For the Orphaned Children of God

By Don Ray

So, the Religion - Relationship - Political affiliation – Church – Family - Belief system - Spiritual practice – career – investments – orthodoxy - charismatic leader - fraternal organization – society – nation – civilization - and all those other foundations of life didn’t quite fulfill your hopes and dreams after all. They rejected you, or you saw through them, or you drifted apart, or it all blew up in your face, leaving you feeling orphaned by the foundation you most relied on. Take heart. It just means you’re learning and growing.
For the individual (or society) starting over, this compendium of essays about daily life, society, beliefs, faith, meaning, and purpose.....in other words “life” (with a little pseudo-poetry occasionally sprinkled in) reminds of what really matters. Yes, something does still matter, even when it seems all that mattered is lost.
This volume will seem like a hodge-podge mix of disparate topics, but the topics that daily life throws at us are also not politely organized. Our penchant for dissection of life into convenient categories underlies much of our inability to successfully grapple with any of them. In weaving enough random events, contradictory beliefs, and conflicting priorities together, perhaps this compendium will allow you to step back and recognize a pattern in the life that results from it all.
When it’s all done, you may not know much more about individual topics, but perhaps in your response to these unorthodox perspectives you will know a little more yourself.
The reader of this book will be an exquisitely rare individual, not satisfied with blindly accepting institutional edicts, a soul open and eager for alternative perspectives.
You will be different....which is why you have the potential to make a difference.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Don Ray
• Release date: Feb 3, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005734831

Don Ray

Some degrees in physics, some time in research laboratories and thatched hut villages, some teaching in universities and management in international technology: all sound like credentials to lend credibility to the role of author. But such experiences provide only tools and terminology and opportunity, not wisdom and insight. You and I share the same foundation for whatever wisdom and insight we may glean out of life, the joys and grief, the celebrations and hunger that make up daily living. I hope through this book my knowledge of physics and funerals, science and spirit, quanta and cultures, can help you bridge the illusory gap between intellect and heart. If so, that will happen not through transfer of wisdom, but through an opening of windows to allow realization of your own wisdom. Questioning "what" and "how" led me to universities and degrees in physics. Questioning "why" led me to cathedral and temple and mosque. I have been blessed to learn from a winner of the Einstein Award and from village shamans. But such learning seems inconsequential in comparison to life's lessons: the grim look on the face when after the wreck you ask "will she be OK?"...the feel of the hospital sheets after the stroke...and every warm embrace and authentic smile and sincere welcome. I am grateful to professors and priests, research centers and jungle shrines. But they provide only the paint color to be applied to the structure built of the scope of real life, built of pets and people, love and loneliness, homes and hospitals. I pray my degrees and travel, survival and losses that led to my books can bring a little light to your very real life and reveal to you the brightness of your heart's wisdom and the Source awaiting our discovery.

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For the Orphaned Children of God

Don Ray

Published by Don Ray at SmashWords

Copyright © 2021 Don Ray

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

Thank you for downloading this ebook. You are welcome to share it.

This book may be reproduced, copied and distributed for non-commercial purposes.

Discover other titles by Don Ray

The Reassuring Universe

Doubt and Reassurance Volume I

Doubt and Reassurance Volume II

This book and all titles available in print editions from most online retailers.

Website (including blog): DonRay.Weebly.com

Cover Image: Child in the ruins of St. Casimir Church, Warsaw, 1945

DEDICATION

To you the reader. You are, at this moment, the most important person in the history of this project. The potential of these words rests in your hands. Should you choose to read, all interpretation and application and impact of these word will rest in your heart.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Preface

Introduction, explanation, and instructions

1 Society and Nation

2 The World

3 Life Observations

4 Consciousness and Freewill

5 Unorthodox Spiritual

6 Purpose of Life

7 Religion, Traditional and Heretical

8 Poetry

Warning about Part II, or at least excuses for it.

Direct From the Wilderness

Epilogue

Afterword

Other Publications in the Doubt and Reassurance Series

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thank God.

