Sabbath Messages > Sabbath Message: April 15, 2006
Good Sabbath
April 15, 2006
Spirituality is a value term. It involves a vision of the good. Good is the reasoned and spontaneous actions that assist humanity rather than self, for the highest calling is to be true to God on high and to each other ,right here.
"Our God and God of our fathers, accept our rest. Give us abundantly of Thy goodness." The human mind is anything but finite, for it still evolves towards individuality as it clings to reason in spite of human nature, and longs for nature in spite of environmental insensitivity, and is mischievous from childhood through maturity. And what then? Who knows, for all of life-- each day--is a lasting experiment as rationality duels with mischief and we become-ourselves.
For, no two brains are the exactly the same. Each brain changes throughout our lifetime altered by experience and aging. Yet, we constantly study individuals as a group, for polls and directional hints, as we long to know the future, which is unknowable! Scientists study the brain like a biologist dissects frogs, certain that this is a frog. The main truth about our minds is that they are human in nature, almost similar in structure, and unknowable, for sure.
We study the brain for the location of pain and then take an aspirin and hope it goes away. We have a stroke and search the brain to see where it happened so that we can heal what was short circuited-if we are lucky. As we age, we lose short-term memory at best, or rationality, at worse. Death cleanses the brain as the search goes on to explore immortality or heaven or the true unknown. Science fiction explores what is possible and doesn't care if it seems impossible. Our imaginations take over when impossibilities are denied by facts. Truth lies beyond fact!
A new author, Winifred Gallagher, explores the home: "House Thinking: A Room-by-Room Look at How We live". This is the subject I have studied for over 50 years, by speaking to tens of thousands of consumers. "Men say that they are happiest in their basements.(Hmmm, I haven't had a basement since moving to Southern California so many decades ago). To a man, the basement is a retreat, a bar, a game or hobby room, a workshop. And the female? It is their bathroom because it has a lock and privacy is another form of heaven. The auto will someday lose its possession of us when total privacy becomes impossible as it ensnarls us in a constant jam, with ill-mannered fellow-humans. It won't be the cost of fuel but rather the total captivity of the commute that will change the habit.
As China changes into the biggest this and that, and Russia changes back to the USSR, and India goes from the largest poor house to the fastest growing middleclass, what then will America be, and by whose power and will we become better or spoil ourselves into far below second place. We have become holier than thou, longing for God to rescue us from ourselves as God wonders why His creations refuse to learn from history and experience. Are we stuck forever in our nature?
As Easter reminds us of the beauty of Jesus Christ and Passover reminds us of humans love affair with freedom, can we join one with the other as meant to be, the beauty of freedom? Perhaps this Sabbath holiday can bring us closer instead of praying to the same God in different languages.
Happy Easter, Passover and Sabbath
sandy
