Building a House on a Rock: Sermon on the Mount

Around Christmas and Easter I get emails from a musician friend of mine which have no greeting - just Bible Verses and some musical attachments. Not understanding his intention, I usually scan the emails and delete them.

This year, emboldened by my religious quest, I decided to ask him what he intended to achieve by sharing these letters. Used to pushback, he responded a bit defensively as first, but his response also clarified that by not opening the musical attachments I had missed the clever connections he had made between pop songs and the Gospel. He also mentioned that the Sermon on the Mount was excellent for anyone to read, believers and non, and so I promised I would give it a good look.

Reading the Sermon on the Mount made me feel like I was embracing a philosophy of calm, clarity, and compassion. The way I feel when I am wading waist-high in a pool of water.

One of many magical places in Vermont

The feeling reminded me of an experience I had a few months ago while on a visit to Vermont. As a special treat my hippie friend and I left our concrete floor and wood stove and went to a spa with an outdoor pool and hottub, which they had just opened as the outside temperature reached the required 18 degrees. I wrapped my head in a towel and ordered bourbon from the bar to make a hot toddy from the tea service. We sat in the grey stone jacuzzi, surrounded by fluffy mounds of snow, and watched the sun set in a copper blaze over the green mountains, as steam rose from the pool into the wintry air. It was busy that weekend and there were families and kids playing everywhere, but regardless, I had a tremendous sense of calm. I walked around the spa later, in my white robe, with a smile simmering on my face, opening doors for people, gliding everywhere. So relaxed and at peace, and giving. Only the night before I had had a terrible bout of depression, and less than a day later I was floating on air.

I thought to myself, how can I feel like this everyday? How can I feel like this towards others every day? How can I encircle people in kindness?

I envisioned my circular presence forward as a glowing hulu hoop of compassion. Anyone I meet is free to step inside. And I have no need of anger, impatience, or fear.

Heaven on Earth :: TopNotch Spa, Stowe, Vermont

Part of that feeling came from the knowledge that all my needs were met. And there is a refrain in Christ's Sermon that you don't need to worry about getting the earthly goods you need because God will provide. And by accepting yourself, you may accept others, and as you care for others, you care for yourself.

Now if Christ's Sermon makes me feel like I am wading through water, the philosophy of my childhood was that of Ayn Rand, a philosophy that makes me feel as if I am flying off a cliff. That's not to say one is better than the other - both provide clarity, and I would like to make sense of where I land in the middle.

I have always felt that Rand's writing failed to clarify the importance of love and compassion. From her "Virtues of Selfishness", one may assume that acting in self-interest means never helping others, but that is not true. She never says you can't donate money to things you find important, or help someone weak or ignorant, or help clean out your mom's garage. She just wants you to make sure that you are doing these things as a result of YOUR value system and not because society or peer pressure tells you it's important. Which Christ says as well: he urges you to pray and donate and do good deeds privately, because YOU know they are good, not so others will commend you.

There are so many profound teachings in Christ's Sermon that addressing them all would take forever. But I will start with the easy part: by clarifying the things that I eschew.

Firstly, the bits about divorce and marriage and adultery are gobbedley-gook. It sounds like an artist suddenly talking about tax code. At that time in human civilization, there was so little infrastructure as far as laws and communication and employment that monogomous, male-dominated marriage was about all you had to keep the place from utter chaos. He was against divorce because it created chaos. He was for controlling lust and anger, because they led to chaos. He was hoping people would treat each other better, and be happier; he wasn't out to reconstruct all the current customs of civilization.

Of course, no one is a big proponent of divorce and anger or any violent feelings that make us go mad, but we are fortunate to live in a world today where these things do not always lead to chaos, and we have a lot more infrastructure to deal with them, whether that be counseling, sharing relationship advice and best practices, or our good old justice system.

The other very important part of Christ's philosophy that I choose to edit out is the whole reward system: the reward from your Father in heaven. He just lives too far away. Ms. Rand knew that the reward comes from within each individual.

While I believe in beauty and magic and kindness and peace as something bigger than me, I believe it flows from individuals through communities to generations of human beings living here on earth. By following Christ's Sermon in our daily lives, we experience Heaven on Earth, just like I experienced at that spa in Vermont. And again I am fortunate to live in today's age where my life is not nearly as difficult as generations past, and I see beauty and kindness every day, even in my home in treeless Brooklyn.

My beloved corner of treeless Brooklyn, amidst a booming Renaissance

I honestly think Christ looked around at the squalor and indecency around him and thought, "No one is getting their just reward here. Everyone is miserable. I must come up with some idea we can strive towards that feels a bit nicer than everyone's living room."

