Keeping the Sacred Flame

Order is trickier than chaos.  We like order.  We cling to it.  I know I do, on the strangest things.  What’s more, I’m a creature of habits that I don’t even recognize, but get irritated when they get skewed.  (I live in fear of when my son stops napping.  I will be sunk).

This doesn’t make order good, though.  Some order really doesn’t work anymore.  It’s easy to keep things the way they are.  I could keep trying to make my son nap when he’s not even tired.  I could try to keep working the same way with my son running around like a loon.  Or I could adjust and be able to manage both my work and my parenting.  (but not yet!  please not yet!)

The most important thing is that what we do works.  Order can become completely dysfunctional if you cling to the order and ignore the realities of the situation.  You can’t cling to marriages and friendships that don’t work.  Maybe they can be rebuilt, but you can’t rebuild what you don’t acknowledge.

I fear when people cling too much to order, or want everything ordered.  Order isn’t always the answer.  And when it’s the wrong answer, it can drag everything else down with it.

Questions:
What is good order?  When it works.  When it gives you what you want and doesn’t do things you don’t, it should be left alone.  When the option of changing it is worse than leaving it alone, it should be strengthened.

What is bad order?  When it doesn’t work.  When it holds people into systems that are hurting them, it’s not working.  When every option looks bad, it’s not working.  It’s easy to stay in bad situations, and it’s hard to kick them over for the hopes of something better.  But when it doesn’t work, it needs to be changed.

What is order to the Divine?  At a casual glance, the Divine is ordered.  Planets whirl around suns, suns move in their galaxies, and it all moves in a stately dance.  But there’s also chaos underneath, with what appears to be irreducible randomness at the quantum level.  There is order, but there is also chaos.  And the two are intertwined around each other.  Both are the nature of the Divine.

Order and Chaos are a continuum, with space between the extremes for all of life to occur. Order has much to offer, and is often labeled as good. But is it really? What is good about order, and when does it become a disadvantage?

Order is good when it serves us. When things are going well, there is no virtue to changing it. As they say, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” And while that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t evaluate the system to make sure it’s actually working well, as opposed to just limping along half-dead, there’s no reason to change things simply to change them.

But that doesn’t mean we should cling to order when it doesn’t work for us anymore. Life changes. The only constant in life is that it won’t be the same from day to day. When we cling to order above change, we refuse to adapt to the world around us. This blocks us of possibilities and limits our lives into that which can be maladaptive.

We must not cling to order above ourselves. When the order is broken, there is no virtue to keeping it. Being a part of the Divine means having the responsibility to change things when they no longer work. Change the Divine. Change yourself. And fix what’s broken.

Questions:
What is good order? When do you leave things alone?
What is bad order? When do things need changing? How?
What is order to the Divine? How do they relate?

I think knowing what is good and bad chaos is of critical importance.  When chaos is declared as good (or even not-bad) it’s very easy to see that as an excuse to go wild.  If chaos is acceptable, for some people that means the rules go out the window.

I don’t think throwing the rules out the window is a good idea.  There is a need for boundaries and lines.  (no one wants to be underpaid.  No one wants to be discriminated against.  No one wants to be murdered.  there are lines).  But some rules and some lines aren’t useful, and when that happens, it’s time to remove that line and that rule.

It’s easy to say that, of course.  It’s harder to evaluate which rules are useful and meaningful and which need to be discarded.  Most people now agree that Jim Crow laws in the States were wrong, because we can see ourselves on the other side.  At the time, it was incredibly provocative to challenge that law.  People fought, and yes, some people died over it.  It was chaos, but it was good chaos.  When laws are wrong (or customs, or mores) they should be fought against.  When they are right, they should be left to stand.

Questions
What is the change I wish to be?  I don’t know.  That’s such a specific question, and I’m so many things.  I try to treat people fairly.  I try to work for change that I think is important.  I’m sure I could do more, but I’m not sure how.  It doesn’t help that organizations I’d be happy to volunteer with seem to only want money, or want money AND time.  I have time (or did).  Money I’m less willing to spend.

What is it to be an agent of good chaos?  It is to try to make the world better by changing things, and to aware of what it is that we do.  You can’t just change things for the fun of it.  You need to have an idea of what the change will bring, and be willing to change your own actions if you’re not getting the right results.

What would it be to be an agent of bad chaos?  It is to change things that are not broken.  To seek to break things for the fun of seeing what will happen.  It is easier to bring about bad chaos, because it is simply breaking what is there.  It’s not attempting to build something better out of what you have.  But all it does is destroy.

Part of FlameKeeping is an acceptance that chaos is not always bad. There needs to be a certain acceptance that the world is not static, and that things change. But what chaos needs to be embraced, and what chaos needs to be stopped?

Part of the distinction is what the chaos is. There’s a purpose to shaking people up to make them think and question their assumptions. There is no purpose to being cruel and changing the rules on people simply to confuse them. Why we do what we do is important, as is the actual result. If the result we get is not the one we wanted, we have to reconsider what we’re doing.

