Taoism and The Cure for Halitosis

The ancient Chinese believed that a wise person should move quietly through the personal storms that rule most people’s lives. They thought of such storms as ego eruptions, internal explosions created by a preoccupation with things like fame and fortune. Personal storms could also arise from one’s attempts to avoid suffering, which is, at any rate, an inevitable part of human life.

A wise person would develop his or her intuition, learning to discern the deep structure of reality that under girds life and nature. Then, the wise person would organize life, thought and emotion accordingly.

Honoring the structures of reality involved distinguishing between right and wrong. One could develop a deep intuition about the way things are supposed to work in the universe if only he could sense the rightness or wrongness of a particular thing. The rightness or wrongness of a thing was not constant; it involved its placement, timing, or how it balanced with other objects or events in its environment. Fung Shui is an example of this system of thought.

Ancient Chinese called the structure of reality, “the way,” or “Tao,” in Chinese.

(The word is pronounced dahwl, which may make Chinese laugh but gets close enough for people like me!)

Though the Chinese probably developed this idea to a more sophisticated degree than most other ancient peoples, it was nearly universally believed.

In his letter to the Romans, for example, St. Paul alludes to this sense of an underlying “rightness or wrongness” of things. His first chapter insists that God has imbedded a sense of right and wrong within the very structures of the universe. People of all cultures in all times and places thus have access to an unwritten text that teaches us justice and righteousness.

Earlier generations of Western thinkers, going back to the ancient Romans and Greeks, called this concept 'natural law'. For them, jurisprudence was the art of creating and interpreting the laws of a land in such a way that those laws would reflect that deep natural law that they believed was meant to govern all people everywhere.

As late as the late 1940’s and early 1950’s, the concept of “natural law” allowed the Western nations to judge the disposed rulers of Nazi Germany for having committed “crimes against humanity.”

Christians believe that not only the Nazis, but that all human beings live in rebellion against the “Tao,” or “the way.”

In his writings, C. S. Lewis points out repeatedly that human beings experience this rebellion as a deep and irresolvable conflict. He charges that all human beings in every society believe some things to be right and other things to be wrong. He says that human beings are frustrated because even though they posses this knowledge of good and evil, they often choose evil. Lewis tells us, as all good teachers throughout Christian history have told us, that this frustration reveals a fundamental flaw at the core of human nature: that our sincere intention to do what is right is coupled with our inability to actually do what is right.

Christians explain this basic flaw of human nature in different ways, an by using different metaphors. The Biblical word for it is sin, a word that means, “missing the mark”.

C.S. Lewis again, in his science fiction book, Out of The Silent Planet, writes about the guardian angel of an “unfallen” planet, (one in which the inhabitants have never sinned,) trying to describe the concept of sin to those under his charge. He describes the spiritual inhabitants of the earth (demons) as “the bent ones.” The illness of soul that causes angels to be bent is called “evil.” When human beings are bent, we call their illness, “sin.” And that is as good a description of sin as we will find. Saying that a person is a “sinner” is to say that his soul, the core of his being, is “bent.”

In today’s One Year Bible reading (Numbers 16), the lessons continue about making a difference between sacred and profane things. One can profane a sacred thing by using it outside its appointed boundaries or treating it as though it were like everything else. In the Psalm (55), the writer bewails the loss of a friend who has betrayed him. “We took sweet counsel together and walked in the house of God in company.” What the Psalmist would have expected of an enemy has been done by a friend. Things are out of joint, twisted, not right.

Christians call this “not rightness,” “sin.”

We first learn to recognize sin in others. Early in life we realize that people do unjust things to us. “It’s not fair,” the child cries when other children do not share, or they do not receive something that was promised.

It takes a long time for us to realize that the terrible, twisted, bentness we observe in others is in us too. There is a mechanism in each human being that continually creates and dramatizes his or her own life story. In this autobiography, the one who creates the story is the same one who hears it and therefore, the person for whom the story is told is always the hero, always in the right, and always has a good explanation for why things go wrong in the world. Usually, a relationship crisis becomes the first breakthrough – often devastating – when the “hero” realizes that he too is bent. All that he has observed in others that is unrighteous and unholy, is his very same condition.

An old African proverb claims “no one knows when his own breath stinks.”

