I didn't delete my Facebook account. I deactivated it. That is far less permanent. A friend who I love and trust called me a quitter when I made my announcement to leave Facebook. Well, s***. He might be right. I am not quitting my quest. I am upping the tension regarding it. In order to do that, I need to get out of the Facebook space. I am not creating anything there. I need to get away from all of those complicated, intertwined relationships, that big living room, at least for awhile.
I need to write some stuff with no concern of who is offended. I need a quiet on-line space. I need my old blog. Shuck and Jive. I don't want to upset my friends, family, and church folks as I continue my quest. I don't want people to worry. This quest freaks people out. It freaks me out. I need some space. Carry on in Facebook land. I'll be over here. Those who wish can find me.
I am going through some significant changes. A spiritual quest. A truth jihad. That is Kevin Barrett's phrase for his holy struggle. Kevin Barrett is part of this. It is really upsetting to me what happened to him at KBOO. He's a human being! Now I feel like a pariah there. It is like I have been "churched" as they say in the South. I am shunned. People avoid me. How dare I commit the unpardonable sin of trying to put [insert standard name-calling here] on the air? How could I think it might be a good idea for Portland to hear a viewpoint that might invite people to reconsider their worldview? On my one hour per month show!
The phrase "reconsider their worldview" sounds too academic. "Forsake their faith" or "Deny their Lord" captures the angst more clearly. Kevin Barrett, the Irish Muslim, messes up the neat distinction between the good and the bad. Management wrote that he is "diametrically opposed to KBOO's values." That is fear. Kevin is not the enemy. Nor am I. If you are really searching for what is true and not just what is true to your own particular tribe, you will break some taboos. You will begin to see that the taboos themselves are creations by the powerful to silence and shame. The powerful will smear you and do everything in their power to censor you. You have to find your heart. Being on the side of who you think are your "friends" cannot be more important than entertaining the thought that reality is far more messy. And far more sinister. Ultimately, far more beautiful.
It will take ten seconds to watch this video.
What do you see? What do you want to see? What do you not want to see?
There comes a time, if we are lucky, when we go through a dark night of the soul. It is dark, wrenching, and lonely. It shakes the foundations, as Paul Tillich puts it. We are so shaken that we are finally in a position to see what had been veiled. We can see that the neat narratives that have bolstered us as we protest the baddies and sing the praises of those who are on our team don't quite hold together so seamlessly. If we are lucky, we stop trying to patch the now tattered narratives and accept the truth that we have been deceived, duped, and fooled. Tillich would call that grace.
If we can accept that, if we can find the maturity to say yes to grace, we get life. We get heart. We find the heart to begin to pull the loose threads and then we watch with fear and amazement as the narratives begin to unravel. World Trade Center Seven is a lively loose thread to pull. But that is just the beginning. If I finally accept as true what is right before my eyes (and what obvious physics demonstrates), then there are many more questions. Why haven't we seen this? Who put that narrative together of 19 Arabs with boxcutters? Who does that narrative serve? Who is murdered by it?
If we can accept facts that shatter our beliefs, we can do anything. We are the lucky ones. We can be the leaders, the mystics, and the prophets who enable others to find their own liberation. We can be like Moses, Jesus, and Mohammad. But if we cannot allow the possibility that our narrative, our belief, our team, might be wrong, we end up being less than lucky. If we cannot bear being shunned and called "a conspiracy theorist" then the psyop worked (at least on us). We end up serving the master who created the false narrative and we do the dirty work of censorship for him.
But that is not us.
We can be the lucky ones.
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