Jesus: Life’s True Artist

Preston Harold takes us through Jesus’ approach to life; what He sees as essential to having life in abundance. In a private correspondence Henry Miller once wrote: “It’s not that I put the sage or saint above the artist. It’s rather that I want to see established the ‘artist of life.’ The Christ resurrected would be such, for example.”

Harold says…

No theology, acting on command of or by the example Jesus set, may prescribe a stern approach to life, prohibiting eating and drinking of any food of liquid except on the ground that it is offensive to the one partaking of it; what offends one must be cast out of his life, but nothing that enters a man defiles him. Jesus was called glutton and drunkard. He did not deny that He ate and drank as He chose – He stated that wisdom vindicates ascetic or nonascetic practices:

For John the Baptist has come, eating no bread and drinking no wine, and you say, “He has a devil”; the Son of man has come eating and drinking, and you say, “Here is a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of taxgatherers and sinners!” Nevertheless, Wisdom is vindicated by all her children. –Luke 7:33

Jesus provided wine at the wedding of Cana… The teaching and practice of Jesus, however, does not invite drunkenness or gluttony. He teaches that there is nothing in life that cannot be used to further its joy and abundance when man has learned to control himself.

The richness of life must be leavened, and Jesus says the working or coming of the kingdom of God is leavening it. He saw that men must grasp the art of play:

To what then shall I compare the men of this generation? What are they like? Like children sitting in the marketplace and calling to one another, “We piped to you and you would not dance, we lamented and you would not weep.            –Luke 7:31,32

Music and voices call men into action – life calls, nature calls: dance, laugh, weep, join us!

Jesus reveled in nature. Any living thing was precious to him. He sought the open beauty of mountains and sea, the solitude of far places. He came also to the cities, the marketplace, the feasts, and to the temple. He allowed the extravagant. He aided the poor, but He did not extol the mean bone of poverty. He respected the Sabbath, but employed it to His own pursuits. He despised exhibitions of piety, vain repetitions, brutality and self-debasement. His was a total empathy, a compassionate rendering, an exquisite edition of the art of life.

Beautifully stated! But then comes a wrench in the spokes:

Jesus knew the very glory of life – knew that even the stones would shout it, if men did not. And yet, the Gospel of St. John presents an enormous contradiction as regards Jesus’ love of life in this world. He says:

He that loveth his life shall lose it; and he that hateth this life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal. -John 12:25

Against these words are posed the example He set and the statement that He came “not to judge the world,” but that man might have life abundantly… What then could Jesus have meant [by this contradicition]?

It is this we will tackle in our next post. Until then, peace…

Reversing the Rules

Preston Harold shows us how empathy aligns with religious thought. He says:

The effect of empathy and its meaning to life may be likened to Tao: Tao is obscured when you fix your eye on little segments of existence only…” but when Tao is grasped universally, “Without law or compulsion men [will] dwell in harmony.” In individual terms, empathy is realizing on one’s own being the Golden Rule. Empathy is Jesus’ new commandment as an act in one’s own soul – love one another, love the Lord your God with your whole mind, heart, and soul, and your neighbor as yourself. Only through empathy is it possible to step into another’s shoes without displacing him or foisting oneself upon him or losing one’s own precious identity; empathy not only makes this possible, it makes it mandatory.

Mandatory?! Maybe that’s why Jesus couches empathy’s impetus as a commandment. It seems ridiculous to me to make loving someone a commandment that must be fulfilled, but through genuine non-judgmental empathy a slight crack in the door may open that invites me to walk through.

When empathy exists, one experiences in his own being what is happening to another and understands that another suffers whatever is happening to oneself. Empathy is direct, involuntary. It cannot be vicariously expressed because it is borne from out the boundless deeps of a man and, to borrow words from Alfred Lord Tennyson, rises, “too full for sound or foam, but such a tide as moving seems asleep,” and with certainty “turns again home” whatever one does or witnesses.

And here Harold will explain how empathy is born out of the interplay between good and evil:

Because empathy is begotten only of the wholeness of experiencing good and evil involved in any decision, situation, or act, it exerts an incomprehensible power – which is to say, unconsciously it is expressed and it cannot be called into action. Because it is an unconsciously made automatic response, through it man gains freedom from having to make a choice between what appears to be good and what appears to be evil, for his response is both unconsciously tempered and in accord with the reality of the situation. Huxley says: “The fullest freedom is the expression of an inner compulsion of our being, of a choice, which we have come to feel as inevitably necessary…In general, once we manage to ‘see things steadily and see them whole,’ the choice is made for us.”

And with this one can understand Jesus’ breaking of the religious “rules” in order to meet people where they are, with their immediate hopes and needs. Empathy can be summed up in one phrase of Jesus that echoes the Tao quote above and bears along with it huge implications.  Jesus grasped the Tao and stated: “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.”

Until next time, peace.