Universalism

“What are your thoughts on universalism?”

Universalism: a doctrine whereby all people "go to Heaven when they die”.  It is a doctrine that presupposes a definition of both salvation and an afterlife.  In my personal theology, to “be saved”, to “enter the Kingdom of Heaven/God”, or any of those Christian buzz-phrases is closer in meaning “enlightenment” than anything to do with an afterlife.

I believe in the eternal soul but not necessarily in the individual ego that is attached to the soul during a physical lifetime.  Rationally, I’m more inclined to subscribe to a reincarnation of soul through multiple lifetimes with different individual egos than the usual Christian story of individual egos/souls in unchanging eternal torment or adulation of the deity.  So, “to go to Heaven when I die” has a whole different meaning for me now than it did when I was an Evangelical.  

Regardless of what happens to my individual ego after my physical death, I believe that salvation is something that happens in this lifetime.  I use salvation in its more literary connotation of a transformation from one state of perpetual darkness, closed-mindedness, psychological suffering, or selfishness, to a state of compassion, broad vision, service, and enlightenment. Will everyone be saved? That is, will everyone move from a state of selfishness and suffering to a state of compassion and service?  Clearly, one needs only to look around at how many people live and die in a state of selfishness to see that to be untrue. 

Can everyone be saved? Is there anyone for whom enlightenment and transformation is not possible? In this sense, I believe in a doctrine of universalism.  I believe everyone has an equal opportunity to be enlightened, to experience grace, to raise his consciousness.  No one who is willing to commit to the process of transformation will be denied.  Will everyone notice the many opportunities to experience grace in their day?  Of course not.  But everyone, everywhere, everyday has a thousand moments of grace, opportunities to choose compassion over selfishness, and to see manifestations of love and life in the midst of evil and destruction.

At this point, a doctrine of reincarnation becomes desirable and logical.  If one’s theology begins with a loving God creating humanity for companionship, then it is only reasonable to believe that such a God would provide endless opportunities for his eternal companions to reach a place where they can have both a knowledge of Good and Evil and the capacity not to be limited by that duality—in other words, to be able to think/feel/be like God.  A friend recently supported her Christian belief in reincarnation this way:  "if souls are forever, existing in eternity past and eternity future, why would anyone want to limit them to a single lifetime in which to understand spiritual mysteries?  That’s like having a child and then if they haven’t got life figured out by age five, you kick them to the street."

Most theories of reincarnation presuppose a continued connection between the soul and the individual ego (to a greater or lesser degree) and hinge on this very concept of many chances to “get it right” as well as the presupposition of a loving (and only loving) God.  While I have experienced in my visions the immense and total love of God, my reason still convinces me that God is more nuanced than to be only on the Love end of any polarity.  I am absolutely convinced that every conceivable duality is only a mental construct. Each pole of every duality contains and produces its opposite and that the whole meme is a sum greater than its parts.  Therefore, logically, rationally, I have to accept a God that somehow transcends moral definition of loving or fearful, even transcends a morality and somehow includes loving and fearful.  The mystery of God, in my personal theology, includes both Love and Fear yet transcends them so completely as to make such distinction all but irrelevant.  How that can be, of course, is what makes it a mystery.

But any good theologian won’t just leave it all there as mystery. It’s a cop-out. Mystery is all well and good and thoroughly Truth, but damn hard to live well.  How does one live the question of universalism?  How to live in our single known finite physical lifetime with an awareness of all humanity living in a state of potential? For that is what grace is—the moment when potential become transformative action.  How do we treat our fellow man, all our brothers and sisters in humanity, as equally owning this opportunity for enlightenment, transformation, salvation? Doctrine without praxis is useless. Faith without works is dead.

I think it requires our own “conversion experience”, a moment (or lifetime of moments) in which we become aware of grace in our own souls.  Without a sense of our own psychological or spiritual suffering and a transcendence of that suffering into compassion, we cannot see the Divine in all people. Some people refer to this shift in awareness as being able to “see with God’s eyes”.  Until we have met God within ourselves, we can never truly see God within others nor treat them accordingly with the justice and kindness they deserve.

