One Trick Pony and the FNG

There’s a thing called position authority. This is the person who doesn’t do anything or go anywhere but is rewarded because they remain.  They are the kid who never passes grade 6 but remains in the class room , a potential big bully.  They undermine leadership because it threatens them.  They talk change but don’t want any change unless it serves their seige mentality place.  

I’ve lived in several countries, different continents, and several cities. Any kid that has moved around schools knows what that’s like.  As an adult I”m ever at risk from the local boy who thinks they’re grand and consider anyone who comes into their little pond a threat.  They have a group of local friends not so different from the adolescent gang. I’m mostly just passing through.  

I was in dance and theatre then the university arts and then university science.  I did medical school and each year was a different rotation. When I graduated and interned and became a member of the College of Family Practice I went out to be country GP.  Everything was new. Every community a challenge.  Every year of education you are the FNG - the ducking new kid.  It’s the same when. I was a flyin doctor in the sub arctic.  All new.  Failures and challenges and constantly people sniping.  They were always few I always had the most amazing people helping me succeed. Unfortunately I have a personality and character which remembers too well those people who wanted me to fail and didn’ want me to steal their dim light by my light. They were arrogant and would rather maintain their place by killing me than to improve their skills and capacity.  I was always an outside.  Ever learning ever moving I excelled as a family physician , then norther doctor and then moved onto the dual speciality of community medicine and psychiatry. Always the FNG .  I graduated psychiatry and became the psychiatrist then I did the American psychiatry exams having had to do the American medicine exam 4 years out of medicine.  I then came to be a prof at a different university and had to deal with the corruption and addition that was rife there.  I fought to stay alive. I defended the lost and made enemies of the crabs at the bottom. But I also met the most wonderful denizens of the deep and rainbow fish and dolphins.  I swam and learned to swim.  I would go on to be a subspecialist and again go through the gauntlet of relearning and learning and being the FNG .I’m at the end of a career and I look back to when I was a GP and literally ‘knew it’.  Today I am leading in my sub speciality and it’s hard in some areas to keep up There’s no support from on high. There has been tremendous support. I’ve always had amazing referral sources and colleagues, the heads of mediocre, neurology , family practice referring to me. Doctors, Olympic Athetes, Multi millionaires, celebrities seeking me out as their doctor. I’ve arrived in a way but not as the entrenched military with it’s ribbons and glory but as a guide out beyond the wire.  

In my personal time I was always failing too , never resting on my laurels , never the guy that new it all like those entrenched in position authorities who haven’t had to learn the new.  They politic. They also are jeaalous of me.  I envy them their safety and certainty. I’d love to hide in a castle and shoot down new knowledge and insist on the old and say it was new.  

Gymnast, volleyball player, martial artist, dancer,Cyclist, runner, climber, sailer, hunter, motor cyclist.  Each of these endeavours I did an rose rapidly in the ranks gaining skills and competing and getting though the gauntlet of the FNG. Always encountering the One Trick Pony. Thank you Paul Simon for that image.

Now they lie and say I was never a doctor. Now they question that I sailed across an ocean. I’m old and all those achievements and accomplishments are not. I’m overwhelmed and ashamed of the divorces.  Decades of intimacy and the rape and abortion. These seem ever to pollute my inner world .  I don’t look at the audience and see the room full of smiling faces . I just see the frown at the back of the room.  I am so afraid. I m so beat up by the bully and his gang and I’m just passing through. I’m just trying to help these people. I’m just trying to do my job 

They kick over my books and punch me and attack and steal and generally want my attention. I’m delivering a baby , I’m convincing a boy it’s good to live. I’ m convincing a mother to stop smoking dope because she forgets her baby. I’m having a myriad of conversations and writing hundreds of things that require me to sign my name and there’s this local bully with his thugs and he’s shouting “I’ll make you respect me”.  

I’ve fought and won so many fights. I’m the FNG. I’m Clint Eastwood and Mel Gibson rolled in one. I’ve fought the ex, the father of the child who kicked his wife in her pregnant belly inducing labour then came into the hospital where I was doctoring the mother going in labour an I fought him off until security arrived. A doctor defending this woman and the unborn baby of this man’s.  Doesn’t any one get it when I say I was in charge of the dangerously insane. I sailed across an ocean in winter through hurricanes.

No he’s lying.

I was held hostage and survived.

I physically fought off five guys kicking two in the heads with elegant jump kicks., I dodged bullets and disarmed a kid with a pistol, then chased a guy with a knife.

I’m fucking insane. 

In rage I was dead and just in motion,

I’ve made my peace with god

I just ant to run away. I am trying to help the sick and lesser and I’ve come into your courts and I’ve even gone into gang houses and confronted the head guy with dozens of his armed guys around and told him his child is freezing outside and he’d better fix this problem or I’d be back. I’ve run with 10 guys chasing me.

I’m the FNG and I’ve done all the gantlets and now I’m old and tired and I hurt and I can’t run and I’m afraid. I’m afraid a lot of the time because I just want to die in my sleep.  I want Jesus and God and the cloud of unknowing to be less crazy. I am living only today but I wake and it’s another 16 hours on the track trying to avoid these guys who say I don’t exist, these liars who are even more scared and see me as a threat.  I want to avoid the showdowns of old. I want to live and let live but I’m working and I’m won so many fights in these knock down all out wars with guys who hurt women and children and want to be somebody but are afraid to leave their security .  Crabs.  Trolls.

I’m too old for this shit and can’t believe my mind won’t just show me the friends and safety and the love but no I have to look at the dark side and see the threat. I’m always scanning tor threat, back to the wall, wondering where the sniper is, wondering what lies have been told.

And I’m nobody. All is vanity.  I’m done. I’m old. I’m done.  

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference.  Don’t feed the raccoons.  

Frazerway RV, Gratitude, Acceptance

It’s a glorious summer day. I loved walking Madigan and enjoying breathing the clear air.  

I’ve a clinic this morning downtown east side. I continue to return despite having my life threatened there several times, a gun pulled on me, even my dog was threatened.  Stuart, my Scottish terrier was killed by drug dealers but ex navy seals killed the culprits. No joy in vindication. I used to like seeing justice and karma play out. Today I wish there were just fewer bullies and less stupid people.

I reward myself on the way to work with a Mocca. Anticipation of that gets me through the cleaning and dressing rituals.  30 years and more of service now.  

I just read that when a congressman tried to bring action against pedophiles the democrats rejected it saying pedophiles were a conspiracy theory.  They vetted the clergy and teachers but not the law and government.  Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts.  Steal a little and they put you in jail, steal a lot and they make you king.  If 50 shades of grey wasn’t about a billionaire it would be an episode in Criminals Minds.  

I’m still having intrusive thoughts about Frazerview RV, James Epp and Diana Smith. It was 9 months ago that I took the camper I bought from them in after an accident.  The insurance adjusters say that the water damage inside was ‘pre existing damage’ but have offered to pay repairs.  Diana Smith has stonewalled and gaslighted me for month.  I’ve asked to speak to her superior and totally exasperated repeatedly asked what the delay was. The last time she deigned to return a call she repeated herself from 4 months before.  ‘She said that in March before she left when she said she’d have the camper ready for May when you wanted to use it.”  She did in deed say that. Now it’s July and typical of sociopaths she had created a crisis.  These rare summer camping days are here and I’ve been a burnt out physician dealing with the horror and chaos of the covid pandemic. I’ve just read Band of Brothers and learned that the suppliers were stealing supplies so the front line combat troops were freezing in the Battle of the Bulge because of the lack of supplies occasioned by the businessmen making their ‘killings’ in businesss.  I pray for my enemies. I turn the other cheek 70 x 70.  I know stupidity and incompetence and lack of common sense are more common that nefarious individual behaviour.  Each day I wake now and ask why God have I attracted these people and this situation into my life.  

I do the serenity prayer. I am taking my 25 year cake for sobriety next month and miss the alcoholic response and insaniety of my youth when I walked into peoples bed rooms at 3 am and discussed our differences.  I haven’t had a swat team or military unit surround me in 25 years.  I have had dinner with a liberal and conservative prime minister and take joy in my American general friend calling me a ‘Canadian hippy’.  So I am much better advised today than when I was raging.  Yet there’s a repetition of the behaviour of my ex wife who never did what she promised she would do and whatever agreements were made legally and officially were broken. I am aware of ‘gaslighting’.  I’m interested in this novelty in business. I see Trudeau doing all the behaviours we associate with drug addiction and sociopathy. My Pentecostal Minister friend says its a spiritual war that’s raging.

I’m personally going to attend Pride Parade for the first time in decades because I won’t be travelling to the international conference I usually attend.  I’m interested in the inclusivity and exclusivity questions that Christ Church Cathedral and St. Barnabus addressed. 

I’ve got to run.  The clock is always calling me.  Too much to do each day and not enough time. It’s more and more difficult to help people when I’m being stabbed in the back.  I feel like I’m expected to do Surgery here and the people who are supposed to ensure there are lights are partying.  

Yet here we are with Sun. God is good all of the time.  I’m going to heaven.  I’m here in heaven today. I just need to put a suit on and get to work. Madigan likes the outing and all the staff at the clinic are so kind to him. They’re so helpful to me.  

Thank you Yeshua

Children of God

“The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world………to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God…..born of God.’

Here’s the basis of the term ‘born again’.  

Jesus Christ is Greek and means. ‘God within’ and “God will come again”.

Jesus’ name in Hebrew is “YESHUA’ which translates to English as Joshua.   Yehoshua was also a translation which abreviates to Joshua.  YESHUA was the known form of Yehoshua.  In Aramaic and Syriac, YESHUA is abbreviated to YESHU.

- YESHUA is a verbal derivative of ‘to rescue’ or ‘to deliver’.  It is often translated as ‘He Saves”. 

Christ comes from the Greek word meaning the ‘Anointed One’. 

Christ also meant Messiah.  Messiah was the ‘promised deliverer of the Jewish people, prophesized in the Hebrew Bible.  Messiah means anointed.  Anointing refers to the ritual of consecrating.

I am a child of God, a second son perhaps with Jesus Christ as the Son of God.  