PREFACE

What is this?....words for when heart, faith, mind, religion, and society are not quite in sync, or maybe even in abject conflict. You may find it upsetting and challenging, maybe enlightening and uplifting, but hopefully encouraging and reassuring for your very personal journey. It may rattle your cage, but with enough rattling a cage can rattle open and set you free. Who are the orphaned children of God? Anyone who with time, growth, and learning has found themselves at odds with once trusted institutions - religious, political, or otherwise. Southern Baptists trained in science, old school Republicans, people raised in cults, ex-Mormons, ex-Roman Catholics, abused souls who feel like an orphan of a prodigal God, people not accepted by institutional religion, people whose heart could no longer accept the God of their family's church or the situational ethics of a political party.

INTRODUCTION, EXPLANATION, EXCUSES, AND INSTRUCTIONS

So, the Religion - Relationship - Political affiliation – Church – Family - Belief system - Spiritual practice – career – investments – orthodoxy - charismatic leader - fraternal organization – society – nation – civilization - and all those other foundations of life didn’t quite fulfill your hopes and dreams after all. They rejected you, or you saw through them, or you drifted apart, or it all blew up in your face, leaving you feeling orphaned by the foundation you most relied on. Take heart. It just means you’re learning and growing.

For the individual (or society) starting over, this compendium of essays about daily life, society, beliefs, faith, meaning, and purpose…..in other words life (with a little pseudo-poetry occasionally sprinkled in) reminds of what really matters. Yes, something does still matter, even when it seems all that mattered is lost.

This volume will seem like a hodge-podge mix of disparate topics, but the topics that daily life throws at us are also not politely organized. Our penchant for dissection of life into convenient categories underlies much of our inability to successfully grapple with any of them. In weaving enough random events, contradictory beliefs, and conflicting priorities together, perhaps this compendium will allow you to step back and recognize a pattern in the life that results from it all.

When it’s all done, you may not know much more about individual topics, but perhaps in your response to these unorthodox perspectives you will know a little more yourself.

The reader of this book will be an exquisitely rare individual, not satisfied with blindly accepting institutional edicts, a soul open and eager for alternative perspectives.

You will be different….which is why you have the potential to make a difference.

Should you feel called to delve into the material, don’t read straight through. Treat the book like life. Explore, jump around, skip the stuff that doesn’t fit you, find something that strikes a chord. Give serendipity a chance. It’s good practice for life.

1 SOCIETY AND NATION

Winning Versus Conquering

In politics you can win by uniting or conquer by dividing.

The former benefits the nation, the latter benefits the powerful.

Hollow Busyness

Hollow busyness. From the outside the hollow busyness always looks so substantive.

Our hollow busyness always provides an answer to those inescapable questions what did you do?, what are you doing?, what will you do?, what do you want to do?, what do you plan to do? Woe be to those in modern consumer society who confess they did nothing and have no plans for doing something!

Outsiders cannot see past the perimeter of our lives into the hollowness at the core because of the obscuring surface whirlwind of activity, and we ourselves often as not are blinded by the dust and sand kicked up by our frantic busyness, our watering eyes unable to discern the relative merit and value of our frenetic activities, unaware of the real reasons for our tears.

The Antithetical Societal Solution

Can it be?! A quiet Saturday morning at home alone?! ‘Tasha kitty keeping me in the chair by the patio door as snow lightly falls?! Oh joy, oh joy! How many lifetimes have passed since I experienced this sublime joy! I experience it now only because of a wicked bad cold that I do not want others to catch.

But oh this long forgotten, blessed morning state of mind and spirit! Oh joy, long missed joy! Unhurried! Quiet! Unpressured! All because of a cold and a purring ‘Tasha kitty.

‘Tasha also celebrates this rare, rare moment of quiet at home on a Saturday morning. Such a blessing!

Ahhh, an unhurried morning….such a curse that such an experience should so rarely bless the modern man and woman.

I get to scruff a purring ‘Tasha kitty! Thank You! Thank You! Thank You!...for the cold that made this possible!

Such joys and life await in contemplation!

How impoverished the life always busy, active, moving!

How the world suffers for lack of contemplative time and purring kitties!

How strangling to the soul is the ever-busy schedule. Dear God, that poor cleaning lady at work, working three jobs, attending that rip-off night-school, and raising three kids!....by herself! What a hero! I cannot imagine surviving a week in that life! How grateful I am for the opportunity to help her a tiny bit with algebra, though that cause seems hopeless.

