God Is Not 3 Guys

Why I write

noreply@blogger.com (Jeanette) — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 16:06:00 +0000

When I was in third grade I wanted to be a third grade teacher. In fourth grade I wanted to be a fourth grade teacher, and so on up the grades. The top grades of high school were as far as I dared go with these aspirations. College was a must for me in spite of the fact that my oldest siblings weren’t allowed to go to high school. In retrospect, my matriculating for college seems almost unbelievable. Where did that daring come from? At the time I couldn’t imagine life without college; it would have been the end of life for me.

Young people will not understand what a big deal this was. It was 1961, before the counter-cultural revolution; the only post-college careers for women were teaching and social work. In my totally-Catholic world, the only women in college got there by joining a religious order. My dad, a farmer born shortly after the turn to the twentieth century, was certain that his children didn’t need more education than he did—eight grades. Because he did well, didn’t he?

My decision to attend college and other turns in life happened TO me as much as they were directed BY me. There’s a thread inside each of us pulling us into certain paths. But it is possible to go against this pull, more commonly called our vocation or calling. I know women who, I have no doubt, were led toward divorcing their husbands, but they resisted out of fear. I know that fear intimately, experienced the agony of it. But scuttling back into a corner of supposed safety does not bring lasting peace.

I’ve digressed. My point is that education is in my DNA. I can’t remember a time in my life when I didn’t want to educate others. The thread pulling me through high school and college teaching didn’t stop there but led me to another occupation in education—writing as a dissenter in my religion. This also required, and still requires, confronting expectations, confronting fear, and confronting my exasperating desire to please others.

In my unremunerated role of educating adults, I try to bridge traditional Christian believers with new currents in spirituality, which does not mean “throwing the baby out with the bath water.” In a version of comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable, I reassure those who feel bereft because they have lost childhood beliefs, and I disturb the fixed mental paradigm of persons who cling to those beliefs.

I invite them to consider concepts foreign to their accustomed world view, to enlarge their perspective and expand their consciousness, to face down discomfort with the unfamiliar. I also try to mediate between academic research and ordinary people who don't have the time or inclination to read the experts.

Yes, my writing is provocative. That's how change happens, and change is required of us all. But we don’t have to give up what is important in our spiritual upbringing—the essentials of love, wisdom, hope, and the assurance that the spirit world stands ready to assist us in meeting any challenge.

Cradle Catholics have the challenge of repudiating Church authority, which we were trained to treat as the law of God. If there is any good coming out of the clergy sex abuse scandal, it’s the lesson that divine authority must not be confused with Church hierarchy. There are plenty of provocative Christian experts who can help us to grow out of childhood beliefs and into a richer understanding of spiritual reality.

One is Robert Funk who writes these words:

The plot early Christians invented for a divine redeemer figure is as archaic as the mythology in which it is framed. A Jesus who drops down out of heaven, performs some magical act that frees human beings from the power of sin, rises from the dead, and returns to heaven is simply no longer credible. The notion that he will return at the end of time and sit in cosmic judgment is equally incredible. We must find a new plot for a more credible Jesus.

Offended, a traditional believer asks plaintively,

Why is Catholic teaching not enough?

It is enough if properly taught. Truly Catholic teaching includes all humans everywhere—women, non-clergy, GLBTs, and people of faith who imagine spiritual ideas in non-Christian terms. It recognizes Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as Christian symbols, not actual persons. It applies doctrines such as Trinity, Incarnation, Christ’s Death and Resurrection universally. It does not limit divinity to a certain man or a set of male individuals remote and inaccessible except through Roman Catholic rituals and clergy.

I had written most of this post when a minor change in my life grew into a significant signal for me. It turns out that this post is peculiarly apt for announcing that I will either post sparingly in the future or discontinue this blog. I have been promising to organize my writings here into a book and that’s impossible as long as I’m both blogging and supervising student teachers.

But please stay tuned before I say goodbye.

After posting this, I learned that the St. Cloud Times published my piece: In case of womenpriests, justice & truth will prevail.

Womanpriest Mass 2

noreply@blogger.com (Jeanette) — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 17:17:00 +0000

I obtained permission from Judi to quote her.

Jeanette, It was great to read the article about Mary. I have heard that we have women presiding at masses somewhere here in Milwaukee. I am open to male or female and never quite understood how we got to where we are. We had popes with children, priests with children, and yet some say we need to go back to the early church. Which early church was that?
Judith Kittleson Kearney

Judi asks a shrewd question. Going back to the way things were might mean going back to a church so corrupt that Martin Luther was forced to take a stand against church authority. It might mean having 3 popes or having popes direct wealth to their children or having popes with armies. It might mean most priests openly having sexual partners and having children. The Church didn’t get serious about celibacy until after the first millennium.

Campaigns against women have risen and fallen throughout Church history but always there were the underlying assumptions that infested our entire patriarchal paradigm, secular and religious. Like Blacks, women were at times said to be less than human, to have no soul, to belong naturally in a servant role, subordinate and submissive.
Early Americans didn’t educate women and didn’t let them participate in politics. Girls didn’t go to school; they learned “domestic arts.” In Founding Mothers: Women Who Raised Our Nation, Cokie Roberts writes,

Husbands essentially owned women. They had some rights to inheritance, . . . but in the context of the marriage itself they owned nothing, not even their own jewelry. . . . Men legally owned their wives under English law.

Judi again.

I may live to see married male priests, but something tells me it will take longer for the Church to accept that women too may be called to serve as priests. I choose not to spend a great deal of time thinking about what Rome tells me. Like all humans, many of our leaders have changed their message over the years.
I often think that Jesus, the humble teacher in sandals and rough clothing, must shake his head when He sees some of the things that have become Church.
Keep up the good work and remember how powerless we are over the thoughts, opinions, feelings, and actions of others. It is really hard to listen and note other perspectives calmly when they are so contrary to what we believe to be true. Have a grand day!

Kathleen emailed these questions:

Do you think if we were to live another 50 or 100 years-- would we see a change in how the Catholic Church will look?
Would there be more women in the hierarchy as there were in the early church?

I have no doubt the Catholic Church will have womenpriests in the future, and I also expect the Vatican to lose its tyrannical power, to become more of a central clearinghouse and less the seat of power. Finally, I expect Christian beliefs to morph. Christianity has already lost its place of premier opinion-making in our society.

Someday, probably not in our lifetime, the official Church will apologize for its treatment of women, specifically its denial of ordination to women. The embarrassment over that wrong-headed stance has already begun.

Womanpriest Mass

noreply@blogger.com (Jeanette) — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 22:58:00 +0000

Our womanpriest community, Mary Magdalene, First Apostle was covered by the St. Cloud Times today. The article does a good job of laying out the issue to people who know nothing or very little about it. I like the quotations he chose to include by Mary Smith, our pastor, and Kelly Doss, one of our planning group.

In previous posts I’ve refuted the hierarchy’s false, tired, sometimes amusing, arguments against womenpriests. The funniest argument against ordaining women is explained by Florian:

Women are not valid "matter" for the sacrament of holy orders to begin with, at least in the eyes of the church. So, ordination of women priests is not valid, even if "ordained" by bishops who are intending to properly administer the sacrament, because no sacrament takes place anyway without the proper matter.

The valid and proper matter must be the penis.

The hierarchy claims that our Catholic tradition does not include women’s ordination. Wrong. Archaeology reveals that women were ordained priests and bishops in the first centuries of our church’s existence.
And more recently, in the 1970s our tradition was moving toward approving ordination for women. This seemed to be the consensus among bishops,

Bishops who speak on the subject are simply content in observing that the traditional arguments put forward against the ordination of women are no longer convincing

theologians,

Well known theologians have explicitly stated and written that they see no dogmatic obstacle to the ordination of women.

and the “people of God.”

The position of women in the church up until now has been due to social and cultural factors. . . . the Lay Apostolate asks the Catholic Church to give women all the rights and responsibilities of a Christian.

Clearly Catholics in the 1970s saw no impediment to ordaining women and were getting ready to proceed. What happened? Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI couldn’t stand the idea and forced the Church to accept their position. They appointed bishops who toed their traditionalist line and found theologians to manufacture spurious arguments against women’s ordination. In Ordinatio Sacerdotalis John Paul declared,

that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church's faithful.

A declaration that history will ridicule as certainly as the one against Galileo. People of conscience will win this one—it’s just a matter of time.

How Christmas began

noreply@blogger.com (Jeanette) — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 15:48:00 +0000

The history of Christmas should make us ponder. Christians had no Christmas for more than 200 years after Jesus was born. The origin of the feast had nothing to do with the birth of Jesus because no one knew when he was born.

Bible scholars inform us of contradictions and impossibilities in the biblical accounts contributing to the myth, the Gospels of Matthew and Luke (the authors actually are unknown, but that’s another story). Rev. E. J. Niles, a scholar quoted in Unity magazine, says,

I love how Joseph was said to take his pregnant wife Mary 94 miles to Bethlehem to fulfill a type of civic duty (a census) that most women would never have even participated in during those times.

Also factual nonsense are the genealogies in Matthew and Luke, which disagree with each other, as do their implied dates of Jesus’ birth. Quirinius was governor after Herod died, not before.

But we don’t need Bible scholars to tell us that the manger myth lacks facts; any intelligent reader can infer its disagreements with science and history. Myths are not about facts; they're about meaning.

Not until the third century, at the earliest, did Christmas begin. It developed in competition with Pagan feasts observing the birthday of the sun on the winter solstice, when the sun “dies” as daylight reaches its shortest point and then is reborn or resurrected as daylight increases. The Romans celebrated Sol Invictus, the Unconquered Sun, “whose annual journey across our sky can be celebrated worldwide as a truly unifying expression of our global family.” This last lovely sentiment comes from Acharya S., an atheist writer. I note this to banish Christian notions that we own Christmas exclusively.

The earliest written record of Christmas appeared in 336 CE, and in 354, a calendar entry for December 25 listed the births of both Sol Invictus and of Christ in Bethlehem of Judea. This double notice provides an example of syncretism, the melding of religious ideas, which, contrary to Christian claims, occurred often in our tradition.