Must this conversion experience or salvation occur within the Christian paradigm? I.e., must everyone “call upon the name of Jesus to be saved”?  Certainly there are those who preach that dogma, denying even the possibility of universalism. I think that is an unnecessarily limited reading of Christian Scripture and seems to limit ridiculously the companionship for God.  Rationally, it seems absurd:  similarly to the argument for reincarnation but on a one-lifetime-only scale, why would God create humanity for companionship but limit its possibility to a tiny fraction of the world’s population?

Again, theologians claim “the mystery of God”.  (On a side note: my experience with fundamentalist thinkers is that they will claim “mystery” whenever they come up against an irreconcilable tangent of their own doctrine rather than struggle through it.) I’m content with mystery as long as it is mystery that leads one into greater communion with the Divine and greater service of humanity.  For me, a doctrine of universalism, either through reincarnation or otherwise, makes me much more aware of grace, gives me a deeper appreciation of my God, and a wider capacity to love my fellow man.  As I see it, a doctrine of “born-again Christianity” as the only means of “salvation” lead to a sense of elitism, prejudice, and hypocrisy, and a condescension and patronization of those I considered “unsaved”. 

In my final analysis, the measure of Truth for any person is how well it encourages that person to Love God and Love Neighbor.  Regardless of how the Truth is articulated, whether in language of universalism or exclusion, if it draws the follower into a place of more Love, then it is Truth.  If, no matter how it is articulated, a doctrine causes hate and discontent among followers, then it is evil.

 _____________________________________

I wrote this post entirely from my own meditations and contemplation of the relevant ideas.  It wasn't until I went searching for images to attach to the post that I found this article:

http://www.relevantmagazine.com/god/deeper-walk/features/18208-is-jesus-the-only-way

I totally disagree with the conclusion but it raises many of the necessary questions one must consider when one contemplates universalism.  This topic is very difficult to address because it is hardly the simple question that it seems: one constantly trips over one's presuppositions and assumptions based on our increasingly limited interpretations of the Bible.  I think this article notes many of these presuppositions without even being aware of how they limit the possible conclusions.

On Suffering I: If Not I, Then Who?

“No one deserves to live that way.” [comment to “A View from the Abyss”]

I am humbled and grateful for the quality of compassion that motivated the above commenter’s declaration and, in its literal statement, I agree with it.  No one deserves to live in the state of terror, darkness, anger, futility and resignation that I experience while staring into the Abyss, no longer even clawing desparately to hang on to the edge of sanity.  However, what is usually meant when people say “no one deserves to live” in any given manner, is that no one ought to live in that manner.  Yet, most of those conditions so decried are necessary within the range of human existence: there will always be abject poverty, war, evil, greed, and psycho-spiritual instability.  Without them, our humanity would be a meaningless single dimension.  (I am not saying that striving to improve the human condition is a bad thing; in fact, I think it is our very striving to eradicate many of these conditions that we find a state of grace.)

Staring into the Abyss, acknowledging death, experiencing eternity in the endless space between heartbeats, is a necessity that gives depth of meaning to the rest of human life.  The question ceases to be “why me?” and becomes instead “why not me?”  If someone must travel the darkness, better that it be I and not someone else.  I would not curse anyone else with my experiences, yet I am grateful for the blessedness of having experienced them.

Is that an absurd contradiction? Of course, all the mysteries are absurd.

Knowledge of Good and Evil

I dreamed of holocaust and genocide last night.  Recently, I’ve been staring again into my own personal Abyss.  I guess now I’ve moved to staring into the communal Abyss of all humanity.  Whence comes man’s inhumanity to man? That very phrase implies that the evil perpetrated person to person is something intrinsically not human. It seems, however, that the perpetration of evil is specifically a human quality.  

Animals, to my knowledge, to do not engineer genocide, although they may murder, bully, and rape in maintaining social order or in a battle for territory. Animals, according to current research, commit personal atrocities as a means to an end but only people commit large-scale, tribal atrocities as ends to themselves.  At the opposite end of the spectrum, while animals may act with individual altruism in order to benefit the group, only people show any willingness to martyr themselves for ideology (a fact exploited by those engineering atrocity). 

Both poles of the human dichotomy, atrocity and martyrdom, can result only from the same aspect of humanity that I think is the defining separation of man and animal: self-consciousness. Self-consciousness is a sense of separateness from the rest of the world. 