.....as does the cause of promoting contemplative time in modern society.

So desperately needed, such a cure for so many individual and societal ills, but seemingly impossible. Contemplation is the anti-quick fix, the anti-instant gratification, the anti-productivity, the anti-entertainment, the anti-objective, the anti-take control, the anti-winning is everything.

Contemplation/prayer could not be more antithetical to modern society, could not be more seditious, more subversive. Anyone wanting to truly rebel, wanting to truly liberate themselves from the clutches of corporate dictates, wanting to strike a meaningful blow for individual and societal freedom, need only engage in meditation.

Executives, politicians, and marketers throughout the world fearfully shudder at the thought of a citizenry readily able to tap into a source of strength, peace, meaning, and satisfaction.

A populace not perennially fearful, insecure, and greedy?! ….that would sound the death-knell for innumerable marketing and political ploys!

Our economic and political systems have evolved in response to and reflection of the lack of peace, contentment, and personal security in our lives, and those lacks directly reflect the lack of contemplative prayer in our lives. But the resulting systems that demand ever longer work hours and ever more consumption and ever more superficial entertainment allow ever less time for prayerful contemplation, and the vicious cycle spirals ever downward, along with our free time and inner satisfaction.

The root of the cause and the only source of solution lie within us, but the boss, cell-phone, next episode, next tweet, and next playoff game erect the bars and razor wire to lock us out of our inner self.

No mass movement will solve this ill, nor any civil rebellion, societal revolution, or group occupation.

This ill requires the quiet courage of individuals, moving within themselves, rebelling against all–consuming schedules, revolting against pernicious norms of more and bigger, individuals reclaiming their time, and re-occupying their own souls.

Digital Disruption

Do these times not till the soil to plant seeds of reassurance?

The digital disruption has unleashed the worst of the human nature and created levels of illusion and delusion and detachment never before experienced.

Never have people been compelled and even coerced to look happier

Never have people felt so lost and alone.

A pandemic of digital detachment has left us isolated from reality and each other.

Never have we had such opportunity for connection and communication. Never have our connections and communication been so shallow and superficial.

We have created a societal sham when we need substance; we stand on shifting sand of fads and trends when we need foundations secure and solid. The fog of the superficial hides the substance. The glare of the shallow blinds us to solid reality.

The beauty of the superficial and shallow is that they are only smoke and illusion; if we wish we can readily dissipate them with a mere wave the hand of insight and understanding.

Our digital delusions and marketing manipulations have left us hungering for the reliable and reassuring. The same web that drives our hunger for consumptive purchasing can instead communicate a message that fills, fulfills, satisfies, and reassures.

Somewhere someone wants to see. It is time to shine the Light and dissipate the fog.

Digital Migrations

Today's political polarization seems shocking, a new and unforeseen development, unimaginable and inconceivable, at least to us old goomers. But if viewed in the context of history and technology development, we can see this societal divergence as quite natural.

Bear with my brief recap of 100,000 years, and we will come to the key question facing our hyper-connected society today.

We began with family alliances, small groups of people hunting and gathering, parents and children and grandparents looking out for each other.

We evolved into tribes, groupings of people bonded by mutually beneficial survival advantages gained from group membership.

With the advent of farming technology (read sticks and grinding stones) tribes evolved into villages.

Eventually with wheel and ship technology allowing trade across vast distances, the city-state arose. People now joined together for defense, as always, but now also for economic advantages.

Occasionally a city-state, Babylon or Rome for example, would extend its power, and empire was born, but most residents of the empire would not identify with the distant city-state center of that empire.

With improved roads and spreading language and communication now possible over hundreds of miles in only a matter of weeks, the nation-state was enabled, and kingdoms spread their influence beyond the city walls.

These national identities were not as automatic as had been membership in the tribe or village. Coercion and manipulation and propaganda became necessary to convince people to kill and die for king and country when king and country posed no evident advantage to survival. But with enough flags and anthems and taxes, the nation-state secured its natural role as the geographic location of a given linguistic or ethnic or religious group.

