Beatitudes

Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount launches with eight pretty powerful blessings. As quoted in the Gospel of Matthew, they are:

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.
Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called sons of God.
Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

(I never understood who the “poor in spirit” are supposed to be, but I learned tonight it’s folks who recognize they need God. That makes sense in context.)

The people who were listening had to be a little confused by some of this. All right, let’s understand that we need God and we should hunger and thirst to be righteous and pure in heart. But what’s this stuff about being meek and merciful and peacemakers?

Shouldn’t a God-fearing person be strong and forceful about proclaiming and enforcing God’s laws? And this bit a little later when he says if somebody slaps you in the face, you should offer up the other side of your face so he can slap that, too? Wait just a cotton-picking minute.

Jesus here is serving up the recipe for non-violent civil disobedience that the likes of Gandhi and Martin Luther King finally embraced during the 20th century. Yep, it took nearly 2,000 years of religious leaders going to war and forcing Christianity on reluctant and/or conquered souls before somebody took to heart what Jesus was trying to say here.

Jesus, Gandhi and King were all assassinated. That’s how dangerous non-violence is to some people. Make peace? Be humble of heart and, for crying out loud, merciful? That sort of talk needs to be put down, and hard.

This life Jesus was talking about was not easy — the gentle and the loving tend to be ground up and spit out in what passes for “real life” in this day and age. But imagine how much better this world could be if we took these words to heart.

Good for nothing

Try as I might, I can’t think of a reason to kill you. That is to say, I can’t think of circumstances that would justify taking the life of another human being.

I suppose if you were to attack me with deadly force … but even then I’d like to think I’d try to defend myself with something less than lethal.

War is just about the most foolish institution humans have ever concocted. As the song says, “What is it good for? Absolutely nothing!”

War doesn’t convince your enemies to see it your way. If anything it creates more enemies in the people who had no quarrel with you who have lost friends and family at your hands.

War’s only purpose seems to be to reduce the surplus population. One should be wary when people who believe the planet can’t support this many humans start talking about the need to wage war against this country or that country. One might suspect it’s not about ideology or freedom or democracy as much as it’s about indiscriminate killing.

You can raise money for fighting and killing and to make sure the other damn fool dies for his country, as General Patton once said, if that’s what you like. Me, I’m going to lay down my sword and shield down by the riverside and study war no more.

The next version

Sixty years ago, in the fall of 1963, I made my first appearance in a newspaper, a sallow-faced 10-year-old who looked like a zombie.

I remember the names of my classmates, I remember their faces, I wonder where they are today, I wonder how the past six decades have treated them.

It was an early version of me. In a few months, in the middle of the school year, we would move to a different town and everything would be different. Everything had already changed; a few months earlier I had spent 12 cents on a copy of Amazing Spider-Man #4 and comic books transformed from a summer vacation distraction into a monthly obsession.

I’ve been listening to Bob Goff’s “Dream Big” podcast. In the episode I listened to yesterday, he asked his guest what he thought “the next version of himself” would be like. I’ve been asking that question myself lately.

“We each live different lives within the one we live,” a former wife said once. When I turned that statement into a song, she didn’t remember she was the one who gave me that line. But it’s true; the zombie in this picture was nearing the end of that particular life, the Little Falls life, and the Chester life was looming ahead.

I’m starting a new life, a life where I live alone with my dogs and cat in this house. It’s been 30 years since the last time there was a version of me who lived alone. Looking for something else as I started to organize this next version Thursday, I found a stash of old photographs and the yellowed Passaic Herald-News clipping tucked between them, and started thinking of parallels and versions of me and different lives.

The last me who lived alone spent a lot of time writing and composing. In those late 1980s I wrote a bunch of songs, some of them pretty good if I say so myself, wrote a couple of novels, and created a superhero named Myke Phoenix. One of the novels was The Imaginary Bomb; the other, never mind. When publishing books stopped being cost-prohibitive, I sent the I-Bomb and Myke out into the world in 2008, and that was the beginning of the public author version of me, as opposed to the author wannabe version. I’d like this version to be as prolific as the last live-alone version. Time will tell, of course.

Red poured herself into her gardens every spring and summer after she retired. “I don’t know how many gardens I have left,” she would say. “I’m going to enjoy them while I can.” She had fewer than we knew.

I don’t know how many versions of me I have left. I’m going to enjoy them while I can.