Sin and the 12 steps

Richard Rohr, Franciscan monk, proposed that sin was the biblical word for what we call addiction today.  Sin was used in archery to denote ‘missing the mark’.  

 In Romans 7:19 Paul said, For I do not do the good I want to do but the evil I do not want to do …this I keep doing.”

This gets to the core of intention and outcome.  Dr. Phillip Ney felt that the second law of nuclear physics pertained to sin in the world,  A perfect state would be described by the first law of thermodynamics without entropy.

Milton in Paradise Lost best described the first angel , Satan, as preferring to look at his shadow than to turn around and lose himself in the light of God’s gaze.  

Pride is the first sin and also the hubris of the Greek philosophers.  

The 12 step programs once called  the “way out’, describe the individual aa overwhelmed by separation and alienation and seeing their individuality, the ego, as all.  Psychological studies of alcoholics and addicts showed them to be developmentally regressed, selfish and self centered..

Anna Freud, the child analyst daughter of Sigmund, described the developmental journey from the narcissism of the baby to the altruism of the grandparent.  Alcoholics and addicts were seen as “stuck’ in childhood or adolescence using coping skills which no longer served in the mature adult world.  

C.S. Lewis , the great Christian theologian said ‘ don’t look for God in the wall’.  That’d like looking for love in all the wrong places.  

The old joke about the materialist scientist of the distant future is that they confront God and say they can create human and all of life from dirt just as God did. But as they are about to demonstrate their prowess God says, ‘get your own dirt’. 

In the church the sins have been separated in to most serious or mortal or lesser. Venial..  Pride is considered to generate all other sins,    Humility is considered the ultimate antidote as is the understanding of Grace,  The song of addiction is Frank Sinatra’s I did it my way’.  I especially like the Eagles Song, Desperado. The first step of AA is ‘surrender’ but not as in the military use of the word which my friend skips to say ‘her own position was likely overrun’.   It’s more like the Kenny Rogers song the Gambler. You have to know when to fold them,  We don’t need to take the down elevator to the basement or subbasement. We can get off at any floor.  

The 12 mortal sins are 

1, Murder

2. Adultery

3. Theft

4. Bearing false witness

5.  Blasphemy 

6. Apostasy

7. Despair

8. Gluttony

9. Greed

10. Lust

11 Sloth

12. Envy

AA and NA address these in the 12 steps and it’s interesting to consider the 12 step spin offs that have occurred.  Sexaholics anonymous focuses on lust , Overeaters anonymous on Gluttony.  Indeed Alcoholics, narcotics, cocaine anonymous and marijuana anonymous could all be said to focus on gluttony and sloth.  The addiction is not just what is done but what is neglected.  

Dr AbrahamTwerski addresses much of these ‘errors’ in his classic book ‘Addictive thinking, understanding Self Perception.  The alcoholics and addict wants to be the ‘victim’ and say ‘poor me, poor me, poor me another drink’. Yet in AA the men say’ get down off the cross we can use the wood’.  

The idea of right size is finding purpose and meaning and joy and pleasure in right measure but not in over indulgence or unhealthy abuse,  As Joni Mitchel sang of Wood stock we have to get back to the garden. For  most that means we have to sacrifice something, the apple being the image.  Each person’s apple is different.  The epidemic of America is obesity and fentanyl and the study of disease is about not judging the person who has a different addiction  Take the log out of your own eye before you try to take the sliver out of another’s eye, said Jesus.

Trungpa, the great Buddhist teacher,said that we in the west suffered ‘spiritual consumerism’. We wanted to ‘own’ and keep that which is at best rented or leased.  Ernest Becker wrote the classic psychiatric book, the Denial of Death.  Existential angst is fundamental root of human existence.  Yet in communion we can love and only love conquers all.  Jung talked of the shadow self. In 12 steps they say we are as sick as our secrets. Addiction is the symptom of the spiritual disease. The anxiety we feel is described as the god shaped hole that substances can’t fill but community can. We are not alone.

