great example of personal responsibility, though. We can forgive a fictional character in the throes of grief for not being grounded and centered. In our own lives, we can strive for a sense of connection with ourselves even as we foster connection with other people.

We can draw a lot of lessons from these short paragraphs, then. First -- even though our integrity may be seen as sedition and anxious people may persecute us for our intentional alignment with our deepest, most noble selves -- when we engage in fully alive lives, our experience might be beyond what we ever dreamed life could be.

Second, our anxiety can convince us that we know things we don't know. It's important for us to remember that we can't know everything. Our sense of curiosity can help us manage our reactivity.

Third, our anxiety can make us forget things we do know. We can become sharper about examining our beliefs and identifying when we are holding two mutually exclusive ideas in our heads. We can choose to follow the belief that aligns with our deepest values and let the other one go as a product of our anxiety.

Finally, hope is important, and it's most powerful when it's balanced with reality. When we hope for things that are impossible, we can't move toward them in any meaningful way. When we hope for things that are possible, we can act in accord with that hope and create more meaningful lives for ourselves and for the people around us.

John 17: We Are All Self-Authorizing

The gospel of John was written for a specific community of people, and there are clues that some of the book was more about recording the beliefs of that community than it was about recording a historical biographical tale. John 17 is one instance where a desire to record the beliefs and creeds of the community are prominently on display. In fact, the first several verses refer to Jesus in the third person by name or by pronoun. This is more the language of a community's common creed than it is the language of an individuals speaking about himself.

No one can say with certainty what the author meant by some of the phrases in this "prayer," but believers from various Christian sects interpret it as they see fit. They actually must do so, because otherwise the words have no value aside from a slightly cryptic historical reflection of a first-century community's beliefs and concerns. Moreover, various Christian readers interpret the words differently based on their own individual understanding of Christianity. Thus, we can confidently take the same liberties as other readers, interpreting the words to fit our deeply held convictions.

Before we get to a full interpretation, however, there are a few features of the chapter that bear mentioning. Some of these may seem tedious in isolation, but in the context of interpreting the entire chapter, they may have greater significance. We will also keep in mind that, for our interpretive scheme, the character of Jesus in the gospel of John is representative of us -- of the idealized best possible version of ourselves.

First, most English translations have verse 2 reading that Jesus has been given authority over all people. The actual translation here would be power or authority over all flesh. This does not necessarily mean power of individual people, but could instead mean power to overcome the "fleshly" fears and beliefs that distract us from living with integrity to our most deeply held values.

It may also bear noticing that Jesus is made to say here that he has completed the work that was intended for him (verse 4). In the narrative, this is clearly before the crucifixion. Many Christians seem to focus on the crucifixion of Jesus as being the real significant "work" of Jesus. If this passage is to be interpreted in the context of the narrative, however, the Jesus character claims that his work is done prior to being arrested and killed. Thus, we must conclude that whatever the author of John considered Jesus' work to be had more to do with his life than it did with his death.

We also see a trace of evidence that reflects an idea of destiny, that people do not truly have control over the outcome of their lives, by the way Judas is described in verse 12. This is more a function of later editors and translators than the more ancient "son of destruction" or "one worthy of destruction" that seem to more closely match the original text -- which, I'll just remind you, we do not have. There is no known "original" of the gospel of John, just a variety of copies with some contradictions among them from which translations are created.

Regardless of translation, verses 6-20 are clearly about the community for which the author of John wrote. Their unity is also a topic of the biblical letters attributed to the same author. We might conclude that the community had considerable strife and drama and that the author was attempting to give voice to a need for unity, or we might conclude that the community was proud of this unified quality of their relationships that set them apart from other communities. Either way, this middle portion is clearly intended as a blessing on the author's community, and a somewhat exclusive one based on verse 9.

Some readers would like to suggest that this prayer for unity extends to the whole of Christianity, and not just the author's own community. It may be a nice idea, but Christianities have never embraced unity with one another. There have been differences of opinion since the earliest documentation of the Christian church. Once the church gained more political power, the differing minority opinions were labeled heresies and the church persecuted individuals who held those differing opinions.

Even with a seemingly monolithic Roman Catholic Church for centuries, there were always schisms and conflicts up until the Protestant Reformation, which spawned a number of different Christian sects. Now, the most recent estimates by the Center for the Study of Global Christianity place the number of distinct Christian sects at over 40,000. How's that for unity? Even within the bounds of a single Christian congregation, one will find differences of belief and practice, and those differences lead to conflict, and that conflict often causes schisms within the community. In two thousand years, one thing the Christian church seems to have perfected is disunity.

Criticism is easy, though. What usefulness can we draw from this chapter, should we choose to do so? There is some language about the "name" and the "power of the name." Name here connotes authority; to know something's name in the ancient world was to have power over it, even back to the story about Adam getting to name all the animals in Genesis. If "God" is really our deepest, most noble self, then this is where our authority comes from. We are self-authorizing. Actually, every person is. Some people just pretend that their authority comes from something external to them. Ultimately, though, human beings are self-authorizing entities.

There is also some talk about "evil," and "the world" as the unenlightened practitioners of evil. We have suggested before that "evil" and "sin" are the outcomes of mismanaged fear. If this is the case, the protection from evil would be the ability to dismantle irrational fear. "The world" would reflect those people who behave as victims of fear, and based on casual observation, there are an awful lot of those folks running around. Fear, whether it manifests as shame, hatred, greed, oppression, apathy, or some other nuanced form, is churning within all of us. We self-authorize our reaction to that fear or our dismantling of it.

One way that we dismantle irrational fear is by telling the truth. The truth empowers us (verse 17). The consecration language of this passage reflects the transformative potential of every person. The author of John portrays Jesus essentially passing the torch here, indicating to his disciples (and thus vicariously to the readers) that they have the same ability that he has to live boldly intentional lives of integrity and authenticity. That is a message worth carrying forward.

Thus, a re-envisioned Humanist commissioning of John 17 is still high-minded and idealistic, but it may offer some resources for us that the creed of an ancient community does not:

Then, the Exemplar looked at each of them and said, "Now I am speaking to your deepest, most noble selves. The time has come for you to embrace your own capability. I have honored my deepest, most noble self, and in so doing I have shone a light on my authentic self. I have recognized my power to dismantle my fear and live with integrity, and in so doing, I have made clear a way for others to be fully alive. And this is what it is to be fully alive: that you know your deepest, most noble self -- the root of your deepest life-affirming values and principles -- and that you know your own capability to live with integrity to those values and principles, through connection with your deepest, most noble self. People have always been capable of this, but you have now seen it in action.

"I may have awakened you to connection with your deepest, most noble selves, but you have been the ones to nurture that connection and live into a deeper sense of your authentic selves. You now know that all of your power comes from within you. You understand something that many people do not, and you must live with integrity to your life-affirming guiding principles even as the world around you continues to react to its incessant fear. Your authentic life is the embodiment of your deepest, most noble self. You are the incarnation of yourself. You have the power to dismantle your irrational fear, and you have the power to remain calm in the midst of other people's fear.

"May your lives be full of exuberant joy, even as you continue to live among people who don't understand what you are doing. Other people will resent you for not going along with their anxiety, but don't run away from relationships with others just to feel safe. That would be giving power to your fear. Continue to do the work of connecting with your deepest, most noble self, so that you can dismantle your own fears and be a model for others. Other people's beliefs and decisions and reactions are going to look very different from yours. Continue to seek the truth and base your lives on truth rather than irrational anxiety. In this way, you will serve others and build a better world, just by living with integrity.

"Remember that every person is capable of this kind of connection, to some degree. Every person has inherent worth and dignity. This unites us all as human beings. We are all diverse, and our differences are something to celebrate. Yet, we hold in common our humanity, and thus our intrinsic value. May you find connection with other people, even those who seem different from you. May you recognize the empowerment that flows from meaningful relationship, and may you take responsibility for forming mutually empowering relationships. Then, you will connect with others with the same level of authenticity as you connect with your self. That is the essence and the power of genuine love."

John 13: Washing Feet

As you may recall, a few passages back in the story, Mary (sister of Lazarus) lavished expensive perfume on Jesus' feet, and the disciples were somewhat irate (one in particular). Now, in the first paragraphs of John 13, Jesus humbles himself and washes the disciples' feet. As is par for the course in all of the gospel narratives, the disciples don't quite get it, at least not at the time.

