One saying that I hear once in a while is: “It is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.” As someone who has loved and lost, I’m not sure I totally agree with that saying. You put yourself out there and sometimes you get your head chopped off. If rejection is the worst that can happen, then maybe the risk is worth it. But what about the damage to your self-esteem, to your ability to love in the future, to your reputation? Maybe none of these matter if the object of your love is worthy.

There’s that word, “Worthy”, the root of the word “Worship”. But would it be right to *worship* another human being? But I digress…

I’m thinking about risk today. I’m coming to believe that life without significant risk is not worth living. And yet I see a lot of people around me never taking a risk. People who work in a regular job that they hate. People married to a spouse they don’t admire, or don’t love. People with talent and potential who take the easy road. Driving the interstate highway of life in the safe family car, never venturing off the road.

The problem with taking a risk is that, if you miscalculate, or if you are not extremely clear about where you want to end up, you will probably get eaten by the lions and tigers and bears that are just off the interstate.

Several years ago, I decided to quit my high-paying engineering job with a large multinational semiconductor manufacturing company so that I could write novels. I had already written one novel, and another was underway, and I had an idea for a third novel, and I felt it was time to write full time. I had a large savings account, and I calculated that I could get at least one of the novels, maybe two, published before I ran out of money. But I miscalculated. I wasn’t good enough as a writer, or writing fiction was harder than I imagined, or something. And I ran out of money. And I never got any of my novels published.

So I went back to the cube farm of Corporate America and got a “real job” again. But that job nearly killed me. The senior management of the company decided to outsource our work to India, and I ended up on the phone at all hours of the day and night working with the Indians. When I complained about the quality of work of the Indians, and about the impact on our product delivery schedules, I was called a racist. The stress was too much for me, and I quit again. I didn’t get a nice severance package. I got nothing.

I fell back on teaching math at the community college, which I love but which doesn’t pay very well. And now I’m trying to figure out how to survive.

I’m not sure which was the greater risk, leaving the company in the first place and running out of money, or returning to the company and having the life sucked out of me. Risk is a relative thing, I guess.

Which would have been the greater risk to Jesus? Embarking down the road that led to his death? Or remaining a carpenter, or perhaps becoming a Rabbi, either of which he was qualified to do? What would the world have been like if he hadn’t made the choice he made?

Perhaps the greater risk to a man or woman is to stay in our safe little life, comfortable with our six-figure income, doing nothing that can get us eaten by the large nasty forces that are just off the beaten path.

Doing nothing.

In the movie is a wonderful quote, which I often return to for inspiration. It’s a piece of dialogue from Jacob’s chiropractor, Louie, to Jacob when Jacob is particularly troubled:

Eckhart saw hell too. He said: The only thing that burns in hell is the part of you that won’t let go of life, your memories, your attachments. They burn them all away. But they’re not punishing you, he said. They’re freeing your soul. So, if you’re frightened of dying and you’re holding on, you’ll see devils tearing your life away. But if you’ve made your peace, then the devils are really angels, freeing you from the earth.

Meister Ekhart was a twelfth century German mystic who wrote prolifically about religious issues. I’ve read some of his writings and have never been able to find this quote among them. So I don’t know if the quote is just a bit of movie fiction, or if Ekhart really wrote it. It doesn’t matter.

40 days in the desert can be a little like dying, or like burning in hell, though not to the same degree. It’s surprising what we hold on to when confronted by adversity. One of mine is my 42-inch HD LCD television. Although I haven’t tuned to a cable channel since the presidential election, I like to watch DVDs, and I can’t imagine life without my TV. Another is my personal library, amounting to around 2000 books, mostly technical.

But I have less mundane things that I hold on to, like ideas. And a 40-day fast helps to burn some of those off.

One silly idea that needs to be burned off is my belief that I need a daily chocolate chip cookie. I haven’t had one now in ten days. Another is that, if I don’t have dinner with my friends, then they’ll stop being my friends. That one gets burned off when I find that my friends still want to see me when they’ve heard about my fast, even though we can’t dine together.

Another is that I sometimes find myself thinking that I have a hard life. It’s an absurd thought, to be sure. I’m a white male of middle class background living in The United States of America in the twenty-first century, a time when even the poor are better off than kings were a thousand years ago.