Advent is near

My Lord cometh.  In the deepest darkest nights of the winter year a remembrance of a baby’s birth is celebrated at Christmas. Not a God from a far. Not a machine like presence. No cog in a wheel. But a God become human in the womb.  A visitting God reviewing his creation and the co creators he made.  Obviously not all were good.  Among his own he couldn’t gather even 10 Good men. As one was too fond of money as those who are addicted to money are. The power seekers and the crows who like the shiny.  One day he would say you must give up your wealth to follow me to one who was addicted to gold and pomp but wanted too the love that was this God.
Do not be afraid, he said.  Love God. Love your father as yourselves.  I am the son of God. I am the son of Man.  From his teachings the trinitarian God was born. For when he left this one with the father son of God said he’d send the Holy Spirit to comfort us.
When I think of Jesus Christ, a name which means ‘god within’ and ‘god will come again’, I remember I’m not alone and that my life is playing hide and seek with God. When I forget the spiritual I am sucked into the morass of the material.  I lose sight of the incredible lightness of being in the gravity of the earth dwellers.
God is love.  God is omniscient and omnipotent, transcendent and imminent.  When I am still I know God. Be still and know that I am God. I run this refrain through my mind as a reminder. I can be one with God in such a moment
In advent I celebrate the coming of Christ. The coming of Christ is the coming of light.  In winter we fear the sun will not return. The superstitious childish ancient fear that this is the last of summer and the last of days comes over me in the darkness of the rain. Driving home at night I am troubled.  In the morning I can celebrate the dawn but by the time I leave my work the dusk is gone and it’s as if the sun has been stolen. I feel already like I’m back in the arctic with hardly a few hours of daylight.
Constantine worshipped the sun before he became a follower of Christ.  Love is light.
“Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil for Thou aren’t with me.”
I had that sense once of being alone. I’ve been so often alone without people but for a moment I thought that I was outside the sphere of God. I’d become so hardened and scarred and had like Satan turned my back on God. I was fascinated by my own shadow. How big it seemed. But then I turned around and again began walking towards the light and didn’t feel alone again.
Amazing Grace. “I was lost but now I’m found”
I love the idea of Grace. That I the seeker of God am being sought. I’m chased by the hound of heaven. Even today the Birth of Christ is coming at me as I am slouching as a beast towards Bethlehem.  I don’t feel particularly good. I value truth and live in a world of increasing lies and those who don’t even know their lies.  Worse there are those entrusted with the protection of truth who have fled from their service, bought for so few pieces of silver.  But then who am I to judge? So often I have denied God even before the cock had but crowed.
I am a ‘sinner’. To sin is to miss the mark.  I do that which I don’t want to do and I don’t do that which I want to do. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. The ‘outcome analysis’ of my endeavours shows the deviations that are still me.  I am flawed though seek perfection , impatient when I would be patient, unkind when I would be kind, quick to rage when I would be more forgiving, speaking when I would be silent. The list is endless.
I pray today that I might be the man my dog thinks I am. I pray today that I might be more loving and kind. I pray to day that I would expand my personal kingdom in service of you. I pray that I could be a better follower and be better in my work and service.
Christ above me. Christ below me. Christ behind me. Christ beside me. Christ in front of me. Christ around me. Protect me Lord.
I pray that I do the best and be the best in my person and my work that I can be this day.  Thank you Lord for all your blessings. Thank you for my parents and family, my teachers and my friends. Thank you for this life Lord, this sacred and wondrous adventure.  Thank you Lord Jesus. Thank you God. Holy Spirit Come!