Yes, we have to decide what to do with the assertion that the devil put something into Judas' heart that made his impending betrayal a foregone conclusion. Actually, the way the gospel of John keeps preparing the reader with dramatic foreshadowing about Judas' betrayal is quite interesting. It's as if the authors recognize that everyone already knows the story, and their job is to help place meaning on the details. They do this from their own perspective, of course, but they can't actually know some of the things they assert. 

Case in point, they can't know that a supernatural influenced Judas in any way. It was part of their worldview that demons and angels were active in the lives of people, primarily because they had no other explanation for some of what they experienced. Disease was mysterious. Epilepsy and depression and schizophrenia were not even meaningful concepts. As with many people today, luck and coincidence seemed less likely reasons for certain turns of events than the idea that supernaturals were influencing reality in one way or another. We are still prone to making up stories about why people do the things they do, and the idea of demonic influence is still a hot topic in our fictions. 

Human behavior has human causes. I don't know that there was an actual Judas, but even in the story, I don't know what was in the mind of the character Judas. I know what the authors of John believed about the situation, but I also know that human behavior is never the result of a supernatural force. Judas' "devil" was his own thoughts and beliefs, his own fears about himself and others. This is influential enough to account for the whole spectrum of human behavior. 

Beliefs are powerful, especially fear-laden beliefs. When we read of Judas' betrayal later in the narrative, it would behoove us to interpret the devil entering his heart as his own fears running rampant and unchecked. Although Judas presumably has the same capacity as anyone else for rational thought and intentional management of his fear, he will choose to let his fear guide his behavior. We know people (and we ourselves may sometimes be those people) who continue to let their fear guide their behavior. If we know what to look for, it's easy to see it when it's happening, just as the Jesus character may have seen the telltale signs of fear in Judas' demeanor.

The Jesus character doesn't react with his own fear about Judas. He doesn't kick Judas out. He doesn't plead with Judas. He doesn't berate and embarrass Judas in front of everyone. He doesn't tell Judas that he's wrong. He doesn't argue with Judas. The Jesus character just continues with his own intentional actions with the barest acknowledgment that he knows what's cooking in Judas' mind. The Jesus character keeps teaching and modeling a way of being, even though he is fairly certain that all of his instruction will be lost on this person who is so wrapped up in his own fear that he can't see anything else. 

Much has been written in Christian circles about the foot washing scene. It's often a highlight of religious services the Thursday before Easter. In some traditions, this day is called "Maundy Thursday," a name derived from the Latin for "mandate" or "command," taken from the statement at John 13:34, "I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another." The demonstration of love in washing their feet is only the most recent of many examples of Jesus' love for others. The example set in the story is that love is more powerful than fear -- that in our lives, love-centered behavior is preferable to fear-driven actions.

This is true in our personal relationships as it is true in our professional decisions. If we are driven by fear, we will inevitably act in a way that harms other people and ourselves. If we are principled in our decisions, we are more apt to make decisions with integrity. Saying that love should be at the heart of what we do is not to say that foolish decisions are justifiable if we make those decisions with loving intentions. Wisdom and thoughtfulness are still worthy ideals. We might get side-tracked by a flimsy definition of love as an affectionate emotion. If love is defined as demonstrative concern for another's well-being, however, it becomes clearer that we must be thoughtful in order to contribute meaningfully to actual well-being in someone's life.

The Jesus character in this passage demonstrates concern for the well-being of his closest friends by serving them in a way they don't expect. He takes a vulnerable, humble position with them, and yet he still has his own clear boundaries. When Simon Peter protests, the Exemplar doesn't shift his actions, he gently and firmly explains that he is being thoughtful and intentional in his decision. 

Life is full of stress and anxiety. Even though we may not have a friend and teacher about to be executed, and even though we may not be driven into hiding because our group has attracted unwanted attention from authorities, we have no trouble finding things to be anxious about. When we are humbly thoughtful of how we might be of service to other people, it might shift our perspective away from the focus on anxiety that tends to be our default. The Exemplar in this story is not seeking after his own power or fame or reward. He is committed to a particular way of being because it resonates with his deepest values. He wants his closest friends to get that, to see their own potential for living that level of integrity.

We cannot honestly care only for ourselves. Our actions influence other people. We can't not be connected to others. This being the case, it's worth a little consideration how we will influence others. Our fears will suggest certain courses of action. Our deepest values will suggest a different way of being. We get to choose which we will follow. 

John 12: Walking in the Light

The remainder of John 12 is a bit scattered. Jesus says some things to the gathered crowd, then runs away, and finally shouts some parting words. It's unclear in the text whether he cries out as he's slipping away from the crowd or calling out from a hiding spot. Actually, this passage is probably just a piece of the tradition that settled into this spot in the narrative because it seems to continue the theme of light and darkness.

We've already addressed the matter of looking at "prophetic" scriptures and telling a story that seems to be a fulfillment of those words. The book of Isaiah was not written about Jesus. We've actually looked at the first third of Isaiah, and we'll return to the later additions to the book, but none of it is about Jesus. When other people don't see things the way we do, it's easy to write the other people off and say, "God must be blinding their eyes and hardening their hearts." After all, if other people knew what we know, they would see things as we see them, right?

Wrong. People have their own complex reasons for believing and thinking what they do, and we are not usually in a position to sort through another person's psyche to judge their perspective. Writing people off doesn't explain their position -- it just prevents us from having to examine our own perspective. When we believe that God sees things as we do, and that God has blinded others and hardened their hearts against the truth, we have no reason to consider that our own perspective may be off-kilter. Better to spend our time and energy expanding and focusing our own beliefs and ideas instead of judging other people as blind and stupid.

This passage also begins with a confusing event. Jesus is speaking, and then there is a sound. Some people heard the sounds and concluded that it was thunder. Jesus apparently acted as if there was something intelligible in the thunder, so some people hypothesized that he was hearing angels -- that he was hearing something no one else could hear. The explanation, however, is that the voice was not for Jesus' benefit, but for the benefit of the people... who heard only thunder. Should the reader assume that God also deafened the people against his voice, even though it was for their benefit that the words were uttered? Probably best to leave this aside and chalk it up to the mythology of the ancient community in which the authors of John lived.

Of the portions of this passage that can be useful for us in our lives, we can trace a couple of ideas. The authors have Jesus say that if he is lifted up, he will attract everyone, and the authors interpret that as a foreshadowing of the passion story. What if that phrase means something different? What if it means that his way of being would be appealing to all people if they only saw it clearly? This is followed by the theme of walking in the light, and then there is mention of the fear that prevents the Pharisees from being honest about their agreement with Jesus' teachings. The concluding paragraph gently asserts that Jesus has authority and should be listened to, returning to the metaphor of light.

The authors generally present Jesus as fearlessly loving toward other people. He doesn't worry very much about what other people think (although he is sensible enough to run away when people seem to turn violent). He acts out of his own deep values. He is authentic in his expression of himself. And in being his authentic self, he expresses love and care for the people around him. His deepest, most noble self doesn't lead him toward tyranny or abuse, but toward kindness, compassion, and cooperation. He wants other people to have the same freedom to express their own deep values authentically, because he trusts that human beings share certain guiding principles in common. Once the fear and false beliefs are out of the way, he seems to think that people are, at their core, loving and peaceful beings. If people cast aside their fear and live into a best possible version of themselves, then the world can be a better place.

One of the problems, though, is that people can't imagine what that would look like. People need to see that kind of authenticity modeled in order to even believe that it's possible to be directed by one's own internal guidance system of deep values. Thus, the statement that if Jesus' way of being authentic is lifted up, people will find it attractive -- people will believe that it is at least possible to live in a way that authentically reflects their deepest, most noble selves.

There is still a lot of fear to wade through, though. As is the case with the Pharisees, there are a lot of social controls that work to keep people behaving according to societal expectations. Should we suddenly start living by our own deep values and guiding principles, other people will talk. We might be ostracized or abandoned by some people. The authors of John judge the Pharisees and say that they were more interested in glory from people than the glory that comes from their own deepest, most noble selves. Our relationships with other people are important, though. Being part of a group makes us safer, and human connection is vital to our existence. It's a legitimate fear that if we start living differently, we will put some of our social safety in jeopardy.