Before the earth was known to be a revolving sphere, the sun mysteriously disappeared in the west every evening, followed some unknown course below earth during the night, then reappeared in the east every morning. Naturally this cycle of nature inspired mythmaking. The Goddess enveloped the sun in her body in the evening and sent it forth in the morning. The Greek sun god Helios crossed the heavens from east to west in a shiny chariot, descended to the underworld, and was "born anew every morning," sang the poet Horace.

The sun's daily descent and ascent also provided rich Christian symbolism. Surrounded by and steeped in Greek myth, Christians of the early centuries imagined Christ journeying to the underworld and rising in the east. "As the sun rises daily for all, so the mystical Sun of Righteousness rises for all," sang a Christian verse. In ancient records Christ was listed as one sun deity among several.

Pagans called their birthday feast of the sun god “Epiphany,” meaning "appearance." The Pagan Epiphany happened on January 6, which also became the date of the rival Christian feast celebrating Christ's appearance in the flesh, showing Christmas to be one solar celebration among several.
Calendar adjustments moved the winter solstice to December 25 and later to December 21. Some quarreling between Christians in East and West broke out when the East continued to observe the birth of Christ on January 6 after the West switched to December 25. Today Eastern Orthodox Christians still celebrate Christmas on January 6.

Because of its Pagan origin, the Puritans did not celebrate Christmas at all, and a few other Christian groups have discredited Christmas for the same reason. But that would also disqualify Easter, All Souls Day (Halloween), and other Christian feasts related to Pagan holidays.

For thousands of years before Christians took over solstice celebrations, human cultures developed myth and ritual to mark it. Huge bonfires were an important part of such events. We can easily imagine that before artificial light existed, the annual shrinking of light down to the shortest day of the year, followed by the steady growth of light foretelling spring, would have had a huge impact on human life.
Today we see the human impulse to light up the darkness in the riot of artificial lighting from November to January. The lights are not necessarily related to the Christian festival, as few people in the West believe the manger story literally anymore.

But for good reasons we continue singing songs that repeat and embellish the myth. There must be something besides commercial value that makes Christmas precious to more than believing Christians. The birth of the Child represents the birth of the precious Self inside each of us, the Christ consciousness in every person—the urge to give generously, the warm feelings of unity with all. This, I believe, is the enduring value of Christmas.

Christmas message, December 26, 2008
Here's my Christmas message along with my consoling philosophy/faith. I learned 28 years ago that I could reconcile my knowledge of Christian myth with my need for spiritual solace by trusting in a Higher Power. It shows Its face in interesting ways when I give myself over to Its guidance.

I was planning to drive somewhere on Christmas Day, having spent Christmas Eve with my son and daughter. In various ways I was prompted to change my mind, sure that it was best to stay home. I prepared to enjoy music and reading. But a friend in emotional need called and we spent much of the day together. I could not have been there for her, had I insisted on my original plan instead of being attuned to the subtle prompts diverting me from that plan.

This sort of thing happens to me often—an inner thread pulling me through the little and big decisions of life. Others attuned to a Higher Power, whether they respond to Jesus or another name, will not scoff at this.

I don’t consider this a late Christmas message. When I was growing up we started the Christmas season on December 25, and it lasted through January. The Advent period before that really did await the day when celebrations would start. On Christmas morning we woke up to the miracle performed by Christ Kindchen the night before. He brought our presents, trimmed the tree, made Christmas cookies—everything. When a school classmate told me slyly that Santa Claus was fake, I was surprised that he’d ever believed in silly Santa Claus. It did start the wheels in my little brain turning with regard to belief in the miracle.

I resent consumerism for stealing Christmas. On this day after December 25, radio stations refuse to play Christmas music anymore, the inspirational, meditative music appropriate to this dark and wintry transitional time between the old and the new. Professional musicians and singers who perform the music know its text is based on myth but appreciate our spiritual heritage. But the commercial world has convinced Americans that material stuff makes up the whole purpose of life. No more buying presents after the 25th, so no reason to play Christmas music. Despicable reasoning.

I wonder what the purveyors of consumerism think “The Twelve Days of Christmas” are about. The twelfth day was Epiphany on January 6, which was the Roman Empire’s winter solstice until a calendar adjustment moved it to December 25. Pagan religions celebrated the birth of the sun on this day and Christians established a rival feast to celebrate the birthday of their “true sun.” When the solstice moved to the 21st in another adjustment, Christmas stayed on the 25th in the West, but Eastern Orthodox still celebrate Christmas on January 6.

Dates and names are less important than the theme of death and renewal—Easter’s theme. For this reason it was a more important Christian feast than Christmas, before consumerism stepped in. Enough of that.

May the economic downturn direct us away from material things during the following year and toward healthy, loving relationships. This is my Christmas wish for all.

Back to being sheep

noreply@blogger.com (Jeanette) — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 19:10:00 +0000

Lords, Fathers, He’s & Him’s, January 2, 2012

The new imposed Mass translation is even more sexist than the one it replaced; it’s loaded with “Lords,” “Father’s,” “He’s” & “Him’s.” One passage in the Nicene Creed illustrates what appears to be deliberate patriarchal propaganda.
The former text read, “he was born of the Virgin Mary, and became flesh.”
The imposed one reads, “was incarnate of the Virgin Mary, and became man.”
It foolishly substitutes the Latin-sounding “incarnate” for “born” a few lines below the silly “consubstantial.” So we should expect its literal translations from the Latin to continue. But then it mistranslates from the Latin with the phrase “became man” instead of accurately translating the Latin caro and the Greek sarx as “flesh.” (Thanks to my scripture consultant Vincent Smiles for supplying the Latin and Greek.)
I can’t help thinking that the conspirators imposing this translation had in mind something very different from accuracy.
Richard McBrien weighed in on the new Mass translation. He corrected the

seriously mistaken impression abroad that the new translation of the missal was inspired and promoted by liturgists. Nothing could be further from the truth.
I've heard Catholics say that their pastors, though not conservative, have praised the new translations. Either their pastors are not being honest because they don't want to be reported to their bishop or they are deep-down right-wing in their thinking.

Well said. For background on the imposed language changes and why they invite outrage, scroll down.

McBrien identifies 3 strengths of Catholicism —its openness to other religions, its openness to scientific findings, and Catholic social teaching. I heartily concur—these elements make me proud to be Catholic. But I would list them in reverse order—Catholic social teaching, openness to science, and the Catholic attitude toward other religions, which is far from consistently open.
I could also have been proud of my church if, instead of wasting money and energy to impose the bungling translation, it had expended the effort on a translation that international language experts perfected in decades of painstaking, cooperative labor. That Catholic institutions, instead, comply with meek docility to foolish Vatican directives disappoints me. One of these years Vatican tyranny will be too much and it will get the pushback it deserves.
I understand the reluctance to revolt. I can write acerbic criticisms of hierarchy because I’m not in the position of religious leaders who risk losing their jobs for taking a conscience stand or who have to protect their whole religious communities. How admirable those who speak out despite their vulnerability!
Increasingly, we see instances of conscience revolts among Catholics. There is the whole sex abuse scandal moving in on hierarchs who covered up the crimes and perpetuated the abuse by moving offenders around. I feel for church leaders who now have to clean up after the guilty ones.
There were the brave sisters in the Catholic Health Association who corrected U.S. bishops when they opposed the health care bill. The legislation passed because of the sisters’ stand and, as a result, health care is being extended to more people.
There are the Roman Catholic Womenpriests whom the Vatican declares self-excommunicated, along with religious leaders like Roy Bourgeois who openly support them.
There are the theologians ignited into a firestorm of protest against the U.S. bishops’ ill-advised condemnation of Elizabeth Johnson’s award-winning book, Quest for the Living God. Understandably, theologians fear that theology subject to Rome and confined to pushing traditional dogma will be ridiculed. Theologians who dare to challenge literal interpretations of doctrine excite me, but that’s too large a topic for this post.

I rejoice over every protest against hierarchical tyranny and eagerly await more because, only when religious abuse of power is thoroughly discredited, can deeper spiritual awareness flourish. The imposed translation illustrates the truth of Carl Jung’s words: “Religion is a defense against the experience of God.” Authentic spiritual experience in today’s Catholic Church happens in spite of the institution, not because of it.

Back to being sheep, December 8, 2011
The new Mass language produces more than a few ripples of indignation, but only in people who know what took place. Ordinary people in the pews, unaware of the history preceding this change and oblivious to the implications of language, accept it without question. All Catholics who attend Mass, however, will be affected negatively, especially those unaware of what happened.
A reader asked me to comment on the new translation, and I am happy to comply, but first I expose the conspiracy. Yes, conspiracy.

An International Commission on English in the Liturgy (ICEL) produced its first Vatican II-mandated English translation of the liturgy in 1973 and continued its work to improve the first hastily-wrought translation. Liturgical, biblical, and linguistic experts—even poets—from around the world contributed to a new translation, finished in 1998, that focused on beauty of phrase while accurately translating the sense of the original Latin. All English language conferences of bishops approved it.

But not the Vatican. There a small group secretly made another translation now imposed on the world. The perpetrators, still not known, obviously had the cooperation of Benedict XVI.

Word-sensitive persons react negatively to the imposed liturgy:

Clumsy . . . wordy . . . very stilted . . . awkward and convoluted . . . abstract . . . word-for word literal . . . gobbledygook . . .
There are traps for the unwary . . . [It] ends up suggesting that the Blood of Christ and the power of the Spirit are instrumental in scattering God’s children.

Anthony Ruff, of the St. John’s, Collegeville, Benedictine community, resigned his chairmanship of ICEL’s music committee and wrote:

The forthcoming missal is but a part of a larger pattern of top-down impositions by a central authority that does not consider itself accountable to the larger church.
When I think of how secretive the translation process was, how little consultation was done with priests or laity, how the Holy See allowed a small group to hijack the translation at the final stage, how unsatisfactory the final text is, how this text was imposed on national conferences of bishops in violation of their legitimate episcopal authority, how much deception and mischief have marked this process—and then when I think of Our Lord’s teachings on service and love and unity . . . I weep.

