Exultation and Imitation

Gingko Outside My Front Door

Being the oldest
  of its kind –

It is the gingko's

Solemn duty

To speak

On behalf of all trees.

It does this

By waiting

And by holding

Until kindred trees

Have given their color

And dropped their leaves.

Then, having distilled

  a season of sunlight,

And having bided its time, –

Almost overnight, –

The gingko's

Fan-shaped leaves

Take on the color

  of the sun

So that

The waning days

  of autumn color

Are a yellow exultation;

When

  in a final act

  of imitation

The ginkgo

Drops  leaves

  to the earth

  in a rush –

Like sunlight

  radiating across

  the cosmos

To puddle

  On a barren planet.

Philosophy of Life, Yes

So, Republican presidential hopeful Rick Perry believes that he has been called by God to politics generally and by implication specifically to be President. That sort of thinking characterizes a significant branch of evangelical Christianity – that there is intimacy and communication between the believer and God. At the very least, such thinking is prideful. At the worst, such thinking leads to unexamined righteousness. When God is on your side, whatever actions you take are justified. (I remember what Bob Dylan wrote long ago:" You don't count the dead, when God’s on your side.")

I'm thinking about this as I'm double tasking: watching a CNN news report on Perry’s religion and reading a New York Times interview with poet laureate Philip Levine, now a wise 83 years old. In the interview, Levine, a blue collar intellectual, muses, "There is a kind of Protestant ethic that believes that if you're really a good person, God will reward you with a full table and a garage full of automobiles and a beautiful husband or wife – that we should be judged by what the world has delivered to us."

When this outlook is magnified, it often leads to a theology of prosperity, that the Bible proposes Christians will reap financial and other material rewards by virtue of their faith. This is a distorted and malicious doctrine of how Jesus lived and what he taught. It is a slippery slope to unrestrained materialism and the perversion of greed. 

Yesterday, in my Sunday sermon, I spoke to the ancient philosophy of Stoicism. In my preface, I described my own long progression as a student of religion and ethics. As a matter of personal choice, but also as a teacher with my own liberal assembly, I'm now most interested in advocating an effective philosophy of life free of the traps and trappings of traditional religion.

As I prepared yesterday's remarks on the philosophy of Stoicism, I was pleased to find that that much of my outlook and many of my disciplines resonate to the Stoic way. In particular, I admire and cultivate character based upon virtue: the macrocosm of Nature rflected in the microcosm of Self.

I envision the notion of a philosophy of life becoming increasingly my focus – a focus well-suited to an age seeking a center that will hold.  Where is that center?  Where it's always been: in the Self.