Social constraints are like blindfolds. We can be led around by other people's ideas of propriety, but we can't know where we are being led. When we allow the habits of people around us, the marketing that constantly bombards us, and other external directives to determine our behavior, we are essentially walking around in the dark. When we recognize our own deep values and live with integrity to those guiding principles, we are able to walk around in the light -- to have a clearer trajectory for our lives. This is a big challenge, especially when we look around us and find that many of the people closest to us are content to live in the dark. It doesn't seem safe to start walking in the light when everyone around you is happy with the dark.

We can judge those other people, of course. We can call them lazy, shallow, or spineless. We can say that they can't think for themselves or that they let themselves be led around by the nose. We can believe that they are stupid, irresponsible, complacent, or apathetic. Really, though, what reason does anyone around us have to live with integrity to a clear set of guiding principles? What example do they have that living intentionally into a best possible version of oneself is even possible?

Whatever the example of Jesus might have been, that story has been contorted to be about human weakness rather than human potential. The Jesus figures of current Christianities are rarely expressed as exemplars and are much more frequently portrayed as unique divine individuals with superhuman capability. Even historical or living people who do extraordinary things are more often seen as extraordinary people, while we are all normal, ordinary -- incapable of anything more than shuffling through a mediocre life. How can we expect anyone to walk in the light when there is no real model of what that looks like?

This is one reason that living intentionally is so damn scary. We see so few people even trying to do it. It seems far-fetched. Outlandish. Unrealistic. Yet, there are people living intentionally into a best possible version of themselves. We may have to look for them, but there are models we can look to. It's scary to risk being thrown out of the synagogue, but sometimes we have to get ostracized from our familiar exemplars so that we can see another possibility. Our confidence in our own guiding principles is won by pressing through the uncertainty of doing something so few other people are doing, realizing that it isn't that we are extraordinary people, we are just doing something extraordinary. Just about anyone can walk in the light. Just about anyone can live into a best possible version of themselves. It's work, but just about anyone can do it. Few choose to do so.

Paraphrasing the summary of Jesus' teaching at the end of this chapter of John:

If you follow my example of living intentionally and fearlessly by a clear set of deep values, you aren't just trusting me -- you're trusting yourself. You're trusting your own deepest, most noble self to guide you well. If you watch me, you'll see my deepest, most noble self. There isn't a barrier between the way I behave and the deep principles I hold. I'm living this way because it's an authentic expression of who I am, and I'm living this way visibly and publicly so that you can discover how to live authentically in your own life. If you choose to keep living by your old habits, that's fine. It isn't my job to judge you or criticize the choices you make. Something deep inside you knows if you aren't living with integrity, and you're going to put yourself through enough torment without me adding to it. I trust that living intentionally in alignment with the values I hold most deeply means that my life is full and rich and satisfying. I know that's possible for you too. I hope that when you look at what I'm doing, you see possibilities for your own abundant life.

There is no reason this cannot be the message we carry to the world around us. Yes, it is safer to stay within the confines of our familiar social constraints. Yes, it is scary to start doing something different from the people around us. If we care about those people, though -- if we want their lives to be full and rich and satisfying -- one of the greatest gifts we can give is to let them see us living into those possibilities. We live intentionally for ourselves. We get the benefit of living into a best possible version of ourselves. We also influence others, though. And our authentic lives aligned with our guiding principles are going to have a positive influence on the people around us. It is never just about us.

John 11 How Are We Resurrection and Life?

The story of Lazarus in the gospel of John offers a lot of potential insight. That insight doesn't depend on the story having any historical or factual truth. We could acknowledge that there are a lot of mythological resurrection stories across a wide variety of ancient cultures. And we might suggest that there are plausible scientific explanations for how the event could have actually transpired. We might also recognize that none of the other biblical narratives about Jesus even hint at what would seem to be a very significant and astounding event. None of this actually equips us any better to live our lives, however. Determining that this is a fictional story is only a starting point for deriving value from it.

At the same time, the concept of resurrection is perhaps more significant than any particular story about resurrection. Certainly many of us can point to moments of rebirth or transformation. We might even say that we have had to "die" to some influences in order to be "reborn" into a healthier way of being. Some of us are aware that other people have helped us in the process of transformation, sometimes through their support and encouragement, and sometimes through actually working in our lives to connect us to new people and opportunities that springboard us into a transformative experience. Perhaps we have done that for others in the midst of their rebirth, in the midst of a process of morning some loss and rediscovering oneself. Resurrection as a metaphor is loaded with meaning.

Thus, the story of Lazarus and the people to whom he was connected can have meaning for us if we approach it not as a story about physical death and revivification (which is not something any of us should reasonably anticipate), but rather as a symbolic story with a more universally applicable meaning. The story becomes much richer from this perspective, beginning with the response of the Jesus character to the news of Lazarus' illness.

Of course, the story has been interpreted throughout Christian history as a commentary about the supernatural knowledge and power of Jesus. Jesus seems to know the present and future circumstances of Lazarus, and has confidence in his own power to produce miraculous effects. This is all relatively useless to us. Pretending that this kind of supernatural knowledge or power is available to us or to any other person is frankly delusional. Now, if we want to acknowledge the potential of a medical professional (or a team of medical professionals) to perform "miracles," that's fine; we just need to recognize that we have crossed into the realm of natural human capability rather than supernatural prowess.

The kind of symbolic death and resurrection that we have suggested, however, might also be met with some responses like those of Jesus. When someone has experienced a loss -- or when they are in the process of "dying" to some habit or circumstance -- we might have some clarity that there can be some joy of impending transformation in the midst of mourning. We might resist the temptation to be infected by the anxiety of others and calmly respond with love in our own time. We also might choose to put ourselves in a position of vulnerability for the sake of connection with people we care about. Most of us are not going to be faced with a sect of people looking to stone us, but we still feel a sense of threat or vulnerability from time to time. It can seem safer to stay away from people who are experiencing a significant loss, and yet our own willingness to be vulnerable can contribute to transformation in the lives of others.

I'm not sure that the sequence of events is all that important, but in the gospel narrative, Jesus learns of Lazarus' struggle and the anxiety affecting his closest friends and relatives, and Jesus doesn't take on that anxiety and rush to Lazarus' side. Instead, he takes time to gather himself, to be grounded and centered, and to finish whatever tasks he had prioritized because of his own values and guiding principles. He trusted that Lazarus would emerge from his loss, and he accepted that those close to Lazarus were responsible for managing their own anxiety, whether they actually chose to do so or not. Eventually, though, Jesus' desire to be in meaningful connection with a friend prompted him to place himself in a position of vulnerability in order to care for Lazarus and others.

The followers closest to Jesus chose to follow his lead in allowing themselves to be vulnerable, even though they had to do some work managing their own anxiety. Jesus didn't demand or require his friends to accompany him. He simply told them what he would be doing, and he invited them along. It was up to the disciples to decide for themselves how they would respond to Jesus' decision. Some of them may have accompanied him out of anxiety, and others may have reached a point of calm clarity about the decision. Whatever the case, each individual's choice was his own responsibility.

The same is true in our lives. Our decisions will influence people around us, and we can be clear about what we choose to do and invite others along without being responsible for their decisions. We don't need the approval of others in order to make decisions that align with our deepest values, and we don't have to convince others that what we choose to do has integrity. Other people are responsible for what they do in response (or reaction) to our decisions, even when they seem unwilling or unable to make a responsible decision. Surely, our choices have consequences, and we may not know all of the consequences of our actions ahead of time. We may reconsider the decisions we make when new information becomes clear to us. There is no reason to judge ourselves when this happens. It's simply part of the journey.

Allowing other people to be personally responsible for managing their own anxiety and making their own decisions isn't always easy. If we take the story at face value, Jesus spends more time helping Martha process her anxiety than he does with Mary. Maybe he knew his own emotional limits and was worn down a bit by the first conversation. Maybe he knew the two women well enough that he believed he could expect more personal awareness from one than he could from the other.