By the same token, the folks that had any money or access to material goods went crazy for them, not because they liked video games and Jimmy Choos, but because they were happy they would be able to survive past the following winter. The struggle to survive was such that there was no way to serve God and money. You had to pick one.

Nowadays, when I think of my few beloved wealthy friends, I think they have indeed succeeded in serving both God and money. And when I help a young married couple get a rent stabilized apartment in New York, I think we are serving both as well. And when I gather with a bunch of artists in our free time and make music without getting paid, and other times get paid a small fortune, I think we serving both as well. Because that money is in fact in line with our values, and not about status or superiority. 

But perhaps Christ's most valuable message in his Sermon is to challenge humans' skills for compassion, kindness, generosity, and forgiveness, regardless of whether you live in a penthouse or a paper box. In Christ's world, no matter what the circumstances, we must reconcile and forgive whenever possible. We must reach out to those different from us and treat them as family, find the similarities instead of the differences. We must spend time being grateful for the blessings and beauty in our lives, not worry about all the things we lack or what will happen to us in the future. We must know ourselves and ask courageously for what we want.

Only then do we build a House on a Rock.

"Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it." - Matthew 7:13-14

Smoking: Delight vs. Destruction

Is smoking a cigarette a philosopher's moment of repose? An addict's moment of helplessness? A sad moment of slavery?

Without any habit involved, the first option is possible. The problem is that most people who smoke have a habit, an addiction. Therefore they do it for reasons that have to do with a chemical dependency, and not much to do with pleasure, relaxing, or the good life. While smoking regularly is surely bad for your health, it is similar to alcohol in that a little bit won't really hurt you, it's the addiction that's the problem.

I am one of the lucky ones: I have smoked a little bit - maybe an average of once every two months, for most of my adult life. I really don't understand what the physical addiction feels like. And most of the people in my immediate family who smoked when they were younger were able to quit relatively easily.

But recently a few people close to me have been in the process of quitting, and so I'm curious about it. Oftentimes people who quit successfully says they had a philosophical mind change that helped them get through it -

• my cousin says she convinced herself cigarettes give her cancer, and the revulsion to that idea helped her quit 
• An African-American friend told me he realized that addiction to a substance is similar to slavery, a means of oppression and helplessness, and the revulsion to that idea helped him quit
• An old teacher of mine said once he smoked a whole pack in a day and got so sick that he became convinced cigarettes were poison....and the revulsion to poison helped him quit

Then I happened to listen to this Freakonomics podcast that goes into some of the large scale studies - these were my two biggest takeaways -

• Many people smoke in order to medicate themselves - often unbeknownst to them - as a result if anxiety, depression, blood sugar issues - but then of course this "medicine" hurts you far worse than the ailment. So in this case it takes some work to figure out what you're medicating and how to treat it differently. 
• If you are experiencing a dependency on something, you need to divorce the thing from any notion of pleasure in order to break it. I have this problem with food, which I often use as a reward system. In order to control my diet, I often use rewards of time off, seeing a show, or getting a massage, rather than saying "I deserve a nice dinner."

I often notice that smokers equate a smoke break with "a step outside" - a relaxing break in the sunshine. It might be interesting to test how to take that pleasure out of it. It might be as simple as having a rule that you can't talk to anyone while you smoke. Or to keep the pleasure and cut the smoking out: you can sit in the sun or take a break, but not with a cigarette in your hand.

There are so many ways to quit an addiction like smoking, the more testing a person can do, the better. Which is also true of dieting I think. Both take time and dedication, and accepting there is no silver bullet solution.

pretty little lung cilia, dancing in the breeze

All that said, I'm personally trying to follow the commandment of "my body is my temple" with being as healthy as possible while enjoying life to the fullest. Some people have all sorts of addictions in their lives, and still make the world a better place, while their bodies function well enough to do so. The definition of a problem is when it gets in the way of something you want. Not because somebody else says it's a problem.

We must each decide how to live the fullest life, finding our own combination of decadence and discipline.

Sometimes that means, quite simply:

Smoke 'em if you got 'em.

--

P.S. My dad once met Ayn Rand, a writer he idolized, in the back of a limousine while escorting her from the airport to Harvard to speak, where he was a business student. He was so nervous he didn't know what to say. She smoked the entire way. Finally he blurted, "If you're so rational, why do you smoke? She looked at him and said, "The doctors say quitting won't do me any good, it will kill me regardless." She lived to be 77.