His widely-quoted words explain the outrage from the perspectives of authority and linguistic inadequacy. I object for another reason.

Over the course of centuries, Catholics have grown up; they’ve become less like sheep, more educated and less dependent on the word of clergy. Eastern spirituality and secular humanism have contributed to an evolution in recognizing the worth of each individual human person—a trend appearing not only in religion. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the U.N. in 1948 also signals this trend toward recognizing the dignity of the human person in all its forms.

The words Catholics will now say buck this trend. I’ll explain next time.

December 16, 2011
I’m annoyed by the obsequious compliance of Catholics with the Mass language changes. I said Catholics have grown up, but many grown up Catholics give up on Christianity, even on Jesus, and leave. Of those who remain in Catholicism, most go along with hierarchical commands because it’s easier or because they would lose too much if they stood up for their convictions.

Yes, some language changes are “piddly,” as one person observed, but taken together, they seek to widen the distance between us and sacred divinity. I think the perpetrators had a deep motive, one not acknowledged and perhaps not even consciously recognized by them—reinforcing hierarchical control.
The changes do this in two ways—by beating out the theme of human unworthiness and using Latin expressions to make God seem unreachable except through the power of ordained clerics. This creates a chasm between divinity and humanity in direct opposition to the ascending theme of divinity within all. In the last half of the twentieth century an ascending chorus of voices has sung the song of an animating power we call God dwelling within physical reality. The imposed translation tries to reverse this growing realization.

To me, the proclamation, “Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again,” celebrates ongoing, universal expressions of divinity, because Christ represents the divine spark within all, ever nudging us to become better persons. Thus, Christ is constantly dying, rising, and being reborn.
But this proclamation has been replaced by the words, “We proclaim your death, O Lord, and profess your resurrection until you come again.” The interjection of “Lord” vetoes the universal interpretation and directs us to believe literally in the myth of a god who died for us and will come again at an end of the world.

Worse and glaringly obvious is the interjection of guilt-inducing words in a confession that used to read simply, “I have sinned through my own fault.” Now they want people to say “I have greatly sinned . . . through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault.” It would be laughable if it didn’t do so much harm.
The mostly-women congregations left in Catholic churches definitely do not need to hear how unworthy they are, given the tendency of women to grovel in self-criticism and the rates of violence against women. I repeat the accusation I flung out in my Sermon to Catholic priests:

What you don’t realize is that you contribute to sex abuse every time you say Mass.

Provocative? Yes. I hope to provoke change. An indictment of Catholic priests? No. The vast majority are innocent, good, and doing good, while oblivious to the wickedness wrought by the words they say. My Sermon explains adequately; here I have another task.

The second way the imposed translation induces a feeling of remoteness from divinity is by slavish devotion to Latin. As Rita Ferrone states in Commonweal, the imposed translation doesn't sing because it exactly renders

each word and expression of the Latin, [using] sacral vocabulary remote from ordinary speech . . .
It has resulted in prayers that are long-winded, pointlessly complex, hard to proclaim, and difficult to understand. . . .
Like so many of the newly translated prayers, it will come across as theo-babble, holy nonsense.

Some changes are hilarious.
“Not worthy that you should enter under my roof” replaces “not worthy to receive.”
“He took the precious chalice in his holy and venerable hands” replaces “he took the cup.” This theo-babble is especially amusing—the Latin word, calix, simply means cup.
“Consubstantial” replaces “one in being.”
He descended into hell” replaces “he descended to the dead.” This science-defying phrase reflects the first-century belief in a 3-tiered universe with earth sandwiched between heaven and hell where the dead lived. Among other deities, the goddess Persephone traveled up and down between the three levels, preparing the way for the god Jesus to ascend and descend.
The great spiritual master Jesus of Nazareth turned into a male idol! As one of my readers lamented,

Jesus has been polluted and contaminated beyond all recognition.

The foolish changes in liturgical language magnify problems already there—creating a male idol, reinforcing the feeling of human unworthiness, and reinforcing the damage to women. They not only debase the liturgy; they debase humanity.

Michele Bachmann vs Bishop Spong

noreply@blogger.com (Jeanette) — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 15:42:00 +0000

God calls us to fall on our faces and our knees and cry out to Him and confess our sins.
I don't know how much God has to do to get the attention of the politicians. We've had an earthquake; we've had a hurricane. He said, “Are you going to start listening to me here?”
Michele Bachmann

Michele Bachmann's god reflects the reified idol promoted by typical Christian God-talk. He thinks and speaks like the dominant males so admired in the paradigm we are in the process of escaping.
Retired Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong articulates the paradigm to which we are shifting. Joyfully I listened to him on MPR’s Midmorning cogently support the messages in my book and blog. Samples:

Science versus the literal “Sunday school version” of faith;
Bible passages contradicting each other and contradicting Christian doctrine (for instance, the idea that Jesus is God);
Atheism (a-theism means not believing God is an external being; it does not necessarily mean disbelief in God);
God-talk excluding the feminine ("It’s always a he.");
Religion promoting prejudice (“tribal hatred” in the Bible);
Christianity dying in Europe (empty churches; “rigor mortis too kind a term”);
Why have faith? (Humans need something that transcends humanity. “I want to offer an alternative to secular humanism”).

As Spong was answering the last question, he spoke of Jesus’ essential message—love. I was reminded of the many times people ask me why the heck I stay in the Catholic Church, given my beliefs. The answer—I find love practiced by Church people. That I am surrounded by many loving, aware, educated Catholics makes me luckier than many who grow past the spiritual immaturity of literal belief but have no community of like-minded Church people with whom they can continue to grow. I can see why they leave.

In answer to a listener question, Spong discussed “the disconnect” between biblical studies and what happens in church. This gets to the message I keep pounding in—liturgies must change! if Christianity is to have any relevance to contemporary life. As Spong stated, “The way we tell the Christ story is not making it in the modern world.”

The growing numbers of Christians waking up reassure me in the face of fundamentalist Christian revival politics.
Now I’m on my way to Thanksgiving dinner hosted by loving, aware Christians who share their bounty with others.

Spong & Stearns churches” September 20, 2009
On September 27, I was in Bobby Vee’s studio, the interesting former bank building of St. Joseph, MN, participating in the Millstream Arts Festival. With me were John and Bob Roscoe, whose new book presents a perfect counterpoise to my writings, which point to the worst in the Church. Their book points to the best. Legacies of Faith presents in colored photos, architectural descriptions, and brief histories all 52 Catholic Churches of Stearns County, MN.

The brothers Roscoe wrote that, when showing their out-of-state brother the beauty, grandeur, and overall magnificence of churches in Stearns, they realized with a shock, “The architecture we were seeing surpassed all but a few of the churches recently visited in rural northern Italy.”

The churches are extraordinary and this county is extraordinary. John Ireland, Archbishop of St. Paul, called it “a new Germany” and that’s half of it. It must be the largest concentration of German Catholics in the country and their churches, inspired by the best of European culture, are architectural gems. Stearns is my lifetime geographical home and I could say much more about its German Catholicism, but not now.

For some people who understand religious myth, Bishop John Shelby Spong tells it like it is. I first responded to his work less enthusiastically. Yes, he did a good job explaining the silliness of literal belief, but he offered no spiritual uplift.

Spong has evolved, as this MPR Midmorning interview with Kerri Miller shows. I like the way he answered my questions and related questions. My faith in the Other Side continues stronger than his, but that’s all right.

"So why stay?" December 1,2011
In response to my last post, a reader wanted me to say more about “why the heck I stay in the Catholic Church.” He wanted to know,

why we should be on the train at all—because Jesus has been polluted and contaminated beyond all recognition.

I agreed to write about this question that I have been asking myself for over 30 years. I wonder if some readers remember that the first chapter of God Is Not Three Guys in the Sky is titled “So why stay?”
This reader wanted more:

I hope it addresses not only why you haven't left the church but also why you haven't left Jesus—given the sorry history of Christianity.

Answer: I decouple Jesus from the institutional Church. U.S Bishops Conference president, Archbishop Timothy Dolan admitted this is what Christians do.

. . . as the chilling statistics we cannot ignore tell us, fewer and fewer of our beloved people—to say nothing about those outside the household of the faith—are convinced that Jesus and his church are one.

So let’s not blame Jesus for Christianity’s faults.
Churches are human institutions; I believe Jesus represents the life force we call God.
Church preaching can be mistaken and culturally specific;
Jesus’ preaching puzzles and can be misinterpreted, but it speaks to all humans irrespective of culture.
Churches make and enforce rules, some of which themselves violate morality, exemplified by official Catholic bans on contraception, all homosexual activity no matter how loving, and abortion even when it saves a life instead of taking one. Exemplified further by the Catholic Church’s despicable record on women’s ordination and on prominent Catholics who obey conscience instead of hierarchy. Three examples of the latter are Roy Bourgeois and Bishop Thomas Gumbleton and Sister Margaret Mary McBride

To appreciate the gulf between Jesus and Christianity, I recommend reading the Gospels of Mark, Luke, and Matthew, in this order, with eyes cleansed of church propaganda. A useful aid is The Five Gospels: the Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus by Robert Funk and the Jesus Seminar. Also place the Jesus you find there alongside shamans in cultures around the world. Strip Jesus of the garbage laid on him by Christian churches.

Remember—Jesus did not claim he’s God, he did not tell people to worship him, he did not discriminate against women, did not impose specific prayers on people, did not make rules that people know in their hearts are senseless.
Maybe you will not love Jesus even after finding what the man truly stands for. It’s OK. There are ways to be spiritual without being devoted to Jesus. I esteem Jesus' sharp revolutionary challenges to religious conventions, but I have to admit it is cultural factors that keep me in the tradition. Each person has to find her or his own way.

1% vs 99% in church & state

noreply@blogger.com (Jeanette) — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 14:55:00 +0000

Wealth inequality finally has entered the political debate, thanks to the Occupy movement. In politics and economics, the issue is unequal money and power. In religion the issue is power, not money. In both church and state, the few at the top look out for themselves while failing to realize that they need everyone else. This is the reason things are falling apart in both spheres.