The conversation with Martha turns into an assertion of Christian dogma, but that's to be expected from the author(s) of John. One might wonder, though, if there is still value in interpreting the Jesus character as an exemplar of our own best possible versions of ourselves. Could it be true that when we are living with integrity and intentionality by a clear set of guiding principles -- when we are connected with our deepest most noble selves -- we are transformative and life-giving to the people around us?

(If it needs to be restated at this point, our deepest values are not based on fear, but affirm the inherent worth and dignity of every person. Becoming clear about these values is a long-term process of personal work, and we have delved into this in many other posts.)

This is not a question of supernatural power, of course, but a poetic framing of the natural power of intentional people. When we make decisions based on our deepest values, we create an environment in which others can do the same. When we clearly express the principles that guide our lives, we model a way for others to ground their own choices. When we exhibit calm and confident vulnerability, we influence the people around us toward managing their own anxiety a little better. It isn't our responsibility to tell other people what they should do, but it is our responsibility to be clear about why we make the decisions we make. And in sharing that clarity and those values with others, we make it more possible for them to live with greater integrity in their lives.

Moreover, when we trust in our own processes of "resurrection" -- our own journeys through mourning loss and transformation into a clearer reflection of a best possible version of ourselves -- we serve as models of resurrection to the people around us. When we live intentionally, we serve as models of life. When we are at our best, we are resurrection and life. Those who live intentionally by clear, life-affirming guiding principles will know what it means to truly live, even though they will experience loss from time to time. Joan Borysenko has written, "The question is not whether we will die, but how we will live." And it is attributed to Albie Sachs that, "Death is more universal than life; everyone dies but not everyone lives."

Our lives are not lived in isolation. We influence everyone around us. When we give control to our anxiety and fear, we influence people around us toward greater anxiety and fear. When we live intentionally with integrity to our deepest values, we influence people toward greater self-awareness and fulfillment. In any case, other people's responses or reactions are their responsibility, but the sort of influence we offer to others is our responsibility. If we choose to, we can be the resurrection and the life by which other people desperately long to be influenced. And if we are honest, there are time when we will desperately long for such influence in our lives. Best to seek out those people now and bask in their influence so that living in alignment with our principles is well-rehearsed when the time for transformation comes.

John 1: People Notice Authenticity

In the last section of John 1, we meet the main character of the story. We can draw some insights from the behavior of the disciples (students) in this brief summary of how they came to be associated with Jesus, and we can draw some insights from the behavior of Jesus. We might find ourselves situated in multiple places in this narrative. In a way, this flows directly from our observations about John the Baptist's authenticity and brings forward some additional things about people who are authentic.

Part of the purpose of this segment of the story is to legitimize -- or at least relate -- the brief origin stories of some of the significant legendary figures in the early church. This story is not identical to other stories about how the followers of Jesus were assembled, but it serves as an introduction to these men and defines their connection to one another. It appears that all of these initial followers were friends or family members of one another. We can't overplay this observation, because we don't actually have any written materials from any of these followers. We know them (and their relationships) only by tradition. Still, it is perhaps worth noting that the reason people gathered in community around this teacher is because of the invitations of friends and family members -- people who were known and trusted.

Various readers might try to make a big deal about how Jesus knows the things that he knows about people -- as if he had some supernatural insights about them. We aren't explicitly told that he has any telepathic powers, but people read their own impressions into the story. In the context of the story, it's just as likely that Andrew could say to Jesus, "I want to bring my brother to meet you," and the next day Jesus said, "Ah, you're that guy that Andrew was going to bring." And it's just as likely that Jesus literally saw Nathaniel sitting under a fig tree and formed an opinion about him. It's also worth remembering that it's a story that has no means of being verified, so we have to just let it be a story. The point is that it's a story about human interaction, not about superhuman abilities.

In noticing what the story leaves out at this point, two things seem apparent. First, we read nothing about those people who ignored or rejected Jesus as a teacher. We only read about the handful of individuals who saw something worth emulating in Jesus. We also only read one instance of Jesus "calling" someone, and that person seems to have known some other folks who were traveling with Jesus. Everyone who decides to follow this leader makes a personal choice to do so; they aren't all sought out and tapped by the leader as if they had been destined for it since birth.

On the one hand, if we want people to know about what we are doing, we have to talk about what we are doing at some point. That may not mean calling people to follow us, but there are some people who will only consider collaboration when they are invited into it. Maybe that was what was going on with Philip. Who knows. The truth that this story highlights, though, is that if we are authentically ourselves, we will attract people who want to know more about how we developed that ability. It's rare enough to see someone show up authentically that people still find it rather impressive. We won't attract everyone by showing up authentically, but that isn't the point. It isn't a marketing tactic. It's a way of being.

By suggesting that we be authentically ourselves, I'm also not suggesting that we do whatever we want and act like we rule the world. That isn't actually authentic. The attitude that some individuals adopt that seems to suggest that they own the road, or a restaurant, or a store clerk's attention, is far from authentic. Equally inauthentic are those of us who play small and pretend to be invisible, as if we have nothing to contribute and we don't want anyone to find out how worthless we are. In order to show up authentically, we have to be aware of ourselves and aware of our connection to the people around us. It means not pretending to be something we aren't, neither more nor less than our complete selves.

Some people will be attracted to that level of authenticity for different reasons. A couple of John's disciples jumped ship and decided to learn from Jesus instead. Maybe they had learned all they could from John. Maybe they just didn't like what John was teaching them. We have a tendency to do this kind of thing, too. We want to grow or learn something, but when a teacher or situation challenges us beyond our comfort zone, our fear may provoke us to run away and look for something else. We concoct all sorts of excuses, but sometimes the most honest reason we do things is that we are scared.

To complicate matters, there are legitimately some circumstances that are unhealthy or unhelpful to us. We may actually be ready to move on to something else. Some teachers misrepresent themselves, perhaps even unknowingly. If we stay in a situation out of a sense of loyalty, we might actually convince ourselves to stay in relationships that are detrimental to us -- that don't lead to greater well-being. So, we have to consider why we are choosing to do what we choose to do. If we leave one relationship for another without thinking through the honest reasons why -- not just the convenient excuses to cover up our fears and anxieties -- we are likely to find ourselves in similar situations over and over again.

Some of the people who approach Jesus in the story have to get over their own prejudices. "Can anything good come from Nazareth?" is not far off from some of the assumptions we make about the capabilities of people who come from different cultures. When we buy into the idea that people are intrinsically different just because they have some different practices or beliefs, we run the risk of considering ourselves to be worth more than other human beings by virtue of superficial things. When we understand that all people have inherent value, but that we all have different perspectives, we have a better opportunity to assess ideas honestly and still honor and respect the human beings who hold those different ideas. From one perspective, we are trying to "win" somehow -- to be right or to be better than someone else. From the other, we might grow toward a best possible version of ourselves by remaining open to other points of view.

We said early on in introducing this book that we would be meeting ourselves -- or at least our potential selves -- in observing the main character of Jesus. In this story about gathering people in community, we see the possibility of understanding ourselves and our connection to others so clearly that other people notice something compelling about how we show up. We might expect that the rest of the story will suggest some of the means to grow toward that level of authenticity. For now, let it suffice to say that we often show up the way we think other people expect us to show up, or we show up reacting to other people out of our anxieties about ourselves. When we are comfortable with our deep values and we show up confident in our authentic identity -- not pretending to be more or less than who we really are -- people will notice.

A Little Experiment: Our journey begins with noticing how we are -- how we choose to be. Notice this week when you are trying to "win" something you don't need to win, like driving or drawing the attention of a store clerk away from another customer. Notice also when you are letting yourself pretend to be invisible or playing small, like not speaking in a conversation or trying not to be noticed. What is going on for you when you are trying to prove your importance or hide from people? What would it be like for you to be more authentically present? More aware of who you actually are and more aware of your connection to (and impact on) other people? What would it take for you to be comfortable showing up without any sort of mask?

Isaiah 38-39: Living in the Present Responsibly

Isaiah 38 and 39 contain two more stories about Hezekiah, both of which are also recorded in 2 Kings, although the version in Isaiah includes a song that does not appear in 2 Kings. Although 2 Chronicles also contains a version of the siege of Jerusalem by Sennacherib (which we explored last week), including some of the strategic preparations Hezekiah made as the Assyrian army advanced, the Chronicler records only a summary of the story of Hezekiah's illness and leaves out the story about the envoys from Babylon altogether. Perhaps the Chronicler didn't want to record anything that made the Judean king look bad, or perhaps the stories evolved and circulated in such a fashion that the Chronicler didn't have the same information as the authors of Isaiah and 2 Kings. Historically, it looks like Hezekiah fell ill and then recovered at a certain point in his reign. What is more interesting is what the stories about the king might help us see in our own lives.