There is no conclusive research on whether animals are self-conscious; certainly, they are aware of themselves—that my dog can be embarrassed when I talk about him is proof enough for me—but even animals that have been taught to sign do not refer to themselves in the first person.  They use the third person or call themselves by name. Human children commonly develop this sense around the third birthday, maybe a few months later.  They will start to use the word I to reference the self. 

Similarly, there seems to be no indication that animals have any sense of existentialism, that is, awareness that one day they will die (this is different than an end-of-life awareness of impending death).  Human children come to this awareness around age nine.  My elder daughter was 8½.  We were listening to the soundtrack to Ella Enchanted, and she was singing along.  She sang the first line of a song “every day, you die a little”, when abruptly she stopped singing, and ever so seriously informed me, “That’s true, you know.  Every day you live is one day sooner that you will die.”

I suspect that it is this existential self-consciousness that allows for both atrocity and ideological altruism.  To know that we are dying is terrifying, deeply and viscerally frightening to the human psyche. Life is a fragile and uncertain proposition.  Whether studied from the perspective of biology, chemistry, poetry, psychology, agriculture, philosophy, economics or religion, the deeper the subject is mined, the more clear the fragility and uncertainties.  It's all a crapshoot and then you die. That very knowledge demands that life become meaningful.  Why do we live, if only to die? We have a will to meaning—a drive innate within us to derive meaning from our lives (c.f. Viktor Frankl and the Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy). If we cannot extract meaning and purpose from our lives, we will go insane.  

When the only certainty in life is death, uncertainty becomes the defining characteristic of Life.  Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle is Pascal’s “God-shaped Vacuum” into which is sucked every possible kind of meaning: tribalism, hedonism, greed, hierarchy, lust, imperialism, socialism, altruism, theism—and all are present and active in every religion in the world.

So few of us have the courage to acknowledge death, to create meaning, to accept uncertainty. We would prefer instead to expend our enormous psychic energies on denying the one certainty we have by inventing elaborate theories and formulae to simulate certainty.  Even simpler is to accept the theories and formulae of people we deem more willing than we to have looked into the Abyss (though we rarely check this sort of credential in deciding the credibility of our experts). And even more common than anything else is the tendency to abuse substances, behaviors, religions or other people to deny even the fear we feel at the uncertainty of Life.

Anyone who has looked into the Abyss and come away (too often people venture willingly or unwillingly into the Abyss and, in their terror, they get stuck there—our modern religious, medical, and psychiatric professions are more likely to ensure the stuckness rather than facilitating a return) has one other certainty in Life.  That Love exists.  That Love matters. Whether called Love, God, Allah, Light, OM, Brahman, or All/Nothing, whether found through science, religion, mysticism, or poetry, this succoring, sublime, transcendent Ineffability suffuses the Universe, both physical and psychic.  And that Love trumps existentialism in aeternum.

Perfectionism III: Thanksgiving Dinner

Oyster Stew

Rocket Salad with Pear, Pine Nuts and Beetroot

Cider-brined Roast Turkey with Sausage-Fennel-Crouton Stuffing

Wild Rice Risotto with Cranberry and Mushroom

Mashed Red Potatoes with Giblet Gravy

Sweet Potatoes Roasted with Figs, Shallots, and Pecans

Grilled Brussels Sprouts in Balsamic Vinaigrette

Sautéed Green Beans with Hazelnuts

Hot Red Cabbage and Apples

Maple-Glazed Carrots

Ambrosia Salad with Marshmallows and Mandarins

Cornbread and Butter

Cranberry Orange Chutney

Olive Tray

Radishes

Assorted Pickled Vegetables

Pumpkin Pie

Apple Cobbler

Chef Kee’s Cheesecake with Sour Cream Sauce or Pomegranate Sauce

Cranberry Bread

Fresh, Candied or Salt and Pepper Nuts

Apples, Oranges, Pomegranates

Assorted Cheeses

Hard Cider

Sparkling Cider

Chateau St. Michelle Wines

Mineral Water

Coffee

As a confirmed foodie, the annual food orgy in late November is my holiday. During my teen and college years, I lived close enough to my grandmother to celebrate Thanksgiving at her house.  Early in that decade-and-a-half, we feasted with grandparents, a great-grandmother, a great-aunt and uncle, and at least a half-dozen assorted cousins of my grandfather, along with the five of us in our family. My mother’s family history abounds in childless or single-child families so the gathering was heavy in WWII generation and I and my siblings the only children. 