YESHUA

25

It’s a gratitude day. 25 years clean and sober.  I take my cake this coming week at my home group Burnaby Men’s with George insisting he’ll bring the cake.  I joke and say we celebrate the sacraments of cake and coffee of Bill and Bob.  It’s a long fast.  Thankfully the hang over goes in weeks to months though we clean up the ‘wreckage of the past’ for sometimes years’, making amends and just living sober.  

I was a binge drinker . Much of my life was intensely dedicated but I was attracted to the ‘chaos’.  I married women who shared my pleasures.  My family was orderly by comparison.  So much alcohol and mental illness with those I was attracted to or what I attracted.  I wasn’t called ‘Wild Bill’ because I was tame.  Always the first to dance on tables and do anything on a dare.  

I remember at Homewood Treatment Centre, Graeme Cunningham saying to me ‘some people run with the cheetah’s and some people run with the turkeys, you’ve been running with the turkeys’.  My dad called them ‘fair weather friends’.  He was what men called a ‘straight shooter’.  I regret that I didn’t listen more to him.  He transformed from the stupidest man I knew as a genius to the greatest man I knew as an adult.

When I stopped drinking, smoking tobacco and cannabis, so much of that life paled. We joke and say an alcoholic 10 is a  4 with a 6 pack.  Just so much of what people do when they’re drinking has no appeal sober. Like staying up late. I love the dawn now.  I love waking refreshed and alert. I can’t imagine why I would suffer a hangover and then go back and do it again.  

I can’t imagine today ‘not living life on life’s terms’.  I don’t want to be ‘dope dumb’ on marijuana joking about how stupid we talk even if it is like taking valium and relaxing. I don’t want to knee jerk emotions of alcohol and I never want the lack of peace of mind or the ability to appreciate a natural high.  Jesus said we must be like children again to enter heaven.  I remember thinking pot was coming out of my fat cells when I regained the natural love of life and joy de vivre. 

 Do you now remember the joyful times of childhood? a celebrity friend in recovery said to me.  

Suddenly I remembered myself playing baseball in a radiant green park with happy people and a glorious sun.  When we are depressed we remember depression because we are in the valley of our minds. Only on the peaks can we see all the joy of the truly high places as well as the lows and valleys of life.  Drugs and alcohol are depressing.

Asked to remember all the things in life I was proud of and would like to be remembered for I realized that the vast majority of them occurred sober, family and church and childhood, hunting and fishing, the great romances, provincial gymnastic and volleyball competitions,  dance training and competitions, theatre performances,  cycling across Europe, study of history and literature, studying  chemistry and anatomy, medical school training, working as a country gp, delivering babies, flying doctor through the sub arctic, residency training in community medicine and psychiatry. Then psychiatry and another divorce and alcohol abuse. Then work continued but my recreation increasingly was associated cigarettes, reefers and wine.  I’d gone camping to tent and fish but now looked forward to drinking a bottle of wine and smoking a joint around the fire. There was a shift.

At first it’s fun , then it’s fun and trouble, then it’s trouble..  I remember it being trouble sailing down to Mexico and then in Mexico, Instead of sailing around the world my partner and I stayed in margaritaville.  There were good times.  Sailing was spectacular.  Playing blues in the band was fun. Spear fishing and snorkelling and sun was great but it was going nowhere . When we came home she wouldn’t get help.  I didn’t want to be around her friends or my friends that drank and drugged. I’d liked her because she had her own group of dealers and prayers . Her’s tended to have university degrees but were no less ‘friends in high places and low places’ while I had friends who were interesting the sober ones in high place and the ones who crank and did dope professionals and bikers and rural.  

She would get so impaired she couldn’t work. I’d party on the weekend but I’d go to work and I was seeking help seeing professionals and told that my problems wasn’t the joint or wine I drank but the impaired wife doing cocaine. The lying and destruction increased . My unforgettable line was , “I can go to work and help. a hundred people or stay home and help one person. I can’t do both.”  I’d been years of covering for her.  I was so tired of being told a man would handle his wife. She was not a pretty site drunk and stoned though we’d both been younger. We were passed the magic forty year old place where you’re expect to be able to get your act together.  She lied and lied and lied.  It was impossible.  I never liked cocaine but she sure did.  I didn’t like the people around cocaine either. I’d liked the hippy wine and reefer world but this cocaine crowd was mean. My former friends who had fallen to cocaine were the same.  We joke that an alcoholic will steal your wallet but an addict will not only steal your wallet they’re help you look for it.

I just couldn’t carry on. I was working harder than I’d ever trying to cover for her when she suddenly refused to get out of bed forever or see a doctor. I knew this couldn’t go on.  She’d had a grow operation and with friends of her. She’d moved all the money I made into her accounts except for what required my signature.  In the end it was apparent that she’d been financially scheming for a year.  I remember thinking I’m trying to make this work and she’s been stabbing me in the back.  Separation and divorce.  The times she almost killed me and the times drunk when she almost killed us both. I saved our lives so many times, the worst being when I went off the bow wave of a tanker coming out of San Francisco harbour in the fog having again messed up the radar and lied when I asked if she’d touched it.  

I don’t want to ever be back in a relationship with someone drunk and stoned. I don’t want to ever be drunk and stoned again. I can see her behaviour clearly but only know that I was a mirror. I loved in AA the ‘restore us to saniety’ clause. I never realized how insane I was but I certainly saw how insane she was, yet I was with her and our friends were too. It was a bad sit com, something out of a Kardasian bizarro world.

I remember thinking that my life had gone wrong when I was sexually abused by my professor, when I was a psychiatry resident, when I committed adultery when I saw so much learning to understand the insane.  I thought when was my life right and remembered church and prayer and meditation. I was going to return to Winnipeg to talk to the people there I knew and trusted.  I was going to leave psychiatry and maybe go back to being a country doctor or just get out of medicine all together.  The psychiatrists I knew were drunks and addicts and as I learned the depths of my wife’s deceit and even the deceit of my therapist and authorities in general I became paranoid.  My fair weather friends stole from me as did my ex wife. Manly I’d taken nothing of hers and we’d lived on my income as most of our times she’d been a student and took her own income.  I remember thinking that as a man I was powerless and that maybe I could become a woman because I was really tired of having all the responsibility and accountability, all the blame and none of the praise.  I was utterly confused too. I’d spent 20 years with women to have a family but after marriage I learned they didn’t want children.  They wanted a daddy.  Their fathers were alcoholic or absent.  But God were they beautiful, brilliant and fun. I forfeited joy and peace for fun and drama. Not a bad trade when young but time marches on.  

I had been in church as a boy with my brother and mother and father and that was the oasis I aimed for. A Christian friend asked if he could help and offered to rent me his trailer . He didn’t smoke dope and rarely drank.  I returned to church.  She’d refused to go. In psyhiatriy the psychoanalytic professors hearing I meditated as a disciple of Paramahansa Yogananda and a follower of Christian Dr. Carl Ridd I was summarily told that meditation was harmful and must stop and that if I wished to continue my training with these two psychiatrists I had to leave community medicine and stop taking Christian studies courses while in residency.  I had left surgery and family medicine and now was told if I wanted to be a psychiatrist I needed to be a devotee of the megalomaniac analyst I who I frankly admired.  Psychiatrists then were a weird mix, mensch’s and devils.  All were charming and highly skilled. We learned from the psychopaths , narcissists and borderlines. We walk miles in their moccasins and they get under our skin. We are as much artists of the mind as scientists. I was naive and vulnerble.  I was also obedient.  Thise who rise high in systems much have this trait of obedience as the rebels get pruned.  Systems are like military organizations.  They’re like religious organizations.  The abuse of power is ubiquitous.  

I was willing to stay a doctor sober and clean. I was encouraged to go to AA and asked my friend, Kirk, who I trusted if he trusted AA. Kirk and I and been spiritual disciples our whole live, he a follower of Prem and me a Christian doctor who’d taken a detour in better living with chemistry, the tantra yoga,Daost path.  

“I think AA is a good group. I know people who belong and they’ve done well.  I think it’s good that you’ve stopped drugs and alcohol.  I didn’t think that was making you happy. I’m sorry that you and your wife have separated but I never thought she and you were that compatible.  But yes I think AA is a good thing.”  

I’d stopped drinking and left the drug crowd and was detoxing on a hillside with my Bible and my shotgun. The bikers I’d been staying with who stole my money, possessions and vehicle were threatening to come by one night and kill me for the registration.  They never came by but I saw they’d sold my vehicle without registration. I learned that I obeyed laws but so many didn’t .I was so naive. I’d also have all these ‘god’ moments. Events were constantly synchronistic.  Good came to me. I was free of the baggage and suddenly out of the dark I was in the light and it was uncanny how my relationship with God restored. I’d actually thought I was beyond God’s love.  

Bernie showed up in his new truck, the ex wife had destroyed my truck, I was riding a bicycle American Express wanted to claim, my ex wife having with her lawyer and her millions used up all my money on lawyers who said ‘she and her lawyer are refusing to meet so they’re using seige techniques to destroy you and ruin you financially.’  I’d given the last of my money to the lawyer to free my accounts to pay the rent. I was getting charity and food from the church and Christian friends. I went to welfare and the woman screamed at me saying that a ‘doctor can’t get welfare…welfare is for the poor people…you rich men can’t expect poor people to pay you….get out of my office…you’ll get nothing here.”  Every day was humiliation. I’m still hoarding food as again I was hungry like when I left my father’s home.

