Matthew 10:24-25
Revised Standard Version
24 “A disciple is not above his teacher, nor a servant[a] above his master; 25 it is enough for the disciple to be like his teacher, and the servant[b] like his master. If they have called the master of the house Be-el′zebul, how much more will they malign those of his household.
Luke 6:40
Revised Standard Version
40 A disciple is not above his teacher, but every one when he is fully taught will be like his teacher.
[00:08] When I was in college studying philosophy, I remember that an academic, I think he was a professor as well, at another school came to visit the philosophy department at my school.
[00:31] And I remember that one of the things he said at the beginning of his remarks is that he was going to make his presentation and his position more firm and concrete. Those were not the words he used, but I don’t know what words to use,
[00:58] but he was going to make his position more firm and confident in his presentation than his own view might be. And in my verbal vomit, my intention is always to survive. And I dictate my thoughts in the hope that somehow others could derive some benefit
[01:55] from them. But I’m not here, of course, to proselytize or preach. And if I do have any hint of that, it is only because I want to share what has helped me so much to live as a human in what I believe is hell. I believe that life is hell and that until one
[02:47] faces this fact, either through circumstances or through inquiry, although I suspect that difficult circumstances are always the catalyst for the journey. In fact, thinking about a speech that Thomas Hopko gave to some seminary graduates, which is online
[03:25] to view, thinking about that speech, it appears that everyone gets crucified. Everyone experiences life as hell. Everyone has a crisis point, at least repentance. And it’s actually cringing,
[04:06] cringeworthy to go through how popular Christianity talks about repentance. I cringe at just thinking about it, so I can’t even go into it. But suffice it to say that when we’re
[04:35] crucified, we are given a vision, not a mystical ecstatic vision, but a vision of the pit, a vision of hell. We recognize that the dreams that we had
[04:56] cannot be fulfilled, and/or if they are fulfilled, that they’re fulfilled partially. And we realize that even if our dreams were filled completely, that we would still be utterly miserable. I think
[05:20] one of the reasons why Jesus says that the gate is narrow and while few find the kingdom, few find peace, is twofold. Number one, it’s very painful.
[05:40] It’s very deflating. It’s tragic. It’s crushing to recognize the true predicament of being human, how nothing will satisfy us. And again, I’m thinking of evangelical talking points like, there’s a God-shaped hole in your heart. It just makes me cringe. I’m not
[06:13] even going to get into that because it’s such a knockoff, such a counterfeit, such a distraction from the seriousness of the human condition. We don’t need goddamn bumper stickers. We don’t need
[06:32] five-point programs. We don’t need silly books published in Nashville that tell us what the answer is. The first thing we have to do is wake up. And wake up has been used
[06:56] by a teacher that blended Eastern spirituality with Christian spirituality named Anthony DeMello. And I used to binge watch Anthony DeMello a million years ago, and I’m glad I did,
[07:12] but I do agree with the Vatican’s assessment of his work. He used to use that term wake up all the time, and I don’t find it helpful. I don’t find it helpful. But I do believe that the default conclusion after being alive for 47 years, almost 48 years,
[07:49] I do believe that the default conclusion that you have to have if you’re paying attention, if you’re not drowning yourself in drugs and alcohol and Hallmark movies and endless activity and climbing
[08:04] the ladder not to provide for yourself. By the way, I recently stated in a conversation that I am managing my career not because I’m trying to self-actualize or get an ego trip. I mean,
[08:27] there is an element of self-actualization in the sense that I want to do things that I’m in a self-actualization in the sense that I want to do things that I’m suited for, but I manage my career because that’s what it takes to survive, not to get an accolade. Although surviving usually results in accolades because that’s the kind of performance it takes to keep a job.