Science and spirituality agree that every aspect of reality is interdependent with everything else, no exceptions.
On the physical plane, quantum physics shows interdependence between physical objects and human minds in wave/particle experiments. A scientist/observer setting up an experiment on an atom decides which it will be—a wave or a particle. The physical reality observed cannot be separated from human consciousness; it is not objective but united in a web of relations with the mind of the observer.
Quantum non-locality further supports the principle of interdependence by showing that one part of a split particle will change instantly—faster than the speed of light—when its “twin” on the opposite side of the universe changes. Not a single thing in our universe has autonomous, independent existence; no single phenomenon exists on its own.

In the immaterial or spiritual sphere, the principle of interdependence means that altruism, not greed, succeeds in the universe. As the globe tightens in globalization and spiritual awareness, concern for the whole must govern, as indeed all spiritual leaders urge.
One of the reasons I have not left the Catholic Church (And where would I go?) is its stellar record on the issues of poverty and justice. The long tradition of Catholic social teaching has consistently stood in solidarity with those less wealthy, less able, less recognized—the marginalized. Not only in its teaching but in its actions.
As conservative as the last two popes have been, John Paul II and Benedict XVI have spoken out for just economies. But they have tightened their grasp on power.

In an interview with Krista Tippett, Buddhist and scientist Matthieu Ricard explains the consequences of interdependence.

What do I do? I create a small bubble, a self-centered bubble, and I take care of my own happiness because after all I'm this separate entity so I just have to build my own happiness. . . . Everyone will become happy in their own bubble and then the world will be fine.
But this is not working. Why? Not just because of the moral issue, because it's bad to be self-centered, but because it's dysfunctional, because it's at odds with reality.

“At odds with reality” sums up the church and state policies that brought on the economic and religious messes choking us right now.
The Occupy movement focuses on wealth disparity with its 1% versus 99% statements. Protesters who expose gross inequity are EXPOSING class warfare, not waging it. Elizabeth Warren speaks to the real wagers of class warfare:

There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own—nobody. . . . You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police-forces and fire-forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory—and hire someone to protect against this—because of the work the rest of us did.

So how does the Church fit into this? To borrow from Elizabeth Warren,

No pope can dictate doctrine on his own, nor can a set of hierarchs do so. The rest of us form popular piety and morality, sometimes with, often without dictates from the Vatican—think of Marian devotions and bedroom issues.
No cleric in this church became one on his own—not one. You developed your moral values from your mother and other women, less often from men. If you were an altar boy, you probably learned how from a woman. The churches you went to were cleaned by women. The religious instruction you received was primarily by women. The Masses you went to were attended by more women than men.
From pope to deacon, the status of every cleric rests on the backs of women, more broadly, on the backs of lay people.

I quoted experts, but it doesn’t take experts to figure this out. Any child knows that no one and nothing stands alone, that interdependence is the way of the universe. A child can figure out that sellers need buyers, that a successful business depends on customers who have the money to buy the goods or services. A child knows that morality and spirituality are taught by moms, families, neighbors, and communities, not by men in the Vatican.

Systems that continue to favor a few winners with more money or power are unsustainable. Ultimately, they are losers.

1% vs 99%, November 11, 2011
I received a flurry of comments agreeing with my previous post. But most noteworthy are more critical comments from outside of Catholicism.
Laura wrote,

I think money is also an issue in churches and religions, not as obviously in Catholicism. Look at all the rich televangelists.

Good point.
Scott Thompson, wrote,

There are items with which I disagree ......."The Catholic Church has ALWAYS stood behind the poor, the less marginalized, etc....? ??
[Consider] the atrocities of the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages in its confiscation of personal property, the pogroms of the Crusades, the killings of thousands during the Inquisition, the support of the Nazis under Hitler, and last but not least, the uncovered abuses of the last 50 years ................”

Good points.
Regarding Catholicism today, two items on the front page of National Catholic Reporter show its two faces. Tom Roberts reports on a document coming from the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace that urges reform of international financial and monetary systems.

The document speaks of “common dignity,” “common vision,” “common decisions” and “universal brotherhood.” In fact, the needs of the latter, of “universal brotherhood,” say the writers, transcend consideration of the marketplace.

NCR adds that the basic sentiment of the Occupy movement is in line with Catholic social teaching. Praiseworthy. Hallelujah!

But the same front page carries the story of theologian Elizabeth Johnson disputing a claim by the U.S. Catholic bishops conference, which blasted her latest book, Quest for the Living God, a widely popular work acclaimed by her fellow theologians. Johnson replied that the bishops did not follow their own procedures for resolving disagreements with a theologian—namely, to meet with her or him.
Cardinal Donald Wuerl, head of the bishops’ doctrine committee, claimed the bishops offered to meet three times and she didn’t respond, a claim that Johnson called “demonstrably and blatantly false.” Publicly posted letters between Johnson and Wuerl show that she asked for meetings, which they never granted. This is only one example in a constant stream of incidents showing bishops clamping down on theological inquiry, judging ideas they don’t understand. A correspondent quoted by Richard McBrien highlights the irony.

It is beyond me how the bishops can claim, with a straight face, to be teachers sitting in judgment on teachers when they plainly cannot understand the arguments much less the conclusions.

How does this apply to my previous post? The front page of NCR demonstrates Catholicism's “stellar record on the issues of poverty and justice” TODAY, not in the past, as Scott points out. But “common dignity,” “common vision,” “common decisions” and “universal brotherhood” are sorely lacking in the hierarchy’s own relationships with the 99% kept out of decision-making.

More irony—the same issue of NCR reports members of the bishops conference complaining that the federal government infringes on the right of conscience by putting religious freedom under “ever more frequent assault and rapid erosion.” How does the government do this? By allowing practices that most thoughtful members of our society, including most Catholics, deem acceptable but the Catholic hierarchy wants to ban—contraception, sterilization, and gay marriage.

The bishops accuse the government of granting rights that they would take away. The BISHOPS are the ones who threaten freedom! Many, many theologians and members of the Church have had their right of conscience assaulted by the Catholic hierarchy. And until now I didn’t even mention clergy sex abuse.

Why care if God or Goddess

noreply@blogger.com (Jeanette) — Sat, 08 Oct 2011 15:55:00 +0000

Christians & the Divine Feminine, October 15, 2011
The image of God as Mother is so instinctive that patriarchal religions could not avoid it. The ancestors of the Jews worshipped the Goddess Asherah and the mystical tradition in Judaism known as the Kabbalah revered the Shekinah, the indwelling presence of God. Raphael Patai in The Hebrew Goddess called Shekinah,

an independent divine female entity, a direct heir to ancient Hebrew goddesses.

His assessment is shared by other scholars. Asphodel Long in The Absent Mother wrote that Shekinah represented the Tree of Life and the community of Israel.

In the latter case, she is re-mythologized to become the marital partner of God, reflecting the Biblical tradition of God the husband, Israel the wife.

Shekinah was secretly glorified by male Jewish mystics whose devotion to Her was not permitted to the whole Jewish society. Women were consequently kept in the dark about this feminine image.

One author of our Christian scriptures employs an image strangely maternal. John 7:38 says,

From within him (literally "from his belly") rivers of living water shall flow.

We see here the pattern of attributing female strengths to male God-images because our patriarchal tradition did not allow female God-images. Priscilla, a leader in the early Christian group in Asia Minor known as Montanists, declared,

In a vision Christ came to me in the form of a woman in a bright garment.

Not very strange, but the following is. A second century “Church Father” whose theology reminds me of today’s Christian right-wingers, Irenaeus of Lyons, wrote,

His purpose was to feed us at the breast of his flesh, by nursing us . . .

Weird and telling!
Another “Church Father” of that time, Clement of Alexandria, wrote:

The Word is everything to the child, both father and mother, teacher and nurse ... The nutriment is the milk of the Father ... and the Word alone supplies us children with the milk of love, and only those who suck at this breast are truly happy. For this reason, seeking is called sucking; to those infants who seek the Word, the Father's loving breasts supply milk.

Clement assigned the most powerful image of divine nurturing to a male deity, the Father, because patriarchy could not allow a Goddess. This not only robs female-power; it turns male God-images freakish.

Feminine God-imagery came from yet another “Father,” one in the fourth century—John named Chrysostom (“golden mouthed”). But out of his "golden mouth" came vile sexism:

What else is a woman but a foe to friendship, an inescapable punishment, a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, as domestic danger, a delectable detriment, an evil of nature, painted with fair colours! (from Sex Priests and Power by Richard Sipe)

How could men called "Church Fathers" and saints be so stupid?

Catherine LaCugna, a modern Trinitarian theologian, tells us that one of the famous fourth-century Trinitarian theologians from Cappadocia (in today’s Turkey),

chided his opponents for thinking that God is male because God is called God and Father.

A rare man!

Many have remarked that the biblical Jesus seems feminine, the Jesus of Christian art even more so. His beardless face, his long, abundant, and curly locks distinguish him from the disciples. An unmistakably feminine Christ with swelling breasts and wide hips appeared in the art of Gaul, Ravenna, Rome, and Thessalonica from the mid-fourth century to the beginning of the sixth. If you find the book The Clash of Gods: a Reinterpretation of Early Christian Art by Thomas Mathews, you can see pictures illustrating this.

Catherine LaCugna reports that the Eleventh Church Council of Toledo proclaimed that the Son proceeds from the womb of the Father. Other Christian greats who described God or Christ in feminine terms were Gregory of Nazianzus, Ambrose of Milan, Augustine of Hippo, Peter Lombard, Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure, Bernard of Clairvaux, Julian of Norwich, Anselm of Canterbury, and Mechtild of Magdeburg.
Bernard, Julian, and Mechtild contributed to the twelfth century devotion to the "maternity" of Jesus. They imagined him as their mother, his breasts giving them nourishment—“Mother Jesus" was the name Julian gave him.

Praying to a female image of the Holy One is so natural that Christians do it in spite of being forbidden to do it. Every period of history has had its Goddess—suppressed, dismissed, distorted, demonized—but always under the surface and finally irrepressible.

