Books: The Book of Joy - Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu with Douglas Abrams

I'm going to attempt an experiment here with this particular reading adventure.


My nephew Shawn gave me this book a couple of years ago.  He knows the struggles I'm having with depression and anxiety and gifted it to me in hopes of trying to help tame the fire that singes my soul on a fairly regular basis.  Since I've been off work due to mental health issues for almost a year now, within my abundance of time I took up reading, of which I've always considered myself to be the slow, drifting type of reader.  But I granted myself patience, and upon picking up the first book a little while ago, just tasked myself to re-read passages that weren't quite 'connecting' with me.  My attention span is admittedly rather short.  This is not some kind of admission of stupidity or something silly like that on my part.  A lot of non-readers would claim this same trait too, I suspect.

But as I languish in solitude often during these days in the age of Covid, upon tidying things up one day I found this book sitting around.  I do feel guilty a bit that I didn't read this sooner, especially towards Shawn.  But all things happen for a reason, I firmly believe.  And I believe now was meant to be the time to read it.

I'll start this review by stating first where I am at on this day, February 9, 2022.  This morning at 5am, after falling asleep at around maybe 1am last night, I woke up with yet another panic attack (different from an anxiety attack, in that it's quite sudden and feels uncontrollable - where an anxiety attack is a slow burn to a raging fire, for me at least).  The constant worry that I feel about not being able to provide for my household, and my utter feeling of uselessness because of it, puts a burden on my shoulders that I can't seem to lift.  That guilt is a very heavy cross to bear.  I'm trying to change it all, but it's incredibly difficult.  Therapists have been of no help to me.  And drug therapy via Zoloft and Wellbutrin seems to have worn off with their effects.  This leaves me with withdrawal issues coming off of them as I seek to find peace with who I really am, without the numbing effects of SSRIs.  

As I embark on this journey via reading this book, I want to make note here of how it may hopefully change me.  

Seeing as a couple of religious leaders are the core of this title, I will, right now, denote my own feelings on spirituality and religion.  I'm a Roman Catholic in my Christian faith.  I've chosen to follow the general guidelines when it comes to how it teaches people to treat others, but I don't necessarily consider myself a devout follower, because I dissent from some of what the Church teaches.  For example, I oppose abortion, but I'm not a woman, so I have absolutely no say in what a woman chooses to do with her own physical self; it's not my right, no more than it is the right to be mandatorily sterilized after I've had a certain amount of kids, or of someone or something decides why it may be right or wrong for me.  Concurrently, it's a woman's choice to have her 'tubes tied', too.  What bothers me is casual abortion, where a woman gets pregnant on a semi-regular basis only to terminate the pregnancy.  My belief is that a woman should be encouraged to keep a baby that she's tempted to abort, and that she ought to be supported by society if she chooses to do so.  Too often do I see religious zealots champion the 'right' of an unborn fetus to be born, while the mother, after said birth, is chastised for her lifestyle choices and has self-righteous fingers pointed at her when she can't support the child because there's no father in their life, and there's no real sustainable safety net for the infant.  It's in the womb that the child gets all the support from anti-abortionists.  The moment they're born, when actual life is recorded in time through weeks, months and then years (those first nine months or so are not reflected in the age of the actual life of a person anywhere on earth that I know of in any birth document), the anti-abortionists' job is done and the finger wagging begins.  What if, when someone decides against having an abortion, that they're actually supported through the hard times of their pregnancy as well as after the birth of their child?  What if that child is supported, too?  Support for the unborn is one thing.  Support for someone after birth is something other that isn't even considered, it seems.

The Catholic Church appears to have no respect for the divorced.  I get that they encourage couples to stay together once they're married, but it's virtually impossible for everyone to find that kind of innate happiness.  God love those who do!  But God also love those who don't.  I don't see the love coming from the Catholic Church being bestowed upon those who have failed marriages, for whatever reasons those may be, and I find that exclusionary.  The Jesus I believe in welcomed everyone and never turned anyone away.  One well known example of how Jesus protects and loves those who are imperfect can be found in the New Testament when a prostitute named Mary Magdalene was about to be stoned to death by religious leaders.  "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone!"  What more could I possibly hope to add to that??