[08:51] And of course, there’s a lot of conflict between Christ’s kingdom and working for corporations, and there’s no way to resolve that. I’ve written about that scenario in other places, but life is hell. It’s one thing after another. There’s always a crisis. There’s always a fire
[09:11] to put out. If you don’t live in that situation, good for you, you know? And I had been reflecting on the Buddha yesterday. And as I reflected on it, I thought, you know, the Buddha, the Buddhist way
[09:27] is just a symptom of the overall structure. In my understanding of Buddhism, to really become enlightened, you have to become a monk. And so you are rejecting family life, you’re rejecting work,
[09:44] you’re begging, you have a beggar’s bowl, and you spend most of your time either doing manual labor with a mindful spirit or you are meditating. And I got a lot of,
[10:00] I’m glad that I spent two or three years engaging deeply with Buddhism. I think it can serve a purpose in terms of kind of a backdrop to Christianity that shows, that gives prominence
[10:17] to some differences between Buddhism and Christianity, which can be helpful in understanding our own tradition. But Buddhism, especially in its popular form,
[10:30] I don’t think that popular Buddhism in the United States could actually lead to any enlightenment. I think that one thing it has going for it is that a lot of the cultural baggage was stripped away
[10:45] because the baggage in, you know, Tibet is different from the baggage here. And in the transmission, it probably lost Tibetan baggage, but I’m sure it’ll gain baggage over here pretty quickly including the corporatization
[11:02] of meditation as mindfulness and these paid apps and this is not unique to Buddhism by the way I find it horrifying that there’s actually a Catholic app that is backed by venture capital
[11:22] if that’s not the money changers in the temple I don’t know what is so anyway but back to this idea that life is hell. There’s a tradition in philosophy called pessimism, philosophical pessimism.
[11:44] And it actually reminded me today of another philosophical school from ancient times called hedonism. Now, when you say hedonism today, that typically brings up images of luxury life and lavish meals and fancy houses and living it up for pleasure. But as I was taught in college, classical hedonism was about maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain. And so they talked about what I call the hangover effect.
[12:23] So if you go out and indulge yourself in lots of pleasures and indulgences and parties and wine, women, and song and liquor and who knows what else, fast cars, whatever it might be, the pain that results
[12:42] from that indulgence, that series of indulgences, outweighs the pleasure. And so to maximize pleasure in the hedonist tradition, as classically understood, essentially made you live like a monk.
[13:02] And in passing, I just observed that this is also what Buddhism leads to. My understanding of Buddhism’s teaching to regular people is do the best you can, don’t do this, don’t do this, and hope for a better afterlife, hope for a better reincarnation.
[13:24] But these tools, being a Buddhist and being a hedonist, don’t work in the real world. They are an abdication of duty. They are an opting out of the human condition. And in some ways, maybe that’s
[13:45] not a bad idea. I think St. Paul talked along those lines when he said he was speaking for himself and not for Christ. When he talked about given the current circumstances, people should not get married, not have children. It was going to be tough because you could live for God,
[14:02] but if you had a wife, you’d live for your wife and God, and you’d have a divided You live for your wife and God. You have a divided mentality or whatever. And I don’t have any regrets. You know, I don’t think that the single life was for me. But suffice it to say that I don’t think Buddhism or hedonism or anything else is a solution to the fact that life is hell.
[14:27] Life is very hard. And it’s not just intellectually hard. It’s like physically hard, at least for me, with a special needs daughter and obesity and unemployment and illness and the list goes on. I can’t just think my way
[14:51] out of it. I have recently discovered a source of entertainment watching Johnny Carson shows on YouTube. But if I do too much of that at night, then I end up not getting enough sleep,
[15:09] which has a host of negative consequences. So I’m stuck. We’re all stuck. And as I’ve said before, again, we’re talking intellectually and we’re not talking about, you know, danger of self-harm or anything like that.
[15:24] But I say that those who do commit suicide, which I think is usually a mental health issue, not a philosophical issue. But all I’m saying about that is there’s no guarantee that whatever, if nothing comes after or something comes after, there’s no guarantee that whatever comes after suicide is any better.
