in conspiracy

Bud, originally uploaded by basykes.

This fellow up in front of this aggregation of people was giving this kind of talk they call a "sermon" today. Yet my mind wandered from "the gifts of the Spirit" to the conspiracy of kindness. I thought to myself how it might be possible to see things less in terms of creed and ritual and more in terms of a working of good through history. In this notion, one would not litmus-test one's friends and strangers by whether they accept the same myths and origins of rebirth that one accepts. One instead might instead imagine all the good things one can do in life as something one is in conspiracy with everyone of good will to do.

This way of looking at things, not particularly novel to me, could have
advantages over traditional "this I believe" kind of thinking. When one sees, for example, this picture of young Bud, a rescue dog taken in a Creative Commons BY licensed photo by Basykes, over at flickr.com,
one would not wonder about the doctrinal bona fides of those who are fostering Bud until he finds a permanent home. One would just be glad that in one more small way, a kindness is being done to folks like Bud.

It saves a lot of needless debate for the appropritae coffee shop moment. A woman from our church just had one of those experiences of serendipity. She sustained an injury which required
medical treatment. During the tests as to the severity of this injury, a much more severe medical condition was discovered, which turned out, through the serendipity of the medical test for an unrelated thing, to have been caught at a very early and treatable stage. A "doctrinal" view of life would worry about whether this is "grace" or "coincidence".
Yet a "conspiracy" view of the world would worry less about provenance and more about the scientific miracle of potential treatment.

In this view of tihe world, we need fewer "converts" and more "conspirators". We wrestle less with over-mastering peoples' hearts, and more with those hearts pumping blood into all manners of good. Each conspirator joins for her or his own reasons. The net result is a silver thread which can sew and net through the fabric of everything.