What difference if God or Goddess? October 4, 2011
It makes a huge difference how we imagine the Holy One. The male-only God dominating Western life had the effect of disparaging feminine values, which left almost a monopoly for masculine values. The God-king encouraged a hard-on-self spirituality. Edward Whitmont in Return of the Goddess throws more light on his influence:

The patriarchal ego is heroic. Its idealized achievement is conquest of self and world by sheer will and bravery. Personal feeling, desire, pain and pleasure are disregarded. Failure to do so is accounted weakness.
The resulting psychological achievement is a sense of personal identity vested in a body-limited, separate self, answerable to the law of group and God-king.

This rigor had consequences for Western religion and Western political history: wars, conquest, forced conversions, obsession with sin and following rules to get into an exclusive kingdom.

My overriding theme in this series and much of my writing is our need for inclusiveness, and this is a feminine value. J.J. Bachofen (Myth, Religion, and Mother Right) recognized it in his study of ancient cultures:

Whereas the paternal principle is inherently restrictive, the maternal principle is universal;
the paternal principle implies limitation to definite groups, but the maternal principle, like the life of nature, knows no barriers.
The idea of motherhood produces a sense of universal fraternity
. . . Every woman's womb, the mortal image of the earth mother Demeter, will give brothers and sisters to the children of every other woman;

Bachofen's reflection reminds us that masculine exclusiveness, unchecked, can become a harsh message of every man for himself, us against them, we are the best, look out only for our own.

More contrasts between male & female emphases to come.
Maxine Moe Rasmussen emailed,

I've had this quote on my bedroom mirror for many months. Since I've had my own vision of the Great Mother awakening, I can only be hopeful for all of humanity.
"Without a restoration to the Christian mysticism of Jesus' own full celebration of the Divine Feminine, the 'kingdom-consciousness' cannot and will not be born."
The Gospel of Thomas, Annotated & Explained—Stevan Davies & Andrew Harvey

Return of the Goddess
Increasingly the Great Mystery of the Universe is imagined female as She was all over the globe in pre-historic times. Evidence of the Goddess' return surrounds us—visions of Mary, Goddess myths resurrected, and feminism, although reviled, making an impact.

From the science of biology comes the Gaia hypothesis, which observes the biosphere stabilizing global temperatures, oxygen in the atmosphere, ocean salinity, and other factors that support life. It is named after the primordial Earth Goddess Gaia. Even Christians and the slow-moving institutional Church are softening their image of God. An Irish Jesuit quoted by Horrocks (The Absent Mother: Restoring the Goddess to Judaism and Christianity) writes,

Mary is now the atmosphere in which I walk, a feminine atmosphere, a protecting atmosphere, a guiding atmosphere, a loving atmosphere.

The monopoly of masculine values wanes, as the globe steadily, inexorably continues its shift to feminine values.

Woman is Life-Giver, Mother Earth, the encircling womb, the Body that gives life and nourishment. She is the power that gives birth to forms, the ultimate Source. As nurturing Life-giver, She inhabits material reality in a way impossible for a Father-God. She is a more immediate parent than the Father can be because She is the Womb from which we are born and to which we return at death to be transformed into new life. Therefore She is not so separate, so disconnected, so "other" from us as the male God. She is, according to Horrocks,

matrix of everything, that is, the home, womb, destiny, and point of return for all life.

The perception of power She brings with Her also differs from God the Father’s rule. God and male power sit up there in a vertical universe—over, higher, other. Now we visualize the Holy erupting from below or appearing from within or surrounding us. God as Mother encompasses all, is inner, deeper, through. The Goddess is less a Ruler over us than a Presence empowering us. She gives us power-to-act instead of power-over-another.

As did the Nazarene. The man depicted in the gospels was not a dispassionate superior but cared to the point of weeping. His wont was to empower others. He would say "Arise and walk," but "obey" was not in his vocabulary, and he denounced those who expected to be obeyed. His kind of authority did not diminish others or make them dependent on him; it empowered others and gave them autonomy. Jesus really models the feminine principle.

It stands to reason that we need to balance the tilt of thousands of years. We need the whole. He rules and sets limits, provides protection and strength; She nurtures, gives unconditional love, provides gentle security and unending advocacy. We can only guess, but a society too exclusively-feminine might discriminate too little, might need more demanding standards, might need more drive to achieve, more competition, more anxiety! But if the feminine had more say in our world, there would be fewer wars, fewer children starving and abused, fewer assaults, more local and global cooperation, more care of the environment, and more sharing of wealth.

Of course it would be as foolish to insist that the transcendent Power is a She as to insist that it is a He. The ineffable, holy Power/Mystery/Force of the Universe is beyond words, beyond forms, beyond images, beyond male/female, beyond any conceptions of which we are capable. Augustine:

When we have comprehended, what we have comprehended is not God.

Whether we call the majestic Power of the universe "Her" or "Him," "God" or "Goddess," or any of a thousand other names, we need images both firm and yielding, both stern and flexible, both our superior and the ground of our being, both other and our own deepest selves. The Great More continues Her unveiling of Self. The Holy One is both She and He.

Restoring the Divine Feminine is not a favor to feminists; it is the sine qua non of all efforts at healing human divisions. The feminist critique is not a footnote to theology; it is central to everything. Its implications touch global concerns such as starvation, the ecology, the nuclear threat, economic justice, and peace. We are witnessing the most profound change in the human conceptual paradigm in thousands of years, if not in the history of humanity. The evolutionary leap is worth taking.

P.S. In response to an email, I add that I never pray to a female image of Divinity; I communicate with gender-less Spirit. What drives these posts is my fury at Christianity's exclusively male "Father Lord, HeHimHis." I am disgusted that our religion perpetuates ignorance, that it encourages worship of a male-idol, a god, not God.

The world needs Goddess, October 27, 2011
This past Saturday I gave a presentation on the biblical Goddess as part of the Women & Spirituality Conference at the State University in Mankato, Minnesota. In this space I already gave information about Goddess in the Bible and I’ll say more in future posts, but here I want to say that I always come away from the conference feeling hopeful that a shift is occurring in human consciousness.

I started attending in 1992 and haven’t missed a year since then because at that conference I find women (and some men) who GET it, people who ask big questions, arrive at out-of-the-box answers, and come to the conference to be with others who get it. They have the guts to doubt official stories about what we call God, about religion in general, and about politics—the topics that rile and divide people because some have the ability to make imaginative leaps that others fear.

Western religions, which have a disproportionate influence on global spirituality, train people to scoff at the Goddess and that training fosters idolatry. How? By limiting the human imagination to male images of spiritual reality. The Christian “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,” for instance, are discussed as if they were male individuals with never any suggestion that the Trinity could be as much female as male. I think very few Christians realize that the God-images they worship are not God the SOURCE of ALL.
No image of Divinity is. That’s what the First Commandment is all about.

I recall an event in the 1990s that brought together college students and professors to listen to presentations from a variety of religions. I represented Goddess spirituality and, when I said that we don’t claim God is more female than male, I sensed surprise, relief, and increased respect. The surprise and respect from some, confusion from others, rose higher when I pointed out that God is also not more male than female.

To the shame of Western religions, an exclusively male deity is precisely what they preach. I’ve actually encountered supposedly scholarly pieces arguing that God is more male than female, but most such preaching happens unconsciously with the pronouns I’ve come to loathe when they’re used in reference to Transcendent Divinity—He, Him, and His. The habit of using exclusively male pronouns promotes idolatry.
Here’s typical God-talk:

Who has known the mind of God? To him be glory. ”
“The Lord feeds us; He answers our needs.

What happens when you read this alternative?

Who has known the mind of God. To Her be glory.
The Power of God feeds us; She answers our needs.

If it feels wrong, you’re a typical victim of Western religious training. Consider the implications of accepting the first but rejecting the second. I challenge you to consider whether you’re worshipping an idol, thus violating the First Commandment. An idol because your God-image will not admit Transcendence that’s beyond gender, beyond what makes sense to our limited human minds—Transcendence that’s both She and He and infinitely More.

Respectful Goddess-talk and use of She/Her in reference to Transcendence would not only nudge victims of Western religious training toward a deeper understanding of Transcendence; it would profoundly improve every aspect of human life. This is why we need the Goddess.

Zionists & the Promised Land

noreply@blogger.com (Jeanette) — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 14:29:00 +0000

The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) has given up trying to negotiate with Israel, which, in violation of signed accords, continues to confiscate Palestinian land and violate Palestinian rights. Now the PLO is asking the UN Security Council for full recognition of Palestine, which would call more attention to Israel’s violations of international law.
For fear of losing the Jewish vote, the Obama administration opposes the PLO’s bid at the U.N. and will veto it. Despite this, Republicans accuse the administration of not being pro-Israel enough, and the Christian right preaches that Palestine belongs to Israel by biblical command.

This faith response (adapted) comes from Florence Steichen, CSJ, Coordinator of Pax Christi MN, 1998-2006.
The Promised Land
It does not make sense to work for a just peace if God has promised all the land to one people, the chosen people.
The first consideration is, How do we understand scripture? And intertwined, How do we image—not understand, but image—God?

To begin, scripture is not history; it is not a record of what happened. The Bible is like a library, a collection of writings of many different kinds. Biblical accounts of the conquest of Canaan and entry into the Promised Land tell the experience of a people who succeeded against all odds. They believed they succeeded because their God had chosen them, guided their leaders and fought for them.
It is a national epic, told, re-told and embellished for centuries before it was written. The basic truth of the story is this: The Israelites did settle in Canaan. But we need to be cautious about assuming we know God’s will and role in this.

Those who choose to interpret scripture regarding the Promised Land literally need to deal with several related texts. There were conditions to the promise:

Be careful to act in accordance with all the laws that my servant Moses commanded you (Joshua 1:7).

The Old Testament is a history of the Israelites’ faithlessness and forgiveness. Rabbi Michael Lerner, writing in Tikkun magazine in September of 2007 comments on crucial requirements for ownership of the land:

From Moses to Jeremiah and Isaiah, the Prophets taught that the Jewish claim on the land of Israel was totally contingent on the moral and spiritual life of the Jews who lived there, and that the land would, “vomit you out,” as the Torah tells us, if people did not live according to its highest moral vision.