My grandmother provided a meal whose tables truly groaned from the weight of the many dishes.  My father jokes that my grandma didn’t think a holiday was rightly celebrated “unless there were 93 sides dishes”. With so many celebrants, groaning tables were quickly demolished. As the older generation of relatives died off, Grandma continued to cook in the same variety and quantity for fewer of us.  We stepped up to the challenge and continued to consume prodigious amounts of food.  The holiday became for me a festival of bounty, manifest in gratuitous variation of edibles.

Because I love to eat, I learned to cook and Thanksgiving is a made-to-order opportunity to indulge.  My family of creation, however, is not nearly as passionate about food as I am.  Unless I insist, we eat boring, busy-suburban-family meals-on-the-run. When I did insist, I would pull out all the stops.  I made far too many dishes of kinds not much appreciated by my family but that I wanted to eat.  And, of course, in my perfectionism, I tried much too hard, took on far more than I could reasonably handle alone, so that always at least one dish was ruined and the meal never met my expectations.  I was grumpy and irritable long before sitting down to eat.

When I got sick, making even daily meals became too much for me and we spent over a year without celebrating any holidays at our own house.  Since summer of 2007, I’ve only made one holiday feast.  Last year, I finally agreed with my husband’s declaration that what it costs me to attempt a full-hoopla holiday is just not worth the effort.  We decided that I would pick one holiday a year to go all out with food and trimmings.  Naturally, I chose Thanksgiving since it is the only holiday strictly about the Eats. 

I found it a relief, oddly, to know that there would be once a year when our house was the destination feast.  We would invite guests (something else my family dislikes), make loads of food, and no one would complain because it was only once a year.  So, last year, that’s what we did and I loved it.  This year, however, I’ve been sicker than I was last fall and then I complicated the issue by going to a conference in Vancouver last weekend.  The conference was the first official, organized educational attempt I’ve made since the conference in 2007 when I first realized how sick I really was becoming. It took way more out of me than it seemed to deserve—just the travel left me huddled in bed, shaking and incapacitated, by six that night and required the whole next day to rest and recuperate while the family saw the sights.

Needless to say (although I was the last to admit it), any kind of effort at all was more than I could manage this Thanksgiving.  I left the entire day to the rest of the family to plan and execute.  The girls only wanted sandwiches made with deli-processed turkey on their icky sandwich bread and “stuffing from a box”. 

The other evening as I lay resting with my feet up (amazing how much difference that posture makes in handling chronic fatigue), I began writing a fantasy menu.  Of course, everyone in the family ridiculed it—when a foodie lives with non-foodies, it is given that no understands the power of simply thinking about good food.  One daughter asked if this list was all the food I wanted to eat that I hoped someone would make for me; she thought it was a joke but she hit the nail on the head. 

So I share it here in hopes that another misunderstood foodie enjoys the Thanksgiving wishes in every dish.  I am thankful today for my readers.  And for my husband who understands me enough not to serve me a kid’s sandwich and was willing to plan, shop, and prepare a real turkey breast, a spiral ham, chips, shrimp starters, some decent bread, and all the sandwich accessories.

A View From the Abyss

"I tried so hard to do and think all the Right Stuff and now I’ve spent the last three years unable to function to anyone’s expectations, much less everyone’s.  When I attempt too much, my body starts to give out.  And should I not pay sufficient attention, my mind goes—the black holes in there take over more and more of my cognitive function. I extended myself no grace for failure all those years and now I lack grace of gait and thought, a lurching facility of deed and word." (here)

After I posted these words six weeks ago, I hoped this admission and the victorious declaration that followed would become truth for having been stated.  When that expectation did not become my experience, oh, how I crawled like Jonah into my little hovel to hold close my misery and chant my “woe-is-me’s”.

“Just kill me now, LORD! I'd rather be dead than alive if what I predicted will not happen."  (Jonah 4:3, New Living Translation) 

The weather here has finally turned to fall.  From unseasonable daytime highs of 90F/42C when November began, we are belatedly getting to temperatures around 70F/22C.  The lower temps have been great for my physical well-being.  Part of the mess I’ve been in this year stems from the fact that my autonomic nervous system is wildly dysfunctional.  Among other effects of this dysfunction is an inability to tolerate heat (or cold, but that is not so often a problem here in the desert).  Having accomplished so much healing spiritually and physically last fall and winter, I was entirely unprepared for how much this summer’s heat would debilitate me. 