Rainbow Ready, Responding to the LGBTQ Culture with Grace and Truth, CMDS National Conference, 2017

Dr. Ted Fenske presented a remarkably complete and well rounded presentation of Christian physician interface with what I’ll call, Straight meets Queer.  I rudely came late but was truly impressed.The take home point was that to him homosexuality and all matters of gay culture were not a reflection of sexual brokenness in any special way but rather as part of a continuum of humaness and sin.  Christians hold that lifelong monogamous married loving sex and family are  biblical.  So Dr. Fenske pointed out that ‘Serial monogamy and promiscuity’ are no different as sin.  The Biblical bar is rather high. We are humans. There’s hope and grace.  The issue was that we as physicians are not there to judge and exclude but to include and  treat disease. He pointed out the high rates of suicide,  infectious disease, PTSD and violence in this community. I’d argue that much of this is simply the consequence of addiction.  He emphasized the need for physicians to treat the ill not judge them.  We have always done this. The idea that we ‘hate’ gays" is media driven narrative, a kind of fake news when it comes to Christian physicians.  We have always worked and served in the gay culture.  He reflected on our role in the Aids epidemic.  He went on to discuss the difficulties transexuals encountered.  Always he spoke with compassion and concern.
The Question and Answer period was really interesting.  Several Christian physicians worked in inner city clinics and spoke of their appreciation of the professional relationships and patients they had in the  gay culture. As someone who has been called heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, transvestite, divorced, serial monogamist, promiscuous,  and worst of all a sinner.  I felt strangely at home with this group of humble clinicians who appeared so much holier than me, not that I felt any less a clinician or a doctor even though I know the closer I am to Jesus the better I am a healer.   I shared how I’d corrected one gay man who insisted  that doing drugs was  being gay.  It was just good medicine to refer him to a treatment centre run by a gay counsellor in long term recovery.  I might not struggle with lust  as much as I do with the  Hagen Daz,   but I didn’t feel the  judgement in the air that I feel sometimes among those who insist they are for diversity.  But only if one is diverse like them.  The doctors who spoke seemed as  aware of their own brokenness in different ways as I am ever aware of my own. I didn’t see scapegoating here.    The take home message I most enjoyed was the goal was holiness not heterosexuality. Make Jesus the issue.

