Beginnings

The end-of-period bell rang on time at 9:54 a.m. Gathering up myself and my books, I dashed to the next class, which was sophomore math with Mr. Harvey Buren. We called him Harvby. I rolled into my assigned seat six chairs back by the window in the far row. Scattered as I was then, I just sat down and stood up after the roll was called for the prayers and Pledge of Allegiance to the flag. I stared out the window at spring and mouthed the whole set of words. I said them, but I did not attend to them. Harvby called out, "Hey, Andrew, are you a heathen?" I then got an eraser thrown at me, which struck my khaki uniform. I was enrolled in a military Christian Brothers high school in the Midwest. The year, 1964, was not the happiest period of my life.

This event did not stand out to me at all at the time, shame-inducing though it was. It did, however, add another color to the palette of my life. As did the first real effort I put into writing and going to a religious conference, where I heard about other religions beyond Roman Catholicism. This was in the time of Vatican II and efforts to open Catholicism to the twentieth century—both failed. VC2, as I call it, failed because its premise was wrong. Windows were opened, which just blew the papers off the desk. Catholicism really ended during the Enlightenment and after the French Revolution because of its inability to thoroughly address these episodic events.

Rather than write a book about these two assertions, I decided to leave Catholicism for other roads less traveled. It is not surprising, because religiously my parents—one a Catholic, the other a Hungarian Unitarian—somehow affected me equally, as did the church I grew up in and left. I will not return; this book is not at all an attempt to make amends, as you will read. I am not a Catholic, and I will not be at all welcome in their Roman church. This book is also not an attempt at any sort of contrition, since it is not at all perfect. I have, however, experienced something that is called a conversion.

As you read this book that I call a journal, it will become clearer that I am a Christian. What kind I really do not know. I did move from pretty lazy secularism to a near-absolute faith in God. I think my reader will get that. Perhaps others have traveled this or similar roads with different outcomes. If you read my bibliography, there you will find certain effects untold, some good for you, some bad for you, and some ugly to you. Indifference is always an option, but I doubt that response if you are reading this book.

Of college I will add but three matters of interest to this book: First, those four years were inscrutable and difficult. It was almost like lost time, maybe a blackout. I did not fail miserably, nor did I make any lasting connections to fall back on later in life, not even a friend. However, I did learn many life-changing things. Some of those experiences are folded into the pages of this book. Second, like many of my cohort, I worked my way through college in the summers. What I did was a bit different from most of the college students at the school I attended. I got my hands very sore and dirty. I think it is called manual labor, and it trained me to never misunderstand those who make their living by the sweat of their hands. There is never a job beneath me after those summers. Third, I got involved with a Christian cult. While there, many of my current ideas had their genesis. It also saved my life. Fortunately, it grounded me just enough and bolstered me to go on to greater things later in my life. It also opened the doors of my perception without drugs, although there was that. I did not try drugs with them, but on my own, and I learned that there is more to living than meets the eye. I discovered that I had space behind my eyes, though I did not speak of it that way then. My consciousness was stricken by a depth that I now call mystical. Only after years of straightening myself out enough to be functional enough to have serious relationships and not veneer-covered monologues, am I able to say I grasp the true importance of that word.

I got married and divorced and married.

What is important about this rhythm is what I learned in the midst of each event. The first marriage brought the knowledge that I cannot change anyone. Try as I did, there was no possible way to make her anyone other than who she was. The adage "you can bring a horse to water" is apt, though incomplete. Of course, the horse has to be thirsty. More truly, the leader has to know where to find the water and then make sure that it is potable for the beast. You get the point. Along with this small fact came the knowledge that my egocentric views about the world and myself were not necessarily correct. In other words, just because I saw it that way did not make it so. I carried around a sense of entitlement; it was just excess baggage. I made improvements by the time I married the second time, just not structural changes.

What structural changes?

The changes show up in this book. Chapter by chapter, the gospel of Mark allows a life of thought, action, and essence to unfold. One of my friends said that writing this book took a lot of research. Very true. It has taken me some forty years of research across a variety of articles, workshops, books, lectures, and thinking to pull together enough sense to "dive into" this gospel. I felt both called and impelled to do this now. Part of the impetus was my wife's dual medical episodes, which span the life of this book and still echo in our lives.

In the book I say that if you get God, you get Jesus. Although I have shared this book with different Christians and non-Christians alike, I cannot say that either class of friends agrees with me on this point. Most kind of stared at me, trying to get my meaning. Since I do not explain this assertion well in the text to come, here is what I mean: God, Mystery, Divine Providence, Ground of Being, and other interchangeable names point to the reality that we can all experience in life daily, consciously, or unconsciously, if we are ready. If we are witnesses to what is simply going on in and around us—and this takes some preparations regarding our spirits and, more certainly, our souls—we notice it obviously and evidently in the world, in our lives, and in the lives of others.