So i went to church and I went to AA and I trusted Christians .  I trusted godly people. I was lied to by the College of Physicians and Surgeons. I was lied to by psychiatrists but I’d been a family physician , a member of the family physician of canada before becoming a specialist in medicine and psychiatry. I found myself trusting family physicians and Godly psychiatrists. I’d extend my trust to Sam Sussman , an Orthodox Jew. I had named the psychiatrist who raped me drunk and stoned out of the blue and left field this powerful connected man ‘made me his woman’ and ‘bred me’ as my engineer friend liked to put it.  He was a misogynist.  I am still confused.  I was the wife in my marriages to female doctors doing the cooking and cleaning as well as working each day. My colleagues most had wive ‘s and mothers of their children and they went home to the traditional division of labour but I was married to female doctors and never had any support. They did school , I did the wifely duties, and worked two jobs for their ‘desires’ and maintained us while they brought in stipends.  I realized that the guy who said marriage was institutionalize prostitution was talking to me. I was destitute after divorce and they were wealthy yet I’d spent the marriage helping them academically literally dragging them to the library to study and sitting beside them as a study coach, I was ahead of them. But women repeatedly put me down projecting their anger at their husbands and boyfriends who somehow got ‘served’. I never got served’.  I cooked and cleaned and worked.  As a psychiatrist I was most interested in the escorts and their pimps. I was fascinated having pimps as patients and learning how they trained ‘their bitches’.  Exact opposite to all I did.

I read Gottman of Love Lab fame and learned that I was a master at verbally winning battles but lost the war because my wives held onto resentments.  They had horrendous relationships with their alcoholic families and their horendously abusive mothers and I’d had this straight arrow ex military engineer who supervised hundreds of men and a religious Baptist loving mother who had wanted a daughter but had me and couldn’t have more children. I failed her because while I was apparently the prefect child I left home. I preferred running with the pack and had this spiritual path that took me away from the safety and love of home. I truly was the prodigal son.  I came home after I left and then left again. My parents were always there for me. I feel sorry for so many who haven’t had that. The trouble was always my pride.  

Pride is the original sin.  Alcohol and addiction create the mental state of ‘egomania wth inferiority comp;lexes’.

I’m thankful to day because of all the people who helped me to surrender to God and let go of self. The Swami song say ‘mother father have I none I am he, I am he, blessed spirit I am he’.  In my training in theology I learned that there is God and me and if I wanted to know God more fully I must let go of ‘me’.  I had to learn to trust God. The last 25 years have been good. Better and better.

Sober I went to AA with the former head of UBC psychiatry. I continued to see Christian Psyvhiatrists who helped me deal with the addicts and alcoholics in government who abused their power rather frequently. I was blessed to know the lawyer Jonathan Meadows and lived in this great psychodrama of my life.  I was often not the centre state. The play was called William Hay but there were all these bad actors trying to make it all about them. Meanwhile I was listening to the big black Milton who in AA said he pasted a message on his mirror ‘you’re looking at the problems’ to remind him it’s his perception that is the problem.  AA taught me that alcoholism was first a ‘thinking disease’. I had thought I had thought I was spiritual but I’d worshiped the demon drink and demon pot and demon tobacco.  Now I thank God for the early deep breaths I take in the morning. Now I’m writing gratitude lists each morning thanking the Lord for my dog Madigan, my long term friend and lover Laura and all the precious people in my life. I also thank God for the ‘enemies’. The College of Physicians and Surgeons resident pervert was a trial as is the PM today. I was so thankful for the fourth step in AA and Bernie, Hank and Father John who helped me work thought my resentments and fears. I was so hurt and angry and frightened and betrayed. I really wasn’t a good man or a good husband. I probably was a pretty good doctor. I joke and say I fear a class action suit from the 100 babies I delivered who get together and find they share a thumb printed on their forehead because I held too tight guiding them into life. I also think that any day the thousands of people I convinced not to suicide will sue me for false promise.  Yet I did my best and thanks to the amazing teachers and those who went before me and the College of Physiccians and Surgeons, and the Royal College of Physiians and Surgeons and the Canadian Medical Protective Associations and the Society of Addiction Medicien and Christianity and AA and frankly and friends and dogs and cats I’ve done okay.

I’m alive and 25 years ago I so suffered indescribable and utter ‘incomprehensible demoralization.  I had such anxiety and was told by an old internist in a late night meeting of International Doctors in AA, “anxiety is a measure of your distance from God and a measure of your humanity.’  I know God is an experience and not an idea. I used to say I knew Christ and Christ consciousness but today I know Jesus as a friend. God is good all of the time.  

I continued to hunt big game with my friend Bill Mewhort shooting moose and deer and bear with him. I continued to sail and sailed solo on the SV GIRI San Francisco to Hawaii in winter through a hurricane. Thanks to Dr. Willie Gutowski I worked a couple of years in Saipan in sobriety so enjoying meetings on the beach with Frank beneath palm trees watching the sunset.  I loved learning from Phillip another sailor doctor and wise man.  I still struggled with the inclusivity of Christian churches caught between the LGBT include church of Peter and the exclusive church of my evangelical friends. I loved studying theology with the purest deepest Catholic psychiatrist John whose paraplegia he may as well have called his ‘glad gethseame’ like the catholic priest friend of Bill Wilson.  All the Christians I knew and admired were living inspirations as they were persecuted in Canada like the disciples of Jesus were.  I was blessed to go to Israel and make so many trips to conferences all over the US and be with the finest of men like Nady and Art and Carroll and Dick and men and women who are now dying or dead. I loved my friend George in recovery , another physician who would go for dinner with me before an AA meeting as we’d talk about baseball and life and love.  I’ve been truly blessed despite being a kafetch and having the worst tendency to slip into rabbit holes and whine with self pity. My military friend who told me ‘you’ve got one foot in the future and one foot in the past and you’re pissing on your day, get your head in the same room as your ass’ also said ‘get down off the cross we can use the wood’.  

Recovery is ancient healing journey. Just for today was a profound awakening for me as I felt that God , omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent was here and now and for me to be with god I had to be present. The journey I ‘d begun as a child and later continued in church and school and temple and love came to this point of intersection in the cloud of unknowing at the point of Stellate reality and Interdimensional experience with each day a beginning. I pray to know God more and to know God’s will more. I have quiet time.  I meditate. I do right livelihood . I listen to the spiritual teaching of the Bible and the Big Book of AA and Kurtz book, Spirituality of Imperfection, the great teachings of the world. Paramahansa Yolanda taught “I bow to the saints of all religions’.  I never thought of a hell and didn’t believe in the tribalism religions that said ‘our little group wins and your group loses’ but I liked Pascal’s wager and Eben Alexander the neurosurgeons ‘proof of heaven’.  I’ve known sacred and supernatural.

I would love more. I would learn to be more loving not in that sentimental way but in the way of the God of Gods.  God is all. God made the devil and free will and fate are central We like to choose free will when we do something good and blame the other guy but refuse to accept fate when ‘shit happens’.  It’s all ego.  God is good all of the time. The people like the man who abused me or the ex wife who lied and stole or the college administrator whose perversion obscured her vision , all of these people were bicycle lessons like the soldier who held me hostage threatening to kill me, or the native who shot at me and all those antagonists in my play of life with me as the protagonist.  

I’m so thankful to be sober so that I have been able to live this good life with knowing people like I do,  I struggle now with gender, sexuality and aging. At the point when I’m Shakespearean with desire greater than performance no longer a consequence of alcohol but rather a product of physically hurting and slowing. I struggle to stay fit when I was always active and climbing mountains to experience the joy above the clouds with a sober friends revelling in the beauty of existence.  I loved seeing the great works of arts and museums in Edinburg Oxford and London and Paris this spring taking Laura as a companion but missing Madigan yet knowing Karen and Belinda people I could trust with my puppy while I was away.  I can trust today and people don’t lie and betray me. I know that expectations are preformed resentments and I don’t have the unrealistic expectations I had younger.  I’m more mature. Who would have guessed. But I do miss the theatre and dance world and find so many older people still pretentious and tedious.  

I’m becoming ornery with age.  I’m happy alone.  I’m less afraid.  I worry I might drink or smoke dope again and fall into the psychosis of believing the false is true.  

It’s 25 years. A quarter century, much longer than the entire time I smoked or drank. I still don’t know what I will do when I grow up.  Right now I have to go have my hair done and the biggest challenge is whether to wear a skirt or slacks.  I’m having a lot of first world problems and very few third world problems .  I’m full of gratitude and know grace.  I really am blessed but often don’t know what next. I miss the Sturges expedition.  I knew I wanted to ride my Harley there and back like I knew I wanted to visit the church’s of Ethiopian and see the black Jesus.  I knew I wanted to go to Athens and the Vatican and Mexico City pyramids ,  I’ve known what it is I have to do but now I’m able to plan the day but don’t have any real idea for much into the future. I felt last winter I was kedging my life off the sand bars of Covid and the WHO . I’m aware that Trudeau is the devil incarnate and that I’m at best a hobbit in the spiritual warfare of today but it’s hard to see.  I’m in the cloud of unknowing and just keep walking forward with Jesus.  

I need to be sober because the world is so crazy I need all my wits about me. I don’t want to be an ostrich that puts it’s head in the sand and doesn’t know who kicked it. The Donovan song, season of the witch and beatniks are out to make it rich makes me ware of my vulnerability.  I am learning to trust God more in old age. 

I’m thankful for sobriety and don’t believe I’d have achieved the long term sobriety that Vaillant of Harvard fame wrote so eloquently about without AA.  

I’ve a doctors in AA meeting tomorrow. So I know I’m looking forward to that. I’m continuing to work. I’m here. I’’m muddling along. I have a principle responsibility to Madigan who is dependent on me.  He’s a messy room mate.  

Thank you.  25 years. Thank you, Thank you God and as I learned in AA God works through people. Thank you.

I remember being tormented after I stopped drinking and smoking. I think the tobacco was as bad as the pot. I was in withdrawal for weeks to months, hiking all day and visiting a Christian psychiatrist, going to church, praying, meditating, writing, doing odd jobs to pay 

James Epp and Adventurer RV

I was again awoken from sleep by the Kaffkaesque Frazerway RV and Diana Smith.

I had asked Diana Smith if I could speak to her senior and I even asked if she required me to get a lawyer to discuss the matter as the insurer and I both had the impression that talking with her was pointless. She was repeating herself, stonewalling, ghosting and gas lighting.  Nothing about the communication was professional or business like.  

This morning I learned that James Epp and his family began the Adventurer Business.  A multi millionare business friend said that he was surprised that I was having difficulty with Epp’s family business because in the past he said, “I thought he was a good guy.”  When one businessman refers to another this way it suggests that unless the Hell’s Angel, Euro Gang or Mob have joined the company or leadership has changed the problem is with the employee.

