Jack Heald

…is that whatever it is you are believing in is not – in the final analysis – provable.

That’s kinda the whole point, of course; the whole reason anyone ever needs faith is because if you have proof you don’t need faith, and if you can’t have proof then all you are left with is faith.

I think that’s the reason the Apostle Paul talked about “the gift of faith”. Those who are able to believe and not struggle are gifted every bit as much as those who effortlessly create great music or effortlessly dance or effortlessly grok calculus. For the rest of us, it’s work. Sometimes not very rewarding or satisfying work either, lemme tell you.

There’s a hymn I learned growing up called “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing“; it’s one of my favorites partly because of the music, (I think it’s an old Welsh tune), but mostly because of this line:

Prone to wander, Lord I feel it / Prone to leave the God I love

That’s me. And I guess it isn’t just me because someone else wrote that line, so there’s at least two of us. And I also think about a Larry Norman song I learned a zillion years ago called Song for a Small Circle of Friends. There’s a line there where Norman, speaking to his friend Randy Stonehill, says

…you’re crazy but you know it and I love you as we both crawl towards the lamp.

That’s me, too. Crazy and I know, but still crawling towards the lamp.

Most people really have no desire to be free — they only want to be taken care of, and will give up almost any freedom in exchange for the promise of security.

I’m one of those people who would rather be hungry and free than a full-bellied slave. There are fewer of us than there are those with the opposite preference.

Democratic government is a majority of people imposing their will on the minority. (Or, as someone famously commented, two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner.) Since those who prefer freedom to security are in the minority, democratic government inevitably becomes tyrannical. Those who profess to believe that “democracy” and “freedom” mean the same thing are either ignorant and deluded – most people fall into this category – or else they are disingenuous. Those who seek power fall into the latter category. (You can recognize these people quickly – they’re the ones who are always telling someone else what to do.)

Etiene de La Boitie famously observed in the 16th century that a tyrant is able to maintain his power because the people he enslaves allow it. I don’t think people have changed much in five centuries, do you.

Here in the united States, we have a government that:

• takes money from the poor so that rich bankers don’t have to suffer
• sexually assaults us at airports
• tells us what we may or may not put in our own bodies
• reads our mail
• taps our phones
• imprisons us on a whim

…and a myriad of other offenses.

And why do we have that sort of government? Isn’t ours a democratic process?

The prosecution rests.

Doug got hired right after I did this year, and within a month of being hired, was in the hospital with a heart attack, or a bad liver or something screwed up on the inside. Nice guy – I remember him from class. Chicago, tall, older kids like me. See his name on emails every now and then, but that’s about it.

I thought last week was bad. Caroline had emergency surgery on Monday. Pop came down with shingles later in the week. I sprained my back on Friday and had to cancel a training trip to NJ because the chiro told me the worst possible thing I could do was sit. (Ever try to go through a whole day without sitting? I did it for 3 straight days.)

So I thought my week sucked, then I got an email this morning that Doug’s 20 year old son collapsed yesterday while playing basketball and never regained consciousness.

Life just begs for metaphors, because the reality is too big to comprehend. We gotta turn it into a metaphor so we can handle it. “Curve balls”, “raging flood”, “terrible storm”, “hurricane”, “speed bump”. None of those convey the intensity of the experiences real life brings. I’ve been through divorce, and that is as close to death as I want to come without actually dying. Losing a child must be worse. My mind is numb at the sheer size of the reality.

Anyone who reads me enough knows I oscillate between faith and doubt pretty regularly. Sometimes my faith is strong and certain. Sometimes it is all but gone entirely. After a lifetime of this sort of back and forth, I think I have found some sort of solid place to stand. It barely looks like faith to me, and I doubt it would qualify as faith for most people, but I have to be true to myself and the way I am wired this weak, frayed, shadow of faith is the best I can do.

Life is absurd. Twenty year old sons dying playing basketball is simply absurd. And yet — it happens. Shit happens. It is enough to make you think there is no God, or at least not one who cares enough to do anything worthwhile for his poor creatures.  But there is something inside me that I do not control that still believes. I would love to NOT believe. It seems as if NOT believing makes far more sense. But I can’t not believe.

