Mister Naivete

❧
The Earth is hollow today. There is a feeling of emptiness that comes from the outside into the intimacy of what is. A line from an old hymn has been plaguing me lately:

"Blest be the tithes that bind
our hearts in Christian love... "

I don't know if I'm quoting the words right. It's an old hymn and surely in the public domain by now. I probably won't get sued because it's over a hundred years old or more since it was composed. It's just another of those childhood hymns we sang in church a lot. I remember those songs even when I don't remember the words of the songs I wrote myself.

What seems to be annoying me is the idea of tithing within a community. Tithing, such that you offer it of your own free will, as opposed to having your money taken from you by force. I wonder if that principle is strong enough with the great unwashed to incur their loyalty over a warlord or king or an emperor.

My intuition about tithing suggests that the Jesus stories are responsible for capitalism in that the interactions are non-violent. You don't chop people's hands off to get their widow's mite, you bamboozle it from them by promising the hope of a better tomorrow.

This doesn't seem so clear yet. Tithes get spent, ideally, for the good of the whole community as an effort to help as many people as possible. It doesn't always work because, inevitably, some sucker gonna grab the money and run, but when it does work there's a hell of a lot better chance of helping more people than when a tyrant takes the money by coercion and spends it glorifying himself.

When missionaries bring Christianity into a place they're really bringing capitalism. It's not that people haven't been trading goods since the bejinning of time, but Christianity came along and conquered people with trinkets and hope in writing.

As a boy growing up I didn't understand capitalism. If I was taught anything about it at all, it was that businessmen were like the moneychangers in the temple and were despicable to Jesus, and I ought not to be a person like that when I grew up.

How naive could I have possibly been. Worse, I still am not a person like that, and I'm not admired for it. On the contrary it's my neighbors most frequent excuse for dismissing me as an unadulterated fool. No blame.

Occasionally, in the last decade or so, I've wondered where my incentive to cop the attitude I've insisted upon went to. Not only is the thrill of living gone, but why I even sought it out no longer really makes any sense to me. I got no support whatsoever for living life the way I've done it. I am is the only-est one who considers my struggle heroic.

My children hate who they've been led to believe I am is, and their mothers purely despise me for not living up to their idea of what I should have been like to make their lives easier. How can I blame them for that? I'm not innocent. I too have sinned.

It's a hundred degrees with really high humidity again today, but it's supposed to ease off a little tomorrow and be a few degrees cooler for a few days. I force myself to get up and go walk to get some exercise and to maintain sanity. My lawn grass has been cut, and it's a lot easier to walk around the perimeter of my house.

It's easier to do my walking meditation without anybody looking at me. I can concentrate on coordinating my inhales and exhales with the repetitive counting I do to keep me steady on. I still practice smiling while I'm walking in order to be kind. It's just one more side dish to my walking entree. Nobody knows.
❦