?

What's rolling around in my head today...


I'm not a Christian in the traditional sense, but I hope to follow Jesus (and Gandhi, and MLK, and Dorothy Day...). Can Jesus help us figure out why Americans are the richest and yet most depressed nation in the world? He said, "...it is easier for a camel to go through the
eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the
kingdom of God." These words just keep rolling around in my head.

Since I've taken my spiritual studies outside
of a traditional church, I've
come to believe that what was taken literally from the
Bible and what was taken figuratively has always been
chosen for us...For a long time, I cast the entire book aside...but, then I picked up bits and pieces and found them refreshing when viewed outside of the exlusive and oppressive context of fundamentalism. For example, in Luke it reads, "the kingdom of God is within
you." Why is this what we take figuratively? It seems to me that it is saying what might be the most true: God is in each of us... IS each of us...and then, taken with the above Biblical passage, that every overindulgence is another step away from God.

As we Americans
rationalize all that we have, one
child dies from a starvation-related cause for every
breath we take and the MAJORITY of the world does not have running water or electricity....maybe that cuts us off from our
spiritual connection with God in some way...the
"kingdom of God that is within us."
Could this be part of our collective cultural depression?

It's a finger that I point at myself, as my indulgences are plenty. I've heard it said, "we must live simply so that others may simply live." The question is, how far do we take that? Where is the line between being overly-generous and rationalizing? Where is the line between indifference and doing more than is healthy? Is there one?