One's Parents

A religious figure once said that if one wanted to follow Him, one should deny one's parents and drop everything of the past life and go follow Him. Now what does that mean? I was reading a sort of new age theist treatise mumbo-gumbo type thingie and there was a daily prayer, which suspisciously sounded a lot like some other daily prayers I had furtively heard elsewhere. I immediately suspected plagiarism, but I guess the end - spiritual improvement- justifies the means. Anyway, it started out " Our Father-Mother, who is in Heaven..." That's about as far as I got. If "father" is not adequate to mark the Divine, and we require "father-mother" to fully delineate it, then I submit that we actually need a room infinitely full of monkeys sitting at an infinite number of typewriters and typing out items about the nature of God. If God the Father is missing something, God the Father-Mother is missing something also, and has the added distinction of being verbose. To me, God the Father is one of those playthings of childhood that Paul tells us to put away, along with the teddy bears and Cracker Jack toys and water guns. We know no infinite "father" and the metaphor obscures rather than illuminates. If one leaves one's parents to follow Jesus, the point of His injunction was: in the eye of the Holy, there is no distinction between "father" nor "mother"; neither between "parent" nor "child". The concept of this lineage has no meaning before the face of God; the concepts of the world stand mute before God. Note well that this does not mean that one may live without morals, may live without filial piety, may lie, cheat,and steal, for at that point when one says that the human understanding of morality means nothing before the face of God, and therefore one is free to do whatever one desires and to engage and satisy one's lusts without compunction, then that individual has committed a logical error...if nothing else. No. At the time the small soul makes this rationalisation and turns to evil, then that soul has used the paltry words and concepts of an insipid moral discourse to justify its actions. However, if you cannot use words to touch God, then you also may not use words to turn from God. If your mind cannot accept God, then it is invalid to use your mind to reject God. You may continue on in your spiritual funk, your mind roasting on its material spit, over and over, but you can neither approach to nor recede from the Divine. You must live in complete faith. Complete faith is consciousness which frees itself from the wordy structures of everyday life, and it accepts the path of God wherein the precedence of parent to child means nothing, wherein the temporal sequence of filial piety is but a charming and quaint characteristic of the human species. Piety is living, breathing; it does not require 10 commandments; it does not require a genealogy; it does not need vicar nor presbyter nor pontiff. If you wish me to make this clearer, I suppose I could: If you live in complete faith, then the saying of Jesus that one need not give thought about what to eat or what to wear is simple; God provides for your needs. As impossible as that sounds, Jesus did say it. When we understand what it means, we shall understand freeedom in God. This is the mystery of the age: the irreconciliable difference between the Word of God and the word of economics. A stumbling block. Choose! Choose, and make your choice based on which is the structure that will free you: the laws of economy, the laws of science, the laws of logic...or the way of God? The way of God is the most difficult way, and it takes all your life to follow it. Then when you've arrived, you have to leave again on a far longer journey.