But when things do get hard, like when hard financial times strike, or when my health isn’t at its best, it is easy to think that life is hard.

And then I remember Jesus.

I don’t necessarily believe that Jesus died for our sins, or anything like that. I’m not sure yet what I think his purpose was, or whether he had a plan. Maybe he just got behind the power curve and was taken down by the establishment for his teachings.

Yet in his last day on this earth, he certainly had some things burned away even before he gasped his last breath. The horrors of his last hours are hard to fathom. Yet Jesus almost made it look easy. He endured his torture with grace and purpose, perhaps because he believed in his cause. And I believe that his death can be an inspiration for those going through rough times.

If one is committed to his path, he can survive anything. Even the tearing away of his life by devils.

It’s hard to make a home in the desert. Building materials in the desert are hard to come by. There is no wood, so you must construct your buildings of mud or thatch. But you can’t stay in one place very long in the desert. There’s not enough water, and food is scarce, so you wander in order to find them, just to survive. So it makes no sense to construct a permanent building to live in. Maybe you carry a tent, or perhaps some light bedding material.

Kwai Chang Cane, the Shaolin priest from the television series “Kung Fu”, was a nomad. He traveled barefoot from town to town, looking for work, sleeping under the stars, never knowing where he was going next.

In the same way, Jesus was essentially homeless. He may have had a grand plan, but he traveled from place to place, living on the handouts of others, probably sleeping most nights under the open sky.

Clearly Jesus and Kwai Chang chose to be nomadic. But why? Why would someone choose to be a nomad in the desert, homeless for long stretches of time, often alone, risking starvation and death?

In the case of Kwai Chang, the reason was partly because it made for a better plot for the television series. Every week he was some place different, some place interesting, and he had to confront different people and different threats. He was able to have his obligatory two kung fu fight scenes with bad guys we hadn’t met before. And it fit his philosophy of life, that of following the path, the Tao. And you can’t very well follow the Tao staying at home and working in the factory week after week, year after year. So you wander.

In Jesus’s case, perhaps he chose to wander in order to reach more people with his message. I accept that he consciously had a message that he was trying to spread, though a possible atheistic position on the subject is that Jesus was just a nut, possibly even schizophrenic, not unlike a thousand other nomadic (homeless) crazies of that time period. I don’t subscribe to the view that Jesus was a nut. Or I try not to. There’s too much wisdom in words that have been attributed to him.

How common is a nomadic existence today? There are the homeless of today’s world. Many of them are nut cases, with genuine mental illness. But some have simply abandoned the conventional model for how to live life, by giving up their job, packing their bag, leaving their family, and taking a chance on the generosity of other people. You see them on the street corners. Many of them could go to shelters and be rescued, but many of them elect not to. Or so I believe.

But you don’t have to be without a house to be homeless in this world. There is something which I call “Emotional Homelessness”, a kind of nomadic existence of the heart, where you bind yourself to no one. And because you are alone in this desert of a sort, there is no one there to rescue you, or befriend you. You risk a kind of starvation and death in the absence of love and affection, without the occasional gentle touch, with no one to watch your back on a daily basis in this crazy world we live in.

Yet many people are emotionally homeless.

*I* am emotionally homeless. But I would like to find a home.

A man in my Fred group came up to me then. I asked how he was. “Fine. But how are *you*?” He gave me a big hug, as if concerned for my health.

This evening I was visiting a friend to play cards. While we played cards at her dining room table, I looked into her kitchen and saw an onion. I had a momentary desire to eat the onion. When I told her of my desire to eat the onion, she laughed and said, “That’s really sad.” This was the same woman I watched eat ice cream yesterday.

I really am fine. People don’t need to worry about my health. About the only thing negative I can say about this fast is that it’s making me irritable. I sent an email to a friend that I wish I could take back, an email that revealed personal feelings that I didn’t need to reveal.

During the day I fantasized about pizza. It’s irrational, because I am not overly hungry, but I’m having thoughts about food. Now that I’m done with Day 8, I’m a fifth of the way through the fast. But I still have four fifths of the time remaining.