[15:44] And given my experience of life, I would think it probably is worse because everything gets worse. We get old, we get crickety or crackety or whatever you want to call it. It just keeps getting worse. For me, I have to change diapers on a nine-year-old. I’ll be changing diapers on
[16:03] another human being for the rest of my life because my daughter has Angelman syndrome. And again, to me, that’s not something to be, I’m not surprised by that. I’m not offended by that. I’m not surprised by interviewing for a job and not getting a job. I’m not surprised by
[16:23] getting what should have been the most stable job ever and getting fired even though I was doing a great job. Like that is my default experience. One crucifixion after another. And so this is where I come back to the professor who came to the college. And I’m saying this now because
[16:51] what I’m about to say is not necessarily what I believe. I don’t know yet. I don’t know if I believe this yet, but I’m processing it out loud. And the processing that I’m doing is saying that I am not a
[17:24] philosophical pessimist, but I would like to be. I would like to be able to say, life’s a bitch, then you die, full stop, end of story, go play some video games. But I can’t shake the presence of Christ. I wrote a line one time that said something along the lines
[17:51] of, I still have hope, dammit. And I think some people, most people, at least the AI bots, took that as this defiant, like, I’m going to maintain hope despite all costs, rah, rah, rah.
[18:05] And maybe that’s a good thing for people to read that, you know, see my stuff. But I was saying, there’s still hope, dammit. Like, I can’t get rid of this goddamn hope. And partly I think it’s my fault, quote unquote, because I earnestly sought God for years and years and years. And I believe that I found Him,
[18:31] that He found me. And that’s a whole other discussion about what that looks like and all that stuff. It’s nothing spectacular. It’s just, I feel a presence of God and I feel him directing me what to do. And it’s mysterious and it doesn’t really make any sense in terms of normal categories.
[18:51] But it’s regular. It’s nothing exciting. It’s the same thing that has been mapped out in the Christian tradition for thousands of years. You know, but I sought that. I sought God. And what I found is that unfortunately I got what I was looking for in God,
[19:09] but it’s not what I thought I needed. It’s not what I wanted. I have that still small voice, as God says in the Old Testament. The same spirit of St. Joseph who does what he’s told. That’s what I’m living in. I have this still small voice and I can’t get rid of it. I have hope
[19:32] whether or not I want to. And frankly, I think I’m in so deep that I would have to just go through it. I can’t go out. It’s a one-way street. It’s like one of those, you know, when you go into a federal building that’s really secure. At least when I was doing this with a boss 20 years ago,
[19:50] they would have these big spiky things that stuck out of the ground where you were driving your car into the booth. And if you go forward, everything’s fine. But if you were to back up, it’ll slash your tires. And that’s kind of where I feel I am. And I don’t think slashing
[20:12] my tires would help me at all. I feel like I’m stuck. There’s no way out. There’s no exit. Just like that play. We’re all stuck in an unchained world, a disenchanted world or whatever. But yet I have the presence of Christ.
[20:31] I have the presence of God. And it’s just enough to keep me going forward even when I’m exhausted. And that is incredibly frustrating in a lot of ways because I would like to just be able to say, hey, God is dead. It’s all on us. We have to make something out of life, whatever we want it to be.
[21:14] but I don’t have that luxury. I am haunted by God. In fact, I’m not just haunted by God. I am being held by God. And it’s incredibly frustrating. It’s incredibly frustrating to be loved by God because he wants all of me and he wants me to do things for Him.
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[00:01] He wants me to do things for him. And again, I’m not talking about grand visions. I’m talking about signal graces, as the Catholics would say, or just my intuition. It’s just enough to keep me engaged. And it feels sometimes like a hamster wheel, but it’s not a hamster wheel.
[00:29] I see the progression. I see the connections. I wrote a post one time about Easter, and it was called Why Easter is Not a Tragedy. And my proposition was that given that life is hell, anything that would continue this life into eternity is by definition a tragedy because it is an extension of hell for eternity.
