10 Things on Thursday: Thanksgiving Edition

Ten thoughts about Thanksgiving 2015:

1.  I still grieve that hysterical illness has stolen from me the ability to make a feast and create a holiday tradition for myself and my family.

2.  In the renewed awareness of racial tensions in the United States, there is some talk about the racist origins of the Thanksgiving narratives.  I wonder, however, if anyone even thinks about those stories once graduating from kindergarten and those hand-tracing turkeys.  America absolutely needs to recognize our inherently racist society and our genocidal history (and current events) but I doubt if Thanksgiving is the best, or even a particularly relevant, talking point.

3. Black Friday has eclipsed too many Thanksgiving traditions and I think that is a spiritual loss.

4.  With the expansion of Halloween from a simple children's holiday in the local neighborhood and the ever earlier Christmas creep, Thanksgiving has become merely a pre-Christmas, food bonanza to calorie up for the last mad, month-long, shopping sprint.

5. I miss when the televised Macy's parade was actually a parade and not pan-shots of balloons in between song and dance numbers from a variety of non-parade locations.

6. My oldest kid went off to college and this is my first year to get excited about family coming home for the holiday. She came home Tuesday night and I'm still not sure how I feel about that.

7. Our menu has only one vegetable and it's strictly a concession to my irrational love for green bean casserole with fried onions.  Both the nutritionist and the chef in me are wincing.

8. Thanksgiving is the one time I do like living in Arizona because it's always nice weather to eat dinner with the windows and doors wide open and the sunshine streaming in.  Sometimes we're even motivated enough to build a fire outside in the evening and sit around drinking and burning jacaranda deadfall.  Mmmm, I love that smell.

9. Whenever I see A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving, I wonder why all the white kids are seated together on one side of the table and the lone black kid is by himself on the other.

10. I pray for enough community and compassion in the world today that everyone could have abundant food, shelter, security, and friendship to celebrate.

Did Jesus Die to Appease God?

(image from http://www.anchor1611.org, item #4)

Jesus didn't die to appease God. Jesus died because he wouldn't appease men. 

God sacrificed his ineffable infinity to become a finite human with human limits in order to demonstrate The Way of Compassion and a bottom-up society. He was killed "for our sins" in that the society and culture we humans have created, ego-driven and top-down, couldn't tolerate the radical and transformative message. Oppression sells. When the oppressed rise up, the oppressors kill them. That is our collective human sin. And that is what killed Jesus.

Penal substitution is one of the biggest lies Christians tell themselves. When Christ “paid it all, all to him I owe” (as the hymn goes), he wasn't paying a debt incurred by the individual sins of believers (or the world, if you're a universalist). His sacrifice was not death on the cross as some kind of late era human offering. His sacrifice was in accepting the human limits on his infinite divinity in order to teach us compassion and equality. The human culture, created out of the blindly ego-driven human desires for authority, hierarchy, and power-over, killed him to save itself.

Despite the sincere efforts of groups like Anchor Baptist Church, who published the photo above, to establish that Jesus paid a debt to appease a deity whose holiness demanded perfection according to an impossible standard set by himself, the Bible actually never speaks of any debt owed to God (or even Satan, as one version of this doctrine states) nor that Jesus paid it. Nor does the Bible explain how failure to live up to the Ten Commandment standard, which standard even God himself couldn’t maintain in the Old Testament, incurs a debt, demands punitive justice, or is actually in any way responsible for the death of Jesus.

Sin is “having eaten of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil”, or, having come to a state of consciousness in which duality is possible, believing that separation from God is not only possible but the inherent way of existence.  Sin is living in denial of the fundamental unity of All That Is.  Sin creates the human conditions of power-over and oppression, of hoarding resources and poverty, of In-groups and Othering.  The consequence of such belief and behavior is death and degradation of most of the human race. And a nearly irreconcilable poverty of spirit for those few at the top of the heap.  There is reason to believe that the poverty of spirit is so acute that the One Percenters indeed lack any capacity for empathy or compassion at all.  Sociopathy rules.

Jesus’ death was not to justify some cosmic accounting ledger for a tyrannically holy, fully Other, tortuously punitive deity.  That story isn’t in the Bible.  It’s a story modern Christians have made up for themselves to keep the masses shame-laden and burdened with exalting the few who manipulate the stories.  Much like the few who didn’t approve of the story Jesus was telling of a radical, inclusive, egalitarian compassion. 

