A Source for Those Disillusioned with Religions

Jim Palmer was a fundamentalist evangelical preacher with a huge congregation.  He now works to free Christians from toxic religion.  My journey on a tiny scale has been similar.  Though I have continued to work in a Christian religion, to me Jesus fleshing out both God’s Love and our spiritual journey to unconditional love are the heart and soul of my spiritual life. I get uncomfortable sometimes when Jim seems to consider Jesus unimportant and also to assume every person is able on their own to experience spiritual metanoia. We all have some very basic differences when we are born so our journeys may be ultimately similar, but very different in the timing of the process. We also get broken in different ways that need healing to free us to make the journey to wholeness. Being loved is central to healing and freedom to grow. And sometimes in our unfinished world love is scarce. To me the person of Jesus is a both a source of the grace of Love and his life reflects our journey to loving unconditionally.  For me his presence with us even now has been healing and freeing. I feel sure God is not limited to Jesus. The Spirit of Love is at least dormant within us all and its awakening and growth can happen in many different ways. But Jesus freed from the distortions of centuries of male dominated human religion is a key to spiritual evolution not just for me but for many, though not all because of cultural and personality differences. God doesn’t throw away billions of his children on the technicality of when and where they were born.

But many of us need and are open to Jesus as our particular source of grace. That said, Jim’s journey has been similar to mine though on a much larger scale. And I greatly value his wisdom, courage, and commitment to freeing us from toxic religion. For me personally, it’s been important to separate Jesus from the warped limits of religions, but the person Jesus is still the heart and soul of grace for me and I believe for many others.

We and Our World are Unfinished

I’m an idealist. We imagine better possibilities. This life and everyone and everything are unfinished, so imperfect. Accepting this reality is hard for idealists. We have to settle for inching toward the perfect knowing we will never get there. At eighty-seven I still have to catch myself and remember to look for the goodie in every baddie in life. Sometimes they are tiny, but enough to help me move on. This is life: there is a downside and an upside to everything. That’s reality.  We have to settle for inching toward the perfect and never getting there. Since evolution is the name of the game though incredibly slow, inches are important. And no matter what our IQ is we are not going to be right 100% of the time because we are unfinished and imperfect human beings. Neither Einstein nor the Saints were perfect intellectually or humanly. So, a good dose of humility is not only important, but freeing.

Addictions

Good morning all of God’s tenderly loved children!  And that’s all of us.  Good old Paul is still trying to shape us up in Romans. He not only says no quarreling, but to make no provision for the flesh to gratify its desires.

Well, pooh! I’ve given up alcohol, stopped smoking, and as an 86 year old widow my chances of gratifying my fleshly desires are beyond slim. During Covid I switched to a low carb diet, so I even had to give up my addiction to jelly doughnuts. And to top everything off, in the last two years I’ve come to understand those I oppose politically. I think my addiction to feeling I’m right and anyone who disagrees with me is not only wrong, but bad, is my toughest one to get over. But feeling right and virtuous and judging those that disagree as evil is the definition of self-righteousness. And that was the sin Jesus pointed out most often.  It ends up making us push each other to extremes until we become blind to the need for balance.  Even old self-righteous Paul admits we all see through the glass darkly. Nobody knows all the truth and nothing but the truth…but God. The worst sin is pride because we are blind to it. Here’s  a repeat of the poem I wrote when reflecting on the “Body of Christ” in the scriptures.

The Broken Body

Reflecting on the Body,

you the hand, I the foot,

Christ the head and the heart,

someone else the hidden part,

I let the Scriptures

flood my mind with images.

Then suddenly an image

is so harshly real, I gasp aloud.

I see a figure staggering

and stumbling towards me,

arms flailing, head jerking

back and forth in spasms,

body parts all pulling

different ways.

This then, reality:

Christ’s earthly body now.

Lord, forgive us!

Resurrection through Connection

Richard Rohr describes how it’s possible to experience resurrection before we die: 

We don’t need to wait for death to experience resurrection. We can begin resurrection today by living connected to God. Resurrection happens every time we love someone even though they were not very loving to us. At that moment we have been brought to new life. Every time we decide to trust and begin again, even after repeated failures, at that moment we’ve been resurrected. Every time we refuse to become negative, cynical, hopeless, we have experienced the Risen Christ. We don’t have to wait for it later. Resurrection is always possible now.  

The resurrection is not Jesus’ private miracle; it’s the new shape of reality. It’s the new shape of the world. It’s filled with grace. It’s filled with possibility. It’s filled with newness.  

The resurrection is not a miracle story to prove the divinity of Christ, something that makes him the winner. It’s a storyline that allows us all to be winners. ALL! No exceptions! There’s no eternal death for anybody: ALL are invited to draw upon this infinite Source, this infinite Mystery, this infinite Love, this infinite Possibility. Spiritually speaking, we live in a world of abundance, of infinity. But most of us walk around as if it were not true, operating in a world of scarcity where there’s never enough. There’s not enough for me, there’s not enough for you, there’s not enough for everybody.  