Let me leave these two words—soul and spirit—in the most commonsense usage. We eventually notice that we are united with the mystery of life in discernible ways. What made Jesus beyond unique, but the Son of Man and the Son of God, manhood and godhood at once, was that He had an enormous experience of unprompted "cosmic consciousness" in which He became clear that He and God were one. Additionally, Jesus was there with Moses, Abraham, Israel, and Adam. This is the Christ Event. It was a leap of consciousness. He had to "get" God and then communicate the event. Jesus's experience of the Ground of Being utilized the "languages" of second Isaiah, Elijah, Ezekiel, and perhaps others as Jewish touchstones to communicate God's news. Of course, Jesus was not the political messiah Everyman Hebrew was waiting for—or even Everyman Roman, Philistine, Persian, et al. In His communications in Mark, He did not try to portray Himself as the One. Nevertheless, the powers that be did not like this picture and killed Him savagely.

Fortunately, there are many mansions in God's kingdom. We too can know of this union with God, and know that Jesus, the first among equals, never wanted to be the head of a movement, though He did initiate Christianity, which we have sadly mixed up by overemphasizing Him, Jesus. This overemphasis separates Jesus's manhood and godhood. We have also missed the message that "the kingdom of God is at hand." This has resulted in the guiltification and reification of fear in Judaism and Christian accepted wisdom, behavior, and doctrine. Here is the rub. Jesus is said to have brought life abundant. Instead we are all privately and publically afraid of death, thus we miss that in death there is life. We have nothing to be worried about. After all, we were dead before we were born. Jesus pointed to His and our nature as sons of God. What more can there be? Jesus died and ascended. He took earth up (manhood), and in that Jesus gave eternal life to earth and to all on it (godhood).

Finally, I firmly believe, as St. Augustine said, that God is the ever-expanding circumference with a definite point where it stands, sits, or if you will, dances. Perhaps this is "pantheistic." Yet, it more closely relates to the given union with God. It is not to be sought; the union is secure if we witness it.

The first few chapters of this book set the stage in order to ease the reader into the gospel experience. Though you can begin there, these early chapters set the scene and tone. If you wish, you can skip around to chapters that attract you and call out to you. However, when the chapters of Mark's gospel begin, the journal about Mark's Jesus begins. There is grandeur in the process of reading it in the order it was written by Mark. I had fun with a few of the chapters, and please note that I am not making fun of the gospel, ever. I have sought to make the entire gospel more "vernacular." Still, there is a certain starkness to the writing. The left hand of God rested on Mark's shoulder in some spots. I think there is a crescendo from the first to the last gospel line with some quiet quasi-plateau sections that act like bridges to the next words and moods. And by no means did I cover every line; I tried to address what addressed me.

After the gospel ends, the book had to cover a few areas not addressed in the journal chapters. This purposely I left until the end. In closing, I call and challenge the reader to interact with the gospel in an existential way. By this I mean in a way that is down to earth. Metaphysics can come later. Although essence precedes existence, we see essence as it unfolds in life. In all major religious traditions, there comes a time when the individual has to admit two things. The individual must give up his or her separate experiencing ego and admit that individuals cannot define ultimate reality because it cannot be known. This radical admission sets the stage for another more powerful leap of faith, a vision of God that is neither wordy nor reductionistic—a fatherly man on a heavenly throne surrounded by seven levels of angels and with a Son at His right hand.

This vision is monarchical and one which we Christians misidentified in many ways. The restoration of God is Jesus's kingdom of God from which we are not separated by meta-language. It is something we can appreciate here and now, this inexpressible "something" that I name God. Without explicitly naming it, Jesus pointed to it with the words at the beginning of Mark's gospel, "The time has come at last—the kingdom of God has arrived. You must change your hearts and minds and believe the good news." And here, I send you to read the book.

George Andrew

27 August 2014

Opening Thoughts, Ruminations and Reflections

Greetings, salutations, and felicitations.

If you can, please pick up a copy of the New Testament transcribed by J. B. Phillips. It is an old version. Well, not in that it is wrong or decrepit, but it may be out of print. It is the one I am going to use to talk about the first gospel, the gospel of Mark. The motivation for this is complex and multilayered (more on this later in the work). The convention I will follow is simple: prior to each section that I "journal," Mark's gospel is cited after the title. Please read the section before or concurrently with each chapter where cited.

For now, go find a copy. It may be found in a used bookstore, Amazon, eBay, wherever, so much the better, as the hunt is a part of the process of proceeding with the book. A short note on the way to approach the chapters of this book: first, read the Mark section that is referenced; second, try to walk into the scene Mark wrote; only then read what I journal.

I chose to comment on Mark's gospel because it is the first one and it is the simplest compared to the other three, Matthew, Luke, and John. The others use Mark and either extend or embellish their thoughts and stories. Mark, if it is his name, wrote his gospel around 70 AD, we believe. Paul's book of Acts was written about 30 years after the death of Jesus. The others fell into line with John later, or so we think, getting their gospels on paper at around 100 AD. Time is important only because the oral history in these gospels wanes, and by the time it gets to 100 AD, matters are much accreted, meaning many layers on top of layers.

Oral history, as its name states, is passed down by word of mouth. It is passed on from lip to ear, from ear to lip. Remember the child's game "daisy chain"? Imagine a daisy chain, and around the center are petals spread from the center to the edge and back to the center, round and round unceasingly. In the center there is an attachment, which is where the petals are held.