Christianity says that every human being has halitosis and that we work day and night to hide it from ourselves.

The first step to finding the Way, the Tao, is the realization that our finder is broken. We cannot FIND our Way, we must be FOUND BY the Way.

In the Tao Te Ching, Lao Tse writes, “those who name the Tao do not know it; those who know it, do not name it.”

With all great respect to the great sage, I must say that Lao Tse was mistaken. The Tao has a name. The Tao is the One who once said, “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life.”

The Old Testament book called The Proverbs asks the question: “can that which is crooked be made straight?”

Yes! It can. We can cry out to the eternal Tao, as one poor man once did, “Jesus, Thou Son of David, have mercy on me, a sinner.”

It’s a free alignment and its always just one confession away.

Royal Telephone

When I was a kid, we sang a song about a “royal telephone to glory.” Its interesting to me how folk culture adapts spiritual language to the inventions of the time. Generations before had sung about how “Life is like a Mountain Railroad.” Before that, people talked about taking a trip in a good old gospel ship.

Frederick Lehman wrote Royal Telephone in 1919 and I am thinking about it today because on today’s date in 1886, Alexander Graham Bell shouted in the world’s first telephone, “Watson, come here; I need you.”

By 1919 most Americans had used a telephone. They were amazed at how the human voice could find its way over miles and into a receiver at the other end. Lehman envisioned a telephone wire stretching from earth to glory. It would be a trouble free line, where “central” – the place where the switchboard operator made the connection between callers – would never be busy.

“Central’s never busy, always on the line. You may hear from heaven almost anytime.”

It was the lyrics of a Christian explaining his faith in an era of instant communication.

Every generation has done that: explained how the connection works between heaven and earth.

Of course, sooner or later, the explanation always comes back to Jesus.

In the One Year Bible reading today, we read about Jesus before the Sanhedrin.

It is not an easy thing for a believer to read. It seems so unfair and bitter.

The heart of the story, though, is not about the tragedy of it. It’s about the connection that the death and resurrection of Jesus opened up between earth and heaven. The metaphor of a “royal telephone” leaves a lot to be desired, but aims in the right general direction.

In every religion, the faithful people who follow it want to imitate their founder’s life and to obey his teaching. Christians are no exception. Christ was a great man. He was a wonderful teacher. If we try to imitate His life, we will become better people. However, we must admit that a person would also be a better person if he imitated the Buddha’s life, or Socrates, for that matter.

Imitating the life of Christ, as important as it is, is not the main thing for a Christian.

The New Testament teaches that the main point in serving Christ is not imitating Him, but participating in His life! (See 2 Peter 1:3-8)

As a person follows Christ, he or she should expect the character and power of Christ to penetrate his or her own being. Such a person, to use a phrase from St. Paul, “puts on Christ.”

Jesus began the process of “colonizing” our human nature, when He, “for us and our salvation came down from Heaven … became incarnate from the Virgin Mary, and was made man.”

Why did He do it?

Certainly Jesus came down from heaven in order to reveal God’s love to us.

Without a doubt, He also wanted to live an exemplary life, so that we would have an example to follow. The imitation of Christ is a vital part of our spirituality. He also wanted to show us how to die – in submission to God.

Even more importantly though, Christians believe that Jesus lived and died as one of us because the deep structure of the universe required a “settling of accounts.” The connection between earth and heaven was broken and needed to be repaired. Christians believe that this was accomplished through the vicarious death, (that is, a death in the place of) of a man who was wholly innocent, Christ Jesus.

Alexander Graham Bell probably invented the telephone because his mother went deaf when he was a child. He had experimented for years with various acoustic devices, trying to discover a way for her to hear again. How often great things are born from compassion seeking to bring relief to those who suffer!

Our Lord was led into the Sanhedrin in today’s reading to the jeers of religious people. They didn’t believe in his mission. They didn’t know who he was. He had to suffer mockery of the crowd and the denial of his followers.

Just a few hours later though, as he gasped his last breath on the cross, he mustered up enough strength to moan, "it is finished.”

The connection had been made. A call could get through from anywhere on earth, from any person speaking any language, at no cost whatever.

The Royal Telephone was in full service mode and has been ever since.