Baptism

Matthew 21:25  John’s Baptism - where did it come from? Was it from heaven, or of human origin. They discussed it among themselves and said, “If we say, ‘From heaven,’ he will ask, ‘Then why didn’t you believe him?'
Mark 1:4 “And so John the baptist appeared in the wilderness, preaching a a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.”
Mark 1: 7  “After me comes the one more powerful than I, the straps of whose sandals I am not worthy to stoop down and unit.  I baptize you will water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit."
Mark 1: 9 “At that time Jesus came from Nazareth in Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan.  Just as Jesus was coming up out of the water, he saw heaven being torn open and the Spirit descending on him like a dove. And a voice from came from heaven: “You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased."
Baptism is a central ritual of the Christian faith.  At the time of the writing, John and Jesus were Jews.  Indeed much of Christian history Christianity was thought to be an errant Jewish faith. The orthodox Jew therefore might well consider Jesus a minor prophet and teacher but that he is not the Messiah. There is a formalism in Judaism that Jesus challenged. He criticized the teachers of  the law of his day, the leaders of the synagogue of his day and the bureaucrats of his day.  King Herod is said to have tried to kill him even as a child because he was a threat to the political authority of the day.
Asked about money, he picked up a coin with the face of Cesar stamped on it and said, “Give unto Cesar, Cesar’s due.”  There’s definitely an irony in this but he said his “Kingdom was in heaven”.  There is a duality here.
Yet, we know from modern science and physics that Energy and Matter are one, except for appearance, matter, simply being slow energy. As scientists we accept the unseen whereas the materialists of an earlier day would say, “show me”.  Electricity and wind and other forms of energy are today seen no longer as ‘spiritual forces’ but they once were.  We are closer to understanding that which matters but not yet there.  Heisenberg with his ‘uncertainty principle’ and Neils Bohr with his intuitive grasp of quanta pointed us further all the while Einstein insisted, ‘God does not play with dice’.  Newton before him was a Godly man.
Central to the idea of baptism is this idea of ‘sin’.  To sin meant in the day to ‘miss the mark’.  It was likened to an archer aiming at a target, having the intention of hitting the bulls eye but despite all manner of effort unable to consistently 100% of the times actually shoot a bullseye. This deviance from perfection, the coordination between intent and outcome was what was at stake.
Modern ballistics continues to struggle with this ‘idea’.  That’s just at the physical realm where the scientists continue to struggle with concepts of precision and consistency, all in an attempt to remove ‘confounding variables’ and ‘lab error’ .  The words are different but the ideas of the ancients remain as true today as then.
I might indeed have ‘good intentions’ but the outcome is like my experience with love.  Married I ‘loved’ with the best intentions to the best of my ability believing thoroughly that I was only to be perceived by my now ex wife as unloving.  In my earlier life I really believed ‘all you need is love’ and devoted myself to the depth and exploration of romantic erotic love. Like the majority of rock and rollers, writers and artists of my day I failed.
I was thoroughly defeated by the abortion. Ironically the birth control pill which had promised freedom through prevention lead to the slippery slope that culminated in abortion.  I was powerless to stop this result so that what had seemed like a good thing, pleasure, without consequence became the deepest injury.  Homosexuality, anal sex, oral sex, masturbation all followed from the death of the child.  Heterosexual love and children were so intertwined but the church and society celebrated murder in every form.  I was a member of this society, and a murderer by association.
Repentance is an interesting word from another error, just like the word ‘sin’.  Today there is a low brow approach to cause and effect.  Determinism or fate suggests that there can be ‘no praise’ and ‘no blame’. Yet our society and most individuals I know who consider themselves ‘modern’ personally accept praise while rejecting blame.  Most of the social constructs and isms are devoted to this ‘dualism’.  Feminism attributes wrong to men and right to women.  Racism attributes ‘oppression’ to the others and defines the terms of reference to a convenient era that excludes the period when the oppressed were themselves the oppressors.  Nationalisms attribute good to their people and blame the outsides. There’s a kind of tribalism throughout the society and lawyers are mostly involved in playing this ‘blame game’.  Everyone including murderers and pedophiles and whatever flavour of the month is in fashions claims ‘I’m right. You’re wrong’.
People worship the ‘law of the jungle’ and ‘survival of the fittest’.  “Give unto cesar what is cesar’s due”.  Yet Arendt’s description of the ‘banality of evil’ is lost on the present generation.
Sprinkling or immersion in water.
Forgiveness of sins.
There is inherent in this the consideration of ‘morality’.  Morality is an individual code perhaps taken from the group ethics inculcated in the child by the social order.  When great atheist Sartre said that God was dead, the great theist ,C.S. Lewis said that the evidence of death would take a generation or two to show because the morality and ethics of a country were created around the idea of God, that ‘ultimate’ expression of ‘good’.
Kultura was the idea of a national expression of the highest.  Oswald Chambers book, “My Utmost for his Highest’ is laughable in today’s era where art is a woman’s shit on a piece of paper. Faeces art sells like Rapp and fashion like religion becomes a ‘who’s in’ with daily shifts of sentiment and emotion chasing the tail of the dragon, so much created in drug hazes and alcoholic blurs.  The emperor has no clothes.
Holy Spirit is a strange word. When psychiatrists wrote of ‘discovering the unconscious’ they were addressing the ‘inner world’ concepts which were little appreciated in the ‘age of reason’.  A man was judged by his ‘actions’.  Everyone understood that a variety of thoughts and feelings preceded the act but policing moved into the judgement of language then ultimately ‘thought’.  Today the ‘thought’ police are as evident as the ‘feeling or emotion’ police.  We all must think a particular way and feel a particular way.