Out of the varied versions of Hezekiah's illness, Isaiah is the only one that suggests a glimpse at what Hezekiah was thinking. 2 Chronicles suggests that Hezekiah was too proud after recovering from his illness, and that his pride brought suffering on himself and his kingdom; only his humility spared them. Without any details, we can only derive that pride can be dangerous, especially for those in positions of power. More details about applying figs to the king's boils and the shadow on a sundial miraculously moving backward appears in 2 Kings, as it does in Isaiah. There is nothing explicit in 2 Kings to accuse Hezekiah of pride, however. Only in Isaiah does the author include a poem or song that reflects Hezekiah's grief that he would die "in the noontide of [his] days," and his subsequent exuberance about regaining his life.

The poet of Isaiah 38:10-20 observes a few things worth acknowledging. First, there are some things we can't control. There are some illnesses no amount of medicine will cure, and yet sometimes people recover through no conscious or intentional action on their part. There are some decisions that we cannot influence, and yet sometimes we are the unexpected beneficiaries of other people's decisions. Second, when we are miserable -- even if we are not so sick that we aren't likely to survive -- we often wallow in our misery and act as though that misery completely fills our future. We are sometimes overwhelmed with hopelessness in the midst of temporary hardship. Third, we can't celebrate once we're dead, so if we have reason for celebration, we should express it while we are alive. The dead are not grateful or hopeful, and they aren't selfish or hopeless either. If there's something that matters to us, we have to tend to it while we are alive.

To the first observation, there are some who will point out that Hezekiah's illness in the story actually was cured because of something he did; he was in control of his own well-being. Surely, this is often the case in our own lives. Our own habits are often the causes of our misery. If we are willing to change what we do, we might create greater well-being in our lives. In Hezekiah's case, perhaps figs have a curative property that alleviates certain deadly boils, but we know that prayer in and of itself doesn't have any effect on reality. As has been pointed out, wishing for something and asking a supernatural to accomplish it for you is no different from magic. In the absence of any supernatural, we must conclude that we have to do something different if we want our reality to be different. It is this practice of acting in accord with our prayers or wishes that actually changes things. When we are willing to act in accordance with what we want, we change our lives. If prayer or some other religious practice prepares us for acting in accord, then so be it, but in this case it is still human action that makes the difference.

Even then, there are limits to what we can control. When we accurately recognize the limits of our control, we are less likely to be miserable. When we accurately assess the magnitude of our hardship, we are potentially less likely to wallow in our misery. Sometimes, our feelings of hopelessness are completely justified, and our emotions are always true, whether they are actually warranted or not. The more we are able to step back from our own circumstances and see a larger picture of our lives and of the world, though, the more we are able to place our own experience in perspective. This surely takes a bit of practice.

Having some perspective could also help us find things to celebrate. The poet of Isaiah 38:10-20 suggests that just being alive is something worth celebrating, and I'm inclined to agree, even though I haven't just recovered from a deadly illness. It might even be that every moment of our lives is ripe with things that are worthy of celebration, if we are just willing to look for those sources of joy rather than the ubiquitous reasons to feel miserable. There is something to be said for living in the present moment with gratitude for what we have.

Being fully present in the moment cuts both ways, then. If we dwell in the past or focus entirely on the future, we miss our opportunities to act and to create. We often hear that we should strive to be awake to the present. Yet, without any perspective at all, we could lose sight of a larger context. We could get overwhelmed by our temporary misery. We could make foolish or naive decisions that don't contribute to the kind of lives we want or the kind of world we want. In order to be fully present in each moment, we have to understand something about what matters to us -- we have to know our general trajectory at least. Otherwise, we might keep making the same mistakes over and over again, or we might keep veering off course from the things we care about most deeply. Balance and perspective are important.

As an example, we have one last story about Hezekiah, told almost exactly the same in 2 Kings 20 and Isaiah 39. Some Babylonian envoys pay Hezekiah a visit, and the king shows them around to all his treasures. After they leave, Isaiah warns the king that Babylon will one day be a great empire that will abscond with all of those treasures as well as Hezekiah's own descendants. (This is an indication that the story originated after Hezekiah's death during or after the time of the Babylonian exile.) Hezekiah, thinking only of the present moment and his personal experience, is grateful that there will be peace during the rest of his lifetime.

Living in the present could have some negative long-term consequences if we are not conscious of a larger context. Our lives are like threads in an enormous tapestry, and our actions determine our connection to all the other threads. Littering might make sense to someone living in the present, and yet it creates a less habitable world for other people. Large scale pollution from industry would follow the same logic, except that its effects on future generations is exponentially greater than a litterbug tossing a fast food bag out of a car window at a stoplight. Being fully present in the moment without any sense of the interconnectedness of our our lives and actions can be profoundly irresponsible. While we cannot predict the future well enough to know the eventual results of every action we take, we can at least consider some of the obvious consequences of our actions. We cannot consider the long-term well-being of ourselves and the people around us, however, without some sense of perspective. We might be much more prone to seek out quick fixes to our anxiety if we are just attuned to the present moment. Thus, while we strive to be fully present in each moment so that we can most effectively act in accord with what we want for our lives, the lives of others, and the world we all share, we have to spend some time thinking about how our actions in the moment fit into a bigger picture.

One way that we can do this is by connecting with other people, particularly people in different circumstances from us. We might do this just by walking around our neighborhoods and introducing ourselves, or we might get involved in an organized effort to improve the well-being of a certain group of people. For instance, through tutoring primarily Latino students in a local GED program, I was able to connect with people who are taking steps to improve their lives -- and the lives of their descendants. I gained a greater appreciation for the sorts of sacrifices some people make in order to provide for the basic needs of their families, and I became more aware of how challenging the current system of bureaucracy can be for some of those people. They have to confront challenges I have never had to confront. I have a different set of challenges in my life, and a different set of sacrifices that make sense in the context of the kind of person I want to be and the kind of life I want to live. Connecting with people who seem different from you on the surface can help provide a more informed sense of perspective. It's easier to be aware of how your actions affect the lives and well-being of the people around you when you are more deeply connected to those people.

Another advantage of our time is the ease with which we can gain information about the world. It's also true that we can get lost in internet rabbit trails, and we must be ever more discerning about the biases of the information we find. Still, we have the potential to understand a great deal about how the patterns and habits of our lives affect our own well being, and how our actions impact the lives of people on the other side of the world. We don't have to learn all that there is to know, and we don't have to learn it all at once. The willingness to continually place a little bit of new information into our worldview can keep us conscious of a larger context in the midst of our moment-by-moment decisions. It bears repeating that this willingness to take in new information also comes with the responsibility to make sure that information is valid, to the best of our ability. Since everyone has biases, all of the information we find has been influenced by someone's biases, and our interpretation of that information will be influenced by our own biases. Even so, being aware of a larger global perspective can help us live in the moment more responsibly.

There are probably dozens of ways that people could maintain a larger perspective while striving to be more fully present in each moment. I'll mention one final way, since it so clearly connects to topics from previous chapters. When we know our guiding principles, it's easier to make decisions. When we are conscious of our values, it's easier to know what to do in the moment. Our values and guiding principles are necessarily big-picture kinds of ideas. They automatically connect us with a larger perspective. They are tapestry-sized concepts. When we spend a little time each day reminding ourselves of our values, the principles we want to guide us, or what we envision as a best possible version of ourselves, moments of anxiety have less potential to send us into a tailspin. Our temporary misery is less likely to overwhelm us when we know what we stand for. We are less likely to sabotage our ability to express our deepest most noble selves when we regularly spend time being aware of how we want to show up in life. Once we have identified our values and our guiding principles, a few minutes is all that it takes to tune in to ourselves and be reminded of those deep truths about who we are.

