Death And Duty

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My bad credit record caught up with me again last week when I tried to buy an iPhone. I might be able to get some cell phone before its all over but the shouting. That eerie silence might be soon if my life depends on this bowl of soup I am is eating at three o'clock in the morning. Its been in the refrigerator for a while. How long, exactly, I'm not too sure. I nuked it for about three minutes, so it's dead for sure

Life is all about death recently. My sister-in-law's youngest brother has rheumatoid arthritis like I do, but with complications I don't have yet. He has forth-stage throat cancer and its not a pretty sight. He has his own house, but she moved him into their old house, which is located next to my house.

I visited her yesterday afternoon to return a router me and my brother thought we might need to get the computer network setup, and to pay him for the ethernet cable he bought for me on sale. She invited me to come in and talk for a while, and it soon became obvious that she needed to chat for a while to get her mind off of her sick brother.

She knows I understand these things. I was with my father before he died and lived with my mother for over two years without working. It was a hard time to witness her lose her mind and eventually her body, but she didn't know who she was when she finally died, and thus, the woman who was my mother and my father's wife did not taste death. A human animal did, but not the personality that she developed to serve those ends.

This not "tasting death" proposition has been on my mind lately because that's the phrase the early Christian writing labeled The Gospel of Thomas calls it. At the beginning of it the promise is made that if one understands the sayings contained within this gospel they "will not taste death".

There is an e-mail discussion list about the Gnostic Gospels. More specifically we discuss the Gospel of Thomas, but there are lots of so-called Gnostic Gospels and Thomas is just one of them. It's not a heavily moderated group, so anybody discusses about anything they want to.

My interest in participating in these discussions has to do with the way I rejected the Southern Baptist religion that was being forced on me. Presently I conclude that it was the right thing for me to do, in fact, there is a saying that specifically says so:

55 Jesus said, "Whoever does not hate father and mother cannot be my disciple, and whoever does not hate brothers and sisters, and carry the cross as I do, will not be worthy of me."

http://users.misericordia.edu//davies/thomas/Trans.htm

When I was rejecting the Protestant religion I was raised in I wasn't aware these sayings existed. As far as I was concerned I was doing it as the normal teenager rebellion people in Western cultures have grown to accept as a passing fancy, and for most people it apparently is a "phase" of growing up.

Not me. I tried in some ways to get over my rebellious feelings and gradually rejoin the literal church of people I grew up with and around, but the vision quest I accepted (seemingly of my own volition), that I call the "go ye therefore" mission because it is part of the KJV, literally prevented me from re-dedicating myself to the Southern Baptist community.

This discussion group I participate in led me to an early Christian group who were called the Doceticists. Some of their contemporaries including the Roman Catholic Church rejected their views as untenable, and tried to burn all their literature. The Gnostic Gospels only survived because they were buried in a large ceramic jar that was only found in 1945, six years after I was born, and not translated properly for a long time afterward, and they're still being redacted constantly today.

The Doceticists had one belief that threw them out of whack with the Catholics, and that was the fact that they refused to worship a spiritual Christ who could become human. They didn't accept the God-as-man theory of worship. Neither do I. The writer Anne Rice stated it well, "I haven't given up on Christ, I've given up on the church."

It's my sense of things that she was referring to the Catholic Church. I can't say that because I only know what shows up in the media about the Catholic Church. I've been exposed to it a little through it's songs I sang in college glee clubs, and I've watched the stuff on TV about the abuse of it's priests, but the purportedly terrible things they do are as prevalent in the Protestant religion.

The "go ye therefore" ritual I undertook was not my conscious intention when I entered it. As far as I was concerned I briefly "ran away from home" when I was fifteen years old and hitch-hiked from North Carolina down to my grandparent's house in Mississippi, because I couldn't justify my hatred of my parents for their attempt to make me into their bitch.

I literally didn't realize at the time or for many decades later, that their treatment of me was probably better than how many if not most kids in the Bible Belt got treated: Spare the rod, spoil the child. It was only much later that I realize that the route I had taken was common for people seriously seeking their own identity. One that didn't die when the body dies. One that "doesn't taste death".

Maybe it was the famous psychologist Adler who called this process "individuation". That label works for me more than the more romantic ones like "enlightenment" or "peak experience". It's quite simple. Every aspect of what one has been taught they are gets stripped away until there is nothing left but you and the docetic Christ. In that case, it's easy to see that you are not Christ, so you must be what you've been calling "me" all your life, as in "Thou shall not worship any other God before 'me'."

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