The one became many and the many became one.  Someone along this line of development, this oscillating linear consideration there is a comfort zone for the individual.  The struggle between isolation and participation is a lifelong process starting when the individual leaves the ‘fated’ family of origen to create a new family or new group.
Holy is a word that doesn’t get much air play today either.
Carl Jung, the great psychiatrist, described the nuministic feeling, that sense of ‘awe’, what C.S.Lewis called ‘joy’.  There’s a sense of the ‘transcendent’.  It’s the ‘elusive’ high that the drug addict seeks.  Paul Simon wrote the song the “mother and child reunion’ and that sense of expulsion from the ‘womb’ or the ‘severing of the umbilical cord’ or the ‘leaving home’.
Death is the ultimate fear that humans have though they remain in greatest denial about this, puffing themselves up, building all manner of attempts at ‘immorality’ from the reproductive family to a whole range of institutions and ultimately art. The ‘fountain of youth’, the rocket ships to another galaxy all are like medicine a search for pleasure and a flight from death.
Death is the great unknown.  We go to sleep but Hamlet said, “to dream that is the rub’.
We’re a shallow, ignorant group today. Lots of business and words and grovelling but none of the truth of another day when the real questions were asked and discussed.
Today conversations are limited to reality tv and talking heads stupidity.  The clever man amasses wealth.  We are lazy.
War is due if only to challenge the complacent.  A new pairs of shoes and a new breakfast cereal is all we really can grapple with.
Baptism, sin, repentance, right and wrong, holy spirit.  “Like a dove”.  Heaven.
In fear we don’t even look up or look inward any more.  In fear we are caged and don’t disturb the cage.  We kill the young before they are born.  We kill our old.
Scott Peck described this world as a kindergarten.
Jesus participated in baptism.
A voice came from heaven: You are my son, whom I love, with you I am well pleased”.  That’s not something I’ve heard in this world. When I look at my life I am to others mostly a failure.  I have seen the disappointment of my parents, my teachers, my classmates, my family, my friends.  The taxman is the most disappointed.  I am utterly convinced today that my government would kill me for body parts they have so little faith in me or any other Canadian.  They kill the children and now take refugees to teach abortion to.
When you get an atheist together, even a few, they’re fine fellows but whenever there have been many in a group they have destroyed society.  Communists are aetheits. These leftist socialist have murdered hundreds of millions and persecuted everyone who is religion. The religion of atheism makes the religions of theism look cuddly by comparison.
But individually there will always been a Hitchens or Bertrand Russel.  Academics.  But in foxholes and at sea they say there are no atheists.
When one is faced with the great unknown, disease, that horrors of horrors, or death that ultimate unknown there’s a real challenge.
Working with thousands of suicidal people I offered to kill countless explaining I’d not intentionally murdered anyone and would gladly ‘experience’ this ‘new and novel’ ‘high’ with them allowing me to participate in achieving their ends. They were horrified at this because it meant ‘loss of control’.
The illusion of control is central.  It’s not been the essence of the debate of the state sanctioned suicide, euthanasia.  Yet when I offered to kill a person, none, not one, not a solitary individual, accepted the offer.
When I hit a fish over the head I ‘felt’ it’s life go out from it.  I have ‘felt’ the ‘death’ of a carrot when I uprooted it and at it. I felt the death of a baby when I performed an abortion.  I did not feel this when I took milk from the tit of a cow with my father and grandfather laughing as they squirted the milk in my face.  I did not feel I had ‘killed’ like I did with the abortion and the fish, when I cut out cancer.
These are not things we discuss today.
I have been told it is ‘UnCanadian” to think and talk as I do.  I have been consistently condemned for the actions that follow from these thoughts.
I have prayed for stupidity and smoked dope because when I did I ‘fit’ into the world as one who had drunk the kool aid. I didn’t ‘care’ when I was ‘wasted’ and I didn’t care when I was drunk.  My heroin addicts tell me that the only problem with their addiction is not having enough money to support it. To this end the government is supplying free drugs, morphine now, but the plan is for heroin.  The injection sites, distribution centres, are being established.  Marijuana distribution sites are being extended.
Atheists have no ‘prohibition’.  The fall of the USSR is said by some to be a product of the ‘vodka disease’, Russia was the only ‘modern’ nation to show a rise in ‘fetal mortality’ and this was directly a consequence of ‘fetal alcohol syndrome’.
Baptism by water by John was a public event.  Crowds gathered at the Jordan river and participated in this community ritual for the individual.
I did.
I flew to Israel and was baptized in the Jordan river.
Jesus did too. (this is theologically complicated because hair splitters would argue that he was ‘without sin’ so that later he could be a ‘perfect sacrifice’  yet here he is ‘participating’ in a baptism.
Baptism is a ‘drowning’ like ‘ritual’.  The individual who has been baptized is described as ‘reborn’ or ‘born again’.  The old life is demarcated by this event when a new life begins.  The prisoner is let out of jail with a ‘clean slate’.
In the Baptist Churches there is an actual pool, like a mini swimming pool, with sufficient depth that a minister can hold a person fully immersed.
The Anglicans, a much more effete and less robust Christian sect, sprinkle hair on the forehead.
It’s all in the symbolism.
Baptist sinners were sometimes held down by the minister who actually sometimes perceived with good intention he was drowning demons despite the sense that he was a bit sadistic and authoritarian. I saw a near drowning in my childhood church. The minister held this struggling woman underwater and there was a whole lot of thrashing and eventually he let her up blue.  I expect her ‘baptism’ was much more ‘memorable’ than my own in the Anglican church “sprinkling."
The full immersion was however different but no more or less ‘memorable’ . Each in it’s own way was ’transcendent’ . Transcendent or pneuministic might be better described as ’spiritually orgasmic’.