Maybe that’s God. Maybe that something inside me that refuses to stop believing, that certainly isn’t me – maybe that’s God. I hope so.

Requiescat in pace, young master G.

I thought by the time I was this age I would finally have it all figured out. By “it” I mean “Life”.  ”How to do it.” The “Big Questions” finally answered. But no.

I thought that by this age:

• I’d be financially set. Wrong!
• I’d still be married. Wrong!
• I’d have lots of really good friends. Wrong!
• I’d have work that was deeply satisfying and made a difference. Wrong!
• I’d be surrounded by happy family. Wrong!
• I’d have put down roots and be well known and respected in my community. Wrong!
• All my questions about life, God, love, happiness, success would be mostly answered. Wrong! 
• I would no longer feel like I was making it up every single day. Wrong!

Literally nothing in my life has worked out the way I imagined. Nothing. Not one blessed thing. And life just keeps throwing me curve balls at me. And I keep swinging and missing.

Apparently, I’m not doing something right.

I wonder what it is.

St. John the Divine (Not Actual Size)

A buddy and I were discussing the sorry state of the world, and he mentioned that he’s pretty pessimistic about the future of our species. I asked him the reason for his pessimism, and he replied, “The Book of Revelation”. He then asked me what I thought, and this is what I wrote to him:

There’s likely no book in the entire Bible as controversial as Revelation. When I was a kid, I read it literally and believed it was a literal prophecy of stuff that was literally gonna happen. As I got older and a little more experienced and a little wiser, I began to see  it differently. It’s pretty hard to read it now with an unjaundiced eye because of all the “interpretations” I was exposed to as a kid, but I try.

I have little doubt that John is writing what he experienced. I believe he had an ecstatic experience, like Teresa of Avila, like various mystics throughout time, like many people who seem to be more spiritually “tuned-in” than the normal person. (And – if I may say so – unlike me.)

The “vision”, as it were, appears to be in 3 or 4 major parts. (Four if you count the intro.) At the intro, John has his vision of the Risen Christ standing amidst the  candlesticks. There’s a brief conversation where John is told to write what he sees and hears, and then it dives straight into the first of the 3 major parts: the message to the 7 churches.

If any part of Revelation was ever intended to be taken literally, it is perhaps this section. The seven churches named in those first few chapters are churches that actually existed in that time. Apparently, John was given a particular message to pass along to each of the leaders of these individual churches. My suspicion is that the churches – when they heard the message addressed to them in particular – understood exactly what was meant. I likewise suspect that anyone who takes those messages and applies them to different places and times than those to which they were are addressed are just plain getting it wrong. Not that the messages are not timeless, but they were clearly addressed to a specific set of people in a specific place at a specific time.

The middle section of the book is the freaky part: the “Whore of Babylon”, a beast with ten horns, dragons spitting out floods to drown babies, swarms of deadly locusts, stars falling from the sky, rivers turning to blood, seven angels sounding seven trumpets, The Book of Life! The biggest clue that this part should be read symbolically rather than literally is the beast and dragon stuff. If that part is symbolic, then the stuff about  stars falling and rivers turning to blood is also intended as metaphor. Although I can barely speculate what the bit about the beast and the dragon means, the bit about stars falling from the sky is a fairly common piece of imagery in Oriental literature – it is a way of talking about rulers being deposed and kingdoms being overthrown. The “beast with ten horns” can be interpreted as the Roman Empire with some degree of consistency. What is not at all clear is whether the one horn that grew and ruled the others refers to a particular ruler or a particular kingdom. I suspect again that readers familiar with Oriental imagery understood it much better than we do.

The end of the second part is the truly freaky apocalyptic stuff – the opening of the two scrolls, the appearance of The Lamb, the judgment of the Beast and the Whore of Babylon. Frankly, I haven’t a clue what to make of it. The only conclusion I can draw is that John had a mind-blowing vision. (An excess of pain-killers, maybe? Tradition has it that he survived being boiled in oil and ultimately died of natural causes at a ripe old age.)

