If St. Paul took Alleve

I note this week a certain sheepishhness. We covered 24 out of 28 Books of Acts in Sunday School over the past four months leaving the distinct impression Paul was a pompous ass, only to encounter in the Reading from Romans: "For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it."

If Paul had merely been an autocratic teacher, a demanding theoretician, and if he'd not, when he travelled about, incurred the wrath of townspeople, been beaten, stoned and jailed, would he have possessed the matching experience to confess his faults with such a tender humility? If our faith is likewise merely theoretical, would it not follow if it is sinful to harbor lust in the heart, even if the action is not consumated, then if one harbors chartiable intentions, yet never acts upon them, it is just as well?

Basketball-philosopher, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, derives a similar lesson on the worth of theory versus experience, via a reading of Hermann Hesse' life of Siddartha, "who becomes an aesthetic man, a wealthy man, a sensuous man - he explores all these different worlds and doesn't find enlightenment in any of them. That was the book's great message to me, so I started to develop my own value system as to what was good and what wasn't"

I comprehend Siddartha the same and otherwise: after a troubled adolescence, framed by an inherited faith which emphasizes ritual, Sid seeks deeper meanings amongst wandering monks, culminating in a meeting with the Buddha, who, as a necessarily one-sided teacher, as all teachers must be, warning against other false teachings, couldn't help be suspect as perhaps a false teacher himself. Falling away, Sid immerses himself in the world of samsara, that of business, gambling and sex, and though he achieves financial success, it is accompanied by an emptiness leading to an attempted suicide.

That Siddartha, Paul, you, Kareem and myself, are simultaenously alike in some ways, and different in others, is the point. There is no one path in time to enlightenment. The equal sense experience of listening to Sid's story, on a cd in my car, after enjoying the stories of P.G. Wodehouse, each imparting and leaving their own intangible well-being, contains all the inexpressible wisdom there is to be drawn.

Unlike Sid, is it possible to find bliss, samsara-like, on the job? The NY Times reports on Sue Frederick, an 'intuitive' career counselor who says, "It's all about aligning your natural gifts and talent to your passions that will equal a career that is 100 percent about fulfillment." Well, call Midas; I must need a realignment, since my dysfunctional experiences as a bureaucrat, in the Navy, on vestry, indeed, in all institutional enviorns, hardly culminated in fulfillment, though Ms. Frederick hints at the concept of non-wisdom, when she writes, "your dream job should make you giggle when you speak of it."

What of other paths? The Baltimore Sun describes promising results of a new Johns Hopkins study where 67% of volunteers, after ingesting 'magic mushrooms,' rated it as one of the "five most spiritually significant experiences of their lives." It might, though, just be a matter, as Woody Allen says, of laughs not being credible, if the audience is stoned. Or, as reflected by one volunteer "who recalled profound grief as if all the pain and sadness of the world were passing through me, cell by cell, tearing apart my being," it proves once more, wherever you go, there you are.

The on-going struggle for justice, established through politics, is ever enticing, if not morally inescapable, though in these times, with the center aligned on an ideological scale, far to yahoo right, it gives rise, mostly to the absurd. As it recently was for the judges in a recent case who concluded Government arguments alleging statements made in court were reliable because they wouldn't have been made otherwise were comparable to Lewis Carroll's Bellman, who proclaims, "I have said it thrice: what I tell you three times is true."

Must we so quickly dismiss full immersion in samsara? Aldous Huxley writes in The Life Theoretic, that he's been "fumbling over books/And thinking about God and the Devil and all/while others have been struggling in the world/or kissing women with their brazen faces like battering-rams. God knows, perhaps the battering-rams are right."

Voyaging to India, in 1927, Huxley reverses himself, writing "going to the races, playing bridge, drinking cocktails, dancing till four in the morning, and talking about nothing, and meanwhile the beautiful, the incredible world in which we live awaits our exploration, and life is short, and time flows staunchlessly, like blood from a mortal wound. And there is all knowledge, all art. There are men and women, the innumerable living, and, in the books, the souls of the dead who deserved to be immortal. Heaven preserve us in such a world, from having a good time!"

Finally, years later, he exclaims, "happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness - it is generally the by-product of other activities."

In conversation with Timothy Leary, a few days before he died on November 22, 1963, Huxley spoke, too, like Jabar, of what he'd learned from reading Hermann Hesse:

The three stages of human development:

1. The tribal sense of tropical-blissful unity;
2. The horrid Newtonian polarities of the feudal-industrial societies, good-evil, male-female, Christian-Moslem;
3. The Einsteiniam rediscovery of the Oneness of It All.

We're born into a familial insular security, against which we necesarily rebel; forming strong opinions, delineating sharp edges of right and wrong, of which we, superior beings, are entitled to judge; finding, in the end, as did Siddartha and Huxley, that existence is both more complex, and simple, in its unity, like a river which flows but is everywhere at once.

On Saturday errands to familar landmarks of library and market; in the company of friends; tending to the health of elderly step-dog Max; gathered within the fellowship of a youth group, on a Baltimore sidewalk, good naturedly huddling against the freezing cold, rather than in the recall of any forgotten dogmatism promulgated within the arena itself, is wherein lies the impossibly expresible widsom.

Huxley's personal motto was lifted from the depiction of a man in a Goya painting, around whose neck hung the legend, aun aprendo, "I am still learning."

Indeed, as we watched, and the wife endured, another annual presentation of Woodstock on the VCR last week, we were drawn, not to the music, but the banter between sets.

"We sure did talk a lot in the Sixties."

"But it dosen't make any sense."

Precisely.