Long ago and far away there was a farmer.
One day, a storm blew thru the county he lived in and knocked down a portion of his fence. The farmer had forty sheep inside the pen and every last one of them escaped.
“What terrible luck!” The townspeople said.
“Maybe.” Replied the farmer.
A few days later a herd of wild horses wandered into the pen thru the opening the storm had left. The farmer, working quickly, got some old posts from behind the barn and cobbled together a fence repair, hemming the horses in. Forty sheep lost but twenty horses gained. A tremendous increase in wealth!
“What fantastic luck!” The townspeople said.
“Maybe.” Replied the farmer.
In the days that followed the farmer’s son took a liking to the new horses. Soon enough he started trying to ride them. The young man had some early successes but eventually he attempted to ride a stallion who simply did not want to be ridden. The horse bucked hard and threw him and the boy fell, breaking his leg. It was early Autumn and a son with a broken leg is not much use. The farmer would be hard pressed to complete the harvest before the first frosts came with Winter.
“What terrible luck!” The townspeople said.
“Maybe.” Replied the farmer.
A few weeks later the king’s men came round. There was to be a war with the next kingdom over and every able bodied young man was to enlist. When they saw the farmer’s son with his broken leg they granted him an exemption, and turned around and trotted off. The war turned out to be quite bloody. Many died, but the farmer’s son was saved and eventually healed and walked again.
“What fantastic luck!” The townspeople said.
“Maybe.” Replied the farmer.
***
So we don’t know what will happen. We don’t really know, either, what will or will not be good for us. Every choice we make has associated with it a near endless amount of possible outcomes. Things that might happen. It is therefore easy to become paralyzed by indecision. Anxious people are those with good imaginations who can see all the possible bad outcomes of anything they choose to do. With that imagination comes a sense of responsibility to try and figure out the best solution, to try an analyze and think and figure to make sure you don’t choose wrong. Guilt also. When we make a choice, and it turns out poorly, we think back and say, “If only I’d chosen different. If only I’d thought it through a little more.” I have noticed that what actually happens to people is seldom the cause of their misery. It is the worry over choices about the future and guilt concerning choices about the past. That’s all. It’s all just worry. Worry and fear.
The first time I went sky diving I was very worried. I had perhaps reason to be as I’m still to this day uncertain if the man who took us up had any certifications or licenses of any kind. He was an older gentlemen who walked with a limp he got in “'Nam”, the same place he’d learned to parachute. I asked him before we suited up if anybody had ever died on his jumps. “Yes.” He said in deadpan monotone. “Of course.” This did not relieve our anxiety.
I was there with my two roommates from college. Peter and Preston. It had been Peter’s idea. He was a bit of a wild one. Preston, by contrast, was extremely reserved, shy, and monstrously tall. 6’ 7’’ I believe. Preston had never flown in a plane before. Last I checked, he had flown in a plane, this once with me, but he’d still never landed in one. Preston kept repeating to us when the ‘Nam veteran’s back was turned. “We should go.” “Guys… guys… this isn’t a good idea. We should go.”
‘Nam went over how the parachutes worked and about ten minutes into his speech his wife came rolling up the dirt road to the little county airport with a Cessna Sky Hawk on flatbed trailer.
“Here’s our ride!” ‘Nam shouted with glee.
“We should go guys.” Preston repeated. “This isn’t a good idea. We should go.”
“So are we going up one at a time?” Peter asked the instruction ended. “You’re the only instructor. Are we each going to take turns doing tandem?”
“Tandem?” Said ‘Nam. “Tandem’s for p******.”
“Hmm…” Peter nodded. This was apparently what you got when you picked your skydiving instructor off of Craigslist.
“Guys we should go. Guys this isn’t a good idea.”
As we flew up, the three of us jammed into the back of this suspiciously modified Cessna, my heart was doing somersaults and my stomach turning flips. Anxiety after anxiety. Worry after worry. Was this a bad idea? Was I about to die? Why was I in this plane? Should I just tell ‘Nam I want to ride back down?
I think ‘Nam saw the fear in my eyes.
“Don’t be a p****.” ‘Nam said. “The enemy can smell fear.”
Who the enemy was was not clear.
Because the body of a Cessna narrows toward the tail we had been jammed in by order of height. Peter was the shortest. I the middle. And Preston, the man who’d never flown before and wanted less than anything to be here, was at the front.
“You’re up.” ‘Nam said to Preston, sliding open the door.
Preston’s entire body was shaking. “So I just… I just jump?”
“Don’t be stupid.” Said ‘Nam. “Didn’t you listen to the instructions? You jump out here the tail will hit ya. You gotta climb out a little on the wing.”
This, by the way, is a true story.
A few minutes later, I watched Preston flying thru the air hanging on a specially made bar affixed to the underside of an airplane wing. The wind blew his body back such that he was stretched out, laying prone in the sky like superman.
“I’m coming back in!” He shouted, now wishing to reverse his peer pressured decision.
“Don’t be a p****!” Screamed ‘Nam.
“I’m not doing it!” There was no color left in Preston’s face. Pale as a bed sheet. “I’m coming back in!”
At just that moment, we hit a pocket of turbulence. The plane shook violently up and down. Preston’s grip slipped. One hand came loose from the bar and I beheld for the first time in my life an expression of pure, unadulterated terror. I can’t imagine he’d have been more afraid if we were being charged by the Vietcong.