There will be no charges, telephone is free,
It was built for service, just for you and me;
There will be no waiting on this royal line,
Telephone to glory always answers just in time.

Kiss A Teacher Today!

In 1775 on this date, Thomas Payne wrote his explosive paper, African Slavery in America.

Boy, did it upset things! It was like what happens when someone has experienced a temporary malfunction with flatulence control and releases noxious fumes into a small space. No one wants to acknowledge what has occurred and so everyone keeps on speaking as though nothing is amiss. Then someone just says it, “who ^#$#$%?”

Teachers are not just interested in making us learn multiplication tables or the capitals of the fifty states. Teachers mentor us in the fine art of thinking. Without teachers we imbibe and then regurgitate other people’s thoughts. Much of culture is just that – people drinking in the regurgitated thoughts of others, then regurgitating those thoughts back out into the ideaosphere for others to drink.

Teachers make us stop and ask, “do I really want to drink this? Is this really my own thought? What makes this thought true; just because everyone I know repeats it over and over? Does that really make it so?"

For some reason, teachers can make people very, very angry.

Socrates had to drink hemlock just because he asked too many questions and had too many people thinking at one time. That upset the upper crust of Athens.

It happens all the time. A real teacher messes up your head. It’s not usually pleasant.

I don’t like Thomas Payne, for example. He was antichristian, for one thing.

I respect him though, which is not the same thing as “like.”

He makes me answer important questions about my faith, my political beliefs and my commitment to a country in which we allow ideas to fight one another so the people who hold them won’t.

Payne was already telling the nation that was about to be born that this slavery thing was a really, really bad idea.

Six people attended his funeral.

Even so, he was, and is, a great teacher. He deserves to be thought of as one of the nation’s founding fathers.

Isn’t it amazing that our Lord used the word “teacher” in reference to himself more than any other tile?

Jesus was a powerful teacher. He made his points so clearly that to this day He is infinitely easier to read than all the people who try to explain him to us.

He was a supreme story-teller. He was not a scribe, that sort of rabbi who endlessly analyzed the sacred text and gave learned commentary on it. Jesus referred to scripture often. His public prayers were nearly always based upon the common prayers used in the synagogue. However, his words were not really rabbinical discourses. He was something like a first century Will Rogers, someone making points about spiritual life by telling tales of ordinary fishermen, farmers and runaway children.

Most of the Jewish leaders in Jerusalem made fun of His style.

The people however, listened.

He was, of course, history’s greatest change agent. Western civilization’s all too gradual (but continual) liberation of slaves, women, and the poor; the care for the handicapped; respect for minorities and the powerless of society; all these social movements owe much to the preaching of Jesus. This world-changing power did not flow from political genius; it erupted from a gentle but persistent knock on the door of the human heart.

Jesus changed hearts. The men and women with changed hearts changed the world.

The Lord preached his first sermon in Caperneum. (Luke 4: 16-22) I have been there, among the ruins of that very synagogue.

The synagogue was remarkably similar to a modern church. Children remain with the adults for prayers and hymns, and were then dismissed to adjoining rooms in order to play and receive religious instruction. One can still see the marks on the floor where the children played a first century equivalent of hop-scotch. After the children were dismissed, Jesus took the scroll from its place, kissed it, unrolled it and read from the reading for the day: Isaiah 61: “the Spirit of the Lord is upon me for He has anointed me to preach good news to the poor.” Then, after he had read his text, he said these words: “today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”

From that day he kept teaching, in synagogues and open fields, mostly in the little towns around Lake Tiberias, what the New Testament calls the Sea of Galilee.

We still listen to sermons and songs based on his words. Sometimes, we even attempt to put His words into practice. When we do, the words still cause people to stop and stare.

Teachers are an enigma. The upper crusts profess an admiration for teachers but do not want their children to become one. The lower classes tend to make jokes about crazy teachers who don’t know how to tie their own shoes. We pay nearly everyone a lot more than we do teachers and then berate them because they are not doing a good job teaching our children.

Why anyone actually wants to become a teacher is a mystery.

But everyone in a while, a little boy or a little girl reads while others play, learns obscure things that interests no one else, then selects a career that doesn’t pay enough to survive.

Why do they do it?

Because the world is dark and someone needs to turn on the light.