Our lives are threads in an enormous tapestry, and our moment-by-moment decisions determine how we connect with all the other threads and the tapestry as a whole. In order to make the most of our opportunities, we strive to be more fully present in the moment, and yet our sense of integrity suggests that we maintain a broader perspective. We can do this by building connection with the people around us, developing our knowledge about the larger world we inhabit, and being more deeply aware of the values and principles upon which we want to base our lives. In this way, we might recognize our limits and boundaries with greater clarity, more often prevent momentary misery from overwhelming us, and more frequently recognize all that we have to celebrate.

Mark 15: Sifting Through the Crucifixion Narrative

Continuing for another couple of weeks with the Passion story as it is related in the gospel of Mark, we read of the crucifixion event and some connections with the Hebrew Scriptures made by the early church. It  bears repeating that there is very little evidence of a historical Jesus, but we wouldn't necessarily expect there to be. There is very little evidence from the first century of any single person who wasn't a powerful political or military figure, or a historian who wrote about important political and military figures. The Christian cult is mentioned in a couple of historical documents, but in these reports historians repeat what the early church believed about Jesus, rather than verify their story.

Even if there were more evidence of a historical Jesus, this would not necessarily validate any particular story about him. That a person names Nunzio exists is one kind of assertion; to say that Nunzio is manager of an Italian restaurant is another kind of assertion; and to say that Nunzio never buys wine for his restaurant because he can just turn water into alcohol whenever he wishes is yet another kind of assertion. To prove that Nunzio is a real person does not thereby lead to the conclusion that Nunzio can turn water into wine. Even to prove that Nunzio seemed to turn water into wine on one occasion does not necessarily conclude that he could do it again, or that he could perform any other amazing feat. With regard to Jesus, there is simply no way to prove the claims of the gospel narratives.

This is not a glaring indictment for most believers. Many people would say that accepting the gospel narratives requires faith, and they believe that their lives are improved by that faith. I have suggested that believing in a historical Jesus or that such a person performed miracles is rather shallow when one considers the minimal impact such belief could have in an individual's life. To believe in unicorns or dragons matters not at all (save that one may be a target for those who would take advantage of such gullibility), until one decides to quit one's job, leave one's family, and go hunting for unicorns or dragons. Then, it matters a great deal. Belief in what Jesus symbolizes -- belief to the extent that the values represented by the Jesus archetype permeate one's life -- would seem to be more vital than belief that Jesus actually existed.

Thus, when reading the Passion story in any of the gospels, one might do well to push past the question of whether something really happened and look to the symbolism as one would look at any other mythological tale. What is the wisdom being communicated? Where does one find oneself in the story? If the story is about Hercules slaying a hydra, does one identify most with the heroic role, with the role of the nephew Iolaus, with the townsfolk who were victims of the danger until someone heroic came along, or with the naysayers after the event who minimized the accomplishment? Can one learn something from every character in the story about oneself, or about what a best possible version of oneself might look like? This would seem to be a more valuable approach than blind belief that someone accomplished something unique a long time ago, and that the intangible benefits are available to anyone who just believes the story.

For the early church, it was important to set Jesus up as a unique messianic figure connected to Hebrew Scripture. This was possibly an unfortunate misinterpretation of the intentions of the prophets, particularly Isaiah, who cast vision for every individual to live into the ideal of compassionate justice. When the words of the ancient scriptures are made to be about a single person, it rather lets everyone else off the hook for living into that ideal. Several of the quotes and details of the crucifixion story are thus attributable to attempts on the part of the early church to affirm that Jesus was a unique fulfillment of Hebrew prophecy. The mythologizing of the story can be seen in the wine mixed with myrrh which Jesus refuses, the fall of darkness over the land, the casting of lots (gambling -- rolling dice) for his clothing, the presence of criminals alongside him (although this would certainly not be unusual, since criminals were crucified in droves in the Roman empire), and the words that Jesus speaks, which are a reference to a psalm of lament.

An interesting feature of the story is the tearing of the temple curtain from top to bottom. Many have interpreted this as a symbol that the separation between God and man was no more -- that people did not have to go through priests and sacrificial rituals to connect with the divine. Others have suggested that this is a symbol that God no longer lives in houses made by human hands, which would have been a significant concept in the first century. In any case, it was certainly an indictment against the religious power structures of the time, and it was a call to a change of perspective.

The burial scene is intended to provide enough details to make the resurrection event convincing, even though that event is a bit odd as it is told in the earliest version of the gospel of Mark. The verification that Jesus is dead, the traditional appropriate Jewish treatment of the body, and the heavy stone rolled across the tomb entrance are to make resurrection reports credible and impressive. Normally, a poor man crucified as a criminal would have been tossed in a mass grave, and whether he was still there or whether he had gotten up and walked off somewhere would be very difficult to determine. Like the other seemingly historical aspects of the story, hanging one's faith on whether things happened exactly as a gospel narrative suggests is a rather shallow reading. The real value is in determining the application in one's own life, and there are more worthwhile applications that mere belief in an event.

When I say that it is unfortunate that the early church appropriated Hebrew scripture to assert that Jesus was a unique messianic figure, I mean that it is very difficult to reclaim some of the ideas of those writings if one believes that they applied specifically to one particular person. Lament psalms were meant to be available to a community and to any individual who experienced the kind of suffering and pain reflected in the poem/song. Connecting a lament psalm to Jesus takes it somewhat off the market for personal expression, because, from the perspective of believers, no one suffered or felt pain like Jesus.The lament becomes about Jesus' suffering instead of our own, and our own suffering is made insignificant by comparison.

Except that our own suffering isn't insignificant. Comparing it to someone who has suffered more might seem like our preoccupation with our own pain isn't legitimate, but that doesn't keep us from feeling the pain. It just gives us reason to feel guilty or ashamed about feeling our pain. One big lesson that we could take from understanding how the gospel writers and the early church made use of well-known Hebrew scriptures is to reclaim our experience. The original intent behind much of the prophetic writing in the Old Testament was for individuals and communities to be more intentional in their behavior and to have more integrity to their values. These ideas are not unique to the Old Testament. This has been a challenge in many cultures from many different perspectives throughout human history. Seen as such, the Hebrew scriptures become one resource among many resources to influence individuals toward living in a way that contributes to holistic well-being in their own lives and in the lives of their communities and neighborhoods. We need to experience our own suffering without being ashamed of feeling pain, and we need to recognize our own role in influencing our realities.

There are two symbolic results of the crucifixion that bear acknowledgment -- truths that the early church recognized and expressed as well as it could in the culture of the first century. First, there is that image of the curtain being torn in two. There is no separation between the divine and humanity. Since whatever we call divine is intrinsic to humanity, we can connect with those qualities within ourselves whenever we wish. We might become more skillful at introspection, but we are never denied access to our deepest, most noble self and we do not have to go through any particular ritual actions to connect with ourselves. God is a word people use to refer to a deep part of themselves, but we do not have to follow any linguistic protocol to connect with that part of ourselves that we could characterize as divinity.

Second, there is the idea of forgiveness. In the context of a covenant relationship between a supernatural and humanity, human beings had to somehow account for the things they did that were out of alignment with what their supernatural wanted. This is what the Jewish sacrificial system was largely about: staying in alignment with the values of their supernatural. It became something of an obsession in Jewish society. Keeping oneself pure, remaining personally in step with religious law, became more important than risky acts of justice or compassion. People were perhaps apt to disconnect from real, deep community because they didn't want to be scrutinized. Even today, a lot of people are more concerned about what they have done wrong, what other people have done wrong, what people might be thinking about doing wrong, or what wrong motives they may have had for doing something that seems quite good on the outside. It is also much easier to stay in a judgmental frame of mind when you're focused on how people are failing.

The early Christian church solved this issue, but most of them didn't seem to realize it. By inventing a dying and rising messiah figure who eliminated the need for ritual animal sacrifice, the early church essentially said, "We don't have to worry about sin anymore." This is not to imply licentiousness (although some people in the early church apparently did take it that way), but rather to say that the best thing to do when you fall short of your ideal is to get up -- hopefully with the help and embrace of a loving community of people -- and take another run at it. The idea of sinfulness is laced with shame, and it winds up not being incredibly helpful. If we were to accept that we have nothing to fear from getting something wrong, we might get past the self-obsession with where we might spend an imaginary afterlife and focus on things that matter right now -- like how we are in our relationships with the people we encounter every day.

