Welcome to a Peaceful New Year!

Well, that may be too much to expect. No matter how much peace and goodwill we create in our lives and among our family, friends, and associates, external forces (such as corporations and politicians) do their best to disrupt us. Because those forces keep us desperate, we will buy whatever the corporations want to sell and go along with whatever the politicians want to foist on us. The classic example is the family with two breadwinners and three jobs that does not have enough time to eat healthy or to work for social and economic change. Corporations, and governments that support those corporations with tax dollars, are happy to supply the unhealthy food.

But the more peace we can have in our own lives, (1) the happier and healthier we will be despite our circumstances, and (2) the more independent we will be of the dominant forces of society as well. To find inner peace, we do not have to subscribe to a specific spiritual doctrine or purchase a special kind of health food. All we have to do, as much as possible, is to find a regular balance in all the things we do in life, all of them in moderation. If we can, that is.

By balance I refer mainly to keeping a regular schedule with your biological clock. More or less regular times for getting up and going to sleep, for eating, and seeking mindful relaxation. One of the worst things we can do—I say from the experience of having done them and then quit—is to let other people control our minds and create tension, mostly from television. Unsubscribe, folks, and save yourselves a lot of money. I quit cable in 2002 and since that time I have saved $10,000. Not sure where that money went, but it didn’t go to cable. Learn to cherish silence. Worked for me. Instead, I read and write. Usually in silence.

We become most aware of the disruption of our biological clocks when we experience jet lag. Everything seems to go out of balance, not just our cycles of sleep and wakefulness. But it is not just jet lag but poor daily time management that can disrupt our biological clocks.

Medical assistance may be necessary. If you have sleep apnea, as I did, surgery or a ventilation device may be helpful. Get rid of apnea and you will get your life back. At least I did. I also have sleep onset myoclonus, which is a kind of torture that even Dick Cheney never thought of: at the moment of sleep onset, my muscles contract just enough to wake me up. Maybe just a little muscle, maybe a lot of big ones. Over and over and over and over. Medication brought this under control. There is heavy-duty medication, but hemp oil may work just as well. I used to take regular naps; now, maybe three times a year.

An article was published in the November 25 issue of Science in 2016 (volume 354, pages 1008-1015): “Circadian physiology of metabolism,” by Satchidananda Panda of the Salk Institute in La Jolla. This link takes you to the summary; full articles are available only to AAAS members. In this article, the author summarized the many different disorders that can result from disruption of the biological clock:

• Obesity
• Insulin resistance
• Disruption of gut microbes
• Cardiovascular problems
• Chronic inflammation
• Liver disease
• Increased cancer risk
• High cholesterol
• Sleep disorders
• Compromised muscle function

What a list! All of these physiological effects are interrelated, and related to the biological clock. Disrupted sleep can make you fat, give you diabetes, make your intestines sick, and increase the risk of other problems. I was astonished to see this list. I have some of these problems in small measure; what a walking sicko I would be if I did not seek to live in harmony with my biological clock.

I have found that, by mindfully seeking inner peace and following a regular schedule, I am seldom tired. For this, I must also thank certain medications. But we must enable such medications to work by seeking regularity and balance. Even when I have no work to do, I find myself reading and writing—I am on vacation right now—because they are not, for me, stressful. I rest the way the heart muscle rests: between each beat.

Was Ben Franklin right? Early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise. Seems too simple. But if Franklin read that Science article, he would have claimed vindication.

I posted the above on my science blog. For this blog, I would like to add that, in this particular sense, modern science is in line with traditional religious practice. One example is from the beginning of Ecclesiastes, chapter 3:

1 There is a time for everything,
    and a season for every activity under the heavens:

²     a time to be born and a time to die,
    a time to plant and a time to uproot,
³     a time to kill and a time to heal,
    a time to tear down and a time to build,
⁴     a time to weep and a time to laugh,
    a time to mourn and a time to dance,
⁵     a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
    a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,
⁶     a time to search and a time to give up,
    a time to keep and a time to throw away,
⁷     a time to tear and a time to mend,
    a time to be silent and a time to speak,
⁸     a time to love and a time to hate,
    a time for war and a time for peace.

If you do not remember this from the Bible, you may (depending on how old you are) remember the song by The Byrds.

And Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount to not worry about things. Of course, you have to plan ahead about things in order to not worry about them. I have lists and lists and lists, and as a result I do not have to worry about whether something is escaping my attention. Here is the French translation of some of what he said (Behold the lilies of the field…).

Observer les lis sauvages! Ils poussent sans se fatiguer à tisser des vêtements. Pourtant, je vous l’assure, le roi Salomon lui-même, dans toute sa gloire, n’a jamais été aussi bien vêtu que l’un d’eux! Si Dieu habille avec tant d’élégance la petite plant des champs qui est là aujourd’hui et qui demain sera jetée au feu, à plus forte raison ne vous vêtira-t-il pas vous-mêmes?

