I was supposed to have a new article out this morning, and a newsletter last weekend. Clearly neither happened.
The big reason is this. I set myself the task of lining up two informational interviews at my last newsletter. I tried to set one up and crickets. So, I got embarrassed, because I don’t have any results to report.
But, that doesn’t mean I get let off the hook! You, dear Reader, still deserve something!
As Julia Cameron says, it’s much harder to be a blocked artist than to just do the work. So I’ll write about what I’ve been thinking about.
Before getting in to that, I have a request for YOU, dear Reader. If you are enjoying this blog, and have anything you would like me to write about, please either comment on this article, or just email me at distractedfortune@gmail.com.
Without further ado, here we go.
The Minister
I go to church kind of regularity. Well, I have a church I go to when I can. The ministers send out emails every day with a reading, their analysis, then a prayer.
The latest one that got me was about the difference between how Paul presents Jesus, versus how the gospels present Jesus.
One way to look at the meaning of Jesus in our lives is, live like him. This is the Jesus of the Gospels. He was a great man who did great things, cared about the poor, and taught about God. You should walk in his footsteps.
Paul presented a different version though. He didn’t talk about how Jesus lived, only how he was resurrected. The Post-Crucifixion Jesus.
My minister said he once thought the New Testament should be laid out in the order in which they were written – Paul wrote his letters first, and the Gospels came much later.
But why didn’t Paul describe how Jesus lived? I know that about half way through his ministry, the Jewish Christians who followed him were getting a little frustrated waiting for Jesus to come back, the so-called “Second Coming”. So, Paul pivoted his teachings to make it a spiritual second coming. Probably, Paul was a little frustrated too.
The Campground
My older boy had a school camping trip this past weekend. I went too as chaperone, and also because I like to camp.
At one point, I got to talking with the principal of the Lower School. Somehow, I got to talking about this dichotomy of the two Jesuses, and he revealed that he was part of an Eastern Orthodox church. Antiochan (Syria) to be exact.
He told me a little about the Great Schism of 1054 AD, when the Eastern Orthodox Christians split from the Western, mostly Roman Catholic Christians.
That was all from him. So I did a little digging on my own.
Here’s what I found, along with my conspiracy theories. Please do your own follow up research, and don’t just go on my word. Imagine this is right up there with “Drunk History”.
The Schism
Jesus was crucified. The story is that he rose from the dead after three days, appeared to a few believers after that, then flew away at the beginning of Acts.
Jesus was crucified by the Roman Empire. Herod was a lower Roman governor, and Pontius Pilate was his sheriff in Jerusalem.
Why was he crucified? As an example to the rest of the Jews who had started to follow him. Don’t challenge the authority of the Emperor – no revolts or alternative kings of the Jews.
After that point, the Christians were a thorn in the side of the Roman Empire. You just couldn’t kill and feed them all to lions! Especially with Paul running around, organizing the churches that Peter set up, explaining to people why the resurrection was so important.
So, after a while, if you can’t beat them, join them. Or rather, usurp them.
Emperor Constantine saw a golden opportunity in a stupid argument a bunch of the christian leaders were having. Was Jesus God, or was he the Son of God?
To settle this once and for all, and for the greater glory of Rome, Constantine convened the Council of Nicaea. At this council, all the bishops hashed it out until they came to an agreement. Well, not exactly an agreement. They came to a point where a strange contortion of language was created, and codified in what we now call the Nicaean Creed – The Son is Consubstantial with the Father.
The Nicaean Creed reads kind of like a legal document, which it was. It basically decreed an answer that didn’t really solve the problem, and was not agreed on by all parties. Specifically, the Eastern Christians didn’t really buy the argument.
At the same time, Constantine moved the center of his empire to Istanbul, named it Constantinople, and ordered that the Western empire would forever and henceforth be ruled by a Pope.
A Pope with an army.
This lasted until 1054. In that year, the western Pope excommunicated the eastern Patriarch, and the Patriarch responded by excommunicating the Pope. And a great supernova was recorded in China, which lit up the night like a sun for two whole days.
Venice
In the middle of all this was Venice, who operated maritime trade routes between the East and West. They saw in this conflict a great opportunity, like the Roman Emperor before them.
It may be noted that the appointment of Pope to be supreme ruler of the Western Roman Empire by Constantine, the “Donation of Constantine”, was discovered by some Renaissance collaborators of Nicholas of Cusa to have been a hoax. Most likely, a hoax sprung and used by Venice to ensure the world was engulfed in permanent conflict in which Venice itself could profit.
In 828 AD, some Venetian merchants nicked the remains of St. Mark the Evangelist (of “Gospel of Mark” fame), and brought them to Venice. The Venetians quickly claimed St. Mark as their patron saint, and declared independence from both the Western and Eastern churches. Hence, they could operate independently of both, and as a go-between.
The financiers of Venice who profited from the trading manipulated both sides to be always at battle, weakening each other while enriching Venice. Without this split between the two sides, Venice could not have grown as a neutral financial power in the region.
Today
I don’t think Pope Leo is an agent of Venice, but I do think the schism was a crafty way to split and weaken the power of Christianity. Personally, I’m more Episcopalian than Catholic. But I’m not above thinking that somewhere in the Catholic church still lives a vestigial belief that their authority over Christendom was bestowed directly by a God-Emperor.
What does all this have to do with getting rich while repeatedly failing less and less catastrophically? It’s important to let your imagination wander now and then, because it helps to feed your soul. Who knows why we tend to obsess over ideas that appear to have little bearing on the immediate pressures of the day?
I tend to think those urges to find out more come directly from the Great Creator himself, in the form of a little voice. Follow those urges. Take care of your business, but follow your curiosity and turn it into some kind of expression that others can enjoy.
Also, maybe, we can take a little lesson from despicable Venice. There are massive flows of money in our world right now. It takes some creativity and chutzpah to tap into those flows with a well placed side hustle. But there’s enough flowing for everybody.
So how about you? What’s one manual process at your job or in your life that you find tedious but necessary? Somebody else may find it so as well, and might pay for a solution you invent to automate it.
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