Dysfunctional Family and Original Sin

I am commonly amused by people who glibly talk about their own dysfunctional family but would balk at the term "original sin". The beauty of 'dysfunctional' family is that it 'explains' present day failure in an individual to be whatever it is they think they should be or someone else thinks they should be. It 'blames' the parents. Yet our forefathers, a tad deeper thinkers than the present day shallow pseudoscientific pop psychology crowd realized if their family was dysfunctional it was probably because their parents came from dysfunctional families and so on back to creation. Hence, "original sin". And frankly, the Bible tells us that Adam wasn't too bright and Eve was a saucy bitch and Cain a bully and Abel a dipstick. So the world isn't "functional", it's flawed. Get it! Duh! Wake up! Reality knocks. Original sin. In contrast alot of psychology isn't very 'original'.

Yet are there 'functional familes'? Not really. It's one of those terms that may have been useful once but the research just doesn't back it up. Show me a 'functional family' and then peel the onion skin. Oops, uncle Harry was an alcoholic. Dad hid porn. Mom was frigid. Whatever problems kids have can be traced back. That's the nature of genetics. Good and evil run in families. So if you're alive your family was functional. Wasn't the first function of a family 'survival' so how can a family be 'dysfunctional" if you're alive.

It functioned well enough at adaptation to get you here in one piece. The more successful people are the more likely they're going to question the finer as opposed to broad strokes of their upbringing. So the term 'dysfunctional family' is as broad a brush as original sin. A person who is rich may be poor in heart. A person who is artistic may be poor in business sense. No one is 'functional' in all 'functions'. And the people who came up with this buzzword catch all term didn't really define "functional" because they left it as kind of a pass/fail reality. At least Anna Freud described "lines of development" and noted that "different strokes served different folk."

When I looked at the geneology of my family I found rogues, pirates, world leaders, colonels, artists, teachers, philosophers, earls, businessmen, musicians and many doctors. I have an alcoholic cousin who spent time in jail and another cousin world reknowned as a near saint to many. My own family by the values of the day were highly successful. But it produced a psychiatrist so by equally valid values of the day, it was highly dysfunctional. Certainly my parents were disappointed when I left surgery and general practice and went to work with the lepers of the mind, in their eyes. The stigma of mental illness was and still is profoundly deeply ingrained.

Even my colleagues often don't know what to do with a psychiatrist and the pressure is forever on psychiatrists to act like administrative doctors who are desperate to act like their beaurocratic superiors, imitation being the sincerest form of flattery.

The bigger 'family' we came from was our 'nation state'. In the workbook "Drop the Rock" on Lust, I read "If we came from a family that denied, kept secrets, shamed, repressed and suppressed, physically, emotionally, or sexually abused us, or took part in any number of other ways of creating distortion in emotional, physical and sexual responses, odds are our sex life is goofy and has been for a long time."

Frankly that doesn't describe my family so much as it describes Canada, my school, my church and the other major institutions of my childhood, the courts, and police and clubs I belonged to.