Today was probably the hardest day of my fast so far. I went shopping for a new car with a friend. I didn’t buy today but I test drove five cars, and it was hot, very hot, reaching 103 degrees according to the car thermometer. The afternoon sun in July in central Texas and I don’t go well together, and I briefly questioned whether I should finish the fast. As a reward to my friend for putting up with my car shopping for 5 hours, I took her to Amy’s Ice Cream, the best ice cream place in the world, and bought her a cup of her favorite. We sat inside and she ate while I watched. Was I sure I didn’t want some of her ice cream, she asked. Yes, no, maybe. I declined, but it was tempting. Though I was tempted to quit the fast, I put the thought out of my mind and made it through the rest of the day.

Is the fast changing me? I did some house cleaning today that I normally wouldn’t do. I thought about doing some consulting work, something I haven’t thought about in a long time. And today I thought that it was time to completely recreate my life. So maybe the fast is having the desired effect.

There’s something called “The pain of healing” that happens when a wound begins to heal. The theory is that the pain from a wound is dampened by its severity. The more serious the wound, the less you feel it at first. I was once in an automobile accident in which two people died, and I suffered a concussion and severe cuts to the face and bruising to the legs. Yet in the minutes after the accident, I felt no pain from these injuries. It wasn’t until an hour later, particularly when needles were used to administer a local anesthetic for the stitches, that I started to feel any pain. And the real pain didn’t happen until late that night, when the effects of the concussion set in, and I wondered whether I would live through the night.

The pain of healing can happen even if the wound is not physical. I’ve experienced it myself at times when people have hurt me, or when I’ve hurt others, and the pain or guilt didn’t really set in until days or months later. It must have something to do with awareness, maybe by undoing the repression of the painful emotions.

The fast, by creating a vacuum in my life, makes it possible to feel some of the pain that I’ve been repressing, pain associated with the way I’ve lived my life recently, and even from events in my life many years ago. Maybe it isn’t the fast per se, but the fast is allowing me to process some things that I’d otherwise leave buried.

The pain of healing is good when it comes. It means that the healing has begun. If there is no pain, especially after something serious has happened, then it means that the healing hasn’t started yet.

And a knowledge of the existence of the pain of healing is a good thing, because it helps a person tolerate the pain when it does come. Because the pain is temporary, and necessary to the healing process.

I think I’m feeling some of the pain of healing of the wounds of my life.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Jesus lately, about how he lived his life and what he must have felt in the days leading up to his death. He must have known that he was in danger. Given his considerable understanding of Jewish law and customs, he undoubtedly knew the great risk he was taking in challenging the system. Of course if Jesus was God, then he really had nothing to worry about. He’s God, and nothing can really hurt him. If the soldiers pierce his human heart, he simply laughs it off and ascends into heaven.

But this notion of God as man needs more consideration. Does it make sense? I’m sure greater minds than mine have pondered this question, but perhaps most of them were not atheists.

God as man.

On the face of it, it’s an absurd juxtaposition. God is all-powerful, omniscient, etc, etc. If God comes down to be among his creation, he can certainly take human form. But does he then lose his power and omniscience? I think not, not if he can still call himself God. Is there a logical problem here? So maybe there’s something else going on, some reason we should pay attention to the Jesus story.

God as man.

Could “God as man” be a metaphor for how we should behave in adversity? I believe that Jesus didn’t fear death because he believed so utterly and completely in his cause, and because he had resigned himself to the inevitable.

I’ve often wondered what I would do if, say, a gunman entered the Barnes and Noble Cafe, where I often have a chocolate chip cookie, and started shooting people. Would I run and hide for my own safety? Or would I help shepherd women and children out the emergency exit? Or would I perhaps confront the gunman in an effort to save others?

God as man.

When your life is threatened, that is precisely when you must protect what you value. Because a threat to one is a threat to all, either directly or indirectly. Is it your own life, or is it the sanctity of life in general that has value? If you protect yourself, one life, while others die around you, perhaps even because you abandoned them, how could you face yourself afterward?

We have an instinct for self-preservation, to be sure. But I believe that we also have an instinct for civilization-preservation which doesn’t get mentioned as often. We talk about heroes, and we engage in hero worship. But do we fully acknowledge the heroism of indirectly trying to save a civilization, for dying for what one believes may make the difference in the future of mankind?

I think that’s what Jesus did. Perhaps he wasn’t misguided or foolhardy. Perhaps he knew exactly what he was doing, and wanted to set an example of what each of us must be willing to do when the time comes in order to protect what we value.