The real kicker of the year, though, was what I did to myself.  Late last spring our Medical Benefits Account managers decided that the supplement protocol I was buying for my condition was no longer an approved expense.  Neither is it covered by my insurance so my remedies had to start coming out of our regular monthly budget.  And that is very hard for me to do.

Allowing myself and my healing process to rank high enough on the list of priority spending is all but impossible when it means admitting that I am actually sick and not just lazy or malingering, and that I deserve to spend money on my health even if it means the sacrifices will be some of my girls’ educational or extracurricular activities, or the family’s groceries.  The martyred mother archetype has been ingrained in me by our culture, my childhood religion, and the immediate example of my mother’s own early death. Like the Good Mother, the self-sacrificing, self-martyring, Holy Mutha’ that I am, I rarely place refilling my supplement protocol above near-bottom of our budget.

I let my remedies run down, didn’t refill them promptly or at all.  By October, I was completely off all my supplements and my triumph-over-perfectionism post marked the last-ditch effort to pull myself out of the abyss by willpower alone.  Unsurprisingly, it didn’t work against the physical dysfunctions of my body and brain.  A week later, I found myself sobbing uncontrollably in the bathtub while my husband begged me to get help.  I scared my family but I scared myself even more because I was already thinking favorably about a Final Solution.  My usual injunctions against suicide, with appeals to familial obligation, leaving my children motherless, left me untouched.  And that terrified me.

I told my husband that I still don’t trust anyone not to make me worse (as has been the case with the overwhelming majority of professionals whose help I have sought over the years).  I already know the remedies I need, I just can’t make myself order them regularly.  It was an enormous effort on my part, much greater than it would seem from reading these words, to ask my husband for his help.  I simply need someone to make sure that I treat myself with the same care that I would give a client—monthly follow-ups and adjustments to protocols—and to check that I’ve actually ordered the remedies.

So I’ve been back on my protocol for a month.  Although the first doses pulled me back from the very precipice, it had taken most of these weeks to feel as though I’m not within stepping distance of the Abyss.  It has been hard to admit that I really cannot control my life, my body, my health or well-being by sheer will-power.  That there are conditions that a “suck it up and get on with things” attitude simply cannot overcome.  That I am not lazy or malingering, nor shirking my responsibilities, nor letting my family down, when I take the time, money, or rest necessary to my health.  That martyrdom is not holy.   Holiness is life, lived abundantly, joyously, and with humble gratitude for the precarious precious nature of life’s realities.

Halloween Wisdom

Perfectionism II: "You're Doing It Wrong!"

My life has been one long mad dash for perfection.  Even something as simple as prayer became infinitely complicated when I started “trying to do it right”: praying to the right deity (“Dear Jesus”, “Heavenly Father”, “Oh Lord”), closing prayers correctly (“in Jesus’ name, Amen”), praying in the right order (praise and adoration, gratitude and thanksgiving, supplication—never ever put yourself first!) Are the hands folded with fingers interlaced or palm-to-palm? Kneel? Hold hands with prayer partners? What language to use: late Renaissance English (complete with “thee, thou, and thine” in the right syntax), everyday vernacular (“f**k it, God, what the he** is going on here?”), or maybe some glossolalia while channeling the Spirit directly? Eyes open or closed? Aloud or silently?

Are you feeling the pressure yet? Even as I write this paragraph, I’m feeling the burning in my belly and the tightness in my back and chest that accompanies my dread of being judged.  Now expand that striving to include the “right” ways to dress, walk, speak, find humor, evangelize, or vote for president.  There is also a “best” diet, educational pedagogy, career path for women, and even a “right” or “wrong” way to be looked at by the opposite sex.

"You're doing it wrong!"

Every day, to every action, probably to every thought (if I could track put a meta-tracker on my mind, and don’t think I haven’t tried), this statement is the unspoken corollary.  No matter what I do, think, say, plan, someone will disapprove. I can never live up to the standards set out by all people.  Realists among us will read this last statement and respond “of course, no one can possibly meet the demands of all the contradictory voices out there; it is ridiculous even to try.” 