Isn’t that beautiful? A more or less literal translation is:

Observe the wild lilies! They grow without fatiguing themselves to weave clothes. But I assure you King Solomon himself, in all his glory, was never as well clothed as one of them! If God clothes with such elegance the little plant of the fields which is there today and which tomorrow will be thrown into the fire, how much more reason will he not clothe you yourselves?

We are accustomed to finding conflict between science and religion. But when we do find agreement, it is a time for celebration.

Consider the Lilies

One of my favorite sayings of Jesus, many of which were later condensed into a single Sermon on the Mount, is to “Consider the lilies of the field.” The lilies to which he referred were the wildflowers that blanketed the Galilean hillsides briefly in the early spring, before withering away in the summer—just as they still do in the Middle East and other similar climates such as that of California. As a botanist, I really like this passage. Many of these spring wildflowers are, in fact, lilies.

Jesus did not say to glance at the lilies and then forget about them, or to walk past them while you are looking at a scroll or a cell phone. You have to stop and look carefully at them. They are so small that you will probably have to get down on your knees to do it. You will have to pull one of them apart to see the full glory of their structure hidden inside. When you do so, you will find Jesus’ promise fulfilled: “Even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed as one of these.” That is, the most amazing creations of humankind cannot compare with even one of thousands of short-lived flowers.

Jesus did not say to glance at the lilies and then believe whatever your preacher says they should look like, but to consider what they actually look like. But there are millions of fundamentalists (not quite all of them in Oklahoma where I live) who will believe whatever their preachers say, even regarding things they could easily go and look at for themselves. These deluded followers will not even bother to read the Bible, about which they actually know very little, for themselves, but just believe what the preachers tell them it says.

Jesus did not say to ignore the lilies of the field while driving your tractor or four-wheeler over them, or while pouring chemicals on them, or while paving them over or peeing on them.

I recommend that you actually get down on your knees to look at the flower, rather than picking it and holding it in your fingers. By picking it you have already vanquished it and made it into a thing, an expendable resource, rather than a living being with which you share the world. Pick it only if you are dissecting it for closer study.

I like to believe that if people who consider themselves Christians will actually get down on the ground and look at a wildflower, this will begin a cascade of consequences that will make them start thinking for themselves rather than just believing their preachers. This is important since some preachers, most famously Pat Robertson, tell them that God wants them to believe everything that Donald Trump says. How can you worship Donald Trump once you have looked closely at the intricacy of a flower?

Jesus was wrong about a lot of things but...

As I said in my previous posting, I have great enthusiasm for the insights and example of Jesus of Nazareth. I believe that this man really lived, and really said many of the things attributed to him. I realize this cannot be proved by historical evidence independent of the Bible (yes, like some of you I have read Bart Ehrman and Israel Finkelstein’s books) but here is my reason for believing.

Many of the things that Jesus said and did are in direct contradiction to what many self-identified Christians today believe. They are not things that a group of people could use as a way of controlling or oppressing others. “Consider the lilies of the field, which bloom today but tomorrow dry up in the heat. Yet even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed as one of these.” This contradicts many fundamentalist sermons, which say, in effect, Do not bother to look at the lilies of the field, since God wants us to pave them over, and since he is going to burn the world up in a few years anyway. And no one on the Christian Right would tolerate a religious leader who overturned the tables of the moneychangers who made a big profit off of religion, who called religious leaders “whitewashed sepulchres,” who told his disciple Peter to put his sword away, “For those who live by the sword will die by the sword.”

The sayings attributed to Jesus are incredible. How could anyone have just thought them up? Even two thousand years later, we are amazed at them. Certainly the warriors of the Christian Right would never have come up with them. How could a handful of uneducated fishermen have invented them? I am not saying they came into Jesus’ brain out of heaven. But clearly there was a genius named Jesus who actually said these things or something similar to them.

But since Jesus said these things, his followers figured that this was not enough with which to start a church. They were not contented with having people do as Jesus did, just go off in the hills to look at wildflowers and meditate. So they had to create a doctrinal framework in which to place him. All of Christian theology is based on twisted interpretations of the recorded words of Jesus, some of which were invented by his followers.

But even when we consider the words most likely to have been Jesus’ original sayings, we find that he was wrong. He said God would take care of us. The end of the quotation above, about the lilies of the field, is “If God so clothes the grass of the field, will he not take care of you?” His most famous statement is, “Ask and it shall be given to you, seek and you will find, knock and the door will be opened to you.” Perhaps all of you have had experiences that show this is not true. As I will explain in a later post, God does not answer prayers. Jesus was wrong about this. Beautifully wrong, wrong with a supreme goodness of mind, but wrong. He wanted so strongly to believe that God had to be better than he was. But it was not true.

When I read the words of Jesus, fully aware of the priestly accretions that have been added to them, I believe them not as literal truth but as an insight into the transcendent goodness of love and beauty of the natural world.