The last major section is the description of the New Heavens and the New Earth. Pretty cool stuff, but a lot of it completely defies physics, so if we are to read it literally as a prophecy about what is to come, then we must of necessity also read it as a prophecy that the fundamental laws of the physical universe are going to be altered. What should we think of that? Well, if Death – the final enemy – is truly to be overcome, then the fundamental laws of the universe MUST be overcome. The whole universe is dying – entropy dictates the end state of everything, and there is nothing to prevent that from being the final state of all matter – nothing within the physical universe anyway.

A striking part of this book is the repetition of the number 7. Such repetition is a fairly common literary device that gives structure and cohesion to the work. Early oral literature made use of such devices to insure that the structure of the tale held together as it was passed on from generation to generation. Revelation shows many of the same influences. (And that’s kinda cool, because the Apostle John was certainly not a highly educated man – but this is clearly a work of genius or divine inspiration – take your pick.)

I think it is a freaky, amazing, disturbing and comforting vision of a realm that most of us never suspect exists, let alone have the opportunity to see. Are there lessons we are to learn from it? That I honestly cannot say. There are some really wise things said in the book, and some really cryptic things, and some really downright silly things. (A city that is a CUBE? Really? C’mon, man!) It contains some of the most famous literary imagery and phrases in all of western literature, so it is certainly worth reading, studying even. But is it a reliable, trustworthy description of actual events that are yet to take place? To be honest, I doubt it.

Nostradamus had a series of similarly fantastic ecstatic experiences, and his “prophecies” are ambiguous enough to be interpreted as being accurate – but only in hindsight. Teresa of Avila had ecstatic experiences that were clearly life-altering, and that make for worthwhile contemplation, but aren’t remotely prophetic. I think the quality of John’s vision falls somewhere in between those two.

The Revelation of St. John the Divine is an extraordinary work. Like all works of great art, it bears the marks of a divine touch. But I think interpreting any of it literally is a mistake.

For those of you asking yourselves, “should I buy gold”, the answer is pretty simple – YES. For those of you wondering, “should I buy gold now that it is over $1900, or should I wait?”, the answer is – THAT DEPENDS. Gold continues to push higher because of fundamentals – it is a commodity and all commodities are going to be rising in dollar terms for as long as central banks try to inflate their way out of debt.

If you want a little “better” price on your gold purchases, (and gold is technically overbought at the moment, which implies a coming correction), a good entry point is on any pullback to a prior support level. At this date, we had a brief pullback two weeks ago to the mid $1700′s before rocketing back up to near $1900. If you want to find a good entry point, select price levels that appear to provide support.

There are two kinds of support – absolute price support and relative chart support. Absolute price support means that a particular price point – say for example $1700 – has historically provided support. The simplest way to identify absolute price support is to look at a chart. Wherever you see the price chart fall down to a particular point and then reverse back up – that’s support. The support is stronger if the reversal has happened on more than one occasion.

The other kind of support – chart support – is more ambiguous. This kind of support can be seen with technical indicators like moving averages or price bands. (Here’s an example from 2008.) There is no “right” moving average and no “right” price band – these are purely subjective indicators, but – in spite of their subjective nature, can still provide fairly reliable entry points. If you look at a chart of gold over the last ten years, you’ll see it’s general trend is up, but that it is marked by pullbacks. Often, those “support” levels you see on the chart will coincide with moving averages. Try looking at a 20day, 50day and 200 day moving average of Gold’s price and you’ll like see support. (There is nothing magic about these levels, by the way. You can pick any number you want – try a 14 day, 37 day and 83 day moving average just for grins and giggles.)

Whatever your entry point, you should find a way to buy gold because the fundamentals support it: central banks are destroying the value of their currencies, and that action in turn means that all commodities will rise in value relative to those currencies.

Finally, a word about the various ways to own gold.  Buy physical gold, not an ETF such as GLD. If you buy futures contracts, take physical delivery. Buy one ounce coins or tenth-ounce coins or even kilo bars, but buy physical.