I’d already wondered if Diana Smith’s difficulties were predjuce against doctors or men or older men or the LGBT community or Christians.  I had done soul searching and was repeatedly told by the senior mentors I’d talked with that indeed I was being abused.  I reviewed the literature on women in management and realized I’d done nothing to be offensive.  

It seemed then that generalizing Diana Smith’s lack of social and business skills and unprofessional behaviour as reflective of the company was at fault.  I therefore sent a note to James Epp, the president expressing concern about his employee and concern with my not having a camper 9 months after I brought it to them for repair and now months after I was told I would be able to use it for this brief summer’s camping season.  

I was referred to a consumer watch service who would be glad to do investigative journalism because of who I was and their belief that doctors in a medical crisis , we’re burnt out and overworked and leaving the field, shouldn’t be hustled and hassled but rather they should be treated reasonably.  This stonewalling, gaslighting, and ghosting and offensive unprofessional behaviour being done to a educated seniors likely suggested that more junior or less capable people would be easy prey. The journalist is interested in unsavioury business practices and the increase in unethical behaviour and third world business behaviour in Canada. They’ve had a lot of success exposing this.  

Again it’s quite possible Diana Smith is the problem and her intransigence dealing with the insurance people and with me, similiar concerns about the interactions, could simply reflect it’s a personal problem. Women in the workplace are often juggling home duties and work duties. 

I have now sent a letter to James Epp the company president and hope that the problem isn’t with the company but rather with a person in the company. Indeed given the stress of my work these last couple of years and the number of patients that are suicidal and psychotic in my practice it’s probably me personally. I never expected this having done my very best and been quite shocked by Diana Smith’s behaviour.  

Now I have to go get my hearing aid fixed. I had hearing lost after I acquired deafness taking the anti TB medications I had to take for a year after acquiring TB working on northern aboriginal reservices when years went by with the government and university unable to get a physician to serve as a fly in doctor.  I just read that the vaccines have been associated with hearing loss as well.  I joke that it’s a consequence of rock and roll but I joke because I’m so sad at the losses of aging.  My back X-ray shows a fractured spine which I presume is from the plane crass I was in when I was flying into the isolated reserve and the plane went off the run way and flipped in the ditch smashing the wing. I was a year before they could get trucks in to get it out in winter . I was young and thought nothing of it. Kids. Now I’m aging and grieving. Too many close friends have died.  The times are frightening. 

God is good all the time

Don Moen’s Praise song ‘God is Good all of the time.” Has been one I’ve enjoyed.

But how do we explain suffering.

The determinist view of life is that we don’t have free choice and that our believe in our control over events and ourselves is pure illusion.  Shit just happens. Life just is. Everything is pre destiny and fate

Unfortunately those who like that view like it when they’re doing well and don’t like it when the other guy is.  So they say I was born to be rich. Destiny was the rule of kings and aetheists who believe that they were destined to be in the Communist Party leadership too,.

The Christian view of Free Will says that we have choice.  

I’m not sure given that there are all of us and any choice I make interacts with all the other choices.  No problem for God because God is an infinite Cray computer. Even my little brain has billions of synapse and possibilities

But if god is Good why is there Justin Trudeau and Jeffrey Epstein one could ask.  What about the innocence of children.  Christians explained that by the ‘sins of the fathers’.  Original Sin even, is just Genetics 101.

But what about a bad person doing a bad thing. While there would be no joy without pain.  Black and white . Yin and Yang

God is good all the time.  God is perfect and I’m imperfect.  The failure of man in Christian explanation is Pride.  I think I’m okay and God’s not Okay. Transactional Analysis looked at that I’m okay you’re not Okay or You’re okay, I’m not okay or we’re both okay or we’re both not okay.  That occurred with the Game Theory and Prisoner’s Dilemna which when played out rarely has ‘we win’ because people naturally are paranoi.

Piaget studied the cognitive development of children and found that it wasn’t till adolescence that they developed abstract thinking. When the tests for abstract thinking were applied to 30 year old they found that most were ‘developmentally delayed.’  Anna Freud studied ‘lines of development’ like narcissism to altruism.  Again many people didn’t progress.  In the study of humor humor moved from laughing at others to laughing with other to laughing at oneself.  Unfortunately most people lack the capacity to laugh at themselves.

When Buber said I and Thou he said that the thought experiment was that life was a dialogue between God and man, first the tribe and God but now the individual and God.  

I and it versus I and thou.

Jung said all were an aspect of the one.  

For God to be Good I must accept my humility.  Further God is the prime mover.  Ironically functional MRI studies show that action precedes thought. This causes me to believe I’m a voice over on the comic strip of my life.  I love Monty Python’s “look on the bright side of life’.  I can reframe all as positive. God is good all of the time yet even Jesus asked ‘my God why hast though forsaken me.  

All of creation is God since there was one, not two , god and building blocks.  One.  Deuteronomy. 6.4. Hear O Israel, The Lord our God, the Lord is one.

There is in my mind the perception of God as other but as God is one then I am of God.

In first year university I wrote the poem and paper and son,  “I am God, You are God, God is greater than we are. Yahweh”

Moses asked God, the burning bush his name, and God said Yahweh, beingness.  I am, that is who I am. 

Loving God means loving the Devil.  God is love.  In Milton the angel turns his back on God.  Free choice.  In the Garden Human’s break the law.  The first law of thermonuclear and then the second law.  The first law is ‘constant’ , conservation of energywhile the second law is entropy of isolated system always increases. The third law says entropy approaches a constant as the temperature approaches absolute zero.  Entropy is chaos. 

God is love. Love your neighbour as yourself.  We are one.  

The one becomes many and the many becomes one.  The chemical equation is life to death to life.  Oscillation,  Chaos and Order,  The String Theory . The mathematics of music and ultimately harmony.

Peace and perception.  I and I or I and Thou.  Love and War.  Faith and Fear.  I must learn to love the introject of the shadow within. That which I don’t accept I project onto the other.  

The ‘love the sinner’ not the ‘sin’ isn’t Biblical.  I am to love as St. Francis.  Aspire to love all but not be hurt by the other.  Boundaries.  Detach with love.  I love my neighbour as myself.  Livingston when he was preparing to be a missionary struggled with the idea of killing animals for food and being in the jungle then he realized that life and death are entwined like God and the Devil in Job. God is all and God is good.  

Acceptance is the answer.  Surrender.  Accept.  I live and die.  I and God. No there is none but God.  To know God is to let go of self.  The Self and Overself.  It’s all the caterpillar and the butterfly and zen of one hand clapping,  

Frazerway RV and Evil

Frazerway RV sold me a defective camper. The salesman promised me that it was not water damaged. He lied. I was in an accident and the insurers found that the camper was water damaged .  They say that in the couple of years I owned the camper that it ‘leaked’ because I didn’t check the ‘seals’.  I’m an offshore blue water sailor who sailed through two hurricanes crossing the Pacific solo in winter and am assured I know about seals.  I even hired Starfleet RV Service to check my seals in their seasonal repair work.  But Diana Smith calls me a liar and says that I must pay a blank cheque in addition to the tens of thousands of dollars the Insurance Company has offered to pay Frazerway RV.  Diana Smith has been so abusive.  I left the. RV 9 months ago at Frazerway with the promise it would be ‘fixed’ by spring.  I had bought from Frazerway RV because the salesman said that we make the Campers and can fix anything and will do it quickly so you won’t lose any time camping.

I find myself reflecting on other women who were abusive of doctors and they all were mentally ill or grossly addicted to marijuana or alcohol. They worked out their hatred of men through positions of power.  I find myself having the recurrent nightmares of the psychotic female beurocrat Maureen Peircey.  She was the divorced woman bureaucrat who defended my former  asssitant  I’d terminated.  My waiting room patients complained that she was smoking crack when I was in my office. She stole from me. After she was gone computer security  personnel showed she’d broken into police files,  and was running her own business off my computer, using my software to do pornography photography of herself.  The computer security firm I hired found she’d unlocked my confidential police files and given that I had the state of the art security and encryption could only assume she’d stolen my password looking over my shoulder.  ,  Then her boyfriend , a degenerate grandiose addict began to threaten my life all because they had targeted me for extortion demanding that I pay they off to go.  She wass just a very sick psychopath.  I felt betrayed by the people who promoted her, the minister who promoted her, the references I called who apologized and said they’d only been her ‘johns’.  But mostly I was so disappointed in the government some n who ‘allied’ with a psychopath against me.  I felt rage and when the silly little boy she’d chosen to act out her proxy violence threatened me it was all I could do to not kill him.  Literally.  Years of working with the violently insane and finding these people in my office alone threatening me with violence and extortion and feeling no support from the government and doctors who I falsely expected were against crime.  Two years of time and money involved in dealing with a psychopath in recovery and all the other addiction doctors kindly sharing their stories of administrative assistants stealing, Maureen Piercy hating male doctors, deeply disturbed, arrogant and ignorant.   Even though the police verified she’d stolen from me, she admitted it herself and told the police if they persisted in harassing her she’d charge them with sexual harassment.  

I felt so vulnerable and betrayed each day going to work helping addicts and alcoholics and doing everything in my power to treat illness all the while these women joined together to do evil.

I took a course at UBC on suffering , ‘why bad things happen too good people’.  Everyone said I was good. Even the police thought I’d been targeted by her boyfriend a known sociopath and her.  I was Jungian trained in psychoanalystic therapy. I’d done years of individual therapy. I’m a chemist. My first thought was to kill. Young I’d show up in  the wee hours of the morning and tap them on the shoulder and ask to discuss their problem.  But I’m a Christian and I’m supposed to turn my cheek 70x70 , slow to anger, before I o everything in my power to defend myself, since Jesus served the Centurions and Christians ‘win in the end’.  Slow to anger. I felt rage.  But Jung taught that when I was angry that whatever bothered me was something in myself.

