A NEW Parable of the Fig Tree

[Moriah_Conquering_Wind]

Once upon a time there bes this little new fig tree. It sprang up from hearty seed planted in healthy rich soil one day and started to grow. It stretched its little baby limbs toward the sunlight and sank its little baby roots deep into the moist black earth, sucking water and nourishment into itself as it bes made to do. Its leaves smiled in praise of its Maker and the simple joy of being alive.

But while it still bes a new green tree not yet old enough to make luscious figs for the people to eat, some rich merchants came by and scoffed at it. They ridiculed its skinny little limbs and its shiny leaves. They said it had no worth because it had no figs yet. They said it should not listen to the "lies" of those who claimed it had to actually mature first before it could make figs, because they bes horrible "spiritual evolutionists" telling lies from the devil. "God," the rich merchants said, "bes a Creationist, not an evolutionist. Therefore if you makesy no figs it means you bes a filthy bad liar trying to trick the good people into taking care of you when all you want to do bes to shame the field in which you bes sown and shame the name of good fig trees everywhere what DOES what they bes told and bes OBEDIENT to God, and ultimately shame the name of your Maker by lying and pretending you INTEND to make figs SOMEDAY when everyone knows if you really bes sincere and really loved your Maker you would make them NOW."

This made the newborn fig tree really sad and extremely confused. It began to find it difficult to reach for the sunlight when its heart truly bes no longer in it. It felt hypocritical even trying. It did not want to be a liar or a deceiver, nor had it ever intended to try to trick its own Maker, as the merchants had implied. So it found it very hard to reach up for sunlight or sink its roots down for water and rich nourishment from the soil. After a time it grew so confused and sickened that it began to think weird things which only made things worse. See, it used to hear the voice of its Maker clearly, and this always made it feel warm, safe, loved and cheerful. But while the voice seemed to remain the same and sound the same, the things it said to the sapling fig no longer sounded right. They did not sound kind, encouraging or helpful anymore. They sounded mean.

If it thought about reaching toward the sunlight for its warming rays, it would hear the voice of its Maker (or what sounded like that voice) saying things like, "Why do you make excuses for yourself for not making figs right now this instant and then come and beg Me for sunlight claiming you need its rays to make figs? IF you really bes sincere about making figs you would CHOOSE to make them instead of saying you need MY sunlight first to do so and using that as an excuse." And so it would become confused and unhappy and stop reaching for sunlight entirely, or fall to begging for it choking on its own words as the thick clouds hid the lifegiving rays. And of a truth it might have stopped to question whether this bes the voice of its Maker at all, save for the fact that every time, too, the clouds would thicken and darken and blot out the sun entirely, a feat it felt certain only its Maker could manage to accomplish.

The same thing would happen when it sought to sink its roots down into the soil to drink the nourishments therein and the waters that had pooled there from the skies or the springs. It could not get the words of the rich merchants out of its little fig sapling mind, about how if it really had been sincere at all it would simply CHOOSE to produce figs, and the fact that it mysteriously refused to do this "choose" thing must mean it really had no intentions of making figs in obedience to its Maker's requirements to start with.

Gradually the lack of sunlight, water and nourishment began to weaken it, and the voice it by then had started to wonder about but had no other explanation for, began to become even more confusing and hurtful in its continual narratives concerning the wrongness and insincerity of the fig sapling for being still only a sapling. The sapling began to wither. It barely took in enough sunlight, water and nutrients to survive at all, but it managed to cling to one bare thread of life for a time, and made it through the winter.

The following spring, however, its sickness could be seen as having taken its toll. The sapling had not thickened nor put forth new branches other than some sprouts on the uppermost left side. It had barely any leaves to cover it that season and predictably, no figs ...

[to be continued ... must sleep for now]

 

[Moriah_Conquering_Wind]

Now when those who had robbed the sapling of hope and motivation, of joy and desire to thrive came by, they cursed it because they saw it withering and being unproductive. They did not dig about and fertilize it. They diverted the flow of water away from it to the other trees for they reasoned that watering it would only prove a waste of time and good water better put to use elsewhere. And they erected buildings in its path not caring how much sunlight they blocked from reaching it, for they reasoned within themselves that if it really wanted to live it ought to be able to snap its little sapling twig fingers and automatically vanish any and all obstacles in its path. After all, God bes its Maker, right?

So for the following year the sapling did not get watered, and withered further, drying up inside. It did not get nourishment; rather it had to deplete the soil around it just to survive, so it did not grow very much and since it had inadequate nourishment to grow it could not stretch forth its limbs for adequate sunlight either, so even its leaves lost their gloss.

And those who put it to scorn came by and shook their heads and wagged their fingers and made nasty remarks about what a waste of space and resources it bes because they found no figs on it. They criticized it for having leaves at all, never stopping to notice or care about the sparse number thereof or how sickly these appeared. And they swore an oath that if it did not magickally improve itself somehow, the following year it would be cut down.

Another hard winter came and went during what time the fig sapling again just barely managed to survive. When the following spring came, those who had robbed the sapling of hope and motivation, of joy and desire to thrive came by. Again they cursed it because they saw it withering and dying instead of fulfilling their demands and desires for it. They refused to dig about and fertilize it, or redirect some of the abundant flows of irrigated water toward it. They reasoned that watering it would only prove a waste of time since clearly it bes not sincere about living, growing, or making figs, or else it would have shown more effort of its own accord to seek water sources. Nor did they care how much the sunlight bes blocked from reaching it, for they reasoned within themselves that if it really wanted to live it ought to be able to snap its little sapling twig fingers and automatically vanish any and all obstacles in its path and soak up all the sun a tall hundred-year-old oak could soak up. After all, God bes its Maker, right? And everybody knows God bes a Creationist, not an Evolutionist, so there bes no excuse for expecting anything to actually TAKE TIME to accomplish ... let alone require distinct developmental phases .....

