We have the ability to handle all circumstances that have ever been created for all of the creation, which means for everyone and everything. We have the goods within us through the teachings that we have been bringing forward through this church and through John-Roger’s special gifts and abilities that he shared with us over the years. So it’s important that you lay claim to this ability and give that opportunity your patience and trust that all is happening for the good.
When an opportunity comes to you to reject, resist or in some way attempt to cancel or even curse something, consider that there is a grace period. So if you do react, if you do say something that you really know in your wisdom, in your caring, in your kindness you would not say, that you do call it back. Sometimes that means saying to someone, “I’m sorry.” Sometimes that means having compassion for yourself.
One of the John-Roger seminars that I was listening to the other day was about speaking kind words and the importance of making that choice and making that be your character. Consider that your kindness is what comes from your way of being. You can choose to demonstrate your kindness to others in your words and actions. You can also demonstrate your kindness and compassion through your willingness to share.
Our generosity is our willingness to give more than we receive, to be the first to offer to assist when there is a need for a volunteer. Giving is also about being the one to be the first to let go, to forgive and forget about something that happened, to no longer hold a burden or something hard that gets lodged in our heart in againstness.
I am reminded that Jesus was asked about what is the greatest commandment. When you read in the scriptures, Jesus referred to something that was spoken before his time. He spoke of how we are to love the Lord God with all our body, mind and spirit [Matthew 22.37]. This commandment is the greatest commandment.
If you are going to do the work of God, you love it all. You love your employer. You love your work because by our works we are known. Our works are what carry the message of our life. It’s actually not just our works. It’s also our actions.
Jesus also pointed out when you’ve done it in your mind, whatever it is, then that carries forward. So if you sinned in your thoughts, it is as if you have sinned in your deeds, in your actions.
When I first heard that message, I immediately felt like, “I’m a goner. I don’t know how to work that out because I get some strange thoughts at times.” And that’s still true. Thank God we are not responsible for what comes into our mind. But we are responsible for what we keep in our minds. So choose wisely what you focus upon.
I remember a Christmas morning from when I was a child. I had been asking for a BB gun for about five years. Every year I heard from my parents, “You’re too young,” etc. On that particular Christmas morning, I decided to open up the presents early. I tried to cover it up so it didn’t look like the gifts had been opened.
I knew I was in trouble when I started opening up my brother’s presents and my sister’s presents, and I found myself thinking about trading the presents or something along those lines. Then I found one present, and I opened it up and discovered inside a BB gun.
And it came with some BBs. That was an experience of being led into temptation because then I didn’t just want to know about the BB gun, I wanted to shoot it.
The interesting thing about the gun was that it was a new model that I hadn’t seen before. Some of my friends had other models. So I couldn’t figure out how to load it based on what I knew about their BB guns. At some point, I was trying to pour the BBs down the barrel. Then there was a thing on the end of the barrel that you screw in — I think you can get the idea of where this is going.
I broke the BB gun, of course. I didn’t even get off one shot. Then I said to myself, “How am I going to cover this up?” So I did a pretty bad job of rewrapping, but I blamed it on the cat. That actually worked. Then I acted very innocent about why the gun wouldn’t work. I was trying to get my Dad to help, and he said, “I don’t know. Did you read the instructions?” I said, “No.” At least that part was true.
Whatever my dad and I did, we weren’t able to get the BB gun to work. So we took it to the store where he had bought it. Then I got a chance to tell a story, “We just opened it up and it wouldn’t work.”
The salesman got out a flashlight, and he looked down the barrel. He said, “There’s some damage to the valve.” The gun was basically busted. Actually, it wasn’t just busted. You could see the metal was twisted. So no matter what I did or said, the salesman just knew. He kept repeating, “We did not sell this gun to you in this state” and “You did this or somebody did this, but we cannot take it back.” So that was my last BB gun.