That’s the essence of God-like behavior in a mortal man.

That’s right, I can’t be like Jesus, if that means “The Son of God”. However, I don’t believe that Jesus was God. That will upset many Christians, but an atheist cannot very well believe otherwise.

So Jesus was a man. I’m beginning to see that humans need a role model, and Jesus had it all: God-like powers, sacrifice, wisdom, tolerance, seemingly unlimited knowledge of moral and spiritual issues, strength of character… The list goes on. I want to be more like Jesus because Jesus is a good role model. He’s tolerant but outspoken. He’s vulnerable but wins in the end. He’s supposedly chaste, but he overturns tables in the temple. Did he really wear robes and have long hair, or was he disheveled from all his travels in the desert? I don’t mean to be disrespectful, but we take these things for granted. We form an image of Jesus the man, based on movies and storybooks. Did Jesus set out to become the founder of a great religion? Or did he just get caught up in circumstances beyond his control and end up a celebrity?

But are Christians just engaging in celebrity worship? No, most definitely not. I think that Christians are genuinely trying to be like Jesus, to the best of their abilities.

As I told the Fred group this evening, I think that one of the virtues exemplified by Jesus is creating a vacuum in yourself, emptying yourself of things that don’t matter and letting the things that do matter enter you to fill the void. Living in the desert, fasting, riding a donkey, holding on to no possessions, all these things are a way of emptying yourself of things that don’t matter. I imagine that there are books written about what Jesus would do today. Would he drive an expensive car, or would he just walk about among the people? I suspect the latter. Would he be an obese pig of a man, like so many are today? I think not.

Would the Jesus of today find a desert and seclude himself there for 40 days and 40 nights? Undoubtedly. He would have to. In order to free himself from the insanities of daily life, in order to collect his thoughts and reinforce what is important in his mind, in order to connect with the deepest part of himself. And one doesn’t have to travel far to find a desert today. Just walk down any city street. Turn your mind inward. Empty yourself of all but the essentials. Turn your back on humanity for an afternoon or for six weeks. That’s the desert. And don’t be afraid to cry over what you discover about yourself.

I had a strange thought today. Normally people are trying to figure out how to speed up their weight loss. This might sound crazy, but maybe it makes more sense to slow down, take your time, do a 40-day fast and just settle in for the ride. I’m confident that I can finish the whole 40 days. But I’m a little worried that it’s the same feeling I have when I’m at the 4-mile mark of a 26.2-mile marathon.

If you’ve ever run a marathon, as I have four times, you might know that you feel strong in the first few miles. I’m not a strong runner, but after training for a marathon for up to nine months, with its 20-40 miles of running per week and the long runs of 10-15 miles on Sunday, running 5 miles seems like nothing. In the first few miles of a marathon, you settle into a comfortable pace and you just run, breathing normally, feeling good in the legs, feeling energized.

But things start to get harder after you’ve passed the 13-mile mark, the half-way point, and you realize that you still have more than 13 miles to go. And your legs are starting to get a little bit heavier, and you wonder why you’re doing this crazy thing of running 26.2 miles. It is widely known that a healthy human can run 18 miles if he or she trains for it. The human body can store enough glycogen (the fuel stored in the muscles and liver) for an 18-mile run. But the human body was not designed to run more than about 18 miles. It can’t store enough glycogen. Which makes a 26.2-mile run so difficult. So in every marathon I’ve run, I’ve had to walk a significant portion of the miles between 18 and 24. Then somehow I’ve mustered the energy to run from mile 24 to 26.2, if for no other reason to avoid the embarrassment of walking across the finish line.

Why am I talking about marathoning in the early stages of a 40-day fast? Because it seems easy now. I feel strong. I can do anything. Sure, I’m thinking about food, but so far it hasn’t interfered with my life. If this is life in the desert, if this is what Jesus confronted in His first four days of His 40-day fast, then maybe He was singing. It’s like an oasis more than a desert. But I’m aware that I’ll reach the 18-mile mark in my fast, when I’ll be severely tempted.

And when that happens, when cactus plants are laughing at me, when the sun is beating down on me in this self-imposed desert, I’ll think about Jesus, and how He withstood the temptation, how He survived for 40 days and 40 nights alone, without any nourishment at all.