Even for people who want to believe in the historical validity of the Passion story, then, there are these two big things that can transform the way we do life. We are not separated from whatever it is we call divine, and we are capable of making mistakes and moving on. There are often consequences when we fall out of alignment with our deep guiding principles, but those consequences don't have to come with shame or insurmountable guilt. We are human beings. We are not perfect. We will disappoint one another because we will have expectations of one another that go unmet. That's life. Our real work is not to try not to do anything wrong and to do whatever we can to make up for all of the mistakes we make. Our real work is to bring our capability into full engagement in the communities where we live.

This doesn't mean permissiveness with regard to harmful behavior. It means focusing on what will create greater well-being rather than what someone has done wrong. We never just do harm to one person; our harmful acts always affect ourselves and a whole network of people -- often even people that we will never meet. The idea behind grace is not that we shrug our shoulders and say, "Ah, well, I'll do better next time," but instead to direct our focus away from our own "eternal destinies" and toward how we can positively influence the world around us right now, in this moment. This is how we move beyond our fears of scarcity, fears of embarrassment, fears of insignificance, and fears of powerlessness and move into transformational relationships with the people around us. Whether the Passion story sources that kind of focus for you or whether you draw inspiration from somewhere else, we are capable of building incredible powerful connections with other people when we are willing to set shame aside and bring our authentic selves forward.

Mark 13: Days of Future, Past

Mark 13 contains several biblical passages that have fueled speculation about the "end times" throughout Christian history. Part of this speculation arises from assumptions about when the gospels were composed, and part of this speculation arises from a human desire to feel special. If you believe that you are among a select group of people who know an incredible secret, that can be very psychologically persuasive. Even for people like me who believe that there is no supernatural, it helps to have reminders that all human perception is limited -- it helps to know what would convince you to believe something different. If you don't know what would convince you to revise your beliefs, then your beliefs are more likely to be incongruous with reality. That is what happens to some people who believe that Mark 13 is describing something about their circumstances rather than the circumstances of people in the first century.

The Jewish people during the days of Roman occupation didn't like the Roman Empire very much. They staged rebellions every so often, and these rebellions were led by "messiahs" -- men who people thought would fulfill a prophetic role and establish a Jewish kingdom that surpassed all other kingdoms. Jesus was just one of a number of messiahs running around in the first century, but if the portrayal of Jesus in the gospels is anywhere close to an accurate depiction of an actual human being, he was not the typical militaristic messiah that people were becoming accustomed to seeing. Most messiahs collected a militia and struck out against Roman authorities. Eventually, as one might imagine, Rome became rather weary of this, and under the military leadership of Titus (who would become emperor), the temple in Jerusalem was destroyed in 70 CE. Literally, the stones of the temple were pushed down a steep hillside so that they could not be easily used to reconstruct the place.

People were scattered, some forcefully relocated and some fleeing to the hills. The historian Josephus reported that 97,000 Jews were captured or enslaved. Prior to the Roman attack, Caius Caesar had intended to have a statue of himself erected in the temple in Jerusalem (this was perhaps the desecrating sacrilege -- a term that refers back to the book of Daniel), but historical records suggest that he died before it could be installed. Another Roman emperor may have followed suit, or there may have been some other Roman religious paraphernalia installed at the temple. It is clear that Roman authorities pilfered the temple treasury, and that some of the Jewish sects known collectively as Zealots retaliated against what they saw as abuses of Roman rule. This chaotic environment was the norm of first century Jerusalem, but particularly during the period between 50 and 70 CE.

Logically speaking, the gospel of Mark, with its reference in chapter 13 to the destruction of the temple, must have been written after 70 CE. At least the version that we now have (and there are no extant complete copies of Mark that lack this "little apocalypse" section) must have been completed after the destruction of the temple. Some evidence (internal monetary and administrative terminology) suggests that Mark was written in or near Rome, which would make a great deal of sense in the aftermath of the siege of Jerusalem. The book also appears to be written to an audience of people already converted to Christianity, since is assumes familiarity with the Old Testament and includes themes of mature discipleship and comfort. If one insists that this biography was written in the midst of persecution, then this could push the date of composition to the end of Domitian's reign (89-96 CE), but its use by the authors of Matthew and Luke would limit the latest possible date for the document's completion to about 92 CE.

With that in mind, then, Mark 13 offers a contextualization of the destruction of the temple within the framework of Christian identity. Thus, all of the words about upheaval, persecution, fleeing to the hills, and false prophets or messiahs are about first century realities. You may have noticed the words, "this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place" (Mk 13:30), and you may have noticed that included in "all these things" that was supposed to happen before that generation passed away was that the Son of Man would visibly descend from the heavens, send forth angels, and collect those who were chosen for salvation from across the planet. This, as you may be aware, did not happen.

Attempts to reconcile this failure of prophecy with a belief that the Bible is absolutely true has caused a lot of people a lot of problems. Some believers interpret a different definition of "generation" and are still expecting a major supernatural event. Some believers want to include themselves as part of those who suffer persecution, assuming that public admonition or even ridicule is equivalent to being beaten in synagogues and tried before political authorities. More often than not, in developed nations, some Christians proclaim messages of hatred and judgment or try to deny people equal treatment under the law, and then wear the subsequent "persecution" as a badge of honor. Mark 13 is not talking about so misrepresenting the Christian message that you suffer adverse consequences in your society.

What can we derive from this collection of passages intended for first century people in a situation we will never experience? Consistently throughout the last two thousand years, people have predicted the end of the world, some of them Christian, and some of them thinking that they were following the advice of Mark 13, attending to the secret signs around them. No predictions about the end of the world have come to pass. Perhaps people are profoundly unskilled at interpreting signs, or perhaps people cannot actually make risky predictions about the future with any sort of accuracy. It even says right there in Mark 13:32-33 that nobody knows when this supernatural event will happen. The value in this chapter is not about how to predict things to come.

Rather, the value in this passage is recognizing that people need hope, especially in extremely dire circumstances. One reason that religion thrives is because it offers people hope. Sometimes they still take that hope and infuse it with anxiety, which is understandable given the level of anxiety in our world. Let's assume for a moment that there will not be a massive supernatural event in which all of the elect are gathered from across the world by the Son of Man. Let's assume for a moment that human fear is the biggest threat to our well-being -- our own fear and the fear of people around us. Fear is, after all, the underlying motivator of all of the first century upheaval as well as the upheaval we continue to see in the world. How do we respond to our circumstances if we have no firm grasp of the future? How do we respond to fear if we cannot trust a supernatural to eventually rescue us?

Sometimes I feel like I'm repeating myself, but this just seems like the best place to start, and I don't hear a lot of other people saying it. We have to recognize who we are, at a deeper level than our fears, at a deeper level than our daily struggles to make it through traffic and get a certain number of tasks done and pay our bills on time. We are human beings of inherent value who need connection with other human beings. And other people are human beings of inherent value who need connection with us. We are, at our core, loving beings -- even though our fear gets in the way. What we long for is the same thing that everyone else longs for: wholeness and well-being in every facet of our lives. We want to be able to express ourselves as individuals, and we want meaningful relationships with other people. We want our lives to have purpose, and we want hope that what we do will make a difference.

The remarkable thing is that we can create these things in our lives and in the lives of others. We can't know the future, but we can know ourselves. We can express ourselves authentically, and we can connect with other people. We can create meaning by reaching beyond our fears and recognizing what matters most in our lives -- who we most want to be in the world. We can help others create meaning in their lives, too. We create hope for ourselves and other people every time we recognize how little actions make a big difference in someone's life. Every time we recognize commonality or offer a simple smile to a stranger, we bring forward a little bit more the best possible versions of ourselves. With a little intentionality, we might be able to bring our deepest most noble selves forward even more. Whatever future that creates, we'll be more deeply satisfied with the journey.