Over and over again, in one form or another, the Torah repeats its most frequently stated mitzvah (command):

When you enter your land, do not oppress the stranger [the Other, the one who is the outsider of your society, the powerless one].

Not only “you shall love your neighbor as yourself,” but, “You shall love the Other.”
Joshua 6 tells of the conquest of Jericho. You know the story about marching around the city for 6 days, carrying the ark and blowing trumpets. On the 7th day they marched around the city 7 times and the walls fell. However, archeologists have determined that the city was already in ruins—there were no walls left to fall!
Leviticus 25 states:

Hallow the 50th year and proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you: you shall return, every one of you, to your property and to your family. The land shall not be sold [and I add “taken”] in perpetuity, for the land is mine. With me you are but aliens and tenants.

The Israelites are not perpetual owners, but “aliens and tenants"!
But most problematic for both pro-Israelis and pro-Palestinians, from Numbers 31:

They did battle against Midian, as the Lord had commanded Moses, and killed every male.

They killed the kings, and took the women and their little ones captive. A few verses later, Moses is angry at his officers.

Have you allowed all the women to live? . . . Kill every male among the little ones, and every woman who has known a man by sleeping with him. But keep alive for yourselves all the young girls who have not slept with a man.

Does this sound like the word of God, the will of God?
This picture of God is hard to square with the One whom Jesus revealed, who makes the sun rise on the just and unjust alike. In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus says,

Be compassionate as your Father is compassionate.

God has not changed; we have grown in our awareness of who God is, what God is like. We have moved, I trust, from God as portrayed in the book of Job—God who gives Satan the power to do anything he wants to test Job, including persecuting his family!—to God as unfathomable abyss. In the new universe story, as theologian Elizabeth Johnson and others write, God even suffers with suffering people.

Speaking of suffering, Michel Sabbah, the former Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem whose diocese includes Israel, the occupied Palestinian territories, Jordan and Cyprus, wrote a Pastoral Letter in 1993, on “Reading the Bible in the Land of the Bible.”
Sabbah is a Palestinian from Nazareth, the first local person to be named patriarch, the highest Catholic position in the area. An Israeli citizen, Sabbah even with VIP status has been blocked on occasion from entering the West Bank to celebrate Mass with the local congregation.

Patriarch Michel Sabbah wrote the pastoral letter “to answer questions that Palestinian Christians have regarding the meaning of the Bible because it appears to be directly linked to the difficult situation which we have experienced.” It is very painful for Palestinian Christians to hear biblical texts such as Psalm 135:

God struck down many nations and killed mighty kings—Sihon, king of the Amorites, and Og, king of Bashan, and all the kingdoms of Canaan—and gave their land as a heritage to his people Israel.

Sabbah reminds his readers that the Word of God is living and active. Salvation history is history, there is progression. God promised to make Abraham the father of many nations and a blessing for all nations. Jews, Christians and Muslims all venerate Abraham as their common father of faith in one God who blesses all people. Christian and Muslim Palestinians are equally and deeply conscious that they have always lived in this land. Palestine is their country, their political and cultural patrimony.

I interject that even the man Jesus needed to learn that God is God of all. And I, Jeanette, interject this from my post "Canaanite woman & General Lee":

In Matthew 15: 21-28, Jesus rebuffs a Canaanite woman asking him for help, saying his mission is exclusively to the “house of Israel,” that is, to fellow Jews. “It is not right to take the food of sons and daughters and throw it to the dogs.”
To this insult from Jesus the woman sends a clever rejoinder, “Even the dogs eat the leavings that fall from their masters’ tables.” It brings a compliment from Jesus and having her wish granted. The woman has successfully converted Jesus from an exclusive, closed-circle stance to a new, open and broader view of things—including non-Jews.

The Apostle Paul, too, was surprised to see that the Spirit came to the Gentiles, and Peter needed a vision and the visit to Cornelius to get the point.
Continuing from Sabbah’s letter:

The Word of God can be used only in the struggle for truth. In such a case, this word can only unite us. If, on the contrary, it fosters division or hatred among us, this would mean that we have deformed the divine Word, making it a weapon of death, not of truth. And it would mean accepting the principle that we should read the Bible only from a political perspective, thus forgetting its religious essence.

This brings us to the political dimension of Christian Zionists, those who believe that the promise made to Abraham in Genesis 12:3 (“I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed by you”) has abiding relevance, that support for Israel is biblically mandated. They support even the political and expansionist aims of the State of Israel, all its policies and its military incursions on Palestinians.

Zionism is a late 19th century Jewish movement that sought a homeland for Jews, not necessarily in Palestine. There was even consideration of land in Africa for a Jewish state. The modern state of Israel established in 1948 cannot be identified with the Israel of biblical times. Joel Kovel, an anti-Zionist Jew, states,

Zionism asserts that the Jewish claim on that land, which is over 2000 years old, overrides anybody else’s claim, all legal considerations, and any respect for human rights. . . . Zionism is a betrayal of everything worthwhile in the Jewish tradition.

While I am sadly convinced that many distort scripture for political purposes, I also think some really believe the promise literally, such as Rev. L. Nelson Bell, Billy Graham’s father-in-law. When Israel conquered Jerusalem in 1967, he wrote,

That for the first time in more than 2000 years Jerusalem is now completely in the hands of the Jews gives the student of the Bible a thrill and a renewed faith in the accuracy and validity of the Bible.

Christian Zionism is a powerful political force in the U.S, an important constituency of the Republican Party. Christian evangelicals lobby Congress to not pressure Israel in any way to give land for peace.
But it is important to note that not all evangelicals are Zionists, and many make that clear in public statements. From a letter of over 40 evangelical Christian leaders to President Bush:

We reject the way some have distorted biblical passages as their rationale for uncritical support for every policy and action of the Israeli government instead of judging all actions—of both Israelis and Palestinians—on the basis of biblical standards of justice. (July 2002).

In July of 2007, more than 30 evangelical leaders wrote to President Bush,

Being a friend to Israel does not mean withholding criticism when it is warranted.

Jimmy Carter, an evangelical, is a good example of a critical friend of Israel. He has been vilified and accused of anti-Semitism for his book, Palestine: Peace not Apartheid.

There is no reason to assert that the ancient Israelites had or that the modern state of Israel has a right to perpetual control of the Promised Land, Palestine. I conclude with Sabbah’s question: Is it possible for a just and merciful God to impose injustice or oppression on another people to favor a chosen people?

Patriarchal dominating god

noreply@blogger.com (Jeanette) — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 14:12:00 +0000

(continuing “Goddess Mary” series)
Jesuit sociologist Walter Ong argues in Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness that God is male. As can be expected, he conflates his God-image—the male “Father”—with Transcendent Reality and unwittingly argues against himself.

We are distanced from God as from a father.
We have never been physically and physiologically attached to God. . . .
In this sense, God is male. He is not nature.

Nature is feminine, Mother Nature. Out of her we grow.
We do not grow out of God. . . . [God is always] other, different, separated as a father physically is . . .

Without intending to, Ong shows plainly that the deformed relationship of Christians with Transcendence stems from their male god—the sole image of divinity permitted to them—out there, over us, detached from us.
From this grew the image of a stern and relentless judge-god and sin-centered theology. The demands of the exacting god prompted Teresa of Avila to,

thinking of how I have offended God, and of the many things I owe Him.

It led her to frequent confession and worrying over confessors who committed "so great an evil" as to say that mortal sins were only venial sins. She called it a "pretext" or excuse when they told her that “pastimes and satisfactions" are allowed, sure that her "poorly educated" confessors put her salvation in jeopardy.

I hasten to add that I am not trying to destroy Teresa’s deserved reputation as a great mystic; I am exposing the deformed image of divinity in our tradition. Teresa’s scrupulosity grew naturally and abundantly out of the staple spiritual diet in Christian Europe.

The Little Flowers of St. Francis belongs to a genre called hagiography—Lives of the saints with limited historical value but revealing a spiritual attitude that still plagues us today. Writing a century after the death of Francis, the author attributes to Francis of Assisi this "wonderful" sermon given in a town terrified by purported wolf attacks:

. . . saying among other things that such calamities were permitted by God because of their sins, and how the consuming fire of hell by which the damned have to be devoured for all eternity is much more dangerous than the raging of a wolf . . .
how much more they should fear to be plunged into hell . . .

The gleeful relish in this writer’s description of punishment for sin occurs commonly in our tradition. Another sample comes from neo-scholastic theology:

It is certainly fitting that God, as legislator and ruler, should not remit offenses without temporal punishment, so that in the future His laws might be better obeyed.

The Big Boss in the sky tops a long line of bosses who exact greater submission from females than males. In another Flowers of St. Francis story, Clare, the saintly sister of Francis, is visited by the pope, who asks her to bless loaves of bread on the table. She replies in a painfully obsequious manner:

Most Holy Father, please excuse me, but I would deserve to be severely blamed if a vile little woman like myself should presume to give such a blessing in the presence of the Vicar of Christ.

The Greek word hierarches means "one who presides at sacred rites," but a theological dictionary defines hierarchy as,

the body of men [sic] empowered to administer sacred things, a body organized in ranks and orders with a subordination of the lower to the higher ministries.

Creatures stand on a ladder in greater or lesser proximity to the Boss "up there" and must go through "ranks and orders with a subordination of the lower to the higher." The Holy is not freely accessible to all but must travel down to lower creation in a well-defined pecking order: pope, cardinals, archbishops, bishops, priests, men, women, children, animals . . .
Always power flows from the top down, and morality consists in following rules and obeying superiors—obedience a touted virtue and pride the biggest sin.

Hierarchy presumes submission to authority above and domination of subservient others below—a can't-fail recipe for alienated relationships. In his play Saint Joan, George Bernard Shaw gives Joan of Arc's main interrogator at the trial condemning her to be burned a telling speech:

What will the world be like when The Church's councils of learned, venerable pious men, are thrust into the kennel by every ignorant laborer or dairymaid whom the devil can puff up with the monstrous self-conceit of being directly inspired from heaven?

