My family has deep roots in the American Lutheran Church. We are Protestants. We protest against the sins of Humanity before an angry but supposedly merciful God.
Our God is constipated.
Our God struggles against punishing us beyond our deaths.
Lutherans seem to be natural authoritarians, admiring and aspiring to order in all facets of life, personal and institutional. After all, what true revolutionary would build an almost identical church just with a different colored robe for the priests or preachers or whatever they call them nowadays? In the 2020s, they’d call this spinning up a start-up competitor, and the Catholic Church should have sued the early Protestants for copyright infringement if such a thing had been around back then.
A true revolutionary would have ultimately walked away from their Church as Krishnamurti did. Jesus would have dumped the wine on all these fools heads and told them, “Hit the fuck outtaheah.” A true revolutionary would have found a better story to listen to and then mostly kept it to themselves because words like violence break the silence, come crashing down through our tiny worlds, right on the heads of all the boys and girls. That’s religion in America, that old-timey, take over the Supreme Court, and gag all the women kind of religion. It’s been bullshit for centuries.
Why is it so easy for a child to get ahold of a gun in America, but they can’t find God inside themselves, even with these supposed Sunday morning maps these Churches hand out?
The goal of the first half of our lives is to find something beyond ourselves inside ourselves.
The goal of the second is to find something beyond me outside of me. If I can’t find whatever that word “God” points to inside my heart, I’ll never find it in a baby’s smile, a lover making love with me, a puppy playing, or a stranger scowling at me when I pass by them on a busy city street.
I was blessed to have a religious awakening happen to me when I was 19; it changed everything about my life and character. But I belong to no church, except the one in my home office, where I keep all my books and guitars. Everyone needs a room of their own to worship inside, especially all the well-intentioned atheists, those poor souls who put their faith in the creaky leaky wooden vessel instead of the mercy of the Ocean, where it belongs.
A drunken Lutheran might philosophize that order occurs when human beings consistently obey Laws Of Moral Righteousness as interpreted by a select few, and maybe just One.
The Human Year Book has too much pain, suffering, theft, and murder. It could drive a good person mad thinking about it.
Pink Floyd recorded a song titled Us And Them about the lines we draw and defend on the maps of our hearts. That song was on a record named Dark Side Of The Moon, and the whole album was about the things that make Humans crazy.
Rumor has it that this all began when the rock the Church was built on put a cannon up and realized that it paid well and felt pretty good to kill people and take their lands for peace while pointing to the sky to try to cry.
Pointing to the sky with crocodile tears, while poor people with darker skin suffer and die to preserve a sick peace, is the same philosophy modern conservatives in America have about putting high-capacity firearms in children’s hands. Most of them would call it a necessary evil. But people with hearts and minds that work together just call it evil.
I went to Lutheran Church as a boy with my grandma, and the focus of Lutheranism is mainly on the suffering of Jesus. My grandma was a devout Lutheran to her last breath. She died from Covid in 2020, holding her Bible and cross while merciful nurses sang a hymn to her because no one from her family was allowed to watch her die. Yet, she was ready to meet Jesus the entire 45 years I knew her on this planet. No one’s faith was as strong as my grandmother's. And she suffered much in this life. Yet, like her poverty, she wore suffering as a cloak of dignity.
The suffering Christ hanging on the wall behind the pulpit was the biggest icon in the Church she took me to every Sunday. I went with her until I grew old enough to put my foot down and tell her it was a waste of my time. I’m sure it broke her heart, but I couldn’t take it any longer, and I have a mean streak like a badger that often hurts the people I love most, which is also a form of suffering. It wasn't nice when I was a child. It was worse when I was a mannish boy, but it has gotten better since my children taught me how to love unconditionally, even through blinding anger and pulsing neutron stars of all the things that annoy me about living.
Suffering leads to salvation; that’s what good Lutherans believe. But I was never a good Lutheran. I do not think that the natural state of Human Beings is to suffer. Neither did Krishnamurti, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Bagwan, Jesus, Chief Seattle, or the Buddha. All of those great teachers say the same thing, “Fucking get over yourself, big mouth.”
I’ve found from my white cis upper-middle-class perch of privilege and whatever passes for safety nowadays that suffering is the residue of intense and active emotion. Whether joy or misery, suffering has a brief and fleeting shelf life. It passes, or at least it can pass if we let it.
I think of our Human suffering as a screen door. The small spaced screens let nothing but a little bit of air through. But a screen with larger spaces in the weave could even let the big bugs pass through. Trauma and suffering are big bugs, and if the screens are woven wide enough in the doors of our souls, those big bugs will pass through without even grazing the sides. It’s like a perfect game of Operation.
Those big trauma bugs fly on past us to other places, and we let them go.
What do we care about where our trauma goes after it passes us by? So let it go and be gone; it’s the only way we’ll find out what happens after suffering ends.
What Happens After Suffering Ends?