The Anatolian Zealot

Two weeks on the mountain.  A hot sun for most of the day.  Yesterday’s rain continued through the night.  Today or tomorrow Maya leaves for her mother’s home.  It is a tradition practiced by all married women in Nepal every year.  Next month the women will celebrate the Teej holiday where they dress in red and dance the day away.  There’s also a tradition here where a wife can publically ridicule her hapless husband. 

I was invited by Laxman’s father to pay a visit to his home.  I look at the clock, I have two rashes in unfriendly places, I felt a little nauseous thirty minutes ago, there’s still a lot of sun out there, though clouds should prevail in a few hours.

Getting saved or becoming enlightened won’t make those gallstones disappear.  Suffering. 

Laxman bought some land and built a road that leads to the rear of the guesthouse.  Now he needs a jeep.  He should name the road after his wife: one suggestion, Maya’s Way. 

In truth getting saved and becoming enlightened are one and the same.  It’s semantics, dude.  On the road to Damascus Paul was seriously enlightened and most likely saved.  If you see the light you’ve experienced both. 

My Christian conversion, though, was anything but enlightening.  Well, it was in a reversed way.  Expecting peals of thunder and choirs of singing angels, there was absence, nothing.  Why did I expect a supernatural kind of saving experience when I got on my knee and asked Jesus in my heart?  Because I was going undercover and I didn’t know it until almost 30 years later. 

That’s right, I was born a Roman Catholic and put on the coat of evangelicalism to see how they worked, how they thought, what they believed and so forth.  When I entered the future through the acceleration of coincidences both their failures and successes were revealed to me.  Big mistakes on either side of the aisle, you’d never in your wildest imagination believe me if I suggested the church fathers in Nicea should have kept all of Paul’s letters separate and put them after the book of Revelation and called them a commentary because these men erred in not recognizing the difference between inspiration and opinion.  John and Peter saw. 

My intention was to never leave the Catholic Church, I just needed something with spiritual tangibility and was always interested in the faiths.  After the divorce it took a real long time to enter a church of any kind.  In hindsight though I was more or less like my father.  Cursing at God?  There is nothing wrong with that.  He was communicating in his most heartfelt way a gilded lace of profanities through the mid-Atlantic humidity, to God.  And God knew it, like Job, like Mother Theresa, it’s ok to shake your fist at God for that doesn’t shake your faith if your faith is on solid ground.  You’re talking and that’s all the Creator can ask for when you’re really p o’d at Him-Om.

Maya came in with a mug of masala chai.  God bless you, ma’am.  

So, should we discuss the curse of the Detroit Lions now?  

By four o’clock the sun is no longer menacing, it is safe to go out now.  And for what it’s worth just as I began to type ‘by four o’clock the sun is no longer menacing’ Dave Mathews sings ‘talk about the weather’.  What a cute coincidence.  Is there really so much to say that hasn’t been already said, Dave?

Paul, the Anatolian zealot.  Let’s ask a question:  Why weren’t any of Paul’s letters sent to Arab believers?  Because there weren’t any then?  Because they were of a different covenant?  If you wish to understand why Islam exists you can start with the Jewish dude from Tarsus. 

And ya know if I were a Jew I’d have more of an issue with Christians because Paul isn’t in their book!  Perhaps Jews before Christianity lived at least harmoniously with the Arab pagans, and were close enough politically, socially, economically they didn’t need their theological differences pointed out, way to go, Saul. 

Time for something to eat.