Just One Thing...

You know, yes you do, too much of religion is wrapped up in trying to tell each one of us how to behave.  How to be acceptable...to God, and to the particular religion offering the moral guidance.  What we ought to do and what we ought not to do.

Don't get me wrong here, I ain't against ethics and morality and doing the right thing.  But doing the right thing shouldn't oughta be that dang complicated.

In my faith-tradition (Christianity), it would seem that even Jesus got a bit taxed over all the rules and regulations and protocols that had somehow taken on "sacred" status in his day.  When asked which of the rules and regs were the most important...and how one might go about not breaking any of the "Thou shalt nots," he offered that what was needed was to simply love God and love neighbor. 

Now "simply" is a slippery and difficult word in the above sentence...and its my word, there is no record of Jesus having used it in his pronouncement.  But "loving God and loving neighbor" is pretty simple compared to all the other moral observances some of his critics were wanting him to agree to.

This line from Kurt Vonnegut's God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater comes as part of a baptismal speech the protagonist says he's planning for his neighbors' twins: "Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you've got to be kind."

I am not trying to one-up anything Jesus said, but I am trying to suggest, without religious trappings, what One Thing might be necessary for we human folk to practice in order to make this time and place in which we live a better time and place than it otherwise might be.

 

This might be another "One Thing" that would serve as well as Vonnegut's "Be Kind."

 

Or maybe this would work: "Be Good."  That's just a slight variation on either "Be Kind" or "Take Care."

Of course, Jesus' two rules are really just one, when you get right down to it: "Love."

Now there's a mantra we would all do well to engage in every now and then:
"Be Kind.  Take Care.  Be Good.  Love."

Its not a simple One Thing, but we all know it when we see it, huh?