But I’m an overachieving first child of a preacher, a third generation Christian fundamentalist—I was bred for performance, raised to guard against “even the appearance of sin”, taught always to be concerned for my “witness”.  God wanted to save all people but they would only be drawn to Him through wanting to emulate my life. I learned to judge myself against the cumulative standards of whatever group I was with so that my witness might always be pure.  Yet, while I was “to be all things to all people” for the glory of God, I was also not supposed to be a hypocrite who only showed people what they wanted to see.  My integrity was supposed to be such that God showed through my every action and thought, even every facial expression.  And I took all of these conflicting messages from the myriad teachers, preachers, family members, very, very seriously—this was God’s plan for saving the world, after all, I didn’t want to be the one responsible for messing that up.  (Oh, how small is the fundy god, if a scared, shy, skinny teenaged girl can derail his work!)

I learned the lessons of performance-based self-worth so well that when I ditched Christianity, I never realized that I was bringing all the fundy black-and-white worldviews, magical thinking, and “salvation by works” paradigms along with me.  I took the surety of “one right way to happiness, health, and acceptance” right into the neo-hippie, crunchy-granola world.  I birthed my babies at home, doctored them myself with herbs and remedies, homeschooled them from very early ages, ate organic or local food, and made as much of my own food as was possible without actually growing it myself. Every book I read on natural healing, nutrition, or holistic education gave me new information to be assimilated and applied, new truth to demonstrate to the world with my very life.  Every educational cooperative, nutrition and community gardening group, and alternative medicine class had its experts to follow religiously, and its own set of holistic living rules by which to be judged. Sometimes I experienced actual judgment from people in each of these groups; more often, I assumed their judgment because I had so internalized the impossible standards worldview.

For forty-two years I pounded my square peg of a self into the round holes of performance-based value systems until my body and my mind quit working.  I tried so hard to do and think all the Right Stuff and now I’ve spent the last three years unable to function to anyone’s expectations, much less everyone’s.  When I attempt too much, my body gives out.  And should I not pay sufficient attention, my mind goes—the black holes in there take over more and more of my cognitive function. I extended myself no grace for failure all those years and now I lack grace of gait and thought, a lurching facility of deed and word.

In the black-and-white, action-reaction, fundamentalist way of looking at things, I could think that the judgmental god of my childhood is wreaking vengeance on me for failing to meet his standards.  Or for daring to call myself a Christian, while wresting my own interpretations of spiritual reality from Christian scriptures and traditions.  Or for… whatever.  Surely I have sinned greatly to deserve such punishment.

Instead, I choose (am choosing, it is a continual choice to deviate from my knee-jerk assumption that others are judging me) to consider this state not poetic justice from a cosmic judge but divine irony that is so much more characteristic of God’s grace. I am only a human Being since I can no longer be a human Doing much of anything.

Be still and know that I AM (Ps 46:10)

Perfectionism I: Pursuing Ever Greater Righteousness

Last weekend, we hosted a dinner party in honor of my daughter’s twelfth birthday.  A diva-in-training, she requested a formal, black-tie celebration.  She, of course, already owned a sparkly, be-sequined cocktail dress (yes, really, at less than twelve) but I had to outfit the rest of us. We are now all members of the little black dress brigade.  She planned a simple menu of steak, mashed potato, “mushy carrots”, and salad, which I thought was fortunate so that I wouldn’t tire myself unduly with the cooking and be unable to enjoy the party (something that happens regularly since I developed my chronic hysterical illness). I really wanted to make this party perfect for her.

I started the cooking for last night's dinner about 5 hours ahead.  My plan was that I'd cook ahead, have it all ready to reheat (aside from the steak, which my husband would be grilling), then shower and change into my little black dress and pearls.  But as I worked, making up the carrot recipe as I went along, I kept thinking of another little special touch that would "make it all just right", so that I ended up touching up the reheated foods in my undies (because even in an apron, stuff jumps right at my nice clothes) just minutes before the company arrived--despite, or maybe because of, having three helpers and a serious intention of not going too crazy.