To be a FlameKeeper is not to be an agent of formless chaos. While chaos is not the enemy, times of change are times when harm can be done as well as help. We must live the change we wish to see in the Universe. But this means we need to be sure the change we’re living is the one we wish to see, not simply live as change for the sake of change. It’s not enough to have the right principles. There must also be the right result.

Questions:
What is the change you wish to be? Are you?
What is it to be an agent of good chaos? What results does it bring?
What would it be to be an agent of bad chaos? What would that bring?

I see the dark, the unburning flame
I see the artist, striving for perfection
I see the gamer, focused through his need
I see the loner, trapped inside himself

I see the Light, the burning flame
I see the saint, striving for redemption
I see the mother, sacrificing for her children
I see the Politician, collapsing under others need

I see the balance, the shadows between the flames
I see the judge, considering the reasons
I see the jury, weighing fact and emotion
I see the Divine, and the hope of all.

We are all individuals.  And that individuality puts up walls between ourselves and the “other”, ourselves and everyone else.  We find ways to block out the other to protect ourselves.

Part of opening to the Divine is breaking down those walls.  We have to accept that there is no real “other”, no “them” for us to strive against.  All are part of the Divine.  All are part of “us”.

It’s hard to bring down those walls and open ourselves to the Divine.  Opening ourselves means making ourselves vulnerable.  It’s hard and it’s painful.  But as long as we keep those walls up and pretend we’re not of the Divine, we’re crippling ourselves.

Questions!
How is being part of the Divine a responsibility?  When we see ourselves as part of the Divine, we have to reach out and do things.  We can’t just see ourselves as part of the Divine and stay home and watch TV.  We have to go out and be the change we wish to see in the world.  As long as we refuse to engage with the world, we’re not really accepting our nature of being Divine.

What does the Divine ask of me?  To share what I think I know and what I believe with any that asks.  To reach out to people with all the ability I have, regardless of what they believe, if I have a way to help.  To be the change I wish to see.  I hope I’m doing a decent job.

What is it to open up to the Divine?  It’s a way of letting go.  Even more, it’s a way of promising ourselves to something greater.  it’s also a sacrifice, because it gives up a certain level of autonomy.  We are all individuals still, and we are all responsible for ourselves.  But we’re also a bit more, and at the same time, a bit less.  What does the Divine give?  Tasks.  What does it take?  Time and effort.

I’ve spoken of asking the Divine. But here I’m going to speak about opening yourself up to the Divine for it to speak through you.

It is easy to think of what it is we want and to ask for it. We all have wants and needs, and we’re taught from a very young age that we only get what we ask for. If we don’t ask, we won’t get it. So we ask.

But what we don’t translate that into is listening. The Divine asks, and we turn a deaf ear. We are given opportunities, but we ignore them because they’re not presented in a way we expect to see them. We ask the Divine, but we don’t give of ourselves in return. To refuse to give when we expect to receive is to betray the Divine.

We are the Eyes and Hands of the Divine. It cannot act but through us. We cannot wait for another to do it. It is our task, our calling. Our path to walk.

Questions:
How is being part of the Divine a responsibility?
What do you think the Divine asks of you? Do you give it?
What is it to open up to the Divine? What does it take? What does it give?

yes, I used an analogy!  Don’t get used to it.

But when I had the image of people in a two-dimensional world, with us moving about on a piece of paper, it was such a useful image that I had to share it.  It describes who we are, though our universe has more than two dimensions.  (Don’t ask me how many, all that talk of squished-up dimensions in string theory makes my head ache).

But this is who we are, and what the Universe is.  We are all one.  We are all separate.

Luckily, there aren’t any toddlers scribbling on us and missing the lines completely. *grin*

Questions!
How are we lines on a paper, and what does it mean?  It means we’re all connected.  You can’t chop someone out of the Divine without hacking at yourself.  You can’t color over someone without changing yourself.  We’re separate, but we’re all connected too.

What does it mean to be interconnected?  It means that when we hurt other people, we’re also hurting ourselves.  That doesn’t mean we have to put up with being hurt, though.  But it does mean that nothing happens in isolation.  (and it also means that when we hurt ourselves, we hurt other people.  There’s no such thing as isolation there, either).

What does it mean to be separate?  I am not you.  I can’t give $20 to my husband and claim that pays a debt to a third party.  I can’t assume that doing things for myself makes other people happy (or that they should want to make me happy above themselves).  We are all central to our own universes.  Not each others.

How are we both parts of the Divine and individuals? We are like lines on a page. There is one page on which we all are, but we each have a line drawn around us. There is a separation of each person, though the lines can bump into each other. But we are each our own shape.

What does it mean to be our own shape? We are individual, and that’s important. Without those lines giving each of us our shape, there is only one blank sheet of paper. It is the patterns on the paper that make it interesting. Without the patterns, there is no shape to life.

This doesn’t change the fact that we’re also all on the same piece of paper. We are all part of the same Universe, and when we ignore that reality and start trying to cut other people out of the Divine, we’re cutting ourselves. It is all one piece of paper. We can’t declare some shapes as part of a different paper and meaningless.

Questions:
How are we lines on a paper? What does it mean?
What does it mean to be interconnected?
What does it mean to be separate?