Tantric Coconuts (15 page)

“Are you questioning Christ’s divinity?”

Father Chuck leaned over and dug his hands into Argo’s warm fur. The terrier let out a little yawn. “This sure is a good dog,” he remarked, then returned his attention to Ted. “Well, some people would certainly answer your question differently than I did. I don’t deny Christ’s divinity; I just don’t deny yours, either. Not just saints and saviors make it to the Kingdom.”

Ted laid down a two of hearts and declared, “Gin!”

“Rats. I was just a king away.”

Ted shuffled the deck and dealt another hand. “What do you mean by Jesus’s humanity?”

“Good question—that is what I like to talk about.”

Father Chuck scooted closer to the fire pit so he could better see his cards. “Over the last century or so Jesus scholars have come to realize that this man was up to something incredible. Has Angel told you about her third realization?”

“I’ve got a general idea—in our lifetimes we have the potential to progress through multiples levels of awareness.”

“When we go back to the earliest versions of the Jesus story, when we try harder to get the translations right, toss out what was probably added by the early church fathers, and focus on what was there from the beginning, one thing
jumps out. Jesus wanted us off that shore, moving to the other side.”

“You’re saying Jesus recognized the third realization?”

“Of course, he wouldn’t have used those words, but his teachings focus on this need to journey and grow.”

Hoping Chuck would lay down a king, Ted added, “Angel said that Jesus had the ability to resonate with spiritual first graders through sixth graders and move us all farther across the spiritual lake.”

“Angel and I both believe that the ego is mud gathering on the window of our divinity. The spiritual journey is engaging in a process to clear away the grime that blinds us so we can see the way. Jesus recognized that what primarily stands between us and God is our thinking, knowing, small self. This is why his life remains relevant and still inspires me today.”

Ted reflected for a moment and had a troubling thought. “Chuck, if Jesus was all about helping us mature spiritually, why are you the first person to tell me this? Why is so much of Christianity focused on his divinity and not his humanity?”

“To sell boat tickets, religion has historically not always played fair. Sometimes it creates an unhealthy codependency. Let me give you one example that occurs in numerous places. Let’s take the word ‘repent.’ We hear Christians use that word a lot to explain what they believe to be a fundamental aspect of their faith. What does that word mean to you, Ted?”

Ted was pretty sure on this one. “As best I can tell, I think it means that we’re basically sinners and we need to believe in Jesus. Otherwise we rot in hell.”

“Sadly, that does seem to be the message. We’re all sinners, broken souls, and we’d better purchase a ticket on the Jesus boat or the Muhammad boat or the Buddha boat. Otherwise we’re out of luck.”

“Sounds familiar,” Ted concurred.

“If by ‘sinners’ they meant that we are all stuck on the shore of our ego minds, living out our lives at the lower levels of awareness, they would get no argument from me.”

“You’re saying sin might just be a clumsy way of describing the first realization—we’re all asleep on the shore needing to wake up and journey across the lake.”

“Yes. This is why I chose the word ‘repent’ to make the point about religion’s too-frequent sleight of hand. The Greek word from which the English word ‘repent’ was translated is
metanoia
. The literal translation is to reach ‘beyond the mind’ or ‘into the larger mind.’
^*1
Do you think ‘repent’ is a very good translation for
metanoia
?” Father Chuck asked.

“Awful, I’d say. ‘Transformation’ would be much better.” Ted had quickly gotten the point and had to admit he was a little surprised. It was profound and so far outside of what he’d expected that he felt the need to repeat it. “You’re saying that Jesus was trying to encourage us to evolve our consciousness,
to row our own boat, while religion has too often been delivering an entirely different message: that we should seek refuge in their boat.”

Father Chuck shrugged. “That’s it and why I am so excited to be a priest. I want to help people like you get back to rowing and quit fixating on the boat.
The Jesus boat was built with virgin timbers. The Buddha boat travels a straight course
. None of this matters. Jesus was offering a simple but extremely powerful spiritual equation for rowing. It makes E equals MC squared seem rather puny. As a priest, this is what I want to share.”

“I’d love to hear the formula.”

“Are you familiar with the mathematical arrow signs for ‘less than’ and ‘more than’?” Chuck shaped his index finger and thumb into the sign for “less than”: <.

Ted shrugged quizzically and said, “Sure.”

Using the arrow sign, Father Chuck provided the bedrock formula that he believed Jesus offered for all of our spiritual growth. He took a branch from the fire and drew the formula in the soft earth using thick, strong strokes:

< self = > God

Then he translated the symbols aloud. “Less self equals more God.”

Ted pondered the equation for a moment, smiled, held up his fingers in a sideways
V
shape, like a peace sign taking a nap, and said with enthusiasm, “I like your formula. Math always came naturally to me.”

Father Chuck continued, “Jesus carried this equation to its logical conclusion. When he lost all sense of self, he became truly the son of God, or even God, a distinction in terminology that has been troubling the church from its very beginning.”

Ted took the stick and drew the following formula by the campfire:

~ self = ^God

Chuck studied it for a moment and grinned. “Aristotle would have been proud. No self equals the most possible God.”

After pondering the statistical probability of drawing the nine of hearts, Ted asked Father Chuck, “I get the math, the logic, but how do we get less self and more God into our lives?”