[01:01] And that just sounded awful to me. And I said, look, you know, I can’t imagine that any part of my life that is eternalized would not turn into hell. Because everything that I’ve ever experienced in life eventually turns to hell. Because everything that I’ve ever experienced in life eventually turns to hell. And so I said
[01:22] to myself, I can’t imagine anything that has anything about me in it. Anything about who I am and what I’ve experienced. Anything that’s eternalized is hell, by definition. And that
[01:39] means Easter’s a tragedy because you’re just eternalizing existential hell. But the conclusion I got to was that I have to trust Christ. I don’t have any conception of how life after death could be anything but hell,
[02:00] but I have trusted Christ in crises over and over, and he’s always come through in his own way. And by the way, this is why Christ says, blessed are the poor, because theirs is the kingdom of God or whatever, because they’re closer to this reality, because their life is more hellish,
[02:33] more precarious, more dependent on Christ, less oftentimes distracted by intellectual gymnastics. So the point of all this is that life is hell. There’s no escape. There’s no guarantee that what comes after this, if anything, is going to be any better.
[02:57] Anything that does not recognize that life is hell is a distraction, is a drug. And yet I found Christ. And yes, I understand that joy can come mingled with pain. To me, it would have to come mingled with pain. I can’t imagine just pure joy, that even if I did have pure joy, it would not last, and it would just create more pain because of its absence.
[03:32] We have the word of the cross. We have the word of the cross. That’s what St. Paul writes about. And it doesn’t give us an answer. It doesn’t give us an intellectual answer. And I’ve said before that an intellectual answer is not an answer.
[03:52] An intellectual answer that tries to explain in words why life is so hell, hellish, and why God created it. That would be worse than the hell itself. And so what we have is we have a dead
[04:09] man on a tree. We have a dead man on a tree, which is the word of the cross. And Christ is the word. His life is the word. And so what we have is solidarity. We have the solidarity of God.
[04:30] God is in the trenches with us. He’s not forgotten us. And in a lot of ways, I think maybe we should borrow a page from the Buddhists and not try to explain everything. I’ve written a lot about why explanation is a distraction. A refusal to face facts.
[04:47] It’s much easier to think about theology and the theology of the cross than it is to face the fact that humans belittledly, graphically gashed flesh and drained blood and complete violence and utter disrespect of any kind of humanity,
[05:09] tortured to death by lashing our Lord, scourging him, making fun of him, mocking him, putting a crown of thorns on his head and mocking him, paying false homage to him,
[05:26] and having him drag the cross up to the Calvary Hill where he fell over and over, and they compelled somebody to help carry it, Simon of Cyrene. It was so bad that it was only the Romans
[05:41] that actually realized he needed somebody to help carry the cross. His own people did not. His own people had betrayed him. He was crucified naked, nails pounded in. Nails pounded into his hip, to his ankle bone. You can look at a picture on
[06:05] Wikipedia about somebody that was crucified around the time of Jesus and see how he had the nail went through the ankle bone. It was the most painful looking thing I’ve ever seen. I sometimes talk about the cross as a lynching tree or an electric chair or gas asphyxiation.
[06:25] to try to jolt myself out of just looking at the cross as a symbol. But really, in fact, the cross is much more painful than any of those things. And so that is what Christ experienced. He experienced the worst type of crucifixion possible, both in terms of physical pain, physical exhaustion, and shame.
[06:52] And so that’s what we have. We have the God-man who is in the trenches with us, and we have his promise of something later that is better. That’s all we have. We have the hellish existence that we live in,
[07:21] and we are offered many… That’s what we have. We have hellish life, and we’re offered all kinds of distractions and achievements and enticements. Just talk to a retired person about their career.
[07:47] It’s all vanished. Just look at your own career. Think about your job three years ago, what you accomplished. It doesn’t matter anymore. At least it doesn’t matter for me. And so again, all we have, the only thing we have is hellish life, the hellish condition of being human.