During the perennial warfare of the age of nations French speakers in the Alsace moved west, Deutsch speakers moved east; Deutsch speakers moved north of the Alps, Italian speakers moved south; Muslims moved west of the sub-continent’s Line of Control, Hindus moved east; Shiites and Sunnis and Jews and Turks and Armenians packed up and moved in countless migrations in whatever direction the swords and guns pointed; Russians and Mongols and Magyars moved wherever they wanted.

We always had somewhere to move, even if only a desolate reservation assigned by treaty or a tiny strip of desert between the ocean and the tanks.

We moved as ethnic groups, as language groups, as religious groups, and we formed new nations, or conquered old ones, or assimilated into existing ones, but we wound up in a place with people of some shared identity.

All fine and good until recent decades. A new coalescing, a new great migration, now unfolds. A large swath of the human population has taken to a virtual road to journey to their promised lands.

That new promised land is populated with people just like us. That new promised land is run the way we think a land should be run.

Our new virtual migrations do not conveniently lend themselves to tidy borders and genocides and conquests and subjugations and expulsions.

We now migrate digitally. Our tribe and ethnic group have been replaced by those who listen to the same news sources. Our religious denomination has been replaced by a congregation of people of shared faith in political and social and football philosophies.

We once coalesced around a water source. Later we coalesced around a color on a map. Now we coalesce around a FaceBook page.

Shared genes once brought us together, then shared food sources, then shared language, then shared place. Now it is shared opinions and attitudes that bring us together.

Spears and clubs facilitated the tribe. Hoes and digging-sticks facilitated the village. Sails and compass facilitated the city-state. Wheels and roads facilitated the nation.

What migration, what new structure of human interconnection, is our digital technology facilitating? It is not a migration of place, not a structure of geography. It is something new and unforeseeable, as the city-state and nation were unforeseeable before their advent.

The word we associate with tribal is warfare. Name a city-state: Troy, Babylon, Rome, Venice, and we can list its wars. Mention a nation and you can list the nations with which it fought wars. Will the outcome of these new migrations, this new connection, this new communication, be new in its influence on our behavior?

The migrations of old separated us as we crossed rivers, mountain ranges, or lines on a map to be with those who spoke our language or read our scripture. Today’s digital migration to our preferred news source and web sites and FaceBook friends still leaves us living next to the same irritating neighbors, in the same country as those benighted voters we won’t talk to, and in the same world as those gentile/heathen/infidel heretics we fear and demonize.

The technology has changed, and the geographic distributions have changed……but have we changed? Do we want to change? Each historic coalescing of identity: family – tribal – religious - and national, led to violent conflict with the others. Will our coalescing into right and left - red and blue - liberal and conservative - fundamentalist and progressive - NASCAR and Indy Racing League - science and superstition, simply lead to new iterations of conflict? …or will we finally learn that the person of different belief – opinion – perspective – attitude – philosophy does not necessarily pose a threat? When no longer separated by the mountain between villages, the river between tribes, the language between nations, when we have the same language - the same neighborhood - the same community - the same world, when we are done texting and tweeting those who agree with us, will we finally talk to each other?

Oblivious to the Obvious

Oblivious to the obvious defines the willful madness, the chosen madness, the cultivated madness that has become so entrenched and fortified in our society.

There is no easy breaking of this spell, this spell cast by the rich and powerful seeking more riches and power, this spell cast via media manipulation.

The great tides of societal change arise when someone figures out how to harness the latent madness, fear, and anger that restlessly resides in the darker recesses of the human soul. Such is the phenomenon now unfolding in our nation and the world. The worst of human nature has once again been harnessed and brought to focus, the most easily manipulated masses set into concerted stampeding motion, fear and fulmination concentrated into irrational political panic.

It catches us by surprise, these surging tides of self-destructive populism. It could not happen here! is our cry of denial as at the behest of miscreant leaders the mobs set alight the foundations that support and sustain their own interests.

Values and truth, logic and rational assessment may lose the day……as they often have throughout history.

We must try to preserve our society, nation, and democratic institutions. But failing that, we must preserve our values, principles, and truth, preserve them at the individual level, at the family level, at the level of our souls.

These are the seeds from which freedom and liberty of the human spirit, progress and hope of the human species, have always sprung, in times of opportunity and times of hopeless despair.