Jesus told of unity and oneness and the inseparability of holy and human.  He taught that the weak and the poor are as worthy and powerful as the rich and the strong.  The One Percenters of his day had created a society in which such talk wasn’t only heretical but treason.  The social climbers and power-hungry and would-be rich-and-famous colluded with the society of sin and degradation to put that story to death.

We crucify Jesus again and all like him whenever we allow oppression, hierarchy, poverty, or exclusion to occur.  When we believe in the separation of sacred and secular, when we ascribe to the few more worth than the many, when we deny the holiness of all humanity.

Longing for the One Who Denies Me

I have a question related to a comment you posted on [another blog]  I hope you don't mind.  You said:

"I grew up a third generation Christian. When new converts would come to our church or I'd help out my dad with his work with street people and addicts, I used to wish I hadn't grown up in a Christian home so that I could see God's grace as actually saving me from something. These people with their newly-converted zeal--which sometimes lasted for many years, at least as long as I knew them--had an experiential understanding of salvation that I could only glimpse intellectually. My Christianity was a mental exercise of theology--doctrinal statements, lists of rules, and worldviews--I longed for what those homeless drunks found in God. What had I been saved from after all? My big sins were arguing with my brother and having "an attitude" with my dad, and those certainly didn't go away with a conversion experience. I never saw that I had been "saved" from anything nor to something that was experientially different than my "former" life."

 I ask, have you ever found an answer for that longing and dissatisfaction?  I ask because that is my longing too.  I have been a Christian since I was 5ish.  I know I didn't fully understand it all at age five but I did have a heart for my parents God.  That faith matured until I though that he was my God too.  But that longing to truly have that fervor for the Lord, to be truly saved from and FOR something has never left me.  It ate at me thorough my childhood as I wrote stories and poems of a God who SAVES.

Now, I am tired of waiting for that salvation.  I long for the feelings of redemption but I fear that God has forever denied me this.  I grew up in a house allergic to Christian emotions and I am honestly about sick of Christianity.  I am sick of longing for something and loving the One who denies me it, then beating myself up for wanting it and telling myself to submit to an intellectual faith.

I know that you are a complete stranger, if this letter is just too personal I am sorry, please ignore it and know that in no way am I trying to be rude or to dump my problems on you.  I am simply approaching you because you wrote exactly what I was feeling and I hoped that perhaps you had found the answer.  Thank you for clarifying what had been simmering in my hear for a long time.

"I hoped that perhaps you had found the answer.”

I certainly haven’t found The Answer, but I have found An Answer, sometimes.  That’s the good news.  The bad news is that I had to leave Christianity to find it.  In every flavor of Christianity that I experienced growing up—dozens of different denominations and teachers but all of the same basic fundamentalist Evangelical genre—God was always this distant, self-righteous, easily offended, jealous/possessive tyrant who used Jesus alternately (depending on the teacher) as bully-boy to enforce his Will or as whipping-boy on whom to take out his displeasure with me.  Of course, that was rarely the direct teaching I got, it was taught implicitly in “live right to please God”.  The cognitive dissonance between the explicit teaching of “for God so loved the World” and the implicit next phrase that he’d rather kill his own son than meet directly with humanity baffled me for years.

As a very young child, as I suspect most children do, I had some visceral understanding of unity with Love and Life and the indivisibility of Creator and Creation.  Over time (and through some traumatic experiences) that intrinsic awareness of Love Divine was co-opted into language of self-hatred and bigotry and performance.  Despite my best efforts to make sense of a god of love who has damned all people to eternal torment if they don’t live bounded restricted lives of martyred self-abnegation, which was called abundant life, I just couldn’t accept it.  Somehow, in that place where I knew things that my Evangelical worldview said couldn’t be known, I knew that God was more than some bipolar sky cop (as a commenter on my blog called him).  Somehow I knew that love and punishment could not be synonymous (though I still get that mixed up).  So in my mid-twenties, I began walking away from Christianity. 

It took me a good five years to completely leave the religion and begin living a thoroughly secular life.  Five years and the support of a contentedly skeptical agnostic husband whom I married during this period.  I tried to be an atheist, denying both the tyrannical god of Christianity and the Divine Love I had once known but I found myself drawn to people who had found other means to manifest their spirituality—Pagans, Witches, Buddhists, social justice and tree-hugging do-gooders—I just couldn’t leave the God Question alone.  Finally, in my mid-thirties, I found in yoga a place where I could quiet my brain and all its doctrinal doubts and declarations, where I could simply Be and let God meet me. 