It’s 25 years ago I stopped drinking and smoking marijuana and cigarettes. My ex wife was addicted and a threat to herself and others. Her cocaine problem was such that her impairment occasioned the psychiatrist to recommend she go to treatment in San Diego.  The dealers were preying on her for her money. She didn’t keep her appointment. I left saying I can ‘either stay at home and watch you or got to work and help a hundred people ‘ but I can’t do both. This time of the year is always difficult for me.  Stopping drinking I realized I’d always had a difficulty with women who were actively using and boozing.  It was the pattern of my life and my marriages.  I re entered therapy in sobriety and studied spirituality and Christian theology. I also sailed solo in storms and rode Harleys across the country while big game hunting shooting moose at 500 yards all the while. I’d already collected a large amount of poisons paranoid and ready with my chemistry to address anyone water supply.  

I was suicidal back then and the women were homicidal.  It was 25 years ago that I made the committment to God and surrendered Thy Will Be Done, not My Will.  I studied Martin Buber who said that the world reduced to a relationship, I and It, the paranoid position, the position of the cave man and woman.  The evolution of character and consciousness is to I and Thou.  JOB, the chapter of the Old Testament about God and the Devil wagering with the lives of Job and his family.  Jesus dying on the cross saying “My God, My God, Why hast thou forsaken me.? “Eli Eli, Lama Sabachtani?”  Jesus surrendered to the Father.

When I was treating Vets and a vet who had murdered a woman came to the emergency to murder any psychiatrist because a psychiatrist had said he was too dangerous for the military after several tours and he was unceremoniously discharged as broken and uselesss.  I remember as he told me how he was going to kill me locked in that little room I thought I’ve spent my life specialist in healing people, delivering babies and doing surgery and now working with the most in need and most marginalized , I was no match for someone who spent their life learning to kill and killing so I surrendered. I prayed and had acceptance.  I was going to die and there was nothing I could do about it if it was God’s plan.

I’d wanted to be a missionary but Jack Hildes who got the Order of Canada for his work with Circumpolar Health and the Northern Medical Unit convinced me to become a fly in doctors to the isolated reserves.  He said ‘we have natives here without medical care no different than in Africa.”  So I spent the next 10 years first as a family physician then as a psychiatrist making countless flights into the wilderness , surviving a plane crash, which injured my back, getting shot at, and countless times threatened on the ‘wet reserves’, and acquiring TB, the year of treatment damaging my ears leaving me deaf.

I’d been to church and ashrams and studied Buddhism 8 fold path and did ‘right livelihood’.  I struggled to do my best. I took an oath to do no harm. I forfeited high income for service.  The materialists laughed at my lifelong marshmallow test and the thought of rewards in heaven..

But we are only in heaven when we can love hell.  Mostly I’ve thought this is hell. There is only Now. God is in the present. The past and future are illusions. I spend much of my time relieving schizophrenics and addicts of the torments of their lives and thinking but grounding them. One day at a time. The truth and facts are now. All else is conjectured.

Carl Jung taught that all the people in a dream are yourself.  The shadow is the unknown enemy within. Milton in Paradise Lost taught that Satan was the first angel who chose to look at his shadow rather than the light of God.  The law of attraction says that if we focus on evil we will gain more evil till we no longer need or want it.  The Tibetan Book of the Dead says we reincarnate as a team, some hundred or thousand of us together all acting out the roles of love and fear. Emerson, the father of American philosophy wrote “if the redslayer thinks he slays or the slain thinks he is slain, they know not well the ways I keep and turn and toss again.’

In this life I’m the good guy because in my last life I was the bad guy. It’s all karma but its now. All the characters of my life are aspects of myself now because God is omniscient and physicists teach the spiritual. It’s seen in the fractuals and the particle and wave.  String theory teaches higher power.  Do I love or fear.  There is only love and fear. Anger is the fight of the fight and flight equation of the fearful.

Why do I fear Diana Smith at Frazerway RV.  Why does this corrupt unprofessional abusive evil sick organization and individual remind me of those other times I’ve been attacked by the devil and my own ignorance.  What is it about me that attracts such psychotic and disturbed women.

Hitler had Eva Braun.  Stalin’s wife committed suicide. Sophie tells Trudeau she wants more nannies.  

All women are variations of the lover or mother or daughter in the Jungian sense. Canada has become gynocentric celebrating the Fifty Shades Kardasian porn star childless teenage while the Catholic Church celebrated the mother of Jesus.  The God of Christianity is the Trinity, the Holy Spirit feminine and the father and son. The family God. Jesus was the servant God. The aetheist Marx wanted war till his side won. Islam calls itself the religion of peace but fails to say that will only occur when all are subject to Allah.  In AA I learned ‘live and let live’.  Women and Men sex and war.  Men are direct while women prefer proxy.  There is the Overt and Covert Agression.  The Big Brain of man is for deceit.  We didn’t ask the water Buffalo if we could eat it. The great fight off evolution was the Big Cat and man prevailed because he and his wife were more devious than the house cat, as inconceivable as that is.

Now I’m attacked by Diana Smith and Frazerway RV.  My insurers said they’d pay and 9 months has passed and Diana Smith has done nothing. The spring and summer are here and I don’t have a camper. My friend Laura exhausted as I am and other health care workers are after more than 2 years of Covid want to get out of this city and camp.

I’m trying to understand what God is telling me.  I’m at the age or retirement. I thought I’d continue to work but as this is happening I don’t feel I have the infrastructure to continue to work here.  I’m a subspecialists.  Diana Smith and Frazerway are business people. While I’ve been training to the highest level , beyond the local ability to support subspecialization, like a surgeon dependent on lighting and generators I’m finding that the business community of Vancouver, Surrey, Abbotsford and Langley, indeed BC is world renowned for it’s corruption. When I was at a conference in Washington I was told that Vancouver was the principal conduit of drugs into America. Marijuana was an 80 billion dollar criminal industry but the Prime Minister, himself a user wanted the money for the government.  Jesus was killed by government. Steal a little and they put you in jail, steal a lot and they make you king.  Now Vancouver remains as the Heroin conduit of North America, billions of dollars of crime. Crystal meth too. The BC Casinos have already been  exposed for the money laundering centre and now it turns out that the highest cost of living here is because the housing market is another multi billion dollar money laundering scheme. 

I’ve just done medicine.  I’ve studied decades and beyond with an alphabet of degrees behind my name and a life time of accomplishment. I’ve caught and stopped so many pedophiles and their writings always show up in rate your doctor. My forensic colleagues and I commiserate. The addicts i refused to give drugs to even the ones who pointed guns at me in the office have hated me and attacked my good reputation as a clinician.  Drug dealers killed my dog and I regret the times I did the ‘right thing’ because I believed the government and the people i helped would appreciate it. But I’ve read Arendt and seeing the government today with idiots the likes of Trudeau in high place despite their unethical and often criminal behaviour it makes it all seem absurd.  

The sense of hopelessness returns .  I’m paralyzed in the homicide and suicide of my brain. I’m attacked and subjected to the seige and the passive aggressive or female aggression of failure to do your part. I remember all the men I saw in marriage therapy who had agreed to marriage, been providers and protectors, did their work, but came home to cold sexless loveless homes with alcoholic drug addicted wives and a cold marriage bed. The yin and yang of the overt aggression of testosterone driven war versus the withholding passive aggressive estrogen driven seige, covert aggression. I loved reading Turing and the Enigma machine and recently watching Troy and the seige and deviance.

i can treat hundred patients, doing my medicine or be distracted and care for one. I am here now faced again with the same evil.

What is is about me that attracts the Diana Smith and Frazerway RV devil. Everyone I consults say that they are Evil and Corrupt. All who have walked this 9 month journey , insurance and other campers and family tell me I did no wrong. I’ve paid all the money I have . My friend a multi millionaire laughs and says ‘doctors aren’t good businessmen.’ How can we be. I’ve lived my life learning everything nerve and blood vessel of the body, every way to save an infants life. I’ve stopped until number of suicides and homicides by treated the dangerously insane and the dangerous and addicted. I’ve worked with the most difficult most marginazed populations.  I’m tired. My brother used his big brain in business administration and made a fortune in business but I’ve devoted myself to medicine.  While I’ve sailed and camped and studied so many things I’ve listened to medical audiotapes and read countless journals and books a year. I’ve brought all this training and experience to work and yet the infrastructure of business is corrupt and criminal and people prey now on the elderly, the vets and the mentally ill and best doctors are leaving.  

I want to run away.  I am faced with my devil. The shadow.  I’ve walked away from mansions and millions. I stayed in BC not because of the city. The corruption here and the filth and gang war fare and the corrupt and evil political entities like TRudeau in Canada and knowing that I walk among people who vote for such banality has me escaping every chance I get to the wilderness. That’s what BC is ‘God’s Country’.  The outdoors here are what brought me back from living in Marin County California,.  The wonders of camping and fishing and hunting and sailing and skiing here have had me coming back from living in tropical islands, Mexico , England.  Now I don’t know. The cost of gas makes travel exhorbitant,  Vancouver devolves into gang gun fights. Walking my dog my life and my dog’s life are threatened by an addict. The failure of the government to address addiction and crime and homelessness had Stanley Park nearly burnt to the ground by the crystal meth addicts who live now in the woods. 

I’m getting old.  What have I done wrong? What is wrong with me? What must I do? I have given so much of my earnings away, after the government has taken it’s 70% and the the cost of practice makes me the lowest paid of my colleagues.  I left surgery and became a psychiatrist. Psychiatrists, internists and family physicians are the lowest paid here.    I loved that the promises of AA Said ‘fear of economic insecurity would leave us’. But with Trudeau’s corrupt energy police and government created obscene inflation with the collusion of the corrupt Bank of England and the censorship of the CBC and elite control of information we have become more akin to the dictatorships of communist china and the Middle East royal dictatorships akin to the 15th century pre Magna Carta.

70 churches were burnt to the ground in Canada last year. The elderly on fixed pensions are going to food courts and everyone in my practices lives in fear of eviction. The 60 year olds, 70 year olds and 80 year olds are desperate. They saw what government institutions did to the elderly and frai during Covid. Only the rich can escape Trudeau’s Medical Assisted Suiciee programs as he expands it to the mentally ill and other undesirables. Only his friends are immune.  