Spark of Progress

Life and pain and survival prod us into action. Occasionally opportunity may prod us into action. On rare occasions our own drive and creativity will prod us into action. But most typically it is pain and survival that motivate us.

That means our actions will probably not be well thought out. They will probably address issues in a short term, reactive way instead of a long term, resolving way. The condition of the world - the environment - our nation - and our individual lives testify to this.

Yet still once in a while the Spirit of human potential motivates our individual or national actions and progress and creativity momentarily result.

The potential for that Spirit resides in each of us. As children we don’t question that, but soon enough fear and pain and lust make us doubt the existence of any spirit period, and within a few more years of worldly life we even forget the question.

But on rare occasions we get reminded of that latent potential to create and progress instead of just react and flinch. An inspirational leader or a natural wonder or the example of a child may for a moment distract us from our fear and prejudices.

Such moments can be held only with courage. Such moments, if held and remembered, elevate the individual, and in the aggregate, elevate the nation, to fulfilling the grand human potential.

Most leaders get and keep their jobs by assiduously avoiding such moments. Fear and prejudice are much easier sells. Most leaders seek job security by appealing to that which would leave us mired in the rubble of our gut- reactions and insecurity.

We can do better though. Listen to that spark of humanity within you that does not fear creativity and progress and change, in other words that human spark that does not fear life. Hope for a leader that will inspire and feed that spark, but even in the lack of such rare leaders, nurture it within your own heart and in your children. Do not let the momentary inevitable political tides of fear and anger anchor your spirit. Be the exception, and by being the exception add your spark to the combined potential of the human spirit that will someday rekindle the flame of progress that liberates from fear and prejudice and scowls of retribution, progress that frees us to hope and help and courageously smile.

2 THE WORLD

Our Nature

For millennia humanity struggled with Nature, simply hoping against odds to somehow survive.

Then we won. We got our agricultural revolution and our industrial revolution and our information revolution and we settled into our boxes, little house boxes and tall office boxes and little rolling boxes to get us from one to the other. Most of us could pretend our struggles with Nature were over and we could isolate ourselves from Nature unless it appeared in a calendar picture or a television program. This was perfectly understandable after the millennia of struggle and fear and cold and drought.

Then we got sick, spiritually sick, heart sick, societally sick, for as a species we had locked ourselves into solitary confinement, isolated away from that which gave us birth and made us human. Our games and entertainment and luxuries and endless distractions tried to replace the role that Nature once filled but the results were ever deeper malaise and madness.

A new potential beckons if we would but recognize it. We no longer need to fear Nature. We no longer need to hide from it. Our technology gives us the wondrous opportunity to explore, to enter, to immerse in Nature while maintaining the secure material life to which we are understandably accustomed. We can safely crawl out of our boxes if we dare. We can breathe the air, if we remove our smoke. We can splash in the crystalline waters, if we remove our chemicals.

We can walk in the rain, lie in the sun, and play in the snow. We just have to get out of our boxes, physical and mental.

We can celebrate Nature, no longer afraid or intimidated…...if we haven’t killed it.

Impact of refugees

On only rare occasions do we safe and well fed actually have to face the injustice, to look into the refugee’s eyes, to see the child being carried by a parent escaping war. On only rare occasions do we get to ask, have to ask, what will we do for that person, for that child, for that parent. Often as not we find no satisfactory answer, and we leave the desperate masses on the bridge or shore or sidewalk or shelter, while we return to our comfortable hotel room or home.

But God help us if we are not changed by the encounter. God help our souls if we do not ask what we can do, even if no answer is evident.

What will we, the well fed in safe places, do about those hungry and at risk?

We will not change the world, but can we change a life? And if so, must that change not start with our own life?

Ceasefire

As of this writing, one hour and nine minutes ago a ceasefire was supposed to start in Syria, after five years of horror.

What are fighters in Syria thinking right now? Dear God, sitting in the dark, wondering what will happen I a few minutes. It is unimaginable.

Are some planning a surprise strike? Do any dare to imagine the possibility that no one will be shooting at them tomorrow morning?

Are commanders preparing them for a brief lull, using the opportunity to rebuild and restock? Are some commanders touting the real prospects and hopefulness of a ceasefire?