Because Joan's interrogators cannot imagine Holy Guidance erupting from within, her replies remain incomprehensible to them.

LADVENU. Do you not believe that you are subject to the Church of God on earth?
JOAN. Yes. When have I ever denied it?
LADVENU. Good. That means, does it not, that you are subject to the our Lord the Pope, to the cardinals, the archbishops, and bishops . . .
JOAN. God must be served first. . . . My voices do not tell me to disobey the Church; but God must be served first.
CAUCHON. And you, and not the Church, are to be the judge?
JOAN. What other judgment can I judge by but my own?

Christian hagiography reveals the effect of the power-over model on all relationships. When Francis commands one of his monks to twirl around like a fool, the monk is expected to obey him even "if he should order you to throw stones." Benedict finds one of his monks loitering during prayer time and strikes the offender with his staff.
In a more subtle manifestation of this mentality, Teresa of Avila writes that because Jesus "was subject to Joseph . . . Joseph could give the Child command." Caught in the hierarchical model, she struggles to sort out who had command over whom. Did Joseph because he was parent? Or did Jesus because he was God? The possibility of power arising from within or for shared, mutual, horizontal, reciprocal relationships does not occur to her.

Augustine's writings betray the same perception of a cosmos structured in super and sub-ordination, domination and submission, power flowing down and requiring absolute obedience:

It is You who make wives subject to their husbands . . . [in] faithful obedience; you set husbands over their wives; you join sons to their parents by a freely granted slavery, and set parents above their sons in pious domination . . .

You teach slaves to be loyal to their masters . . . [You] warn the peoples to be subservient to their kings. (quoted by Peter Brown)

All relationships are vertical. You either dominate or are dominated. Authority, leadership, and order translate to command, control, and subjection. As late as 1982, J.A. Lyons writes,

Just as it is not possible to be a father without having a son, so too God cannot be almighty unless he has creatures over which to exercise his power.

The top-down power model still pervades Church communication, not only in governing the institution but governing belief! Vatican officials and bishops give themselves authority to,

judge whether what is presented as the content of faith is accurate.

Even theologians are forbidden to dissent publicly from official teaching. When polls first indicated a Catholic majority favoring the ordination of women, a bishop asserted that "the only appropriate discussion" about the question was "why the teaching of the church is correct." He assumed that, contrary to Vatican II’s declaration in Lumen Gentium, the Church is not the whole people of God but a few men in power.
At a 1994 synod on the role of religious orders, a Hungarian cardinal complained that the notion of obedience is being “corrupted by democratic sentiments."

Today the power game continues over Elizabeth Johnson’s Quest for the Living God: Mapping the Frontiers of the Theology of God. Despite the author receiving numerous awards for her theological studies and the book being widely used as a theology text, the U.S. bishops’ Committee on Doctrine censured it.

When the Catholic Theological Society of America objected to the bishops’ harsh critique, Cardinal Donald Wuerl, chair of the committee, answered that the role of a bishop is to be a judge of authentic theology and that Johnson should have sought an imprimatur (approval) from her bishop. I find this highly ironic because, in my view, Catholic bishops—indeed, all clergymen—could benefit from taking courses in theology from Elizabeth Johnson.
No doubt Johnson’s inclusion of the Divine Feminine poses a problem for the censuring bishops. Chapter Five of Quest for the Living God is titled: “God Acting Womanish.”

Tea Party & Medieval piety, August 30
(continuing “Goddess Mary” series) This response came to me:

I fear my mind cannot take all this in. . .

Yes, it's hard to take in. (She was responding to "Patriarchal dominating god.")
Thank Goodness, we have come some distance from past “saintly” attitudes and perceptions because they clash with ours. A huge shift has ensued. The “Father-God” now resembles less the thunderbolt-hurling Zeus and more a loving, caring Mother. But domination/subordination still cripples all our relationships—male over female, clergy over lay, white over black, straight over gay, and so on.

How the POWER-OVER model demeans women is exposed with sickening clarity in the image of a female soul relating to a male god. In medieval piety men adopted a dependent, submissive, stereotypically-feminine attitude to gain approval from a male god. They spoke of their soul as "she" in obedience to "Him." She was to be dependent and submissive.

Prevent the soul being too confident of her strength and so yielding to presumption.
(Louis Bouyer, The History of Christian Spirituality)

The passive female soul was dominated by the active male god who boasted,

Know that I am he who is and thou art she who is not.

As late as 1981 Walter Ong wrote,

In relation to God . . . we are all, men and women alike, basically feminine.

The female’s place is clear: she is inferior; she must never be the initiator; her proper attitude is yielding compliance. No wonder Teresa of Avila, a stronger woman than most, often apologized for being a woman. This model laid the spiritual foundation for the scourge of pornography.

It is also hard on males who lack the will to dominate. Rapists in prisons force a weaker male partner to be "the girl." Passive boys are beat up in fights. Both women and men are hurt when divine initiative and activity are seen as masculine, human dependence and passivity as feminine.

The POWER-OVER model underlies all, and churches continue to pound it in with their relentless HeHimHis Lord talk. It took feminist theologians, who stopped seeing everything as either higher or lower, to spot what lies at the bottom of the other inequities. This was written by Sandra Schneiders:

Rosemary Ruether has pointed out that patriarchy is the basic principle underlying not only the subordination of women to men, but of one race to another, of colonies to master nations, of children to adults, of nations to divine right monarchs, of believers to clergy. In other words, patriarchy is the nerve of racism, ageism, classism, colonialism, and clericalism as well as of sexism.

The male-over-female pattern supports and perpetuates all vertical, alienating relationships. Power unchecked becomes power corrupted. Given this pattern, clergy sex abuse—its biggest shocker the cover-up by bishops—seems inevitable.

The submissive female role also is forced on supposedly inferior parts of ourselves—feelings, for instance. Augustine expected men

to love the sexuality of their wives and the physical bonds of their families only as a Christian must love his enemies.
(biographer Peter Brown)

A brother in The Little Flowers (see previous post on hagiography) shocked his confreres when it seemed

he was grieving for his brother out of a natural and worldly affection.

They were relieved when he assured them he was not giving in to natural feelings.
The POWER-OVER model leaves Nature no inherent rights. Animals, forests, lakes and streams can be used, manipulated, and destroyed at will. Here is a writer still preaching domination over ourselves and over nature:

Christ is still living and cooperating with us in the restoration of dominion first over ourselves and then over the non-human cosmos—a truth forgotten by many theologians and spiritual writers today. (George Maloney, 1982)

He complains that ideas are changing, wishing that "dominion" would proceed unchecked.

The male god who demands exclusive worship forms the root and base of every power inequity, the religious justification for deformed relationships in our social fabric.
You think this is an overstatement? I point you to the example of fundamentalism with its extreme deformity, “Dominionism,” Evangelicals In Spiritual Warfare, a right-wing movement of Christians warring against views different from their own. They believe they must gain dominion over all aspects of society—religion, business, government, family, media, arts and entertainment. They're doing "the Lord's" work, converting Jews, GLBTs, Muslims, etc. to Jesus.

All beliefs “wrong” or out of alignment with their view are the work of demons, as you can hear in Fresh Air by Terry Gross.The rule of Jesus, they believe, will conquer all, make everything right, and they have the job of bringing on that rule. Politically they're aligned with the Tea Party.

Restoring the feminine to our idea of the Holy—getting rid of HeHimHis Lord talk would restore dignity to the less-powerful of every kind. It is all of a piece.
I add caveats. I am not condemning all clergymen and churchgoers but consider us all more or less prisoners of a mental pattern that, I gratefully observe, shifts under the radar while Dominionism grabs headlines. In my own prayer life, I surrender to my inner Guide, trusting Its wisdom as superior to my own. By outlining the deformed framework I hope to raise awareness of it and help to free us all from its shackles.

Sin-talk, September 6
I outlined the male god’s dominating power in my post “Patriarchal, dominating god,” which sets the stage for Judeo-Christian sin-talk and its effect on all Western relationships.

In the Christian myth, a father god rules as a Big Boss topping a long line of bosses who judge us for our sins. He’s out there, over and against us, inspiring more fearful obedience than trusting love. Creatures are distinguished from each other by their relative proximity to God—you know, the pope much, much, much holier than a lay woman. The son-god adds guilt by being crucified for our sins. Guilt, worthlessness, and powerlessness infuse the faithful.

The institutional church strengthens these feelings with its line of hierarchs over worthless sinners who lack the authority to decide what’s right or wrong. Power in this paradigm flows through channels that defy sense, commanding experience-wizened women to address a naïve young man as "Father" and ask forgiveness for sins. Likewise educated, worldly-wise men and women. Small wonder that few Catholics go to confession anymore.
Power always comes from above, and morality is all about following rules and obeying superiors, adding shame to feelings of guilt, powerlessness, and worthlessness, especially for those low on the scale of authority, with more people to look up to than down on.

Yes, of course I’m exaggerating, but not by much when we consider the paradigm that, fortunately, is now past. For a taste of it, scroll down to bits of Christian literature in previous posts, and here’s another tidbit. The following theology was written as late as 1982:

Just as it is not possible to be a father without having a son, so too God cannot be almighty unless he has creatures over which to exercise his power.
(J.A. Lyons, The Cosmic Christ in Origen and Teilhard de Chardin)

It takes a while for the insanity of this to sink in.
Richard Sipe in Sex, Priests, and Power critiques the role of celibacy in deforming Church authority,

The male virgin—the celibate—is one not defiled by woman (his emphasis).

As the celibate system took shape, power had to be limited by one factor: sex. Women cannot have power. . . . [Many] accept this bias as natural and sanctioned by grace.

Sipe quotes St. John Chrysostom complaining in about 386,

Divine law has excluded women from the ministry . . . Yet I have heard someone say that women now assume such liberties as to rebuke the bishops of the Church.
What else is a woman but a foe to friendship . . . a necessary evil, a natural temptation . . . painted with fair colours.