I will find inspiration in Him.

If anyone is interested in the details of my nutritional supplements for this fast, let me know and I will post a link.

So today was Day 3. Actually, one of my greatest fears going into this fast was that I wouldn’t be able to survive without my daily chocolate chip cookie from the Barnes and Noble Cafe. It’s a *huge* cookie, packed with chocolate chunks, and giving it up was one of the main reasons I hesitated so long before deciding to do this fast. Of course Jesus didn’t have to contend with chocolate chip cookies of this magnitude.

So afraid I was of the temptation of this cookie, I avoided the Barnes and Noble for the first two days of the fast. However, I realized that I needed to confront my fear. So today I resolved to enter the book store, make my way to the Cafe, and steer clear of the cookie. It’s not as easy as it sounds. Everyone who works in the Cafe knows that I buy my cookie every day, and so they have it waiting for me as soon as they see me coming. So I figured that I would have to quickly get to the cash register and tell them, “No cookie today,” before they had served it up on a plate and charged me for it. Such are the difficulties of being a regular customer.

However, today it seemed that “higher powers” were at work. Okay, I’m just being silly now. Being an atheist, I don’t believe in a higher power. But when I arrived at the book store, a thunderstorm had just passed over us, and the lights were all out in the store. I walked in, was greeted by an employee who knows me well, and she said that the store was open but they weren’t doing transactions. Hmmm. So I went to the Cafe expecting to buy only a large water, but they wouldn’t even sell me that. No transactions. They didn’t even try to sell me a cookie. I couldn’t have bought a cookie even if I had wanted one!

It was quite depressing.

So I sat at my usual table, prepared to study some math and physics, and was rudely interrupted by loud children sitting at the next table. In my weakened and hungry state of mind, and sitting virtually in the dark, I was only able to stay for a few minutes and then I had to leave.

I’ll have to face my cookie temptation later.

Today was long. Many of you may not know this, but I teach and tutor math at a community college. Today I started my day on campus at 9AM and didn’t leave until 8PM, and I was either lecturing or tutoring for the entire time. It is exhausting work, but it is also fun and worthwhile. However, it can be stressful, especially if you don’t have a meal to look forward to at the end of the day. There were times today when I wanted to cry, not because the day was bad, but because I didn’t know when my next pleasurable moment would be.

Do I depend so much on food for my happiness? Maybe that’s the first thing that has to get burned off in this desert.

An ex-girlfriend called me today and left a message. I would have taken her call if I could have. It’s complicated, and I won’t share details now, but we recently became friends again after many years, that is until she discovered that I’m an atheist. So she hasn’t communicated with me since then, for a couple of months. But today she calls. She didn’t say why in the message, but I think it might have been because of my 40-day fast. She is Christian, and I hope she is supportive. Maybe she knows that the first few days will be the hardest, until enough baggage has gotten burned off in the heat of the desert.

I’m not hungry. And I’m not going through caffeine withdrawal, because I went through the last of those many years ago. I’m feeling pretty good, physically anyway. No overwhelming cravings. There’s a part of me that would like to report something bad today. But nothing bad has happened yet, except for the feeling that, without food, I will get depressed. Focus on other things…

Jesus was reportedly tempted in the desert. The bible says it was the devil who tempted Jesus. What if it wasn’t the devil? What if it was Jesus’s own human weaknesses? He was reportedly a man, after all. I’ve been tempted today by food. Maybe Jesus’s great strength was that He didn’t succumb to the temptations. He was an example for the rest of us. It seems to us that it was so easy for Him. Isn’t it always that way, that a great man makes it look easy? The bible reports it matter-of-factly, that Jesus went into the desert, fasted 40 days and 40 nights, then came out. He didn’t blog about it, describing in detail his every difficulty. They didn’t have blogs back then, but I suspect that Jesus wouldn’t have blogged about His experience even if there had been blogs. One of the things that makes Jesus great is that He lived simply, without fanfare, and yet now, 2000 years later, a billion people on the planet believe He was God.

As an atheist, I don’t believe that Jesus was God. But I can still believe that He was a great man, perhaps the greatest, and that He continues to inspire many of us to achieve our own modest successes.

So I will focus on the image in my mind of Jesus in the desert…