“The Christian mystics, like all mystics, believe that God exists within all things and is part of us, inseparable, and that through meditation or prayer we (the self) need only get out of the way—so to speak—to access God, to become Christ-like or maybe even God-like. The mystics abandon the dualistic way of seeing God as separate and up and out there somewhere.”
^*2
Chuck pointed to the night sky crammed with stars. Then he pointed to his heart and head and concluded, “Instead, they look in here.”

What Chuck said triggered a palpable sense of relief in Ted. The tension in his shoulders subsided. For the first time, he was not excluded from religion, left on the outside looking in. Instinctively, he had resisted buying into a destructive and misguided message about his own sinful nature. Seeing God as not “out there” but part of him and all things made him worthy and integrated, not unworthy or cast out. It gave him a sense of hope. Maybe Ted and religion were not oil and water.

Ted leaned back and with all the concentration he could muster said, “All right, I get it. Our psyches or our souls are like glass laboratory beakers. If you fill the glass up with water, or self, then there is no space left for air, or God. True spiritual growth is an emptying process.”

“You’ve got it, Ted Day! We must work on fostering and allowing the God within us, our higher self, to expand. Our journey is not to find Jesus’s divinity but our own.”

Ted laid down another card and again declared, “Gin.”

Father Chuck was not used to losing at this rate, but still he deftly shuffled the cards. He was enjoying Angel’s student. Ted was a quick study.

“So how do I shed the self?” Ted asked.

“You get in a boat that’s actually going to leave the shore, cast off, and learn how to row. We call it the Work. Angel and some of our other friends will help you. You and I have a far simpler task.”

Deciding to go a new direction with the cards, Ted rearranged his hand before asking, “What’s that, Chuck?”

“We’re going to sit beneath the stars, play cards by the fire,
get a great night’s sleep in the mountain air, get up with the morning sun, and then, my friend, to top it all off, we’re going trout fishing in paradise. You see, Ted, sometimes good rowing is just good living.”

“It’s that easy?” Ted asked.

“Does a rose have to work hard to bloom?”

“Not likely.”

“Should we care if it tilts to the left or tilts to the right?”

“No concern of mine.”

“What do you expect from a rosebud?”

Ted thought about it and answered, “To bloom?”

“To realize its potential. That’s the crux of learning how to row, doing the Work. That’s why Angel wanted you to climb the mountain. From where you and I are sitting, doing life right may start to look different.”

Ted liked the message. “Thanks.”

Father Chuck drew the ace he needed, laid down his cards, and for the first time that night said, “Gin.”

Father Chuck gathered about twelve feet of the leader from the reel in his left hand while he raised the rod to a vertical position with his right. When the rod was at the apex of its arc, he brought it forward. He repeated the motion several times, whipping the line back and forth, until he had the entire leader fully engaged in the cast, then took his thumb off the leader and let it whip the nearly invisible microfilament line, carrying the small fly through the air to flutter and land on the surface of Stewart Lake. It took several attempts, but Ted performed a similar motion and to his delight experienced a similar result.

Argo sat and watched patiently. Twenty minutes in, the process took an interesting turn. Ted moved from practicing fly-fishing to fly-fishing. He caught his first fish.

While Father Chuck gave Ted a crash course on fly-fishing and further discussed Christianity, Angel drove down the mountain several miles to a small camp store and purchased
a few groceries. She put away her groceries and drove a bit further down the mountain to a secluded place on the river, where she parked Bertha the Bookmobile, washed some of her clothes, and bathed in an icy-cold pool of water from the Pecos River while No Barks stood watch. With her hair shampooed, Angel felt invigorated. She was resting for a moment on a boulder with her feet dangling into the cold water when a slight movement fifty yards upstream caught her eye. She sat perfectly still and watched as two does and a fawn moved into the water. She closed her eyes and imagined herself moving with them. When she opened her eyes, they had disappeared.

Angel dried off and pulled on a warm sweatshirt, found her cell phone, and called her father. He had left two messages and she knew he would worry if she did not call him back.

When Larsen answered, Angel said, “
Age
, it’s Angel.”

“I was worried. Where are you?”

“I’m on the Pecos. It’s very beautiful and it makes me think of our time together fishing on the Cheyenne. I’ve been out of coverage for a few days or I would have called sooner.” Larson had steeled himself against many losses in his life, but no matter how hard he tried, he worried too much. Angel’s loving presence on the phone, instead of the lingering pain of her absence, brought small tears of joy to the rims of his eyes. He said, “It does me good to hear your voice.”

“
Age
, I wish you were here with me. I have good news.”

“Tell me.”

“I have my first client. He’s a lawyer from Crossing Trails, Kansas.” She then carefully found a way to suggest to her father that there was not yet any intimacy between them. “He has the white man’s disease, but there is hope for him.”

Larsen preferred to avoid the subject of white men. “How is Bertha the Bookmobile and your Aunt Lilly’s dog, No Barks? Do they like this pilgrimage?”

“They are both fine. Did you know that Bertha only has eighty-five thousand miles on her? She’s practically new.”

“Yes, but I want to talk to you about something else,” Larsen answered. “I went to Pierre to visit your Aunt Lilly at the girl jail.”

“How is she?” Angel asked.

“I think she is good. They take good care of her. She has a doctor. I spoke with him. It may be that your Aunt Lilly is crazy, and maybe not so crazy. She spoke of missing No Barks. She thinks that I need a dog too. She also said something about Bertha that I want to share with you.”

“Yes?” Angel asked.