The Golden Rule has become a golden calf for most of us.

"Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" is the directive of Jesus, and it contains the seeds of a tremendous mystery. But as the saying is filtered through the popular--and religious-- culture, it ends up as a vacant expression of our own inability to relate to anyone at all.

A mental pruning job is necessary to get at the core of Jesus' meaning.

It's hard to consider the saying without recalling jokes like "He who has the gold rules" or "Do unto others before they do unto you." I think people just like the idea of a "golden rule," so they won't have to remember more than one. I had my own golden rule early in life. It was "Rules are for when brains run out."

That was before I found out God had 613 commandments in the Torah, none of which I could keep. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Perhaps the most galling use of the Golden Rule is its transformation into a self-help success tip, as part of collections like "The Twenty Greatest Rules of Human Relations" and degenerating into things like "The Golden Rule for Direct Marketing."

This started in the late 1800s as a defense against Social Darwinism's suggestion that religious people were ill equipped to make it in the dog-eat-dog jungle of competitive business. A Golden Rule movement arose to claim that Jesus' saying could be a guide for success in capitalism's arena.

Another problem with interpreting the Golden Rule is that literalists quote it without considering some of the absurdities that can result.

A typical conflict is the one encountered by Pete, one of our longtime single members. He often finds himself wanting to "do unto" a female companion who, uh, don't wanna do that.

Or consider Harry and me. I would just as soon forget about my birthday, and all birthdays for that matter. On the other hand, Harry, The Door's advertising and promotions czar, has been known to pay the kids to sing him happy birthday. A strict application of the Golden Rule in our relationship would lead to chaos. (Plus, Harry would get fired.)

In fact, the members of our community are from such diverse backgrounds, the kind of empathy usually asso'iated with the Golden Rule doesn't work. Our former drug addicts and the homeless can't understand the lawyers and businessmen, who can't understand the artists and writers, and nobody can understand people of the opposite gender.

We've tried.

As George Bernard Shaw put it, "Do not do unto others as you would that they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same."

The history of the Golden Rule (where did that name come from anyway?) predates Jesus, of course. It was expressed as a motto to guide any conventional system of ethics, either in its negative form by Confucius and Buddhist, Hindu and Zoroastrian sages, or in reference only to friends, as in Aristotle's writings: "We should behave to our friends as we would wish our friends to behave toward us."

Jesus' statement was a commentary on Leviticus 19:18, "Love your neighbor as yourself."

Some Jewish teaching, interpreting that verse, forbade people to hate their enemies and required them to behave in the same way toward sinners and the righteous. Rabbi Hillel added the negative command, "What is hateful to you, do not to your fellow men."

Jesus, as was his habit, pushed the rule from an outward form of behavior to the inward reality that can't be faked. He returned to the original intent and applied it not only to friends, but to enemies. In effect, he made "Do unto others" undoable with our own resources.

The Golden Rule is not something we can achieve. Rather it is a constant reminder of our need to repent. Our inability to relate to others according to the Golden Rule creates the only condition in which that kind of relationship might be possible--our own repentance.

The Golden Rule as Jesus put it wasn't meant to be an appliance company's slogan or even "a moral ladder for all humankind" as philosophers would have it. Like the rest of the Sermon on the Mount, it was a description of life in the Kingdom of God. If there's no king, it doesn't work.

We're just grateful his reign extends to our block.

And to yours.