In the quietness of meditation, my mental chatter finally shuts up, quits repeating to me all the noise of doctrinal “faith as intellectual exercise”, and lets God speak in silent fullness.  I developed a very ecumenical spirituality of Pagan earth-loving, Catholic saint-commemorating, Buddhist mindfulness, Hindu-originating yoga, and totally commercial Easter Bunny/Santa Claus rituals and family festivals.  I became a glutton of religious smorgasbord.  But it grew out of a healthy awareness that God was present in all these traditions in a way I hadn’t found him in Christianity.  But I kind of burnt out from all of it.  Largely, I suppose, because I still hadn’t let God be God—I hadn’t truly renounced the god of Christianity as I’d known him, I was just trying to drown him out with these other practices. 

Somewhere in the mix, I began reading the works of the mystics, mostly medieval, mostly Muslim/Sufi and Monastic Christian, and I was happily astonished to find that the God that they all wrote about having met was remarkably similar to the God I met in meditation.  Julian of Norwich, Hildegard of Bingen, Rumi, Hafiz, Meister Eckhart all seemed to know most intimately this same God of Love, of renewal, of creation, of compassion.  And they all were at odds with the conventional God of their religions.

It took developing a chronic hysterical illness in my mid-forties for me to begin re-examining Christianity from the perspectives I’d learned through my years as a heathen.  I realized that in rejecting Christianity so vehemently, I wasn’t embracing all traditions with tolerance and a willingness to learn, I had become an anti-Christian bigot.  Logically, I knew that Christianity couldn’t be any better or worse than any other religious tradition; they all have better and worse expressions. In order to become whole, I needed to exorcise the demons that still inhabited my soul, making me fearful, inspiring me to hatred.  I needed to find the God I knew within Christianity, as I’d found him in so many other places.  I’m still working on that.

So, yes, I have found a communion with the Divine that fulfills me and I find comfort in reading so many that have come before me who found that same communion.  But no, I have yet to find a community of fellow God-finders with whom to corporately commune. That is what I long for.  A group who comes together to meet God, each in our own way, perhaps, but together.  The internet has been marvelous for connecting me with people who seek the same God but often at great physical distance from me.

I don’t know if my experience will help you find God—or more realistically, help God find you—I hope so.  

Come to Church This Weekend

Wanna experience something like never before?  Tonight at 7 at Two Rivers.  I think you will be shocked to NOT find what you expect.  Come and see.  Yes, it’s prayer and praise night at church, but I don’t think you’ve ever experienced such a “church” like this.  You love to stretch your mind regarding religion?

Dear G_____,

Thank you for the invitation to your praise and worship service tonight.  I don’t think we will be coming.  

I could tell you that I have been too busy for what my Hysterical Illness lets me do (have I told you about that?) or that this is our first free At-Home Day in three weeks (we usually try to keep one a week as a kind of Sabbath) or that with Thom out of town for the weekend we are going to keep everything very slow and low-key—and all those things are true.  But they really would only be excuses.

Although I have been doing a lot of work this last year reconciling my spiritual understanding of the Divine with the Christian God and figuring out who Jesus is for me, I still have enormous and unhealthy prejudices against anything that even sounds like Evangelical Christianity.  The thought of attending a Praise and Worship service make me a little sick to my stomach.

Your particular church may be none of the things I identify with evangelical church but I’m not in a place spiritually or psychologically where I am ready to risk it.  Not long ago I wrote a couple of blog posts about how I am keen to continue working to resolve my knee-jerk revulsion to Evangelicalism but that it is not something I can even attempt at this time.  I wrote about needing to step back from all my inner work of the last year and just rest alone with my God for another long while.

Even the fact that I feel compelled to write this very long explanation for declining your invitation instead of a simple “no, thank you” is indication that there are still huge issues for me to address.  But I can’t do it just now.  It may be months or years before I can face those particular demons.  I haven’t set foot inside a Protestant church in almost ten years.  It has only been this summer that I found I could read a Bible without physiological unpleasantness (after nearly two decades of being outside Christianity).

