Brian’s Reflection: Monday, April 16, 2012

Don't matter how much money you got,
there's only two kinds of people:
there's saved people and there's lost people.

Bob Dylan. Poet. musician. It was on this date, 1962,
that he debuted his song “Blowing in the Wind”
at Gerde’s Folk City in New York


“Saved”. “Lost”. Bob wouldn’t - I don’t think, anyway - have been thinking of those terms in ‘traditional’ American fundamentalist Christian context. I think Bob Dylan was more profound and more spiritual than the purveyors of that form of American Christianity. I don’t need to expand on this. Those of you who get these Reflections will, I think, understand what I am saying. No, I think that Bob’s comments well up from a deep intuitive sense of what it means to be “lost” or “saved” ….. either one has found the way to the heart of being human or one has not. I’ve listened to Bob Dylan for decades .. and I hear his Wisdom.

“Lost people” are alienated from the Universe, from themselves, from sympathy, from others, from Compassion, from their mortality, from friendship, from the freedom which wells up from self-knowledge.

“Saved people” know and respect themselves, are One with the Universe, understand others’ suffering because they know their own, comprehend the poignancy of their mortality and therefore share the common humanity, see themselves in every other person no matter their perceived “otherness” (which they share), sense a friend in all other struggling persons, and live in Freedom because they are not “attached” - in the Buddhist and indeed Christian sense – to transitory things. They live only for the Love which is, as Jesus and St. Paul and other wise teachers teach, the only standard for judging the “success” of a Life.

I’m ‘saved’. Meaning I’m on the path. I know a lot of ‘lost’ people … people who aren’t open or who are unable to shift their consciousness or heart into the ‘Christ-mode’ … even in the face of their own unhappiness or discontent. I also know that, as St. Paul said, I have to ‘work it out and fear and trembling’.

But let me tell you, after 45 years of serious Christian striving: the working out is exhilarating!!

Brian+