And so we hoard it—Spirit, Love, Life—to ourselves. We hoard grace, we hoard mercy. We don’t allow ourselves to be conduits through which it pours into the world. Truly, the only way we can hold onto grace, mercy, love, joy—any spiritual gift—is to give them away consciously and intentionally. Once we stop acting as a conduit, we lose them ourselves. That’s why there are so many sad, bitter, and angry people. Disconnected from God, we choose death. We ourselves contribute to negativity, cynicism, anger, and even to the oppression of other races and religions. In that state, it’s always other people who are wrong.  

We Don’t Know What We Are Doing

Brian McLaren (One of Richard Rohr’s CAC) invites us to an imaginative experience of the painful reality of scapegoating that occurred on Good Friday: 

Let’s imagine ourselves with the disciples just before three o’clock on this Friday afternoon. A few of us have come together to talk about what has happened over the last twenty-four hours….  Why was there no other way? Why did this good man—the best we have ever known, the best we have ever imagined—have to face torture and execution as if he were some evil monster?   As the hours drag on from noon to nearly three o’clock, we imagine many reasons…. Jesus has told us again and again that God is different from our assumptions. We’ve assumed that God was righteous and pure in a way that makes God hate the unrighteous and impure. But Jesus has told us that God is pure love, so overflowing in goodness that God pours out compassion on the pure and impure alike. He not only has told us of God’s unbounded compassion—he has embodied it every day as we have walked this road with him. In the way he has sat at table with everyone, in the way he has never been afraid to be called a “friend of sinners,” in the way he has touched untouchables and refused to condemn even the most notorious of sinners, he has embodied for us a very different vision of what God is like….   If Jesus is showing us something so radical about God, what is he telling us about ourselves—about human beings and our social and religious institutions? What does it mean when our political leaders and our religious leaders come together to mock and torture and kill God’s messenger?… Is this the only way religions and governments maintain order—by threatening us with pain, shame, and death if we don’t comply? And is this how they unify us—by turning us into a mob that comes together in its shared hatred of the latest failure, loser, rebel, criminal, outcast … or prophet?… What kind of world have we made? What kind of people have we become?…  In the middle of the afternoon … even from this distance, we can hear Jesus, “Father, forgive them!” he shouts. “For they don’t know what they are doing.”  Forgive them? Forgive us?    Our thoughts bring us again to the garden last night, when Jesus asked if there could be any other way. And now it seems clear. There could be no other way to show us what God is truly like. God is not revealed in killing and conquest … in violence and hate. God is revealed in this crucified man—giving of himself to the very last breath, giving and forgiving.   And there could be no other way to show us what we are truly like. We do not know what we are do. If God is like this, and if we are like this … everything must change.

Ordinary Lives Transformed

Father Richard Rohr writes about encountering the Risen Christ in our ordinariness and woundedness. I’ve noticed in the Gospels that even after two appearances of the Risen Christ, the apostles return to their old job of fishing (John 21:3). They don’t join the priesthood, try to get a job at the Temple, go on more retreats, take vows, leave their wives, or get special titles. Nor is there any mention of them baptizing each other or wearing special clothing beyond that of a wayfarer or “workman” (Matthew 10:9–10). When the inner is utterly transformed, we don’t need symbolic outer validations, special hats, or flashy insignia.  We can also note that the Risen Christ is never apparent as a supernatural figure, but is mistaken in one case for a gardener, another time for a fellow traveler on the road, and then for a fisherman offering advice. He seems to look just like everybody else after the Resurrection (John 20:15; Luke 24:13–35; John 21:4–6), even with his wounds on full display! In the Gospels it appears we can all go back to “fishing” after any authentic God encounter, consciously carrying our humiliating wounds, only now more humbly. That is our only badge of honor. In fact, it is exactly our woundedness that gives us any interest in healing itself, and the very power to heal others. As Henri Nouwen rightly said, the only authentic healers are always wounded healers. Good therapists will often say the same.  True mysticism just allows us to “fish” from a different side of the boat and with different expectations of what success might mean. All the while, we are totally assured that we are already and always floating on a big, deep, life-filled pond. The mystical heart knows there is a fellow Fisherman nearby who is always available for good advice. He stands and beckons from the shores, at the edges of every ordinary life, every unreligious moment, every “secular” occupation, and he is still talking to working people who, like the first disciples, are not important, influential, especially “holy,” trained in theology, or even educated. This is the mystical doorway, which is not narrow but wide and welcoming. Matthew Fox affirms mystical experience as a gift: Deep down, each one of us is a mystic. When we tap into that energy we become alive again and we give birth. From the creativity that we release is born the prophetic vision and work that we all aspire to realize as our gift to the world. We want to serve in whatever capacity we can. Getting in touch with the mystic inside is the beginning of our deep service…. Mysticism is about the awe and the gratitude, the letting go and the letting be, the birthing and the creativity, and the compassion—including healing and celebration and justice making—that our world so sorely needs…. Every mystic is a healer. We are healers all.