What is happening in the dark houses and holes and buildings and bunkers? Are many simply sleeping, letting the morning tell them whether ceasefire was just a dream?

Are some imagining what their life might be like in a few days if the ceasefire holds?

Are some so scarred and bitter that they do not want a ceasefire, but want to go on killing?

Are some so jaded that they do not care?

Has any word reached the civilians under siege?

Will this be the longest night or the shortest night?

How far into tomorrow morning, into next week, into next month, will the fighters have to wait before feeling some sense of relief and hope?

When will the first sound, the first pop of a gun, the first reverberating base vibration of a shell, shatter the hope?

Does anyone, at this moment, think in terms of holding their fire even if they hear that first pop or rumble?

When the sun sets tomorrow will there be any hope left?

Who will still be left alive tomorrow?

What hope or pessimism resides in the hearts of the millions of refugees?

It has started, the declared ceasefire. Thirteen minutes ago, the guns and bombs were to be silenced.

Somewhere a shot rings out. But perhaps, perhaps, somewhere a breeze is the loudest sound, or snoring, or the opening of a food package.

What could better capture the razor edge of the human disaster and human hope than the minutes preceding and following the declared start of a ceasefire. …Midnight the designated time….. Ceasefires almost always start in the dark of midnight.

Someone somewhere is at this moment making a choice.

How many will have no choice? How many will give orders out of duty and desperation? How many will obey orders out of duty and despair?

There on the frontlines, on the razor’s edge of darkness, breathes the human condition, the prospects for disaster and the potential for greatness.

The fate of innumerable individual lives, the fate of the world, will be decided by a few actions in the coming hours.

The great tides of conflict and cooperation inexorably move through human history, as relentless and inescapable as an artillery shell already fired. But then come moments, moments in the darkness after midnight, when Choice hangs heavy in the air, the fate of someone’s child, the fate of nations, precariously balancing on the needle point of someone with a gun, someone with a grudge.

Ceasefire…….how curiously difficult to get people to quit killing each other.

Ceasefire…….a word of suspense and uncertainty.

Ceasefire……the lives of millions pivoting about that midnight moment decreed by diplomats to be a new beginning.

Ceasefire……will bullets remain in chambers, even as bitterness remains in hearts?

Ceasefire……opening the door to the Choice, the Choice we all make every day, the Choice between pulling triggers – literal or figurative - or praying for peace – in whatever secular or sectarian form our prayers may take.

3 LIFE OBSERVATIONS

Let yourself get a little lost that you might discover what you could never imagine.

Machine Mirrors

There is something profound in how much time we spend staring at screens. I just read we spend ten (or was it fourteen?) hours in front of a screen every day - a glowing screen! What has happened to us?!

How we crave that modicum of information that appears on that flat surface! How we try to implement our will through a keyboard!

Is this a stable situation? Can humanity endure such a radical, drastic, fundamental, and rapid change?

There is ample evidence that we have used the screens to help us sink into ever greater self-absorption and to promote ever greater isolation. Certainly the political trends accompanying the tidal wave of screens into our lives speak of a society that has unfettered the worst of selfish human nature.

When interacting face to face - hand to hand - touch to touch, we cannot afford to be quite so selfish or self-absorbed. For many of us who are poorly equipped for interpersonal interaction, the screen and keyboard are too easy, too safe, too tempting.

I used to write on paper and tuck it away in a file drawer. Now I write on a screen and tuck it away in the Cloud. That is hardly progress.

Our screens and keyboards seduce us because we so long for connection and acceptance. Our screens and keyboards seduce us because we so long for power.

Will the screens and keyboards prompt the next quantum leap in human evolution? Will the screens and keyboards be our undoing?

I really think this is all too new and alien for us to answer that question.

We can say that the screens and keyboards are both mirror and window, revealing the unfiltered condition of the human spirit. The reflection and view are not pretty.

The power of information absorption and dissemination through screens has utterly and completely seduced us without our even recognizing it. The eventual impact on what it even means to be a society, a nation, and human is probably not predicable and would not be recognizable if we could predict it. That future impact will be determined by what in our human nature the screens and keyboards unleash. We would do well to look through those virtual windows, and more so, to look into those digital mirrors. Before we become the machines, before the machines change us, perhaps we can