And I ask what do you want me to do God? What is this a sign of?

Its’ the anniversary of 25 years of sobriety when I surrendered as I had held hostage, as I had knowing as the planet crashed in the north that there was nothing I could do but pray. I pray all the time but now my prayers are interrupted by my fears and resentment of Diana Smith and Frazerview RV.  

Based on their promises I expected to have my camper back in May.  Laura’s and I canceled our May long weekend camping.  It was raining. Despite my love of vamping in the rain since I don’t tent any more and loved the camper I didn’t react, When Diana Smith didn’t return the calls made by insurance and myself and I had to cancel patients to make Time in my schedule to try to contact her royal highness since she only worked 9-5 while I’ve worked 24/7 all my adult life seeing 10,000 patients, hundreds of children and so many nightmares.

I have worked p;ast the retirement age and past the new older retirement age that Trudeau has introduced. I’ve given my soul to the company store and Diana Smith and Frazerway RV hate the elderly. We’re just food to these cannibals.  They prey on us. At a time when I would be resting from a life of service I’m abused and obscenely mistreated by a very sick and angry woman .

But that’s to Jung, my shadow and my anima,  I’m in heaven when I can love hell. Love your enemy.  Jesus said Love God and Love your neighbour as yourself. He didn’t say love your good neighbour.   Diana Smith and Frazerway RV are my bad neighbour . They’re they crack addicted psychopath.  They’re Satan. They’re my Shadow.  

To love doesn’t mean to die. When patients have tried to kill me and gangs have attacked me I defended myself.  The first rule of lifesaving was to save the other only if it doesn’t cause you to die. If a person is in a Mexican standoff with you and you both are faced with shooting ,shooting your enemy in self defense saves them going to hell. If you let them murder you they do two crimes.  Trudeau said ‘if you kill your enemy he wins,’. What a fat cat trust fund mentally incompetent runt of the litter bully of girls and their.  Jesus only died because he said ‘thy will be done,’. His men carried knives and defended the girls and the apostles weren’t above killing. The effete Jesus is not the Jesus I met in Jerusalem. A man who walked with Fishermen and Herdsmen across the desert of Israel isn’t a fancy clad girl in a silk dress.  It’s not her suited businessman Herod lover easy.  It’s a whole different story. I can kill in self defence as a Christian. CS Lewis spoke to the troops in WWII. He was said to be the soul of the nation while Churchill was called the heart of the nation.  Killing Nazis was holy in it’s day as later killing the invading communists was a sit was at the crusades when Mohammed killed all the Jews, Zoarasterians and Christians that had inhabited the Middle East before Mohammed’s Jihad against all but his tribe began. 

I wonder if I should have devoted my life to killing. Trudeau made billions of selling war supplies last year.  Very clever. I’m often thinking as a doctor I’m a fool especially at the end of my career when I look back and see that all that I did for free didn’t go to the patients but was taken by the government and put in their pockets, clever businessmen , laughing to the back and the service of teachers, doctors, ministers.  

I am too quick to self pity. Such narcissism.  Im the agent of my own suffering. I attract the devil  It’s a sunny day in paradise and I’m letting the Diana Smith and Frazerway RV distract me from my patients from the day from my worship of god and my gratitude.  What am I supposed to learn. How can i get out of this .  Am I to walk away like I did when my wife refused to get treatment for her cocaine and drug addiction leaving tens of millions of dollars in her hand,  I paid the extortion fee to the criminal woman the college backed . I don’t want to fight. I walk away. I sail away.  I ask myself what am I supposed to learn from this.  

The immigrant doctors who have left their countries have come with their clever business practices and families of business minded ness. Their countries are more corrupt than Canada so they prefer to take their education and serve themselves and their families. They don’t want the wilderness. They don’t want the lost civil liberties of this once great country. Maybe it’s my bent vision. If I looke to the light and disregard the darkness. The light conquers the darkness.  

God what is it I can do ? Thy will be done, I’m immobilized by this. This time of the year is always difficult. 25 years ago I was suicidal and homicidal and I surrendered.   I don’t drink , haven’t for 25 years. I go to church and study and pray and meditate and now ask for help because I simply don’t know what I’m doing to attract this ..

I call it the Eva Brawn syndrome. Good Men killed Hitler but today good somen won’t address the Eva Brawn’s of the world. Where is Joan of Arc when we need her.  

i am contemplating a sex change.  Girls just want to have fun. As Leonard Cohen wrote, I want a new face.  My face is ruined with wrinkles and age and countless nights as the side of beds, listening to the worst people describe the most demonic things  and all the shame and guilt and being tin the presence of the possessed and psychopathic. Some has I can’t spend enough time in the shower then I realize there but for the grace of god go I and I am the one who killed Jesus. I am God and the devil.  I know projection.  I’m failing to learn from my mistakes.  I am here again faced with the same old passive aggressive seige and attack.  Evil prevails for a while. What am I to learn. Am I to leave and walk away. What is it I am to do. Now I’m behind work because Im distracted.  I have either time for Diana Smith and Frazerway or the hundreds of patients that see me.  They can focus all their efforts on making money and arbitrarily working 9 to 5 in the illusion of money where as today someone will tell me they’re going to kill the selves.  Yesterday someone was seizuring.  I m thankful for my colleagues but I’m weary so very weary asking what I”m doing wrong, Please God show me the way. Thy will be done. I surrender.  

Tuesday, Thank you for waking me up God

Thanks to my doctors I’ve learned that stretching before getting out of bed reduces the sharp pains of getting out of bed, moving from horizontal to vertical and dealing with gravity.  My spine is better capable of doing the shift if I do some stretches before getting up, “Like a cat, ‘ she said.  

I saw the chiropractor and that dulled the pain. The sharp pain is what bothers me most. I can live with the dull pains and have for as long as I can remember. I was depressed I’m convinced because the background pain came to the foreground and reinforced my self pity.  Exercise helps it.  I’m best after swimming but kids have been in the pool this week. I get pool time like others get laundry time trying to find when no one is there.  I’m doing pretty good. Walking Madigan throughout the day is good too. I call him my dog physiotherapist.  He’s right now chewing on an old bone my foot found in the night a couple of nights back. Felt like a big Lego in the dark.

Laura wrote and said sun is promised this week.  I’m looking forward to backyard sun bathing.  

Frazerway RV continues to delay my camper repair.  It’s now 9 months of their corruption and incompetence.  Such a shame for a business to function that way and then expect perfection of doctors.  We’d have mass death in our communities if our doctors and nurses functioned as Frazerway RV Abbotsford.  It used to be Abbotsford was a Christian community but it’s anything but Christian at Frazerway RV.  Customer service is communist if anything.  I am convinced they vote Liberal by the failure to work.  I bought a defective unit from them and when an insurance claim exposed they’d sold me a defective unit they simply won’t repair it and to date have put nothing in writing. I’ve waited, turn the check 40 times 40.  Don’t express concern.  I am used to dealing with insane and psychopaths so I wait. Everyday they are more and more incompetence and bullying like Ottawa.  I wake thinking about the utter abuse.  I never would have thought in a thousand years when I bought the unit and heard all the promises and claims of Frazerway that I would be without a camper for 9 months working through covid and now continuing to work with more and more people struggling with the increasing number of bullies and despearate sociopaths .  Each day I hear of people struggling with inflation, cost of food, evictions and I am distracted by my own demonic attack by Frazerway RV obviously possessed as they continue to communicate with callous arrogance. I suspect as always it’s the drugs the staff are on. This level of offensiveness almost always indicates drug abuse and alcoholism. I deal with it every day in my work and find that if a person is an asshole, you just have to add alcohol or drugs to make the person an asshole turbocharged.

 Meanwhile I figure like Jung teaches that I am attracting this and am trying to detach with love.  I pray for the lost souls of Frazerway RV.  It’s a country in a world of fear led by the devils own Justin Trudeau the incompetent corrupt perverted dictator wannabe .  As Bob Dylan sings ‘there’s blood on the saddle’ and the world has gone crazy.  

I am exhausted selling life each day to the suicidal, wrestling with the devil trying to have a person stop the slow suicide of addiction.  It takes all my energy and at the end of the day I’m utterly exhausted.  Meanwhile I’ve errands to do and distract myself with whatever works.  

The war is real.  

The Wuhan virus continues psychologically.  The damage to families and connection is only now rebuilding.  Deaths continue.  

I’m finding it harder and harder to reassure people. I’m an eternal optimist and know that people like me who believe in the success of patients have a 30% greater success rate than those who don’t.  I’m feeling burnt out despite my strategic R&R and the use of all the things I recommend. But the back pain,, I was in a plane crash on a mercy mission as a flyin doctor to the northern reserves,  Later my car was hit by yahoos as I was driving to a hospital to deliver a baby. Thank God my colleague could replace me.  I was in an emergency myself being assessed that day.  A guy going through a stop sign hit me as I was bicycling down a hill on my way to church and truly I thought I was going to be paraplegic after i flew over the roof of the car and landed on my back behind him.  I am so thankful to UBC and the doctor who returned saying that the Ctscan showed my spine was fine.  I am reassured by technology on occasion. I know all pain as psychosomatic and feel ever in a fight between life and death, sensitive as I am to the yin and yang.  

It’s all light and darkness. Without pain I’d not know pleasure.

I’m truly blessed. I’ve known so much joy and wonder in my life. I’ve had such depth of joy in study. I’m get such glee reading an learning. I’ve such fun in nature. It’s such a joy to be there helping a person ‘change’ from dying to living. I love watching the light come on in their eyes. I enjoyed watching the spirits return to bodies in the ICU.  I feel auras expand when the hopelessness goes and life returns. It’s a real pleasure to be with people helping them out of the rabbit holes.  I’ve walked so many miles in so many moccasins I don’t judge. I was told by Jesus to Love God and Love my neighbour as myself. I ‘m learning everyday to be more loving.  I’m living more in the moment each day. I’m evaluating truth more clearly by separating hearsay and disinformation. I’m struggling but doing the heavy lifting of forcing my mind to turn from the propaganda and loud brass bands of the bullies to the wee small voices and the cclestial bells.  It’s amazing I’m still alive. I never thought I’d survive so many times in my life when all I had was faith and grace was ever kind and generous.  