I had to ask myself "what constitutes perfect?"  If I think of another little touch, an extra ingredient, a little twist, and don't do it, then is the result less than perfect?  I know that stems from the whole Pauline idea that if we do not do what we know is good, we have sinned. A total paraphrase and gross misapplication but is it really so far removed from the fundy Modesty codes or the Pharisees’ Purity codes and other absurdities in the name of sanctified living?

And then, when we actually served the meal, the steaks were charred on the outside, overdone on the inside from appliance faults rather than operator error; the mashed potatoes too thin and the gravy too thick (almost the same consistency) from reheating problems that were operator error (mine); we ran out of wine; and the toppings for the cheesecake only glopped instead of drizzled.  And everyone who ate thought it was absolutely the best food (well, except for my husband and me who both have these perfection issues). The guests ate it all up and asked for seconds.  

So, by what standard do we measure perfection? The eaters' enjoyment? (Excellent.) How relaxed and peaceful the cook was while she produced the food (poor, but not at all the worst, at least I didn't fall to pieces or start crying this time).   The comparison to how it would have turned out in a professionally equipped kitchen by, say, Bobby Flay? (As if...! But you know I made that judgment!)  And is the ante really, fairly, upped every time I think of some extra finesse? (Absurd, when you think about it, but isn't that what we do all the time?)

It seems ridiculous to over-analyze a dinner party this way but the prep and presentation seems an apt metaphor for the striving for perfection that we Christians do, and are taught to do.  Why is it so universal to teach the do-more-work-harder-feel-guilty model of Christian living but so rare to teach the rest-in-the-Lord-be-still-enjoy-the-simple-things model? Why do we let ourselves be consumed by the judgmental, perfection-seeking, always-something-holier-to-do, Pharisaical, conspicuous religiosity?

Post Christian Traumatic Stress II: No True Christian and Read Your Bible More

[author]  Someday that demonic Christian voice will be gone and I can live freely in the divine love for all.  Why can't that be today?
[commenter]  Possibly because you insist on calling it a Christian voice? True Christians don't buy the ancient heresy that matter is evil. ...I'd encourage you to really dig into what the Bible actually says about being Christian, as opposed to what you heard growing up. You may be surprised at what you find.

The matter=bad/spirit=good dichotomy has a long history in the ancient Greek-influenced cultures and you see it creeping into Jewish literature as the traditional Jewish communities got drawn into the Greek-dominated Roman empire.  One man's heresy is another man's orthodoxy, though, even among such True Christians as the early church bishops who were responsible for setting doctrine: Augustine, Origen, Valentinus, Iraeneus.  Most of the self-proclaimed True Christian teachers of today, as I read them on the internet or read their followers' blogs, do buy most of the ancient heresies (whether they realize it or not).

Because it is such a prevalent understanding in Christianity, I call it "the Christian voice". It is probably the most common voice heard in Christianity--in my childhood and today (if the blogs I read are any indication of what is common teaching).  It is so prevalent that most people don't even realize that they accept it until the idea is challenged--another reason to use the term "Christian voice".

I think the bible says almost none of what the Christian voices of today are saying.  I am actually quite sure that what passes for evangelical and fundamentalist Christianity--either as I remember it from before the mid 1980's or what I read in today's internet and hear around town--is completely different from the radical love and spiritual awareness with which Jesus inspired his followers and frightened the controlling institutions of his day.  I'm not so much surprised at the bible as I am at the lengths people go to just to support the controlling, demeaning, power-mongering interpretations.

My use of the term Christian as a self-identifier is only possible for me because I acknowledge that the prevalent "heresies" are not what I understand Jesus to have been preaching.  If I still believed that God and Jesus really were about the shaming judgmentalism that I find in Christian circles, I would never have started calling myself Christian again.  But I don't associate God with those voices anymore--it's just that those voices got so embedded in my psyche that I still get a kick in the solar plexus just about daily. It’s about the PTSD experienced from Christianity, not what the bible actually says.

Post Christian Traumatic Stress I: The Evil Flesh

Wow, still that knee-jerk-to-the-gut!

A facebook friend is recuperating from surgery and posted that she is feeling human again.  I responded "human is good".

Before I even finished typing, I got that cramp in my belly and that old voice in my head telling me to take it back, that human isn't good, that only the heathens glorify humanity and this is not the way of god.

Sigh. Someday that demonic Christian voice will be gone and I can live freely in the divine love for all.  Why can't that be today?