Communion... the very word, to me, says 'to commune', come together.  With the rite of Communion, we come together in Christ... but not if you're not of our faith.  WHAT.  IS.  THAT.  ALL.  ABOUT.  If Jesus is indeed manifested in the blessed bread and wine of the sacrament, shouldn't everyone be able to partake in the gift of Christ growing inside them via the eucharist?  Would that not inspire us to be better people?  Certainly better than turning them away because they're not part of some kind of club or cult or something.  So I believe in Holy Communion.  But I believe everyone should be invited to partake in it to grow their own spirituality.  I have siblings who have been married and divorced, and thereby virtually ostracized  by the Catholic Church.  It's why other churches exist, in protest.  It's why they're called Protestant.  How said is it that those who've grown up in the faith of the Church are basically excluded because of a divorce that may happen because a couple may have made a mistake in bonding?  I won't subscribe to a Protestant following, but I won't eschew those who do, either.  In fact, I welcome any Protestant who chooses to explore the Catholic faith.  But in the end, we're all Christians.  And nowhere in the Bible does Jesus condone us fighting with each other.  He wants us to commune together.  

I've personally witnessed an example of ignorance in the Catholic Church in that they teach others only what they want others to believe, in the perfect example of Donald Trump, who I maintain could be the anticrhist.  Nuns are taught that he's some kind of savior, and are only fed information that feeds into that extremely perverse narrative.  No opposing points of view are allowed, lest they be canned from their faith like those who've been divorced.  They're blissfully unaware of this man separating children from their families.  That he literally incites violence at his rallies.  That he demonizes anyone who's left-of-center in politics.  That he 100% supports Capital Punishment, where their very own Pope denounces it.  They ignore that numerous women have accused him of sexual misconduct, including rape; that he's engaged in inappropriate conduct while married with porn stars.  Do they actually hate other women?  They're against abortion, even if its the product of incest or assault.  It appears that they're against men being punished for forcing themselves on women sexually, too.  He actively promotes hatred toward anyone who doesn't advocate what he does.  He continuously breaks the law.  But these women in the convents will not believe it, because they're told not to.  If they even are allowed to hear or read about it in the first place.

I've come to believe that much of the Bible is written in metaphors.  A lot of it just doesn't make sense if it's taken literally, because there are so many contradictions within its pages.  The Bible was written at certain points in time, with the Old Testament having its views and approaches (and, dare I say, the most metaphors), and then the New Testament is written, leaving us to believe Jesus is introducing us to a far gentler, more forgiving, loving God.  With respect to those who adhere to the Old Testament, Jesus re-wrote much of its rules, seemingly to acknowledge the changing times.  Times did not stop changing since the New Testament.  But the common thread that we should recognize, I believe, is that we must learn and discover how to accept each other.  To simply "tolerate" one another is not acceptance.  

For example, I "accept" the LGBT community.  I don't "tolerate" them. If any kind of toleration is going on, it's them tolerating us straight folks.  We've been the ones making them feel like freaks that don't belong in society; that make them feel like victims of scorn and prejudice.  When ultimately, we can't choose who they should be allowed to love and feel happy with.  In Biblical times, it can be understood that the gay community was something that was just beyond comprehension.  Surely we've grown to understand it since then!  Churches must evolve to include love in most of its forms.  Of course, I can't, and won't, understand inter-sibling romance.  Something like that is an abomination to me and is perverse, as are any kind of incestual affairs.  I never see my views on that changing with any kind of evolution.  Basic science points to the absurdities in the potential outcomes for such things.

I don't anticipate this book that I'm about to read to be overly religious - lest it turn me off.  The fact that you have a Tibetan monk coming together with a Christian to discuss things is immediately a lesson to the world just in that it's taken place.  We all need to commune like this.  Not go at each other's throats.  To do the opposite is anti-love, and/or hate.  That's where it leads.

This particular 'book report', as I remember doing as a kid in school, will be an ongoing editing of this very post.  I hope you'll come back and see what I'm thinking of what I'm reading.

A very special thanks to Shawn Cook for gifting me this book.

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