Years later, when I was a State Park Ranger in California, I had a gun issued to me. And I became the first Park Ranger to ever fire a weapon during duty. So that was another experience about how our lives come forward in ways that aren’t necessarily what we want or expect. It turned out well, though. Nobody got hurt. I just shot at a car. And I was so thankful that I didn’t hurt anybody.
Somebody had been driving recklessly on the beach. They didn’t stop when we turned on our Park Ranger Jeep’s red lights. So it was considered resisting arrest. If you’ve seen those car chase scenes in movies or on television, it was a long car chase. We called in and reported the situation to our headquarters. Back then, we didn’t have helicopters with cameras or we would have been on TV because there was a full-on chase.
There was no chance of us catching up to the driver because we were driving a four-wheel drive jeep and he was driving a pretty hoppedup road runner. But then he kind of erred or something like that. He turned down a residential street where there was basically a dead end, and then he did like a 360 and spun out. That’s when my partner said, “Felony stop!” which is kind of code for, “Draw your weapon.” My partner was an ex-marine and an ex-sheriff, so he had a lot of training to back it up. I was just a young pip squeak. I think I was about 21 years old at that point.
We did this official stop, and the next thing I knew the driver was basically flooring his car. He was about fifteen feet away from me, and he came right at me with his car. The next thing I knew I was doing a little dance to get out of the way, and then the next thing I knew was that I was consciously going to fire the gun. But there wasn’t anything to justify my doing so.
If you know the way the law works, the law says that if your life is threatened, then you can use lethal force to protect yourself. But once that lethal force passes by, then it is no longer justified to use lethal force, which is what happened.
At that moment, I knew the gun was going to go off. Then I remember consciously lowering the gun because I realized the gun was going to go off. So I lowered the gun and then it went off. Later, I found out that the bullet had gone into the trunk. It was fortunate because the guy had suitcases full of stuff in the trunk of his car so that the bullet went through the trunk and lodged in the suitcase. And no one was hurt.
I had an opportunity to interview, or some people might call it interrogate, the young man who drove the car. It turned out he was AWOL, which means “Absent Without Leave,” from his Naval Unit on the east coast. His story went that he found out that his girlfriend was breaking up with him, and he had driven non-stop across the country to see her. He had taken whatever medication would allow him to do that drive, so he was rather hopped up by the time he got where we were. Then the guy apologized to me. “I should be on a morgue slab right now,” he said.
I remember I said to him, “No, no, that would really be a very terrible outcome.” Then I told him, “I want you to know I did not want to shoot you, and I am just glad I did not shoot you. The best thing I can tell you is I was shooting the car. That’s really what I was doing, even though my training would say I shouldn’t have done that.” My training specifically said, “Don’t shoot out tires. Don’t do the things you see on TV,” which is funny because I grew up as a TV child. I was watching TV all my life. So I realized I had to sort of retrain myself because I’d been watching people shoot out the tires in chase scenes all those years, which was in a sense my training.
The driver and I had this moment then which was to me a Christ moment. There was complete forgiveness even though at the time I didn’t know how to articulate it. I felt tremendous love and compassion for him. He said, “But I wanted you to shoot me, because I have no meaning in my life right now.” That felt really powerful because I had felt the temptation. I feel like I was blessed to deflect it because I really was trained with the message, “You shoot to kill.”
Before that incident, guess what I had told my supervisor? I said, “I don’t want to carry a weapon.” My supervisor had worked in the military intelligence community so he knew a lot of things like SEALS know or Special Forces know, and also he was an ex-Marine on top of that. So I was working with people that were practiced and very experienced with how to confront a violent situation like that one. I was told that I had to carry a gun.
I said, “I want to appeal that. I don’t want to carry a weapon. I’ll do my job. I’ll do it like a bobby does it in England or something so that I don’t have to carry a gun. I’ll just arrest people like physically, manually. I’ll be a tough guy or something like that.”
