God and the Plague - A Dream

[Daniel-David-Joseph]

Plague 1

I dream a dream in which I make the following statement to a group of spiritual friends, including one I believe to be Jesus, with whom I am walking:

“You know how we think of God as something, an entity or consciousness that doesn’t need anything outside of itself to feel satisfied or fulfilled? Maybe that’s wrong, and this is His/Her way of getting it.”

When I am finished speaking I wonder to myself if I will continue to possess the equanimity I enjoy when making this comment to my friends if it is ultimately my fate, or the fate of someone I care about, to be sickened by this awful plague loosed by God upon the earth, this wretched curse that I believe God for whatever reason sent. For yes, make no mistake, I do not accept the idea that it was merely a stroke of bad luck, a random event devoid of meaning which brought the world once again to its knees. An apocalypse called forth by the eating of bats, though the eating of bats may have been the instrument of something greater. As it is said "God makes luck." Luck that is good and luck that facilitates the death of thousands. But I digress…

When I am finished speaking I wonder to myself if I will continue to possess the equanimity I enjoy when making this comment to my friends, if it is ultimately my fate or the fate of someone I care about to end up on the altar of God’s “fulfillment,” of God’s “satisfaction;” to end up just another sacrificial lamb in a world where the God known to me in my dreams as the "Anonymous Power" pursues a sometimes brutal strategy, the motive and purpose of which we may never know for sure.

Indeed, it is difficult to comprehend in a direct way the mind of God. Mystics, poets and theosophists from the dawn of human consciousness have struggled to unlock the puzzle and the paradox of divine thought. They have looked to the model of nature, they have surrendered themselves to the practice of meditation, they have wandered in the desert and waited for visions, they have reclined at length under the Bodhi tree hoping for enlightenment. As for me, like Jacob, Joseph and Daniel, I am one who follows the way of the dream. Only the dream awakens me to the Living Law. Only the dream presents a window that seems worthy of my trust, into the unseen, a sacred, secret window that allows me to know or so I believe a little bit of what God, the Supernal Mind thinks, a little bit of what God intends. Only the dream inspires at least for me, a faith in the divine. And it is the voice of the dream which told me this:

"When the Lord makes us suffer it is because or when He is more concerned with the end than the means, with the product than the people."

If it is thus, if it is as the voice in my dream instructs, I wonder, what is the end that God desires now? What is the "product" that alone, will satisfy or fulfill "Him."

What is so important to God, this God who sometimes mixes good and evil, this Oxymoron of Oxymorons that He/She is willing to sacrifice the innocent along with the guilty? What kind of dark-light, Yin Yang, Shakti-Shiva Master of the Universe would sacrifice their own creation, so in need of Tikkun Olam to get what they want? Not the easy going cosmic guru worshipped by those who trumpet the New Age… Not the mainstream Christian deity of unconditional love, mercy and forgiveness in whom, as the Bible instructs "…there is no darkness at all." We know better I believe than that. Neither of these what I would call man-made myths of divine perfection, which have more to do perhaps with what Man wants that what God is, answer the question posed by the dream.

Maybe it is a God who, after sending forth Her messengers one by one and seeing them rejected, crucified or stoned, after trying a gentler, kinder more ethereal approach realized finally that human beings need to learn everything worth learning, the hard way…

Maybe it is a God who hopes the human race will come together in opposition to a common foe, who hopes the human race will recognize that in the words of a dream I had long ago, “You cannot save humanity until you save humanity as a whole.” Maybe it is a God who, while the archetype and progenitor I believe of everything good, is nevertheless quite capable of employing the predatory force of the natural world in service to some ultimately beneficial aim. Word of the Dream: “Nature is cosmic, His idea is law.” Meaning nature is a part of the cosmic scheme and as such a reflection of divine nature which can be harsh like the tundra or gentle like the dune. Which can be both at the same time: punishment and opportunity; censure and correction; fire and snow. Maybe it is a God, myriad and paradoxical who, in order to save the world must first destroy or at least infect it.

 

[Gargovic Malkav]

Maybe it is a God who, after sending forth Her messengers one by one and seeing them rejected, crucified or stoned, after trying a gentler, kinder more ethereal approach realized finally that human beings need to learn everything worth learning, the hard way…

This is an attitude I've adopted to make sense of the chaos and evils in this world. I have faith that He knows what He's doing though. I believe He allows a lot of this evil and confusion to happen, so that one day, even those who reject Him cannot deny Him without lying to themselves because of all the things that have happened. Every time people lose respect for Him or respect for others and make up excuses to justify their injustices, bad things are bound to happen. When such self-deceit becomes a family tradition or a cultural norm, it becomes terribly hard to restore things to a state of purity, and those who see through the illusion are seen as crazy or even as a threat.

 

[Daniel-David-Joseph]

Thank you for your thoughtful comment Gargovic.

I especially appreciate your insight into the way the effort to deny the evil in ourselves and our behavior requires a level of self-deceit that may become a part of family tradition or a cultural norm. I think this is how prejudice, bias and to use your word various forms of disrespect are legitimized and inherited.

With regard to your faith in Gods' intentionality, I think that's true to an extent. I think there are moments when God knows what "He's" doing and even when there is a cost inflicted via the suffering of innocents, what He or She does is ultimately for the best. I also think that there are times when God loses control the way a human being might, and that that too is part of why there is evil in the world.

Nevertheless, what the dreams cited in my post suggest to me, is that there are junctures in our development when the Hand of God, even when moving in an ultimately spiritual direction may not be gentle. That there are occasions when, wielding the often blunt instrument of nature, it is more like the hand of the woodsman clearing the path, willy-nilly through the forest, or the stone cutter smashing through whatever gets in his way.

I know this may not be a comforting thought for those who adhere to what I would call the simplistic vision of the divine embraced by mainstream western religion, because it implies that there is evil or destructiveness in God just as there is evil in everything God has created, but I think it is more in line with the nature of a being who made a world where, along with beauty, goodness and love, animals eat each other alive.

There is a saying in the Jewish tradition, that without the yetzer hara, the evil inclination, a man would not bother to get married or to build a house. This means that there are times when we need an aggressive instinct to achieve positive ends. It’s only when that instinct, for a combination of reasons including those which are intrinsic and those which are environmental, instead of being subsumed by our good or creative inclination (the yetzer ha tov), takes control that evil becomes a problem. I think this is something that can happen on the metaphysical plane as well as with human beings. In this case however, while there is evil, cruelty and indifference in the power of the plague, I believe my dream is saying it may be a tool God is using to help us build a better world… To help us move a little closer to that kingdom of heaven on earth we are all, on some level perhaps, yearning for.