Alferian's · Journal

We decided to get my daughter an old iBook 300 for her ninth birthday and it arrived this week, so naturally I've been busy in all the spare moments explaining things to her and today we went to get it a new battery and the software and hardware needed for her to connect to our wireless internet network.  We'll see if all that works.  Meantime, I found a really cool software program that is used for designing houses and landscaping.  I bought it to speed up my work on Avalon Center's physical campus designs and, I hope, render them in attractive presentation form to show to potential patrons and donors to the Center.  However, predictably, the new program required me to upgrade my OS from Panther to Tiger and so now I am learning the world of wonders programmed into Mac OS 4 -- Owl learning how Tigger works.

Today has been nothing but running from one doctors appointment to another and to the computer store in between.  In less than an hour I have to be off to the lodge to rehearse the role of Jubela (the first of the three "ruffians") in the 3rd degree ritual drama.   --- and then of course the doorbell just rang and it was a fundraiser.  Arrrrrrgggggg!

I'm quite sympathetic to fundraisers as I'm trying to learn how to do it myself and want to get some people to help raise funds for Avalon Center.  But I really hate door-to-door fundraising and phone calls.  It works, of course, especially on weak-minded, soft-hearted chaps like me, but I would feel guilty of coersion applying such methods myself.  People need to be given the time to think and ponder their budgets. Too much fundraising of this sort aims to manipulate people's charitable emotions at the expense of their family's budget.  Now, I know that many American households (especially in my neighborhood) have two incomes and spend loads of money on stuff (like computers) and that perhaps that money would be better put to political action groups or charities.  But it is a powerful moral dilemma to know where to draw that line.

Jesus reputedly said, give away everything you own and follow me.  Well, I don't think I've ever met a Christian who actually did that, but Jesus also said that it was easier for a camel to get through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into heaven.  This is a remark typical of Jesus, who liked to talk in witticisms and metaphors.  It is often taken to mean that just as it is clearly impossible for a camel to be put through the eye of a needle, so no rich man will ever get into heaven.  I had a biblical studies teacher once explain that in old Jerusalem there was a particularly small gate into the city which was called (in Hebrew of course) "The Eye of the Needle" due to its smallness.  For a laden camel to enter the city through this gate it had to be completely unloaded and still had to stoop down.  In other words, not impossible, but the camel had to be divested of all its merchandise (software upgrades as well as electronics).  Possibly the camel could keep its iPod earphones on...  Anyway, this is a lovely metaphor or analogy.  The rich man, carrying the weight of all that stuff (today probably in an SUV) has to divest himself of all of it to "get into heaven." 

But what does it mean to "get into heaven"?  You know that's always been a poser.  The medieval Church (if not the earlier more sophisticated Greek and Jerusalem Christians) developed the idea that Heaven was a particular place, the place of the afterlife, like the Greek Elysian Fields.  Lots of writers developed their own imaginary ideas about what that was like -- playing harps, singing praises to God the Father all day, floating on clouds.  These imaginings must have come from priests and monks.  The Islamic afterlife is considerably more like that imagined by the ancient Norse and the Celts -- a place wherer warriors got to fight all the time and never died and came home at the end of the day to marvelous feasts and lots of attention from the opposite sex (or whatever their preference might be, in the case of the Celts, apparently).  All in all, it is supposed to be a nicer place than here, our mundane earthen lives.  No disease, poverty, though the matter of rank and status was not wholly abandoned, as there certainly were hierarchies of angels (at least in the Roman idea of Heaven). 

But is that what Jesus meant?  I mean, the rest of the story is allegorical or analogical, so is "Heaven" a metaphor too?  A symbol, as it were, of a place within oneself, a paradise of love, charity, and peace, joy, praise of the Deity, appreciation of the sensuous in life, appreciation of beauty?  In short, is not "Heaven" that inner place, temple, or city that we build within our own soul that is as we might say, Enlightenment? 

I do not mean to suggest that Heaven or the Celtic Otherworlds are not real, that they are "only" symbols.  The enlightened mind sees that realities are also symbols and symbols realities and that there is no distinct separation between those categories.  So, yes, you might die and really go to a lovely place with young, immortal people, doing the things you loved to do in life, and experience an existence of pleasure and complete health.  It might be for eternity, or it might be simply timeless so that if you tired of it you could choose to be reborn into the world of time.  Rather like leaving the sauna and jumping into the frozen lake just for the change, the shock, the excitement, the risk, and because it doing so actually is healthy for your body and soul.  But if such existence is just as real as the one here where I sit typing at my Mac in my study while the Sun sets on a late Summer's day, it is also symbolic of an inner existence, an inner state of being, or even, as we sometimes say, state of consciousness.  Heaven, Valhalla, the Otherworlds within the mind and soul.   We are in it, and it is in us.

But I digress from my title topic of this entry, which included also Harry Potter.  I was very pleased this morning to, at last, after years of cajoling, finally convince my daughter (now nine) to permit me to read the first Harry Potter book to her.  Egads, that girl is stubborn when it comes to anything she thinks might be scary!   I read to her for about two hours this morning after we took mama to work and she was drawn into the story, wanted more, and was delighted.  She has heard enough about the stories her whole life almost to know a few things that are coming, which seems to delight her all the more.  She doesn't like to be completely surprised by anything. 

So, all in all, it was a good day, even though I am tired.  I've made myself some eggs and sausages and potatoes for dinner and will be off to the lodge shortly for fun with the lads.

So it goes.

Alferian

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