I'm a big fan of history and believe that if we forget history we're doomed to repeat it. This latest history book I've been reading, the History of Vietnam by Stanley Karnow shows the British, French and Americans like a bunch of kids in Lord of the Flies. I met Stalin, Mao, Dulles and Eisenhower, Ho, and all the French guys with foreign names I didn't know, on the playground. I avoided most of these characters most of my life.

After the French had been bullies with the Vietnam and the Vietnamese and Chinese had been bullies to their own people while Stalin was making Hitler look like a saint in his orgy of killing, Canada was making toys and America was selling bombs to both sides, the Americans went into Vietnam and did the same thing that the French had done but worse. The Viet Cong and the Pol Pot out did the Americans and tried to imitate Stalin who maybe was impressed with Ghengis Khan who probably liked the Roman Emperors who would have liked King Henry. Face it, the history of the world is a history of "dysfunctional families". These are the mommas and papas of nations. The Cleopatras aren't any better either. When they weren't being bad themselves they loved the bad boys. That's the Eva Braun Syndrome big time. Gas me another Jew or Pole or mentally ill or homo, Adolf Baby!

I didn't know when I was marching in peace rallies inadvertently supporting the enemy because if you 'aint for us you're agin us', trying to take a third stand, that the whole Vietnam war had been debated in France for 2 decades before Americans got themselves all fired up. With the advantage of time and looking back through history books we can see who was getting pay offs and who was breaking promises and who was lying and who was telling secrets. Having lived through the lies and deceit of the government Military Management of the War on Drugs I'm finding myself in the War on Terrorism and frankly would rather treat all this as sickness and consider immunological principles as well as surgical strikes.

My brother and I with my elder parents pieced together bits of their past in the last few years. My brother found out my father met my mother at a dance. That's so sweet. He learned that Dad was out of work after the war for a brief time shoveling coal for a bakery because the Ontarians gave priority to their returning soldiers over solders from Manitoba and it was a year so before Dad got back to work as an millwright and later engineer. We just learned that Dad applied to the Air Force to be a pilot but was made a bombardier instead. That explains those flights we had as kids with Mom worried on the ground and angry that Dad was taking her babies up in planes. The house had the flavor of a Vietnam Geneva War debate on those days. Very functional in it's own way. As kids we were witness to it all.

So today I know "sex sells" and that when I went to a church where the membership was collectively over 75 the preacher was talking about "lust". He clearly had a dwindling congregation and in a lame attempt to fill the pews had a racey sermon. At 50 I was the youngest there and the person next to me was demented. The one beside them was thinking about their catheter. The television is all about sex.

The first female Prime Minister of Canada tried to sell herself with lust , the infamous Campbell with her delicious judge robe draped provocatively across her shoulder. Then all those short little Napoleon leaders standing on blocks of wood for their pictures trying to be sexy tall when they're really short. The guys with socks in their shorts and the girls with push up bras being attorneys in the courts while the doctors use the latest beauty products and the men are in the tanning booths. Lust is everywhere. Viagra sales are through the roof and pornography's only competition is guns and ammunition. Freud was right that 'sex and aggression' is the food of the young. Jung 's work was about integration. So where isn't there "dysfunctional families."

The trouble with so much pop psychology these days is that it assumes what is "functional". If you look at history, the principle job of the family was to produce mean sons of bitches who kicked the shit out of the neighbours. As for Canada we've kept the meanest sons of bitches, the world Winners, the Americans, the new Emperors from invading us with tanks and missiles. The one time they tried to fight us we kicked their asses. In all peace keeping missions we come off tough and impressive and the Americans, forever putting everyone else down, are forever asking us to help them in their diplomacy and to be their mercensaries. So if 'functional' means creating a group of people that can kick ass then to date we've been doing it. Now the Chinese and Indian women got together and said lets create the maximum babies and let a whole lot die but in the end we'll 'locust' the world like the Catholics tried to get their south American women to do. And recently the South Americans spent billions on guns and arms and Canada send food and resources to everyone else. Kind of like feeding the drug addicts so they can spend their welfare cheques on drugs. It's all 'well intentioned' but it's 'outcome' has the same qualities that the theologians gave to 'sin'. It's not what was 'supposed' to happen. It's not ideal.