I do want you to know that I appreciate the invitation and the friendship that inspired the offer.  It is nothing personal to you, your family, or even your particular church that keeps me from accepting.  It’s not you; it’s me (weak chuckle).  Please try again in a few months.  Who knows the timing of God? I may be able to consider such invitations sooner than I think.

Thanks for understanding,

Sandra the Heretic

What is a Samaritan?

And behold a certain lawyer stood up, tempting him, and saying, Master, what must I do to possess eternal life?  But he said to him: What is written in the law? how readest thou?

He answering, said: Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind: and thy neighbour as thyself.  And he said to him: Thou hast answered right: this do, and thou shalt live. But he willing to justify himself, said to Jesus: And who is my neighbour? And Jesus answering, said:

So there’s this gay bar on the way into a big town.  It’s a popular spot for wild-eyed crazies to lounge in the shadows and prey on the hated sinners as they come out of the bar.  One night, there is a man lying beaten and unconscious on the curb in front of the bar. 

Jerry Falwell is being driven into town for a conference, sees the scene, and demands that the driver turn around. “Find another way into town; what will people think if they find out I was in this part of town where the gay bars are?” 

Rick Warren drives his own fancy rental car past the bar but doesn’t even see the man in the street because his mind is occupied with his upcoming launch of the new reality series “After the Sermon with the Purpose-Driven Preacher.”

Along comes a wealthy Pakistani Muslim with strongly rumored but unconfirmed ties to Al Qaida.  He tells his cab driver to stop.  He gathers up the unconscious man and directs the cabbie to the nearby Sisters of Mercy Hospital, where the hospital determines that the man has no identification and thus no insurance.  The Muslim slaps his Visa card down on the counter, “Insurance is no problem.  I will pay his charges.  Make sure he has a private room and the best of care.”

Which of these three, in thy opinion, was neighbour to him that fell among the robbers?  But he said: He that shewed mercy to him. And Jesus said to him: Go, and do thou in like manner. (Luke 10:25-37)

Breaking Faith: When I Left the Church

My mom’s birthday is coming up this weekend.  She hasn’t celebrated her birthday in 18 years and it hasn’t been a happy day for the rest of us since then, either. Three months after her 49^th birthday, she died of cancer.

During the months preceding her death, her church prayed mightily for God’s healing, for her recovery from the illness.  But then she died.  It was a watershed moment in my life, both practically and spiritually.  I lost my job for taking a few extra days after the funeral to help out my dad.  Without a job, I couldn’t afford my apartment either so I moved across the country to live with my dad and my sister who was still at home.  In such a big move, I also lost my friends, my own church, my community, and my independence.  Not only did I lose my mother, my best friend, but everything else that gave structure and meaning to my life was gone as well.

I expected my parents’ church to step into the breach. After all, my father was on staff; my mother had worked for a member of the church, and there was an active singles’ ministry.  Instead, I found that the church, which had helped out admirably during Mom’s illness with meals, companionship, and assistance of all kinds, defaulted to the assumption that I would now take care of everything for my father and sister.  The not-so-unspoken thought was that I would step into my mother’s place as caretaker of the home, mother to my sister, and helpmeet to my father.  When I was looking for a job, more than one person mentioned the opening at my mother’s old job.  I can’t count how often I heard “it is so good that your father has you to help him out in this time of grief”, but I know exactly how often someone asked how I was doing in my own grief—one person, one time.

Where was God then? That year was really the end of my Christian era.  I had lost my faith in fundamental dogma years before but I had kept up my church attendance, partly out of fear of admitting that I no longer believed in the God I’d been taught, mostly because I craved the community of spiritual thinkers.  I never had found that community and my year in Dad’s church made me realize that I wasn’t even getting a practical community of friends and social support, either. 

So, really, where was God? Not manifest in His People. In all the years I’d grown up in churches, I maintained a denial that my experience with the Christian community was neither very Christian nor very communal.  I thought there was something wrong with me, or perhaps my family, that had always held the church family at bay.  The year after my mom’s death broke through my denial.  It wasn’t me, or at least not entirely, it was the nature of the church that expected the sweet smiling stiff upper lip.  No one wanted to know if something was less than great for me, even in the midst of the quite obviously worst tragedy of my life. 

If that was the community of God’s People, there was definitely not a place for me in the community.  I gave myself up to the lost faith in God, in fundamental theology, in Christian community.  If spiritual and practical community was not to be found in Christianity, I would look elsewhere. I became a heathen.