Ghosting God, Ghosting Self
Day 86
“Just be who you are and speak from your guts and heart-it’s all a man has.” This quote from Hubert Humphrey from the book Touchstones, was the topic of a men’s meeting I go to each Tuesday. It stirred up in me so many thoughts, ideas, errors, and joys. Juxtaposing this quote with the funeral services of Lindsey Graham,, my own inner wrestling with “what’s next” I see the correlation to how subtle and easy it is to Ghost God, Ghost our authentic Self. Writing this last sentence sent trembling awe throughout my body and it reconfirms the TRUTH of Hubert Humphrey’s words above.
Lindsey Graham was a good man who was very flawed, just like the rest of us humans. Lindsey Graham’s fatal flaw, however, was he could not “be who you are”. He was tied to some code within him that made him hide and betray his basic goodness of being, he was ‘friends with’ a person who denigrated a war hero, a U.S. Senator who only served his country, who was loyal to his oath to the Constitution from his days in the Military to his dying day, Lindsey’s friend, John McCain. How could this happen, he knew who Trump was/is, yet his need for power, his fragile ego would not, could not allow him to be an elder statesman like Ted Kennedy, like John McCain. While all of We the People are flawed; loyalty to principles rather than people, faithfulness to one’s inner knowing rather than to self-aggrandizement, being loving and kind to “all God’s Children” rather than feed the “cancer of the soul” called prejudice/racism/anti-semitism, etc are all ways of being that are in our “guts and heart”. The crime of Lindsey Graham was giving up “all a man has” to be near power, to sit at the right hand of the Pharaoh.
This is the main issue facing the United States and Israel today: what will it take to “just be who you are”! Not the ego-driven asshole like Trump, Netanyahu, not the false prophet and lying ‘servant’ of some idol you choose to call god, some authority you claim comes from Jesus, Moses, the Bible, the New Testament, rather the authentic Image of God you and me are created in, the Soul we are created, called to be! It is WAY PAST TIME for We the People to stop our self-deception, to end our belief in the lies we tell ourselves, to “lift up our eyes and see”! It is our “gut instinct” that gives us the words to speak truth to power, the first power being our rational mind that wants to take over from our intuitive mind, that believes it should not be a servant, rather it should be THE BOSS-forgetting about God’s Will and instead of making God’s Will our Will, these people are convincing WAY TOO MANY of we the people that their will is actually God’s Will, don’t believe the lies of the New Testament that speak of Christ’s generosity, grace, love, kindness, justice, truth, radical kinship with all people, don’t believe the Bible’s teachings of loving the stranger, caring for the needy, remembering we were “strangers in the land of Egypt”, not stand idly by the blood of your brother/sister, BE HOLY!
I am distraught at the News Media, who are supposed to be the prophets of our time as they were during the Vietnam War, that they keep dumbing down what is going on in the Middle East, that they decry the awful destruction of Gaza and DO NOT DECRY THE MASSACRE OF INNOCENT ISRAELIS BY HAMAS! All to keep on the good side of “socialist democrats”, aka keep their ratings, keep their bona fides pure for those radical extremists on the left who ‘love’ the underdog of the moment and have no loyalty to principles like Justice, Compassion, Truth, Kindness, Listening, Love for anyone nor anything that does not fall in lockstep with them. ISRAEL did the wrong thing in Gaza, in my opinion-not rooting out Hamas, doing it indiscriminately. The world did the wrong thing in Gaza by not demanding the release of the Hostages and forcing the hands of the supporters of Hamas in the Arab world and across the globe because the world showed their disdain, their hatred of Jews by their inaction. BOTH ARE TRUE and until We the People know ourselves well enough to hold two opposing ideas in our being at the same time-there is no hope for “a man to be who he is”!
I drank because being who I am was never good enough, never listened to and drinking became my way of escape. ALL LIES and in the jail cell in Dec. 1986, I began to listen to the Call of God, I began to listen to my “guts and heart”, I began to grow into the “man I am”, the soul I was created to be, into the authentic Mark Borovitz. I have been listened to by many and together we have created great lives with meaning and purpose after living the opposite for years, I have been speaking from my heart and guts, sometimes at the ‘wrong moment’ and in ‘wrong ways’, and it has been used against me, I gave them bullets and they shot me-my bad-or is it. I can live knowing I have not compromised “my guts and my heart”, that I live “who I am” and this is my path to Holiness.
ACTION STEP: How and when do you give up “the person you are”
When do you speak and live from your guts and heart
GOD BLESS, STOP GHOSTING GOD, GHOSTING SELF, Rabbi Mark