Tygarjas Twyrls Blog

I’ve noticed that when people use the term “God” they often put themselves in the midst of a fairytale with dangerous ramifications whence compared to the reality within which we find ourselves residing. In this fairytale there is an invisible all-knowing father or mother figure that does whatever it wants, and often is blamed for what happens in our lives, or worse, is our tormentor-master with a plan and we its helpless pets. God is something big and has nothing to do with us, or worse, is controlling us without there being consciousness attached to our actions, because, after all, the will of our puppet-master is too great to fathom. And with this notion, I do not agree.

There maybe something very large, very pointedly conscious that decides the flow of existence in some way, but for now, having interest in a notion of deity too large to grasp doesn’t seem helpful. That is, it doesn’t seem helpful when there is a version almost too large to grasp, but not quite, which is helpful.

So I start with what is easy to grasp, and that is whoever you happen to be. And when you look at yourself, what you can see, aside from the set of circumstances that are beyond your control, are a set of circumstances that are within your control. To an ant you may easily be as mysterious and powerful as “God” is to you, while you are no more mysterious than an ant when viewed from a different angle. And with your God-like abilities, no sarcasm intended, you do have the power to decide the life of that ant. In fact, you have the capacity to decide the life of an elephant. And, for that matter, your power is so great it can decide the life of another human being; of many human beings. You, just little old or new you, has the capacity to determine death on a scale as large as the planet on which you reside. If you don’t take out the trash, it stinks. If you wash the dishes, the odds of your personal health rise. You can choose to fight an addiction with everything you have, thereby not only determining your physical health, but the amount of joy, the quality of existence you give to any human being you may care about; and for that matter, by extension, many you may not care about. You can hand a child a balloon, make a silly gesture, or inflict your own inner-torment upon that young life with anger, thereby filling that life with anger that it gets to resolve. Or, you can choose to channel your anger productively into practice of patience until what was once anger becomes a source of Love the likes of which you’d never guessed at before. And all this is what a small perception of what creation entails; a micro-cosmic rendition easily understood, at least, by those not in denial. Personal influence is to God, this version I am describing, like a cell of the body to us. And without these cells, we are not, and likewise, nor could it be.

But for God as we utter it, it is larger. Consider that our actions can create further life, more of us. The interactions of that life create immediately something much larger than ourselves. And so it gets larger. Families as a unit have a structure like a body with every member playing a role if they function well together, helping each other in all their endeavors. A neigborhood with another neighborhood creates a town, which only functions as people agree to do certain tasks. And this becomes a city in which the more people contribute in pleasant ways, the more it is pleasant. And before considering the world, which is obviously where I am heading, let us stop and consider the city for a moment.

The family can be too personal for those whose family unit is far less than ideal, which unfortunately afflicts many of us, but let us look at a city. Its beautiful lights, its waste management faculty, its businesses and theaters. Parks, and police, and trash, and bums, and cabs, and stadiums. And it all functions together. And the resources that are put into it maintain its cleanliness and security. The more people take ownership for their often “insignificant” actions, the more pleasant can be a place in which so many cohabitate. And the more people without minds of there own roam without proper care, the more the urine scent of the city tells its tale. The more people pick up their own trash and look each other in the eye, the more visitors will feel at home. Look for just a moment at what a city could be.

Now look at the world.

I was inspired to write this by a friend of mine who is about to die from cancer. This coming several weeks after another friend of mine died of cancer. After years of watching people struggle with their cancer, often to an inevitable conclusion. And then I stop to consider if the plastic bags in which all the food we eat are BPA free or not. If you don’t know what BPA is, it’s the chemical found in plastics that is now well know to cause cancer. And I think of how many billions of bags are made and used to carry our food each year; how many we are handling daily. And then I think about what chemicals go into the paper bags which decompose into the soil that grows the food we eat. Then I think of the great pacific plastic gyre, the two-Texas’ worth of plastic being eaten by birds and fish that end up on my plate regularly for supper. You see, farmed fish doesn’t have the nutrient content that wild fish does; if only I could purchase it without the side of cancer . . . And then I take a walk and see the plastic bottles bobbing up and down in my local small-town creek. Not one or two bottles, a murky-dirty little pool of water with six or ten bottles churning in their own filth. And then there’s the pesticides with which we grow our food, the gallons of chemicals dumped into our water supply by the pharmaceutical companies, and then, of course, the oil industry just dumping raw crude into the water every chance they get. The oil industry which insists that there is nothing harmful about their product, and which our government pays to keep poisoning us day after day. Enjoy the air with the millions of cars, the poisons dumped into every major body of water on a fairly regular basis, and, yes, plastic bags.

So, we can choose whether we want to take responsibilities for our own actions, or whether we want to continue to wait for daddy God to come make our boo-boos better. But when someone asks me why God would let a good woman die so young, what I have to say in response is this, “Please forgive me for continuing to drive a car that isn’t a hybrid. I was too shocked at how much I was paying to consider I could buy a car that pumps less cancer-causing agent into the air she breathes and would enable me to give less money to a dominant cancer-causing company that poisons the food she eats, and supplies the materials for the bags that poison the food she eats and the hands with which she carries them. I would trade the car in now and buy a new one, but I have harmed it in such a way that they won’t take it back in trade at this point, and I have to pay the government that uses my money chiefly to pay the oil companies and fund the killing of innocent lives, and make sure that people who have way more than they need can have even more, otherwise I would have the money to buy a cleaner car. So, my answer to why she is dying so young is that apparently I, along with the vast majority of the people on the planet have chosen to live in such a way that it means she dies. That is why God has chosen her to die. Why we, as God, have chosen her to die. But, at least, while I pay for the oil company to continue to poison us all, I never use a non-reusable bag to carry my goods. I walk to work whenever I am able, and I vote for somebody who might not immediately give the country away, somebody who at least doesn’t boast about the fact that they will sell our lives to the highest bidder. I do what I can to ease the eventual caused by the rest of God. And for not doing better, God forgive me!” And that’s my answer to that.

Smile at someone today, no matter how you are feeling. It will make you both feel better!

Salaam!