Riffin’ on Eating the Rich/the Communion Ritual (Luke 18)

The Rich and the Kingdom of God

18 A certain ruler asked him, “Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”

19 “Why do you call me good?” Jesus answered. “No one is good—except God alone. 20 You know the commandments: ‘You shall not commit adultery, you shall not murder, you shall not steal, you shall not give false testimony, honor your father and mother.’[a]”

21 “All these I have kept since I was a boy,” he said.

22 When Jesus heard this, he said to him, “You still lack one thing. Sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”

23 When he heard this, he became very sad, because he was very wealthy. 24 Jesus looked at him and said, “How hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of God! 25 Indeed, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”

26 Those who heard this asked, “Who then can be saved?”

27 Jesus replied, “What is impossible with man is possible with God.”

28 Peter said to him, “We have left all we had to follow you!”

29 “Truly I tell you,” Jesus said to them, “no one who has left home or wife or brothers or sisters or parents or children for the sake of the kingdom of God 30 will fail to receive many times as much in this age, and in the age to come eternal life.”

One of the persistent tyrannies playing out in the vicinity of devotional practice of Catholicism in the West is the vague notion that it is at ends with social opulence/accumulated merit to the tune of magnetizing one for both moral AND material ruin… that when one attempts to play the games of persistent truth AND society as it is, they end up losing it all, as these two things are apparently at war/ends…

For being meaningfully curtailed in the general sense of it, dualities really are rather natural in the vicinity of such a large and confusing world…our personal experiences need to track socially to the tune of being codified in conventions and motifs that can be, at one level, construed as entirely impersonal, like most vehicles in life…in nearly every conceptualization of self across time we sacrifice the notion that we are terminally majestic, absolutely one of a kind, an expression of the Almighty befitting of the grandeur and uppermost echelons…whatever those entail, only to reclaim it humbly through normative behavior, communally, and service to others, often times in the name of spirituality/God…the very God we are an awesome expression of. And with good reason, often… but we are above condition as much as we are not, a dual-pronged expression of contradicting states (Godhood and Self as is) striking favorably against one another, growing the prospects of the all-redemptive vehicles along the way… we are not to, as in today’s passage, follow the sentiment of the religious laws/doctrine literally. I mean, yes, we are to “honor our Father and Mother”, we are to not “steal” or “Murder” or “commit adultery”…but these positive values, in addition to these cultivated aversions… are meaningless.

Meaningless like all actions in life, as there is only one meaning, one thing that gives a sense of…and it’s an inevitable Oneness with the Father…a likeness in his Image…we are to conflate the personal identity with the Father as Jesus did in taking on the secondary identity of “the Christ”… devotional practice is ultimately about doing as much…and it’s only then that we can take that final turn and say things are about what they’re about…that honoring your father and mother are worth a dang in the first place…it all inflects meaningfully off the center, which is Source…

Doing as much frees one. Life will sometimes rob you…except this passage seems to assert it never does, short of you not setting a proper intent. Life robs man, is what this passage ultimately conveys…until man construes himself as deterministically bound to become meaningfully One with God. Man is God. Man ascends, and escapes his suffering. Catholicism is Buddhism and vice-versa.

If you really follow the logic here, the passage is saying …it’s a little easier maybe for a poor man to be called to truth than a rich man because he has less stuff to barricade himself behind, but ultimately even that seems to be an entire wash. It’s not that you need to sell your stuff to enter the kingdom of heaven…one of the major deterrents to monk-ship is the notion that you must immediately renounce all of your material possessions before even giving it a shot…we don’t want people to be monks…they can simply just practice, y’know? (In my humble opinion we need religion to partition off wealth into familial lines by way of economies laden with opportunities) But truthfully, its difficult for someone who conceives of themself as “man” to enter the “kingdom of God” as relayed by today’s passage. Rich…poor…one needs to realize that they are deterministically bound to play the part of the Benevolent…Socially manifest and bombastically effective… beyond condition…unstoppable… the Heart of Life…

Ironically to do that one actually peels the layers of self greatly back, so it is like shedding ego…but arguably those that do this end up with the most powerful egos known to history so… it all seems like a cosmic joke. It’s a thing of self-manifesting…it’s exactly what you’re already doing in your seeking… we do it unwittingly…

To be distastefully hip…did glow enters voice  Mr. Table-flipper seem all that subdued and moderate to you? The man traveled with an entourage… at which He was the head…

Comedy aside, character is truly etched off of this…this stuff shapes bodies as much as the trajectory of lives… to be cultivated slowly by the spontaneous flow of days to the place in which you can go challenge the Lenders in the Temple along mystical/loony lines… it’s been my experience that the only way to appropriately Orient the affairs of the social world is to have someone capable of that level of mystical insight/expression. It’s the natural resolve of the political frameworks, it seems…like if you happen to be Caeser, it’ll happen to you. If you sit in his throne and wear his robes, it will happen to you. The head of state, I think, as a template is this…and we were sent on an auxiliary loop so that they could get ahead of us in how they framed our very Democracy to us…all of this pomp and circumstance, these traditions…they are trying to establish oneness with Source, and can’t broadcast as much because our savage public wouldn’t allow such blood rituals without trying to fire back…well, also too… when we look at men like the Donald Trump types would we go so far as to accuse them of keeping the real secret to themselves? Would secretly they take a serious tone with serious and important men in unbroadcast events in which they frame some of their actions as about appeasing the Almighty while outright avoiding the subject/notion publicly? As a style of leadership that amounts to suppression… you are meaningfully differentiated from the ruler as God appears to be from Man in the frameworks in today’s passage…   

You will be called to do things, should you taste the eternal/kingdom of God while still very much embodied. Which is like…seen as maybe a surrender of agency but it’s also the same as what those who are not living right and aren’t called to anything are up to…they don’t have control over that stretch of their lives either… they mention that if things are taken from one in the name of God (some of this audience go on to become martyrs)…that they are paid back tenfold, materially. The material is an expression of the eternal…as relayed in this passage… and this eternal life they are asking about ends up becoming less of a personal reprieve at the end of life and more of a social identity by way of Jesus’ answer, and it’s some sort of spring that apparently is going to start flowing through the social lives of entire people…

These people are literally paid back materially, those who face persecutions in the overt name of God. Society goes through cycles but ultimately re-allocates wealth so as to do justice by history…as its perceived and relayed, socially. The truth of history…was already, miraculously, dynamite…precious in its actualities. The fight to maintain civility is also the fight to maintain perspective.

Reading between the lines, like a proper conspiratorial type…. That they would call this section “the Rich and the Kingdom of God” is usually taken, tragically, to mean that it’s impossible for the rich to enter it after they die, but if one reads the passage it seems to moreso be implying it is the sole task of the wealthy to communicate truths about the Kingdom of God, socially, and that the entire institution of wealth is contingent on as much, as It, itself, is a spiritual endeavor.

Why has anyone ever been turned refugee but for God, no matter what the situation? The entire march of history, of every People, the main reason behind every big social happening…has been the evolving narrative on God and God’s will… we are all walking each other home…

Trump has persistently presented wealth in America as a thing of specialization and moral savagery moreso than what it is…a reliable point of reference for the individual regarding what is proper. He’s doing this with all of the cultural vehicles, sowing the notion that the poison is in the well rather than the ego… while in the abstract the president’s work is of shaping the edifices of Ego…