My supervisors told me, “You can’t because then your fellow Park Rangers will be in jeopardy because you don’t really have the willingness to do your job. And your job is to protect public safety. So if you are not willing to carry the weapon, then you must resign.” That’s what I was told.
This experience was like a kind of convergence in my life. I became the first Park Ranger on duty to fire a weapon in all of the State of California. Then because we had done some things that weren’t quite to policy, we were put through the equivalent of a Court Marshall. That involved a formal hearing with a judge and evidence and testimony from the Highway Patrol and other Police Officers about how to handle a situation in a high speed pursuit, and what are the things that are safe and what are the things that are reckless and uncalled for.
The review of my case along with my partner’s actions of driving off of State Park Property were cited as violations that were called, “Willful Disobedience.” In my own integrity, I understood I violated the policy of my Peace Officer Standard Training. I knew exactly what the policy was, and if I’d shot the weapon when he was coming at me with the car, I was justified.
There was a guy that had come down from State Park headquarters in Sacramento who was part of State Investigation. He put his arm around me and said, “You know, if it was me, that guy would be dead. I would’ve taken him out.” He said something like, “You shouldn’t feel too bad, but when you shot the gun it is kind of a problem because it was a little late. You’ve got to be quicker on the draw there.”
At that point, I knew my days were numbered as a Park Ranger. In any case, I didn’t have agreement within myself that this was willful disobedience because I didn’t willfully, consciously want to do what I did. I knew I did not want to fire the weapon. It was a reaction. It’s as though I couldn’t stop myself. In some level, I was reacting unconsciously.
They still decided to go through with the hearing. I heard the testimony of the other officers of the law that didn’t work in my department, including the Highway Patrol, Sheriffs and Police Department officers. They were brought in to give testimony about how they would handle such a situation. Essentially, they said that the State Department of Parks and Recreation had no business in law enforcement because they really didn’t understand the responsibility and the intensity of a situation like this. They testified that you really need to understand that you are dealing with human beings. And even though you have policies, at times you need to look at what was behind it and what was the intention. They said you have to consider if the action was really out of alignment in terms of what the person or the officer was doing. So the bottom line was I was absolved.
More important than the result of the hearing was that as I walked into the courtroom that day before the hearing began, I had one of the most powerful spiritual experiences of my life. On the first day of that hearing, this peace came over me. And I mean that literally. It was as if a bucket of “peace juice” poured over me, and I just went calm. Then I became alert, so alert that I felt like my mind was completely switched on. And yet I had no negative concern whatsoever. That experience of the peace at that moment was the most significant thing about the whole event. I was left with a deep curiosity to learn more about that profound energy that poured into me.
I now know about that experience because I have met up with it quite often since then. In fact, I seek it out. It is the beloved of God that walks with us in every breath.
We are all being raised up as children of God, and this is a perfect world that we are in for our learning, upliftment and growth. It is perfect for what we need as experiences, and they do often challenge us because that’s how we learn. We are put into positions where it can be awkward. It can be surprising and unexpected. Then we observe ourselves and ask, “How did we respond?” and “What consciousness came forward in us?” I understood that there was some kind of convergent moment there with that young man who had gone AWOL such that I felt complete compassion for him.
I understood what it was to love somebody and feel hurt at what they said and did. I know we all have these moments when this presence, this bucket of peace, this bucket of joy comes in. The Christ’s love is poured upon, within and through us.
With the things that continue to go on in our world, it seems to me there is always something to challenge us. You’ve probably heard me refer to my Mom because she used to say over and over, “It’s always something!” There is always something for us to respond to with our peace, our compassion, and our joy. There is always an opportunity to bring forward the Christ within through our friendship and our love for one another.
Our body, our consciousness is a house of the Lord. And when we are asked, as it notes in scripture, “Who do we say that we serve? For me and my house, we serve the Lord” [Joshua 24:15].
Baruch Bashan
John Morton
