Am I a Celibate Vegan Proto-Catholic Sinner, Saint or Both?

6:48 AM Wednesday.

I just woke up from a powerful dream, which felt like a teaching from Adonai, and before I do anything else I need to go back to the beginning of my thought upon awakening and see if I can capture the gist of it.

Okay, right. It was a conviction that the gripping testimony I heard from Chuck Sugarman in an MJTI Panim el Panim Zoom Class last night was a profound spiritual gift, and that the Torah has two sides, perhaps like the Jewish man himself, a yetzer hara and yetzer tov. Does the Torah have a destructive aspect and a creative aspect, like holy fire from Sinai? Does the entire body of the ecclesia have these two sides, a sinful side and a righteous side, a destructive aspect and a creative aspect, even after transformative encounters with Yeshua and the resilience of Jewish peoplehood turn our lives around? 

There is a part of me that feels like I am more of a saint now than I was before I wound up on a mental health unit in the Albany County jail back in 2019. But is this part of me that now feels like a born-again celibate saint (at least relative to my prior life) a healthy spiritual ego, or a prideful false ego? What about my veganism - is there an attitude of sinful pride that I still have about that? What about my blogging? Am I projecting European American white male arrogance when I blog, or interfaith decolonial androgynous antiracist humility? From a Catholic perspective, which I hold in high esteem, even though I have not converted, it's important that I bring the sacraments into my life, including the sacrament of reconciliation. Until then, I cannot be living in a state of grace. From an interfaith perspective, the situation is different. Here I wonder what Messianic Jewish rabbis think about teshuvah, grace, and sin. Do we constantly get soiled with sin, is teshuvah the way we clean ourselves up, and is grace the state we live in for a while until we start to accumulate so much impurity that Hashem sends us another reminder to repent?

Chuck's courageous and courage-inspiring testimony also has me thinking about the similarities and the differences between a fear of Hashem that turns us to teshuvah (with or without a faith in Yeshua), and the fear of death that can turn us into cowards and shirkers. This is a major issue in Israel in terms of conscientious objection to military service, and how that might apply or not apply to the Haredim in whole or part. I often wonder what I would do if I knew all that I know now and was living as a young Haredi or Messianic Jew in Israel. Would I answer the call to serve in the IDF, or would I be a conscientious objector? I wanted to ask Chuck this question, too, but it only came to me upon awakening. This much, thanks to the gift of Chuck's testimony, I can say about myself: I am in part a serving patriot for the Commonwealth of Israel (as I think Rabbi Dr. Mark Kinzer would define it), I am in part a conscientious objector, and I am in part a draft dodger. In other words, I am definitely still very much a sinner and a work in progress.

End 9:38 AM.