Mark 12: Trick Questions and Clever Answers

So much of what passes for theological debate involves asking insincere trick questions or providing ambiguous clever answers. Such debate rarely increases understanding, but the smugness of participants in such debates seems to thrive on trick questions and clever (albeit unhelpful) answers. It is perhaps passages like the challenges to Jesus in the gospel narratives that have convinced people that the right clever answers can eventually win over a skeptic, although psychological research has demonstrated that debate only increases the persistence of one's belief, whether or not that belief is warranted. In Mark 12, the authors write of three questions that were allegedly intended to trick Jesus into saying something that would get him arrested. Of course, since Jesus is the hero of the story, the authors write his character as more clever than anyone who questions him. The authors of Matthew include these stories as a unit, almost verbatim as they appear in Mark, while the authors of Luke excerpt the third challenge to Jesus, appropriating it as an introduction to the parable of the good Samaritan (which does not appear in the gospel of Mark). We'll get to the good Samaritan story another time.

The first trick question in this passage deals with taxes. Roman taxes were debated quite a bit in Jewish society, mostly because the Jews saw the Romans as foreign occupiers and didn't want to give them anything. There are various teachings about taxes in the Talmud, and Jewish teachers were not of one mind. In the gospel stories, words put in Jesus' mouth are often very similar to the words of prominent Jewish teachers, primarily those who agreed with the views of Hillel the Elder, a well-known Jewish teacher who lived a generation before Jesus' supposed lifetime. From the perspective of these teachers, worrying about taxes was often seen as a distraction from living the kind of life one was supposed to live. The authors of Mark seem to echo this, although the answer given by the character of Jesus is far from clear.

This business about giving to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and giving to God what belongs to God is so subject to interpretation that it resolves nothing at all. It is the sort of answer that essentially says, "make up your own mind about the matter," but has all the appearance of a wise and clever answer. Many people seem to enjoy drawing the conclusion that everything belongs to God, but then they continue to live their lives as though they have rights of ownership. Some people imagine that they have been granted "stewardship" over a portion of what belongs to God, which entitles them to act as surrogate owners of a piece of God's property while he isn't using it. All of this, of course, is being taken completely out of the context of first century society, in which private ownership wasn't even a consideration. Kings and lords owned land and everything on it; the people were granted rights to live and work on the king's or lord's property. One cannot directly translate the lessons of a feudal society into an economic system that hinges on the concept of private ownership.

If we approach the concept with the idea that gods don't need money or property, not least of all because they are the products of human imagination, the answer to such questions becomes much easier to address. Pretending that there is a supernatural who must be taken into consideration with all human decisions is often just an excuse for people to claim entitlements that otherwise seem completely without foundation. Should one pay taxes? Does one benefit at all from the services those taxes fund? What would be the most equitable, just, and compassionate response to the needs of one's society? Is one prepared to suffer the legally enforceable penalties for non-payment of taxes? These questions may evoke differences of opinion, but they lead toward a more warranted response to taxation than questions based on subjectively interpreted religious constructs.

The second challenge is also an obvious trick question, pertaining to myths about the afterlife. One might think that the challenge was about Levirate marriage, but if the gospel writers were concerned about that issue, they would have had Jesus comment on that instead of on the conditions of the afterlife. Lots of people still make a considerable amount of money publishing books and speaking about an afterlife. It's very convenient, since no one can really contradict what anyone claims about afterlife, since any claims come out of the human imagination. Jesus' answer plays into the mythology of the day because the gospel authors bought into the mythology of the day.

In the twenty-first century, we wouldn't ask, "How can Pegasus fly, being the size of a normal horse?" If someone were to ask such a question, though, we would have a choice. We could say, "Pegasus has lighter bones than a regular horse, so he doesn't weigh as much as a normal horse." Or we could say, "There's no such thing as a flying horse. That's a story that came out of human imagination. Don't worry about how the horse flies, just enjoy the story for what it is." When it comes to questions about the afterlife, we seem much more inclined to make up answers that sounds good, even though we have no evidence or justification outside of our own imaginations. It's certainly a marketable option. If we were more honest, we might say, "There's no such thing as an afterlife. When we die, we're done. But if there were an afterlife, I would hope for it to be like _________." Instead, like the gospel writers, we pretend to know something that we don't know.

This doesn't seem like such a bad thing on the surface. Believing in an afterlife gives people comfort and hope, right? Well, sort of. If your heat goes out in the dead of winter and the temperature stays way below freezing for weeks on end, you might be comforted by the idea that the heat will come back on (or even that a supernatural will protect you from the cold). Being comforted and hopeful doesn't bring the heat back on, though. If you believe in a pleasant afterlife, maybe you will be comforted and hopeful enough that you won't mind freezing to death. That seems delusional, but there are an awful lot of people who spend an awful lot of money trying to communicate with people who have died, or who resist opportunities to improve their well-being because they believe that their afterlife will be filled with rewards for the hardships they face in this life. If comfort and hope are based on imaginary claims, then the comfort and hope are insubstantial and potentially harmful.

The gospel writers do indicate something important in this exchange, however. The idea that the Jewish god was not the god of the dead but of the living can have some traction beyond satisfying this trick question about mythology. Our deepest, most noble selves are not adversaries; deep down inside, we are not lifeless. While we are sometimes our own worst enemies because of the false beliefs we develop about ourselves, other people, and the world around us, at our core, we know what makes life satisfying. We hold the truths about our passions and we know what the best possible versions of ourselves would look like. When we turn inward, we are not looking to discover all the things we have done wrong or catalog regrets and failures. Connection with ourselves places us within a context of growth, of becoming, of abundant life. We don't need to be bolstered by mythology to create the lives we most want -- to develop into the best versions of ourselves possible.

When we consider the third challenge in this passage, the gospel writers have thrown an easy pitch. It was a major theme of Hillel the Elder (and the rabbis that followed his school of thought) that the whole of the Torah could be expressed in what we know as the "golden rule." So, this idea that the greatest commandments were to love Yahweh and to love others was a prominent ethic in first century Judaism. If this question had actually been asked of a historical Jesus, perhaps it was merely a way of asking, "Does what you teach agree with what I believe?" Perhaps all of these challenges were originally along those lines. The end result is that we get an impression that our loving actions are much more important than our religious practices.

Recontextualizing this portion of the passage to accommodate the understanding that there are no supernaturals for us to love or worship, and that any characteristics we call "divine" are human characteristics that all people possess, we wind up with something like this:

One man approached, overhearing the subject matter of their conversation, and seeing that the teacher was wise, he asked him, “What's the most important thing?” The teacher answered, “The most important thing is, ‘Pay attention: at your core, you are capable, beautiful, and creative; love yourself enough to connect with your deepest, most noble self and become the best possible version of yourself.’ The second most important thing is this, ‘Love other people with that same depth of connection, and see the capability, beauty, and inspiration in everyone else.’ There is nothing more important than these.” 

The question about the mythical messiah being David's son is a bit anticlimactic, but it seems to belong to this passage, at least as the passage was edited and rewritten over generations before it became the document we read today. It's a nonsense question, based on a poetic expression in a psalm. The psalms are as much poetry as anything else, and their language is poetic language. When we read that Yeats had a fire in his head, or that a trout he caught turned into a girl, or that he was going to pluck the silver apples of the moon and the golden apples of the sun, we don't take all of that literally. We don't believe that Yeats' head actually contained a fire, or that he actually caught a trout that actually turned into a girl. We don't believe that the moon and the sun have silver and gold apples. Such questions would miss the point of the poetic language. The same is true of the psalms. Perhaps that was the point of the gospel authors: all of these challenges are as silly as trying to pick apart the poetic language of a psalm and draw some sort of logical conclusion.

If there is anything to be gleaned from this passage, it is that we can get distracted by theoretical debates that have no foundation in reality, and in so doing, we can miss the more important things: Being the best versions of ourselves possible and empowering the people with whom we share this planet to do the same. The most important thing we can contribute to the world is to know ourselves well enough to recognize what we are really passionate about, to nurture our own ability to bring our own selves forward, and to create the kind of world we most want to live in. Incidentally, this also involves dismantling the fears and the false beliefs about ourselves and other people that keep us from connecting with our deepest, most noble selves. The second most important thing we can contribute to the world is to be present in the lives of the people around us. To see them as human beings of inherent worth, to listen to their dreams and challenges, to bear witness to their creativity and beauty, and to encourage and empower them as they grow and develop into the best versions of themselves possible. This is a lifelong engagement, and it's also what brings meaning to our lives. It's easy to get distracted by clever questions and answers, but how well we love ourselves and how well we love others is the answer to the most important questions.