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GOD BECAME MAN

SO THAT MAN WOULD BECOME GOD

This is what all creation is about!!! Therefore, it is pretty important to get it straight! Here I will try to examine the role we must play in order that “theosis”, the process itself of becoming God-like, be implemented. God has in no way left us uninstructed in this regard, but, as Herbert Schwartz was wont to say: We are taught to obey every commandment but the FIRST!!! Which is, however, the cause and driving force which effects ALL THE OTHERS! See Exodus 20:1-3

And God spoke all these words:

"I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me.”

Consider, for starters, how we make a god of our own minds:

How often do we hear: “No, I DON’T THINK SO.” Anyone with the temerity to ask, “Please be so kind as to give us your reasons for thinking (or not thinking, there really is no difference in this instance) so, or not so, as the case may be ….” will typically be brushed off as just too simple-minded to comprehend the subtle and esoteric workings of the speaker’s superior wisdom. “I don’t think so.” This ipso facto makes what anyone else may think utterly immaterial.

Or, mutatis mutandi: “I don’t LIKE that.” Be it a celebrity, a neighbor, a new culinary concoction – or an old one – or maybe a movie, makes no difference. The Pope in the Vatican should enjoy such infallible and incontrovertible certitude as the typical American Big Mouth lays claim to! Usually at an ear-splitting and head-splitting decibel volume, and with arms slashing the air in so many directions, these persons could be taken for the multi-limbed Hindu god Vishnu.

Against such aggressively bellicose egotism, anything even resembling union, communion with another person, be it God or man, friendship with an “alter ego”, another “self” - as Aristotle already was convinced is a pre-requisite for ethical rectitude, which he in turn saw as identical with sanity, back in those pre-Freudian times – such communion, the prescription for freedom from enslavement to oneself, to one’s own petty self-worth, doesn’t stand a chance.

Nor do warm, compassionate, yet fragile and vulnerable, human persons, or small, exquisitely beautiful countries like Haiti - with a populace which is, moreover, incredibly gifted artistically - stand a chance in our culture dominated by self-appointed demi-gods, who remain oblivious to the first of the Ten Commandments, even as they blithely trash any and all who, however unsuspectingly, fall afoul of their highly idiosyncratic mores, purported to derive from the other nine.

Let us consider, for starters, a spelling test taken by another granddaughter of mine (our divinely blessed family specializes in Haiti-types) in 2nd grade some 15 or 20 years ago. So far as I know, my daughter still has today the test paper in question. Every entry has a huge, consummately in-your-face, red X by it, and at the top is the grade, 0, a giant zero, aggressively underlined with serial stab marks. Yet, if you read the words, you see that they are so expertly spelled phonetically, one can even detect the teacher’s New Jersey accent! My granddaughter is a VERY smart girl, and one who doesn’t memorize, but uses her mind systematically in a manner Aristotle (whose thought is referred to as “common sense systematized”) would definitely recommend. She therefore had mastered the very straightforward logic of phonic spelling – and reading, incidentally. One summer close in time to this spelling experience, I took her through the entire “Hooked on Phonics” program – first through 12th grade reading – in 2 weeks, that being all the time my daughter would let me have, because she didn’t want her daughter to be under any pressure. So for 2 weeks that summer, we spent mornings doing the phonics program, then after lunch we met with friends close in age to my granddaughters and the girls would shoot the rapids below a nearby waterfall! As she moved through the readings for the upper grades, which were quite informational and often amusing, my granddaughter would regale her friends with all this fun stuff she was learning about. I was more than satisfied at the end of the two weeks, because if she never read another page in her life (a very real possibility given the mostly puerile junk they were at the time giving the children to read – I have to say that my grandchildren currently in grade school do have incomparably better fare) – so if she never read anything else, she nevertheless knew that she could already read as well as any high school graduate, and thus she would never be beaten down by teachers such as the one in second grade.

Because the overall effect of such asinine disparagement from the second grade teacher (and others, this being so largely the temper of our contemporary culture) is not something which can be blown away in an instant. What this beautiful and sensitive girl learned in second grade - which was a terrible lie that I had to insure she UNLEARNED, and thoroughly – was that her superior use of her highly gifted mind which gave her a grasp of the entire logic of language, which is an expression, of course, of the logic of the human mind as such, which in turn is the way we come to grasp ALL BEING, was just totally useless, all she would get by using her very sophisticated intellectual capability was a big fat red ZERO!

It was only incrementally that the pieces of this puzzle so combined as to shock me into a traumatized realization of what was at stake here; I was so devastated, I cried continually for 3 days. A friend took me into her home because I was simply unable to be in my own. Finally I made a plan to go to Haiti and my husband – who could see I was a hopeless case even if he had no clue as to why – gave this plan his blessing. This was about 1994, as Aristide had just been returned to Haiti as President by the Clinton Administration. The condition Haiti was in at that time frighteningly reflected my own – and for identical reasons. But I did return home with a modicum of sang-froid. I was aware that I had to do whatever was possible to me to restore to my grandchild a sense of her rightful human dignity.

I believe the clincher was the ice skating. The pond in our town iced over, so everyone suited up for an hour’s skating. My granddaughter didn’t like it as she was just a beginner, but of course she had to keep skating or freeze! As she began to get her balance, I told her to stroke out further, which she did – it makes it easier, after all – and before long she was in her element, because she is well built, long limbed and very graceful, when all the children would run around in our yard, she had always been like a swan gliding gracefully through all the others. So of course soon the other skaters began to notice her poise and elegance – until, to conclude the whole episode, on her next visit she was showing me how she had earned the title of the best roller blader in her town, Newport, Rhode Island!!! And while neither she nor her sister, nor my daughter, their mother, “melt into the crowd” as our contemporaries are wont to do, they all know they are loved, and incredibly blessed, by God – and they, as spontaneously and unselfconsciously as they breathe, communicate this to those around them whom they commune with.

And hopefully my granddaughter to whom this is addressed, now a college freshman, will be (rather less agonizingly, please God!) liberated from the destructive powers of those addicted to “ME, MYSELF & I” that inevitably swirl around her – and go on to liberate myriad others, there being nothing more infectious than acquiescence to the order God has pre-destined for His world from all eternity, from which all gods we might put before GOD have been banished.

FOR God spoke all these words:

"I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me.”