[08:09] And some people see it and some people don’t. It can be explained to some people and they get it. Others, they refuse it. They haven’t been crucified yet. And I’m not going around proselytizing. I’m just processing my own experience, but some of us realize it. Some of us are so
[08:33] completely crucified that we recognize that there’s no walking on the sunny side of the street to quote Willie Nelson’s Stardust album. There is no sunny side of the street, and if it is, it’s just
[08:56] enticement. So all we have is the hellish world. There’s no escape. There’s no guarantee that whatever comes after is any better. We have responsibilities we cannot shirk, special needs children, typical children, family,
[09:21] caregiving, aging relatives, whatever it might be. Buddhism, for all its wisdom, is just a structured opt-out, as is Western Christian monasticism, as is any monasticism, as is, you know, well, in a
[09:42] slightly different category, Western Buddhism is just another product. It’s a product I’ve consumed a few times for about three years, and it was helpful, but there’s no escape. That’s why my model is Saint Joseph, as I’ve said many
[09:58] times before. Saint Joseph does what he’s supposed to do and doesn’t do any more, and he’s faithful. And to me, the only thing we have is the word of the cross. We have Jesus Christ, the God-man,
[10:20] who has entered this world in order to heal it. And he can be the source of a voice, a small, not a verbal voice, but a small, still small intuition. We’re not even guaranteed that.
[10:37] But as Peter said in the Bible, where else can we go? And so there’s this hope. And I cannot embrace philosophical pessimism because I have this hope. And frankly, the hope pisses me off sometimes because I would like to just say,
[10:58] life’s a bitch, then you die, and go play video games. Actually, video games are not my thing. And I would still have to take care of my family, obviously. But no, I have this hope. And it doesn’t tell me. I’ve interviewed for three jobs this week. I’m unemployed, despite having made supposedly
[11:21] wise decisions about my job situations. But I’m unemployed through no fault of my own. I have great references everywhere I’ve ever worked. And I had three good job interviews this week, and one of them already told me no. And I don’t know what’s going to happen to the
[11:41] other two. And, you know, the voice doesn’t tell me, well, you’re going to get this one, so relax. It tells me just what I need to know, just in time. And sometimes I’ve rejoiced in that because I realized that if I knew too much ahead of time, it would have been too overwhelming. But sometimes
[11:59] it feels like God is holding back. Sometimes it feels like God is playing cat and mouse. Sometimes it feels like God is playing hide the ball. Sometimes it feels like God is trying to manipulate me or to, you know, to toy with me. And I understand being in the dark night of the soul and the wilderness
[12:18] and being formed, you know, but, you know, I feel like I’m coming out of the wilderness and yet I’m still in this limbo. And I’ve learned to live in the limbo, but it’s still very frustrating. I’ve tried to have peace, but unfortunately I can’t just grab things and start making things happen.
[12:40] It doesn’t work that way. I have to respond. I have to be led by the Spirit. And my circumstances are so insane that I don’t really have any other options because even if I wanted to try to project manage God’s will, I don’t have the time and energy to do it. I just
[12:59] have to listen. So unfortunately, I’d like to be a pessimist, but I can’t. It’s not that simple. The voice of God, unfortunately, will not let me go. And when I say unfortunately, I’m getting back to that part of the beginning of this meditation where I’m wondering if I really believe this.
[13:28] Do I really believe that the salvation of Christ is a tragedy? I think it’s more realistic. It’s more nuanced than just everything sucks, although it feels like everything sucks all the time. And so that’s what I’m left with. I’m left with a still small voice guiding me step by step,
[14:00] and I’m left with promise of Christ that whatever comes after this is going to be better. And that’s all I have. Any other explanation, offering, whatever, whether it’s from Thomas
[14:18] Aquinas or whether it’s from the guy at the bowling alley trying to pimp bowling tickets or I shouldn’t say that because everybody’s trying to make a living. I think actually the bowling guys are probably more have cleaner hands than I do or than I will have if I get back into the
[14:46] marketplace again. But yeah, I don’t think Buddhism works anywhere. I don’t think that it especially doesn’t work in drive-by contexts in Western civilization. And I don’t think, um, I think that the best we can do
[15:05] is participate in Christ’s suffering, attach our suffering to his suffering, and wait, and we don’t get an answer. The only answer is a dead man on a tree.
Topic: The best way to be conservative is to be radical. The best way to be radical is to be conservative.
Boyd Camak 