Sidewalk Spirituality

Richard Rohr identifies mysticism as a way of knowing accessible to all: 

While most Christians consider themselves disciples of Jesus and try to follow his teachings, a smaller number move toward practical acts of service or solidarity. But I’m afraid even fewer Christians have the courage to go on the much deeper mystical path. The most unfortunate thing about the concept of mysticism is that the word itself has become mystified—relegated to a “misty” and distant realm that implies it is only available to a very few. For me, the word “mysticism” simply means experiential knowledge of spiritual things, in contrast to book knowledge, secondhand knowledge, or even church knowledge.  

Much of organized religion, without meaning to, has actually discouraged us from taking the mystical path by telling us almost exclusively to trust outer authority, Scripture, various kinds of experts, or tradition (what I call the “containers”), instead of telling us the value and importance of inner experience itself (which is the “content”). In fact, most of us were strongly warned against ever trusting ourselves. Roman Catholics were told to trust the church hierarchy implicitly, while mainline Protestants were often warned that inner experience was dangerous, unscriptural, or even unnecessary.  

Both were ways of discouraging actual experience of God and often created passive (and passive aggressive) people and, more sadly, a lot of people who concluded there was no God to be experienced. We were taught to mistrust our own souls—and thus the Holy Spirit! Contrast that with Jesus’ common phrase, “Go in peace, your faith has made you whole” (see Matthew 8:13; Mark 5:34; Luke 17:19). He said this to people who had made no dogmatic affirmations, did not think he was “God,” and often did not belong to the “correct” group! They were people who affirmed, with open hearts, the grace of their own hungry experience—in that moment—and that God could care about it! 

Pentecostals and charismatics are significant modern-era exceptions to this avoidance of experience; I believe their “baptism in the Spirit” is a true and valid example of initial mystical encounter. 

Richard praises the Franciscan approach to mysticism:  

In my experience, Franciscan mysticism is a trustworthy and simple path precisely because it refuses to be “mystified” by, or beholden to, doctrinal abstractions, moralism, or false asceticism (although some Franciscans have gone this route). The Franciscan way is truly a sidewalk spirituality for the streets of the world, a path highly possible and attractive for all would-be seekers. It doesn’t insist every person must be celibate, isolated from others, highly educated, or in any way superior to our neighbors. In fact, those kinds of paths might well get in the way of the experience itself. A celibate monk or nun may have a totally dualistic mind and live a tortured inner life—and thus torture others too. Everyday workers and caregivers with mystical hearts and minds can enlighten other individuals, their families, and all they touch, without talking “religiously” at all.  

We Are Not Called to Just Love Others as We Love Ourselves or to Do Unto Others as We Would Have Them Do Unto Us.

The Timing of Spiritual Journeys Varies Drastically

The timing of each person’s spiritual journey is unique.  We may pray and ask for the same things, but our spiritual needs may take us through other aspects of the journey before the timing is right.

Recovering alcoholics have a lot of support at each stage.  The average Christian isn’t necessarily open to the same helps.  Jesus came to free sinners by sharing the Love of God with them.  Those that know they need the grace of that Love are more likely to embrace it and cling to it.  Those who are managing to live by the basic ten commandments may still feel they are earning that Love.  Sadly the “do nots” are not all that Jesus was about.  If unconsciously we are still trying to earn God’s Love we miss out not only on the joy, but the call of the Beatitudes which is a whole different ball game, but is the way to greater freedom and openness to the grace of joy. 

My Julian’s take on religion was that if your do right list is greater than your do wrong list, you get to heaven.  He only experienced that joy in the last year of his life when he was fighting cancer and could no longer do the things he thought he needed to do.  Unconditional love has no pride in it. It’s pure grace.  And it’s part of the journey along with using our gifts to help others. Our talents and strengths are gifts from God.  We didn’t earn them and some of us are not born with the inner drive and confidence to use them…..whether for all others or even mostly ourselves and family.  Some of us need the constant grace of the Love of God.  We lack the gift of focus and perseverance.  You can see the difference early in children. Some need the grace of God much sooner than others. The older strong and dutiful brother of the prodigal son didn’t know he needed the grace of humility that frees us to love the unlovable like Jesus did. And that’s the unlovable in both ourselves and others.  At some point our journey will take us to the “without one plea” point of openness to the Amazing Grace of God’s unconditional Love fleshed out in Jesus.  Many Of the Saints reached it pretty early in their journeys, because they were not naturally good, or focused or persevering.

The Children of War

The Children of War