nccotus

first of all it helps with chronic pain issues. It also significantly relieves anxiety. It helps breathing in such a curious way. With asthma and bronchitis it supplies oxygen by enabling the draw when your breathing is in crisis. Works for me all the time. In Florida years ago I was having mini heart attacks all of the time and cigarettes were the first line of defense.

the downside is the odor and, obviously, the harm to others by the ambient smoke in a way I didn’t count the cost of in a real way at the time. My son finally picked me up in my chair and forced me out of the kitchen door onto the deck. I finally took the message that day. It was the beginning of the end of our family. I guess it was already over.

I do so apologize.

I couldn’t have stayed living without it. I did actually quit in 2003 but it didn’t last. I went 3weeks without sleep and wound up on a psych ward. My GI system went into failure. I was in an ambulatory coma for four years after that and I was smoking four packs a day.

This is about the danger I mentioned in my last post about smoking: about suppressing a habitual smoker. My family endorsed the habit and then cut me off of it, I was desperate to quit but couldn’t.

it was a trammeled situation all along starting at a boarding school where it was illegal but fashionable for four years. I guess I was unconsciously recreating that situation at Harvard by asking for non-smoking roommates.

I the cottage at my father’s place, Springstone Hollow, I was visited by a presence, I continue to assume it was God, saying that my smoking was “unguent and appealing” to Him. I assumed that it was probably a plank that was going to lead to his stopping it.

instead He has led me to step out not only to defend smokers rights but to endorse smoking as a sign of the Holy Spirit, His holy fire! I said it yesterday to the Protestant minister who comes here and he did not argue with me about it. This morning I got stuck holding onto this in a way that I did not anticipate as I clicked my Bic and the flame went broad. I thought, what am I in for?!!

but I see that as the curious denouement of that moment in the cottage. They didn’t have smoking in Jesus’s time and place. They did have wine, beer, and spirits and people were permitted to enjoy all of them. In the meantime, natives here in the Americas were using tobacco to enhance good “medicine”: wisdom and peace in tribal gatherings. All the while as the civilization in Rome was celebrating a more highly developed culture. What about coffee? I just googled it and there was no coffee in Rome in Jesus day either. It is a lovely complement to cigarettes. A lot of Christians love their coffee to excess because it is permitted.

So, is cigarette smoking divinely recommended?

jesus is God; maybe we need the help of aliens to settle this.