Thank you Jesus for your presence and teaching.  Help me and those I know and love another day of this sacred journey. Thank you for Madigan and thank you for Laura. 

Fate and Free Will

The whole discussion of fate and free will, or determinism and free will or psychosomatic or religion and philosophy is built on various perspectives and perceptions of this primary and secondary consideration of change.

The first rule of thermodynamics and second rule of thermodynamics speak to movement.  The idea of God as Omnisicent and omnipotent and omnipresent is summed up in his name as the Prime Mover.  For thousands of year men and women considered began and begat.

I was reading the history of the Christian Oxford Movement and AA in Wikipedia and enjoyed seeing that Dr. Silkworth told Bill Wilson, who was a member of the Oxford Movement and follower of Sam Shoemaker, Frank Buchman’s Oxford Movement leader in America, that he should drop the word ‘sin’ and change the word to ‘illness’.  

Dr. Bob was a member of the Oxford Group in Akron, Ohio which had had a major Oxford Movement Christian convention there.  Seiberling, who introduced Bill Wilson to Dr. Bob said that the ‘miracle’ had occurred there in Akron  the day or days before Bill Wilson arrived on his business trip,  The whole of the  Oxford Movement community had gathered with Dr. Bob and his wife to pray together for Dr. Bob, a secret drinker who had confessed,  to have a miracle to cure his drinking.  Whereas Freud had said alcoholism was worse than schizophrenia and incurable, Dr. Carl Jung had said he’d seen alcoholics cured by a spiritual awakening, rare as it was.  

Jesus said , where two or more are gathered in my name there too am I.

Dr. Bob and Bill Wilson met and Alcoholics Anonymous began.  These members of the Christian Oxford Movement took the central idea of Christianity that the spreading of the message was what saved the individual specifically to addressing addiction.   Dr. Silkworth had told Bill Wilson while he’d not been able to get anyone else sober by his trying to evangelize the world, he had in fact for the first time stayed sober himself..  Now he and Dr. Bob and the Oxford movement would carry on Frank Buchman’s and Sam Shoemakers work serving the marginal and the alcoholic and addicted community.  

The central tenet of the Oxford Movement was ‘grace’, God is a loving God and that good is the life that  come from accepting God, a higher power, not self.  Kurtz history of AA was indeed called ‘Not Self”.  

Frank Buchman taught that the problems of individuals were ‘selfishness and fear’.  Pride is the major sin of Christianity. In Milton’s Paradise Lost Satan prefers to worship his shadow than turn to the light of God.  Martin Buber, the great Jewish theologian philosopher said that man sees himself and the other which he calls ‘it’ and is frightened of  it until he realizes ‘it ‘ is ‘thou’.  The paranoid lives in a world of “I and IT”.  The enlightened live in the world of “I and Thou’.  The AA movement and the Christian movement taught ‘Thy will be done, no my will” in same was as in Hinduism’s, yoga is the philosophy and action similar to YMCA which ‘yolks the body mind and soul of the individual to God.”  Jesuss’ principal command was ‘do not be afraid’.  He summed up his message as Love God and Love Your Neighbour as Yourself.  

The word to ‘sin’ is an archery term that means ‘to miss the mark’.  The idea ‘the road to hell is paved with good intentions’ speaks even to psychopaths and sociopaths who think they are the ‘good guy.’  Zen and the Art of Archery and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance both speak to ‘works’. Christianity has struggled as other religions with whether one is saved by ‘works’, doing good, like the extreme OCD, or by Grace, the lucky ones of God’s choosing.  Reincarnation and the ‘sins of father’s and even evolution have all been postulated to explain why bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people.  The Sistine Chapels shows ADAM lifting his hand with his finger stretched out reaching for God.  God reaches down.  Which comes first . Again fate and free will and God as the Prime Mover.  Obviously an archer who doesn’t lift his bow and nock his arrow isn’t going to hit the target but when the action of man reaching out meets God the miracle occurs. Grace is the free gift of God.  

Determinism and Fate say there is no change. I say by this token then I’m at best a ‘voiceover on a comic strip’.  The shallow thinkers of philosophy dominated these days by the unscientific religions of aetheism clings to ‘change’.  Each dime a dozen politician promises change while secretly knownng that the reformer is the enemy of anyone who benefit from the status quo and most politicians and their cadre have merely wanted to place themselves on the royal seat which has throughout time been called King, Emperor, Furer or Comrade, so long as the status quo remains. 

Yet fate or determinism and predestination and genetics, without  a ‘mover’ means the. nature of creation/existence/all  is static. The scientific agnostic accepts that there is ‘something’ that causes the ‘ripple’.  The great American philosopher William James, father of pragmatism , focused on the action.  God is said not to be a thought but rather an experience.

When alcoholics stopped drinking and joined non drinking members of spiritual communities they became free of the insanity and psychosis of addiction.  The early AA groups said that the higher power was a ‘god of my understanding’ realizing that alcoholism and addiction was it’s own religion. The way the crack addict approaches his drug and his behaviour and his philosophy and his dealer are all the stuff of religion.  The drama and story of alcoholism is the making of materialism saintly.  It’s like mental wankerism though because like masturbation the experience is exclusive to the inclusive experience of love and love making.  Play can be solitary or parallel or ultimately together.  

Alone alcoholics and addicts could not free themselves from the predator dealers and governments invested in selling all manner of delusions , the greatest being ‘Pride”.  With the help of another they could be lifted out of the hole they’d dug themselves or if they didn’t dig themselves at least found themselves in. .  

The idea that sin is ‘blaming’ is an abomination of Godliness.  Accountability is not ‘blame’.  Yet without accountability there could be no scientific endeavour.  

It is said that there is shame in addiction and dignity in recovery. The experience of shame is that of being outside the group not only as a minority but as an active combatant against the majority.  Live and let live is by contrast a central tenet of AA.  

Frank Buchman was against the Nazi and the Communists recognizing them both as ungodly and aiming for perpetual war. The Oxford Movment wanted world peace.  Having met with Himnler,  Buchman said Himmler was unable to change and that the Nazi’s could not grasp the idea of peace. The Nazi’s, the National Socialist Movement of Germany believe that world war was necessary and all others but the religion of Socialism destroyed so that the Fuhrer would reign. Nothing new here folks.  Genghis Kahn, Alexander, Napoleon, Mao and countless others over the same with different marketing and labelling.  Marx believed in perpetual war until all were communists and peace would occur. This is similar to radical Muslim which maintains that Islam is a religion of Peace in that Peace will occur when all are Muslim.  

The Christian Oxford movement was not a religion like AA would not be a religion.  Religion has often been called ‘man made’ while ‘spirituality “ is God made.   The experience    of God is spirituality. The difficulty for the Aetheist, the Communist or Nazi is that they equate that ‘emotional’ experience of feeling good as ‘spiritual’.  Spirituality by contrast is inclusive and accepting of God , not excluding God.  In AA 12 steps the 4th step demanding ‘rigorous honestly ‘ (like the first step of the Oxford Movement - Absoluate Honesty) suggested that one look at and inventory their resentments and fears regarding people, institutions and principles.  Obviously many still resent and fear God, especially atheists. 

Dr. Bob , a surgeon and loving husband had throughout his life strove to be unselfish.  Bill Wilson had a life long history of egomania and having been an officer in war leading an artilliary unit , never talked about his war experience. He wallowed often in self pity depression and refused to identify his depression with his persistent womanizing and cheating on his wife Lois who began the Al Anon movement of friends and families of alcoholics whose central tenet of survival was ‘detach with love’.  Bill Wilson suffered anxiety and depression and was an ‘empire builder’ despite struggling with Pride long after his own spiritual awakening. He would throughout his life benefit from the guidance of Father Ed Dowling, the Jesuit Catholic priest. 

Alcoholics in the Oxford movement were willing to focus solely on their drinking and stopping their drinking but when it came to their ‘moral behaviour’ overall they remained at variance with the Oxford Movement members who strove for “Absolute Purity’.  Later AA’s would say that they divided from the spiritual Christian movement which had gained from Frank Buchman’s  contact with Gandhi’s and Ravindranath Tagore when Buchman served with the YMCA spending lengthy time time in India and China. Hinduism teaches ‘Saints of all religions, I bow to you all.”  The movement in Christianity has been ‘inclusive versus exclusive’ which different denominations arguing politically that only their group is ‘godly’. The joke follows that there is a ‘highway to hell and a stair way to heaven’.  

Hell in Christian terms is not eternal but ‘for a long time’ , the agricultural measure of the days of Jesus.  The time of god is only now and eternal is the present and this day.   The idea of linear time is a mathematic invention of the modern era at variance even from eastern time which is perceived as circular. The idea of God as outside of Creation is quite bizarre as God is imminent and transcendent but it is common for the rhetoric of debate to create straw dog arguments such as God being an old guy on a cloud when religions collectively teach of the world with in and St. John specifically teaches that the Word as  the very fabric of creation.

Physicists today are far more spiritual than so many of the religious leaders who can’t grasp the nature of Einstein’s E=MC2 , the interplay between energy and matter, psychosomatics or that spirit and matter are like the nature of light , both wave and particle depending on perspective.  The Daoism of the east with Yin and Yang is central to the least taught book of the Bible, Job.  

That moment of giving up the demon drink and demon drug and seeking the spirit of the natural high, children knowing and showing joy greatest before any chemical or process addiction,  is the moment of the ‘new’ man, the ‘born again’ experience that Christian evangelists talk of or the ‘conversion’ experience Dr Frank Buchman ,Dr. Bob, Dr. Silkworth and even Bill Wilson spoke of .  There was no need for the ‘white light’ experience of Bill Wilson but clearly as one accepted the Godly , or good path, the world and the life of the individual changed.   

Hallelujah. 