The other hand failed.
In an instant, Preston was gone.
“He’ll be fine.” ‘Nam assured us. “Just remember what I told ya. Climb out. Let go. Count ten. Pull. Easy.”
Then it was my turn. To this day I have not experienced a more anxiety ridden moment in my all life. I was making a decision. A decision I could reverse at any time. I could call it off. I could turn around. As Preston had wanted to do, I could climb back in that plane and ride it all the way to the ground.
Decisions.
Then, I let go.
Every drop of anxiety disappeared.
It was surreal. I discovered to my amazement that the falling wasn’t actually scary. What had been tormenting me, and the only thing that had been tormenting me, was the possibility that I might be making the wrong choice. Now, that possibility no longer existed. Wrong or right, the choice was made. Anxiety was gone.
“Well,” I thought. “Too late to turn back now.”
When there’s nothing you can do it’s not possible to be anxious. When you are likewise convinced that there’s nothing you could have done differently or better in the past, your sense of guilt similarly melts away. In like manner, the only way to get passed worrying about the future is to accept, like the farmer, that you don’t really know what will be good or what will be bad. So. Worry is pointless. Every single thing I did on that parachuting excursion seemed like a bad decision, sure. But was it? I walked away fine, with a fun story to tell, and Preston and Peter did too. So it seemed like it would be bad but it wasn’t. We can never know such things. Accepting that is your path towards union with God.
I am. The trinity. I and my father are one. My father and your father. That all may be one, just as you and I are one.
Christian scripture and tradition are full of a mysterious interplay between the one and the many. God is singular, but also plural. We are separate from him, but also not sometimes. We are individuals, but also we are one body, made up of many parts. Such a position is ripe for criticism. The apparent inability to distinguish if God is even one person or not seems to scream that the whole thing is just made up. As the New Atheists used to say before they decided to sodomize themselves into irrelevancy, such a stance can make it seem like what we call “God” is just an amalgamation of older traditions. You know, as though Yahweh were the result of combining a bunch of Mesopotamian deities Mr. Potato Head style into a new entity. The clues of this historical process allegedly present in the seemingly ill defined nature of his plurality. Islam too takes aim at the Trinity, as do Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons, on much the same grounds. The question of self and other then, of I and thou, is in some respects the central question of the whole thing. Maybe the central question of everything. Can we be united with God? Are we already? What, if anything, would that even mean?
Well you’re certainly not united with God when you are anxious. Nor when you are worried. Nor afraid. It is only when you let go of all such things. Only when you give yourself over in complete and total abandonment to the care of the universe that you find it.
Why?
Because what’s the alternative? The alternative is that you’re always running around trying to control everything. Which, of course, is the same thing as trying to set yourself up as God on your own, in isolation. Out of fear, out of a lack of faith, you end up frantically going about trying to eliminate all possible negative outcomes that your anxious mind can conjure for each and every one of your decisions. You boss people around. You fill up your schedule. You hedge your bets. You click your seat belt and re-up your insurance policies and make sure to get your daily dosage of Vitamin B. Everywhere, all the time, trying to mitigate risk. Trying to control.
And it makes us a perfectly worried, boring wreck.
No one is more trapped in himself than the worried mind. No one more trapped in ego. The worried mind thinks so highly of itself that it believes that it can not only know the future but also do something about it. It believes that it can, through force of will, make the universe behave.
Never works though. No go.
But what if you did the opposite? What if you let go control? What if you decided, truly, to do what Jesus told you, and to give no thought whatsoever for tomorrow? Well… then you’d get a chance to see if God was going to step in and take care of you or not. Yeah? You would get a chance to see if, maybe, just maybe, moves might happen in the universe to ensure your benefit. And then… once you see that they do. Once you see that you are not an alien here. That you, a man or a woman, are just as much a part of creation and just as loved as any tree or any bird and that God hasn’t abandoned you. Well, then you might just begin to see that you were always one with all of it. That you, Jane Thomson or Bill Stevens or whatever your name may be, are just as much a part of Everything as your own little toe is apart of your body. The boundaries between yourself and all the rest of creation might begin to break down as you realize that what they are doing in their own self interest is also of benefit to you. And you don’t need to control it. That in fact it works better if you don’t. You don’t need to force the trees to provide you oxygen, they want to. Just as you want to give them CO2 in return. You might realize that all of life can be like that and that the only thing stopping it is your fear that it won’t work.
Maybe.
But the secret you see is that this cosmic unity is only accomplished thru the existence of a strong individual ego. An ego that chooses to let go. We are only known by me. It is only by treating all that is not me as truly other, as truly separate, as truly not under my control, that I begin to notice that it is nonetheless working for my benefit because we are indeed one. In this way you retain your individual identity while also coming to see that you are indeed a part of God. “Is it not written, you are gods?” As Jesus said.
At long last I and thou are wed and, in the process, neither is destroyed.
This hits home for me. I make very little income and run a deficit each month yet all my bills get paid and my family has never gone hungry. After years of trying to get out of poverty im ready to give up and accept it but that takes more faith than i have. Finances seem more and more like an illusion but i cant bring myself to really believe that "there is no spoon".