So what is function and what is a family supposed to function at. These are ideals and in a Godless world removing God was removing the best "ideal' that people came up with. The Jewish God kicked ass for them against the Egyptian God and then later there was the weird 'servant king' Jesus, son of the Jewish carpenter.

The Bible is one long dysfunctional family story as is the Greek Gods and Goddesses and the Oriental Texts including the Kama Sutra. Talk about Lust. The Yellow emperor of China makes Long Dong Silver look like a nun.

So the fact is that 'functional' is a funny term. We can compare ourselves against 'perfection' and by that term none of us are 'functional' really but compared against imperfection we're more like A students. Any day above the dirt bed is a good day. On the other hand the good die young so the real question is are you pro life or anti life.

We also have to ask is our religion or value system nihilistic or creative. Consumerism would have me amassing things. I don't like shopping. Really. I simply do not like walking about in malls looking at stuff. I enjoy the boat show but after an hour or two I'm done. I'd rather be shooting my gun than looking at guns. I don't want to be watching travel movies. I'd rather be travelling. To be a good consumer you're just supposed to shop amass and hoard. How stupid and dull!

What's the end point. What's the value system. If 'functional' is to create children with great survival skills in countries which promote sociopaths like Hitler and Stalin to highest office and make the Hoover types the guardians of the country's morality and give inordinate power to ministers of education in eras of Residential schools or Ministers of Defence who are complicit in the torturing and death of prisoners, or heads of RCMP who don't step down when it's recognized that their whole group is following their narcissistic beaurocratic self serving dysfunctionality, what gives?

Well, my country is a dysfunctional family. My Canada is a dysfunctional family . My world is dysfunctional . It's all original sin and my argument isn't with my parents or my prime minister or the RCMP or the CIAG but with God.

It's Original Sin disguised in psychobabble! Some days I'd say God was hugely dysfunctional, too. Other days I ask is it God or me that's missing the point. Those are the days I look in the mirror and see truly my own sinfulness (my dysfunctionality) and my desire to do well (function) struggling with my desire to do evil (dysfunction). Oh ,the latter is more negligence or thoughtlessness. I don't think, oh I'm going to do evil today, like in Halloween horror movies. Low grade sin is just a whole lot more common than high grade dysfunction. Mostly I just think selfishly and egotistically and humanly. I'm my own dysfunctional family.

At least I'm on the path of spiritual progress. Is my country? Is my world? And what does God want of me today and how can I best serve God and my fellows. Is this lust or is this love? If what you have you call love, then I'll take lust any day. But if love is what C.S.Lewis and Fromm and Jesus talked about I'll take Love over Lust anyday. But Love isn't just what's on pop radio thought for most it really seems that love is a video game.

I think there are Functional Families on Mars and that we should all get on a spaceship and go visit them. I talked with my 91 year old Dad about being a dysfunctional hunter only seeing the rumps of deer in the distance as they were running away and we laughed together at that sinful picture. We'd both been there. I shot at two grouse not hitting either as they flew in opposite directions.

Sin was "missing the mark" . Sin was shooting at a target and not hitting the bull's eye every time. I believe our parents, their parents, adam and eve, Prime Minister Harper, Clinton, Bush, maybe even Stalin and Hitler 'meant well'. They probably all started out like good little Margaret Thatchers and Gandhis and the other kids on the play ground. I might not have wanted to play with them. I probably knew them. We all know each other as kids. It's as adults we don't quite recognize each other because we forget we're just big stupid kids in a glorious playground where our toys are real and the world is finite. It's okay. Really!

My God is a Loving God. Believing that is better. Faith is better than faithlessness. We're all functional today. It's just a question of finding out what our function is. Maybe I'm supposed to be a hair dryer. My cat thinks I'm a pillow. The question is important. How can I serve today. What is my function. Not to the war effort or the consumer industry but to God and those I love and those who love me. That's the question today.