Comparison is the thief of joy

Comparison is the thief of joy, was attributed to Roosevelt.  This morning I was circling about the drain of self pity.  My mind is a bad neighbour hood. I shouldn’t go there alone. I was considering finances.  I wasn’t thinking about the day. I was in the future worrying about not having a pension and wondering how much money I would “need’ in really old age.  I was fearing institutions and nursing homes and government attacks on the elderly.  I was so disturbed by the Canadian government mismanagement of the pension funds leaving so little for the elderly and with the Trudeau mismanagement of the economy inflation is literally killing my patients on fixed income, mostly the elderly and marginal. 

Meanwhile, Carpe Diem, I was making Paraguayan coffee. It was a sunny day finally. I’d just walked the dog.  He sniffs everything and his body shakes with joy.  I’ve only a morning work before the weekend. Laura is coming.  She’s a joy to be with. We’re going to the BC Scottish Games tomorrow.  All is well. But where was my mind , concerned about money and making comparisons to former enemies from the past.  Such as waste and buzz killed.  I’m not even having much back pain. The banana and lemon yoghurt I had were delicious. I’m on my second cup of coffee.  The New NIV Bible I bought has arrived.

I opened it randomly, Ecclesiastes.

“As everyone comes, so they depart, and what do they gain,, since they toil for the wind?”

Doesn’t that just say it.  My real job is to love god and love my neighbour as myself.  Comparison is the thief of joy.  I’m only too quick to choose to compare myself who outwardly and financially or worldly appear bettter without considering equally the multitude who suffer with less.  I’m gifted. I’m blessed. I need to be more grateful.

Thank you for the sun today Lord. Thank you for Madigan.  Thank you for my motorcycle and vehicles.  Thank you for the fresh air, Thank you for the bird song. Thank you for my good sleep last night. Thank you for all the blessings. Help me serve you today.

Thank you Jesus Christ, my saviour. 

Evangelizing my mind

I am studying the Books of Kelly’s at Futurelearn, university courses on line.  I am also reading St. John’s Gospel, A Bible Study Guide and Commentary by Stephen K. Ray from Ignatius Press.  My friend Anne is attending the Catholic Church. She was expelled from her local Anglican Church or so I’ve heard.  Having started Baptist, attended United, then Pentecostal and Anglican I’ve also been a tourist in the Catholic Church studying with priests at their seminary. I didn’t  know this book of Stephen Ray’s was catholic per see though I could have told by the publisher Ignatieff.

 I’d just wanted a single Gospel and wished to read it not carrying about the bigger bible.  I’d had a folio years back and enjoyed reading it in free moments. Book of Kell’s is just the four gospels. St. John’s gospel written much later, around 100 ad remains the most mystical.  I’m interested in the mystical or spiritual aspects of church teaching. I meditated with the Benedictines and enjoyed Merton.  St. Theresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross were most moving to me at different times in the past.  Kay’s guide and commentary is very written and right off I enjoyed his discussion of Catholics and Protestant Bible Study. 

Before Martin Luther the Church was the home of the Bible and Church teaching and tradition were the bulwark of truth.  Luther introduced sola Scriptura, ‘Bible Christians’. 

He says they believe 1. There is no infallible authority outside of the Bible alone 2, There is no official interpretation or interpreter of the Bible. 3. The Bible is perspicuous (easy to understand). 4. Any individual can read the bible and interpret it for himself.  This pretty well summarizes the overall Protestant position but especially the ‘evangelical’ protestants viewpoint.

Catholics by contrast Kay says see it as 

1. the authority of the apostles and the Church preceded the New Testament writings, and the tradition of the Church is an equally infallible authority flowing from the same divine well spring

2. The authorititative interpretation of the Bible is the prerogative of the Catholic Church through the living Magisterium

3. The Bible is not always easy to understand and needs to be considered within it’s historical contextual framework — within the community to which it belongs.

4. Individuals can and must interpret the Bible within the framework of the Church’s authoritative teaching  not bases on their ‘own (private) interpretation”.

I hadn’t recognized it but I loved the idea of the ‘teachings’ and indeed the ‘verbal tradtion’ preceded the actual writing of the Gospels.  Much of Paul, the first major interpreter of the Bible was written before the first gospel was put to pen.  Mark is considered the earliest gospel , followed by Matthew then by Luke then John.  Mark dates from about 66-70 ADD, Matthew and Luke 85 -90 and John 90 to 110.  Paul’s teachings and letters date to 50 AD.

There almost endless writings and many gospels including Thomas and Mary which are not ‘approoved’.  Different gatherings of church leaders selected what was to be the ‘bible’.  It’s even more confusing because the original teachings were in Aramaic and Greek translated to Latin and then Rome. In my briefest study of Hebrew I was amazed at the fluidity of writing of the day. Later in the making of the English dictionary history I read that the ‘precision’ of words we use today is purely a modern device.  Words are an approximation. The word tree conjures a mental image for me that is vastly different from the billions of others who might learn a similiar word in their local for the greenery in their neighbour hood or language.  There are some 30,000 interpretations of gospel and not surprising.  The 4 gospels served as an internal ‘proof’ of the veracity of the story of Jesus Christ because the different perspectives over views are so highly consistent, like photographers at an event.  

Based on this the Catholic argument that their verbal tradition predates the written is powerful. There’s also been the conspiracy favourite that the Catholic library houses ‘secrets’ which never made it to the public ‘bible’.  When you consider 300 AD and the Catholic Church becoming the State Church under Constantine , the materials considered at Nicea is quite overwhelming.  All of that information and discussion is in Rome, at the Vatican.  Only the church’s inside men are allowed to read it.  Not every riff riff gets into the library though I understand they’re fairly considerate. The fire of Alexandra that destroyed the greatest library in the world is not easily forgotten by scholars. 

The monks who wrote the gospels by hand copying and recording from the Vulgate Bible of the day didn’t have a printing press or internet.  

Protestant, I’ve loved reading the Bible myself and have enjoyed many a church sermon as an ‘interpretation’ of the Bible. Hermeneutics in technical terms. Later I’d spend years in seminaries studying the Bible and teachings of the church.  Dr. Carl Ridd at University of Winnipeg, Dr. James Houston at Regent College and others have attempted in their way to enlighten me.

I so  enjoyed recently attending the Book of Mormon musical in London near Piccadilly. I really laughed very loudly. It was so apropos and sacrilegious but definitely tainted with truth. Mormonism is indeed one of the latest interpretations of Christ’s gospels.  The earliest were the Jews of the day.  Jesus was a Jew and the Sanhedrin, the Synagogue and leaders of the church rejected his teachings and with the auntority of the invading army of Romans had him crucified.  Early censorship was less sophisticated the subtleties of the ignorant narcissist Justin Trudeau’s preening censorship efforts today.  However St. Paul and St. Matthews and the Apostles in general were Jews and when I visitted Jerusalem I stayed at the Anglican Church there with the Jewish reverend who definitely approved of the evangelical movement ‘Jews for Jesus”.  

The next great interpretation of Gospel came with Mohammed.  His violent rankings clearly drug addicted or insane at times are a full on interpretation of Jesus Christ from the 15t h century. By no means my favourite interpretation given all the passages about killing Jews and further censorship.  It still is an interpretation of the Bible.  It comes later.  

This book by Kay St. John of the Gospel is to my mind really a good academic study in the best of sense. These days with the devolution of the universities in Canada and the political and  management override of ‘truth’ for profit has indeed undermined the very ‘authority’ of the ‘educated’ and especially the ‘university’.  When the University of Toronto granted medical degrees to medical students failed by the ‘faculty’ a decade back I was very open to the profound criticism of learning promoted by Dr. Jordan Peterson. I was further appalled with a local administrative doctor who was given an ‘honorary degree’ in Addiction Medicine questioned my several academic degrees of Addiction Medicine and not only that discounted the teaching of my most learned colleagues. She had the ‘power’ of the British Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons backed by the wealth and Power of the Political authority and Canada was rapidly becoming communist where there is only one god and one truth and that’s what the STATE is and says.  I was shocked by her bullying ignorance and arrogance and the ‘banality of evil’ so apparent to Arendt that truly lit the fervour of this rather stupid political mignonette. 

Now here is the same ‘debate’.  The rhetoric of ‘appeal to authority’.  God naturally talks directly to me. As a psychiatrist I actually separate ‘truth’ from ‘psychosis’ not by the saying but by the deeds.  I’ve met a dozen Jesus Christ’s and wondered if several of them were the Messiah.  The closest approximation, little different than the many Elvis in Los Vegas, turned out of be smoking industrial amounts of marijuana slipped into the hospital by his friends.  That’ high’ I’d be a man of peace. When he tried to escape naked I just couldn’t believe Jesus would smash into me coming around the corner in the hall dressed in a suit and carrying my briefcase. I thought Jesus would ‘know’ to take the turn wider and not collide with me, at that moment very much a doubting Thomas.  It was then I investigated more deeply and found the friends sneaking supplies through the window and then recognized the smells I’d been noting in the patient washroom.  Weed. 

What is truth.  St. John. Is a good start again.  I find that spiritual texts need to be revisited time and again as they elicit knowledge in me that has been gained since last I reviewed them. In the beginning was the word today means so much more than it met to me as a child.  Today I have the benefit or loss of know quantum physics and the mathematics of music. I especially lover the philosopher Buber and Einstein writings. Indeed more and more I ‘m finding that my scientist colleagues are more mystical and magical that the ministers I hear in church who too often sound like social workers and might well think that the Sermon on the Mount was secondary to feeding the crowd with loaves and fishes.

Mostly I need to evangelize my mind. I need a missionary movement to go into that bad neighbourhood. I love the 12 step teaching that the mind is a lost continent and we shoul;d never explore it solely alone.  The key to spiritual study that I’ve learned in my seeking is the need for a ‘spiritual adviser’. That’s summed up by the statement that there are two things you can’t do alone be married or be a Christian.  So I’m thankful that over the years I’ve benefit from having ‘sponsors’ , mentors’ ,pastors’, spiritual guides , and others who I’ve shared with. I often think of my friend Kirk, a guru today, or at least the disciple of one. We began reading and discussing spiritual texts and varieties of religions when we were pre teens and teens. We still laugh when we talk of God and our various adventures in prayer and meditation  and encounters with the divine.