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The Golden Calf Syndrome

August 27th, 2010

Oh, we mortals! We are so funny! Even when we have Enough, even when we are living in Abundance, we always seem to be seeking a Bigger Better Deal.  I’m living what I’m calling a “La Dee Dah” Life” right now, and every day I get clearer about how I add to my suffering by wishing for more than I have.  Aren’t I so humanly cute?

One of my favorite stories from the Bible is when Moses gets called to lead his people out of Egypt through the desert to the Promised Land.  I think we are called every day to lean into who we are meant to be, and I think it is easy to believe we’ve misunderstood. It is very human to doubt a call we are hearing. Or if we hear a call, we think it should be accompanied by a Business Plan with Sixteen Easy Infallible Steps.

But living a Wild, Precious Life does work this way.

I often think it should work this way, and perhaps Moses did too.

Moses didn’t get his call from a angel or even in a dream.  He was called by a burning bush. When he heard the burning bush talking to him, he said, (and I like to believe that his voice had a Robert DeNiro accent), “Are you talkin’ to me?”

He couldn’t believe he was being called to do something grand and amazing in the world. I can identify with that. You probably can too. Who are we to be amazing, fabulous, courageous, brilliant, and capable of transforming the world? Marianne Williamson says–Who are we not to be? We are children of the Universe. Our playing small doesn’t serve the world.

So, not many of us are ready to take action when we hear the Call.

Moses answers the Call, and leads his people through the desert for 40 years. Now 40 years or 40 days and 40 nights is Bible talk for a really, really, really long time. A time much longer than we thought it was going to take, a time which tests our perseverance, our patience, and our faith in the truth of the Call.

That’s a long time. If we were given the Call with a little notation that said, “Not to worry!” this will take you 6.3 weeks, or 2.4 hours, or three years and 10 days–if we just had a timeframe, we could adjust.

But we are never given the time frame. We are only invited to answer a Call. Bummer!

So if we answer the Call as Moses and his people did, we may be out in the desert for a long time, but the good news is every day we wake up surrounded with manna from heaven. Every day we are getting just what we need to get through the day. How about that? How cool is that? We’ve answered the Call; we’ve got a leader, and we are given every day just exactly what we need.  We are living a “La Dee Dah” Life of faith and gratitude.

But it’s not enough.

In the Bible we are told the followers of Moses, even though they have a leader who has obviously answered a Call, and even though they are given manna from heaven every morning, still, they can’t help themselves. They find a Golden Calf, and they worship it.

The Golden Calf Is new!  It has novelty. It glitters. We get a rush when we worship the golden Calf together. We have a new movement of which we’re a part. New, new, new, new, new!

Meanwhile, we are demonstrating a gross ingratitude for the manna we’ve been given. We have abandoned our journey. We are being distracted, even while we think we are moving on! This Golden Calf worshipping is fun, fun, fun! And, we don’t have to do the hard work of trekking through the desert anymore. We get to feel like we’re making progress when we were really lost in a Distraction That Looks Good. How perfect is that?

What does this have to do with you and me?

Where has a Golden Calf slipped into our lives?  What practices have we abandoned, practices that have served us well but don’t seem sexy enough anymore?  Where are we thinking “This is too simple to be good and too good to be true?”

The simple things work. Drinking water, getting outside every day for a walk, writing about how we feel, talking to the Universe in the form of prayer or a dialogue with our Angel Committee, eating fresh fruits and vegetables, lean meat, fiber–and hugely reducing our intake of sugar, especially in the form of high fructose corn syrup – all these things work and they are free or less expensive than Golden Calf alternatives.

(Check out this YouTube video on sugar and you will be radicalized!http://www.ironmagazineforums.com/diet-nutrition/104570-youtube-sugar-bitter-truth.html )

The simple stuff works, but it’s not sexy enough for us. When I worked in a drug and alcohol treatment center, I learned that recovery can feel boring at first. How can a healthy body and relationships and a healthy lifestyle compare with the drama of addiction, getting fired, screaming fights, and getting high on drugs that used to work for you but don’t anymore?

Recovery cannot compete with the adrenaline rush of addiction, at least not at first. If we are going to replace addictive habits of over busying our lives, eating to cover our uncomfortable emotions, seeking yet a new, complicated Answer to All Our Problems–oh, we can distract ourselves forever.

Surrendering to the Power of Simplicity

But when we learn to trust the simple things–smelling flowers, wiggling, hugging a tree, telling the people in our lives precisely what it is about them that we appreciate, singing in the kitchen as we put dishes in the dishwasher and wipe the counters, starting conversations with strangers, writing about the things in our life we are grateful for every day, and let ourselves frolic some every day–when we learn to live in this kind of Simplicity and trust it, our lives are transformed every day. La de dah!

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