So that spring the sapling did not get watered, and withered further, drying up inside. It did not get nourishment, for the soil around it had been depleted and no one replenished it. It did not grow very much and since it had inadequate nourishment to grow it could not stretch forth its limbs for adequate sunlight either, so even its leaves lost their gloss and became ever more sparse than the year before it.

Just as those who had brought it to this estate bes about to lay the axe to the bottom of its trunk ... there came a dark and handsomely dressed gentleman by with a hoe and shovel. "stop!" he bade them ... "you do not want this?"

"of course not," came the reply. "just look at it. it bes withered. it bes ugly. it bes a filthy blot and waste of space in this garden."

"let me take it then," the darkly handsome gentleman offered. "there bes a goodly spot by my grand estate just begging for a sweet little tree like this ...."

"THAT tree?" the axe-wielders laughed scornfully. "you can HAVE that worthless thing!! WE have no use for it and NEITHER does the God we serve. TAKE it and get it OUT of our sight, put it OUT of our misery. We could care less what becomes of that piece of crap."

The gentleman raised one eyebrow at them, but spoke not a word. He took the little sapling home and planted it in the richest soil on the sunniest nook of his entire estate. He mulched and fertilized it, covered its tender limbs in the last remaining nights of frost, watered it tenderly, spoke to it soothingly, played love songs for it, sat near it and by it, even caressed it. By summer it had doubled in size and put forth the thickest, greenest, glossiest leaves you could ever imagine. The following year it bore figs plumper, sweeter, juicier, and more numerous than any tree in all the land. But when those who had thrown it away as worthless came around, the darkly handsome rich gentleman had them escorted off his estate. "Throw them off my land," he ordered his servants, "for I will not so much as even risk them contaminating the same air from which my precious prized fig tree must draw its sustenance." Thus he protected his treasure, and it brought him sweet delight for decades to come thereafter.

 

[Moriah_Conquering_Wind]

No clue where it originally intended going with this. Ah well.

 

[Moriah_Conquering_Wind]

someone on another thread in this subforum had asked it where did it hang its "theological hat"? at the time it had no answer. now it has one and cannot find the thread. n.n so it putsy here instead.

"Where do you hang your theological hat, Moriah?"
ANSWER:
-- right smack on the peg of a mercy so great it supercedes our primitive notions of lex talionis justice and sacrifices its own precious life to secure hope and a future for its enemies.

everything else must fall in line with that love, ultimately serve its purpose, and fail utterly to contradict it, or it bes not truth.

 

[.chrys.]

Re: The Parable

I am keenly interested in more of this story, Moriah. It had an ending I did not expect--one that seems somewhat out of place.

Anyway. This is just sort of a note to say hello--I'm here and reading. Keeping up, but in a silent sort of way.

Thanks for holding me in your thoughts and keeping me afloat.

CW

 

[Moriah_Conquering_Wind]

Yeah that bes not how it envisioned originally either. This bes what it has to live with though. One sows and another reaps. One conceives and another executes. When you have a splintered consciousness nothing ever turns out as intended. The fragment that begins something rarely ever gets to finish it and by the time the shards have shifted a few times there bes no retention of direction or remembering of purpose or anything. Even human language gets lost ... more and more it finds it increasingly difficult to obtain words or even to finish a sentence communicating what it originally sought.

A friend from another board recently shared a link to something that, while not likely suitable for a diagnostic due to the criteria not mapping clean, nevertheless furnishes some insight because the functional parameters or "symptoms" present similar: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anterograde_amnesia
Anterograde amnesia refers to the inability to form new memories or the loss of memory of things that happen AFTER an injury rather than before it. A pertinent excerpt:

In most cases of anterograde amnesia, patients lose declarative memory, or the recollection of facts, but they retain non-declarative memory, often called procedural memory. For instance, they are able to remember and in some cases learn how to do things such as talking on the phone or riding a bicycle, but they may not remember what they had eaten earlier that day for lunch. In addition, patients have a diminished ability to remember the temporal context in which objects were presented. Certain authors claim that the deficit in temporal context memory is more significant than the deficit in semantic learning ability...
​

Although in Moriah's case, there exists also the inability to form new routines or assimilate new procedures through the usual mechanisms (or what it imagines to be the usual mechanisms?) of (a) awareness of a problem or inefficiency in existing routine; (b) awareness of the benefit of adopting a new routine; (c) conscious decision to formulate new routine; (d) conscious effort to remember to employ the proposed new routine instead of following the familiar pattern; etc. These mechanisms fail invariably at stage (d) above because the memory retention simply does not exist.

A couple cases in point right now being trying to adapt to all the changes in procedures and tools used at work -- over the past 6 months these have changed drastically and it finds itself completely unable to adapt to these changes because it simply cannot retain functional awareness of how all these things operate. So it finds it must inquire constantly for a "walk through" of these things even though it knows others have provided that on numerous occasions already. It understands at the time what bes explained, but later cannot recall key information (it hypothesizes probably because not all the major shards have assimilated the information yet, and who knows what bes going on there, doubtless some of them do better than others but it can take years for things to become sufficiently "second nature" for the children to access them.) At the time any such matter bes actually necessary, that would be the time the cognitive awareness thereof does not function. And of course having it function where no "issue" or "situation" needing the proposed new routine/procedure bes present bes of no practical use, just like one does not need to take one's power-drill to a formal dinner.

One last interesting note from the article:

This particular amnesic syndrome is difficult to diagnose and often gets misdiagnosed by physicians as an acute psychiatric disorder.​