Great Author:  To be speculative for a moment, on that passage in Mark leading up to the parable of the House Divided--such a rich and interesting placement there--one has to realize something about what He, Jesus, was doing.  He was democratizing, he was saying that we all are, perhaps sometimes haplessly, a part of the Christian--as it was later to be called--phenomenon.  (Perhaps the studies he conducted earlier in life, whether out in India as a boy, or through the trade routes exposed to the Vedas and Buddha, learning the concept of karma and its great universal applicability, maybe all that influenced him.)  And that's the essence of the miracles and healings he is performing, that he is saying, we are all part of this, all part of the Kingdom of Heaven.

He was saying that the laws of Christian spiritual reality apply to all people fully and completely.  The laws applied to those who were manifesting sickness and species of craziness, and the cure was to accept, to release and expel the resistant demon genies, to come clean, as it were.  His parables speak of waking up to the penetrating reality of the spiritual, as in the Prodigal Son, the mustard seed, the birds and the lilies of the field.  Quite naturally, a lot of people got excited about it, perhaps feeling a liberation from the trying circumstances they lived in as Jews under Roman colonial rule and whatever other hardscrabble circumstances one can easily imagine them as facing.  With water a sort of subconscious metaphor of the permeating quality in wish we, evolved fish, swim in, breath in, the fishermen awakening us to deep reality…  But yes, people must have come running.

And that is the craziness, that both caused people's excitement and also the scandal aspect of this thinker, this sort of teacher or rabbi without the credential of being so perfectly traditional as to toe the party line.  "He must be out of his mind," someone on a familiar basis, with familiar expectations, with the expectancy of normalcy and the workaday world would think, of course.  And he himself is so clear, and understands the logic basis.  A house divided against itself cannot stand.  This was not only to respond to the scribes charges that he must be performing healings through demons, but to speak to people's dividedness, of which they were largely unaware.  Being part of this world here, they forget the larger, the main reality around them that includes them, of which they are a part, subject to the same conditions of being manifested into the world out of That Which Is.

And on top of that, to them he was unconventional, or perhaps too plain.  He kept company with certain types, was gluttonous, and a wine bibber on top of that.  And still to this day his name is a perfect expression of surprise and the unexpected, "Jesus Christ!"  Not for no reason.  Still.  As if things haven't really changed all that much.  Who would have expected…  expected all this wisdom coming from a kind of common man, right?  So it is right that we immortalize a Peter, for believing, for getting it, on whatever level, subconscious or otherwise, intellectually, metaphysically.  And just because he was a fisherman doesn't make him necessarily a dummy or anything.

Like we all feel about our jobs, or come to realize about them, it becomes a matter of just going and doing it.  No point fretting or angst-ing about it or making it more complicated than it is, as any writer knows too I'm sure, just go do it.  A house divided against itself cannot stand.  He had reached that point.



I guess the sadder part is that it is largely his suffering on the Cross, symbol of the dimensional reality we all must live in, that causes us to awake from our enchantment and our worldly strifes and offenses. His life calls us to faith.  You can't blame anyone for trying to do that, it seems to me.  If it helps cease brother killing brother, why not.  But I suppose it, the origin of faith, the higher laws that forbid sin and show sin to be useless behavior, all that must be a very strong thing of energy to bring peace into the world.  One can imagine an anguish attached to the healing vision, for seeing how widespread and pervasive a poorer attitude can be.  No wonder He liked to take naps, burdened, maybe stunned by the release of hatreds and generations of revenge.  To my ear, in His stance, 'let he who is without sin cast the first stone,' you can hear a man tired of witnessing so much ego and drama, as I might imagine a bartender having.

But, on the bright side, one door opens to many others which they themselves upon, and in my father's mansion there are many many rooms, for everyone who calls.


By the end of the week, the individual who keeps bar in a public house is tired.  Not just physically, but  worn  down by all the drama, all the egos that people bring with them.  Not everyone is pleasant and reserved and quiet.  And for some, drink is not medicinal wine, but an exacerbation, a call to civil war and riot in the street and wide-eyed craziness.  It casts light on the deadness of people's corporate moneyed souls, as if an inkling of inner humanity, a memory of trees and nature came back to them.  Appropriately enough, as wine is soil and that which riseth from it.