Sin-centered spirituality shames and subjugates men also, especially men who lack positions of power. They do have power in their families and the result is domestic abuse.

Unworthiness contaminates us all. In this sin-centered atmosphere, every prayer brings the realization of how awful we are. This subject makes me feel dirty. I’ve developed such dislike of the word “sin”—the very meaning of which has been twisted by this power paradigm—that I cringe a little when it’s mentioned in prayers, for instance the “Lord-have-mercy” part of the Mass.

To heal from the paradigm of POWER OVER, we can focus on feminine divinity empowering us from WITHIN.

Goddess confounds male dominance, September 13
From an exchange with a traditional Catholic:

We have God's Truth. . . . Truth is given to us.

Others also have God's Truth. Truth reveals itself in an infinite variety of ways.

Myth and Truth don't mix. . . . god/goddesses are a myth with no divinity. You can demote God to myth-level but that doesn't mean you have the power to control Almighty God Power greater than yourself.

Correct. We cannot control how Source reveals itself; we can't control Its infinite variety of expressions—Its myths—coming through human imagination. We don’t know why male deities supplanted female deities. We can guess but don’t know the reasons for the patriarchal system described in previous posts.

But at this point in the evolution of human consciousness, many are becoming aware that what we call God vastly transcends all possible myths and God-images—goddess, god, turtle, eagle, wind, earthquake, whatever.
Goddess is not better than God; God is not better than Goddess. Both express truth; each is a possible way to imagine the Source of All. To understand this is to understand myth and symbol. And to understand the distinction between Jesus the Man vs. Jesus the Myth.
Being human, we prefer certain images for relating to spiritual reality, probably those we're used to. Nothing wrong with that, as long as we don't demand that others do as we do.

God the Father, the guy in the sky who holds us accountable, now is joined by a softer God the Mother to temper the wrathful judge described in “Sin-talk.” We imagine Mother Goddess giving us life from her Womb; we imagine her Earth enveloping us at death to be transformed into new life. SHE is not as separate, as disconnected, as "other" as the He that Walter Ong describes (in “Patriarchal dominating god”). We visualize Holy Mother erupting from below or appearing from within, giving us a break from the oppressive power above.

Stereotypically, Father enforces rules while Mother nourishes and empowers each child, no matter how weak. He stands for POWER OVER and She stands for POWER WITHIN. He stands for POWER AGAINST and She stands for POWER TO as in the power to act capably or generously. Thus, each individual can work on performing with strength and without adversarial relations. This challenges us more than obeying superiors above us and provides an alternative to hierarchical power under Father God. Instead of always being accountable to someone else, someone outside of ourselves, we listen to the voice of conscience within.

The paradox of She and He together can lead us to appreciate Transcendence by confounding our understanding. We need Mother Goddess and Father God plus all the other conceptions provided by religions and science. We need the mix.

If the divine SOURCE had been imagined exclusively female for several millennia and males had been carefully excluded as either divine images or human authority figures, we’d also see distortions. It’s the exclusiveness of male power that produces the problem.

Mother right

noreply@blogger.com (Jeanette) — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 18:27:00 +0000

When Goddess reigned, August 11
(continuing “Goddess Mary” series)
As there are various names for God, there were, in times when Goddess reigned, many names for Her. I repeat: God and Goddess are simply two different ways to imagine and personify the mysterious Power within all experienced by all in human history.

In remote antiquity the Great Goddess was supreme, with many names and various titles given Her in diverse places. In Babylon She was known as Ishtar. Among the Hebrews, ancestors of the Jews, She was Asherah (see my Goddess in the Bible). In Egypt the Goddess Isis reigned supreme, more important than her brother/husband God Osiris. In Sumer, the area between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, She was Inanna, and Her women priests determined who would be kings. An eminent Sumeriologist quoted by Merlin Stone tells us,

The kings of Sumer are known as the “beloved husbands” of Inanna throughout the Sumerian documents.

In a comparable practice but with a twist, Catholic religious sisters took their religious vows in wedding gowns and became “brides of Christ.” The communities of sisters discontinued this practice a few decades ago as it became distasteful to many.

Archaeological finds show the status of women declining in a worldwide turn to patriarchy, a phenomenon still not fully understood. In Europe the change came after 5000 and before 1000 BCE, when Kurgans, also known as Aryans or Indo-Europeans, penetrated the settlements of Old Europe. Aggressively they invaded the area we know as the Middle East, bringing with them new war technology and replacing female deities with their male deities, Sky and Warrior Gods—Joseph Campbell calls them “thunderbolt hurlers like Zeus, or Yahweh.” Their conquests brought a new order of violence and domination by gender.

Our Bible tells one chapter in this story, the Hebrew prophets unsuccessfully trying to stamp out the worship of Asherah and replacing Her with worship of Yahweh, “the Lord” who commands genocide in many Bible passages. Abram's call (Gen 12:1), dated about 1800 BCE, marks a decisive shift in consciousness.

Power shifted from female centrality (but not domination) to male domination. Massive evidence exists, but here I’ll cite only a few details from Merlin Stone’s research illustrating the shift in Egypt. The word “pharaoh” comes from par-o, meaning “great house” where woman ruled. Thus, the pharaohs received their titles through their mothers. In the earliest records beginning in 3000 BCE, the Goddess was served by 61 women priests and 18 male priests. In the period from 1570-1300 BCE, the temple clergy no longer had any women.

Myths also changed. In India the male Indra, Lord of Mountains who overthrows cities, killed the Goddess Danu and Her son. In Greece, the Supreme Goddess Hera became the subordinate, frustrated, and shrewish wife of Lord Zeus. The oracle at Delphi and the priests passing on Her counsel were female; later they were male. In Babylonia (Iraq) the male deity Marduk murdered the Creator Goddess Tiamat. In his informal conversations with Bill Moyers, Joseph Campbell tells this story.

The characteristic of an imperialistic people is to try to have its own local god dubbed big boy of the whole universe, you see. No other divinity counts. And the way to bring this about is by annihilating the god or goddess who was there before. Well, the one that was here before the Babylonian god Marduk was the all-Mother Goddess.

So the story begins with a great council of the male gods up in the sky, each god a star, and they have heard that the Grandma is coming, old Tiamat, the Abyss, the inexhaustible Source. She arrives in the form of a great fish or dragon--and what god will have the courage to go against Grandma and do her in? And the one who has the courage is, of course, the god of our present great city. He's the big one.

So when Tiamat opens her mouth, the young god Marduk of Babylon sends winds into her throat and belly that blow her to pieces, and he then dismembers her and fashions the earth and heavens out of the parts of her body. This motif of dismembering a primordial being and turning its body into the universe appears in many mythologies in many forms. . . .

There was no need for him to cut her up and make the universe out of her, because she was already the universe. But the male-oriented myth takes over, and he becomes--apparently--the creator. (The Power of Myth)

Besides showing the transfer of female to male power, this myth reinforces the idea that the Gods of the Christian Trinity proceed out of a female Source. We do not have to read these myths literally to see that their very existence supports a maternal Origin or Source.

Where is Christ in all this?
We have to distinguish Christ the myth from Christ, Higher Power or Higher Self. In ancient myths, the Son of the Goddess becomes Her consort and is a God (forerunners of Mary and Jesus), but She is primary, the more powerful, the important personage. The Son is known variously as Damuzi, Tammuz, Attis, Adonis, Osiris, Baal, and finally, Christ—it is the same archetype.

Christ's descent to hell followed the path of female deities to the netherworld, and it illustrates the shift from female power to male power. In the earliest versions, the Goddess—Inanna or Ishtar—is a mature queen who travels to the underworld to visit Her sister-ruler. She acts with independence and dignity. But in a later version, Persephone is a young girl abducted against Her will by Her uncle Hades. Finally the descending deity becomes a male hero, Christ. The symbolism of death to life is no longer represented by a female, but by a male.

Mother right, August 3
(continuing “Goddess Mary” series)
The first human social structures were matrilineal or based on mother-kinship. Woman was perceived to be the sole parent, and it followed that children took the name of their mother's clan. Lines of descent went through her, as did titles, possessions, and territorial rights. J.J. Bachofen (Myth, Religion, and Mother Right) quoted the ancient Greek historian Herodotus who was writing about the Lycians from Crete:

They have a strange custom which no other people has: they take their names from their mother, not from their father. For when one asks a Lycian who he is, he will indicate his descent on his mother's side, and list his mother's mothers, and when a woman citizen marries a slave, the children are regarded as nobly born; but if a male citizen, even the noblest, takes a foreign woman or a concubine, the children are dishonorable.

Bachofen corrected Herodotus' assumption that no other people had this custom. Mother right was not confined to any particular people but marks a cultural stage, a period when names and possessions followed the most obvious parent—mother. As it obviously applies to humans universally, this cultural stage was not restricted to any particular ethnic family but preceded the patriarchal system globally.

He described what he called matriarchy but is really matriliny:

Its outward expression is to be found in the naming of the child after its mother, But its significance, is manifested in several other points.
First, in the status of the children, which is taken from the mother, not the father; secondly, in the inheritance of property, which is handed down not to the sons but to the daughters; thirdly, in the government of the family, which falls not to the father but to the mother, and by a consequent extension of this last principle, government of the state was also entrusted to the women.

Thus we have not an outward peculiarity of nomenclature but a thoroughgoing system; it is bound up with a religious intuition and belongs to an older period of human development than father right.

Mother right in property and inheritance lasted down to Roman times, according to anthropologist James Frazer. But today there is evidence that such social arrangements still prevail in parts of Australia, Africa, and Asia where, for instance, the husband moves to his wife's tribe.

In North America, the Iroquois provide an example. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, principles in the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention that launched the women’s movement, knew Iroquois women who, unlike white women, had equal responsibilities with men in family, religion, government, and commerce.
They watched the Seneca nation, near Seneca Falls in upper New York State, govern with women holding political power. Clan mothers, for instance, nominated male chiefs, one requirement being not to have sexually assaulted a woman.

Archaeologist Marija Gimbutas found that matrilineal passing on of possessions survived in mountainous regions around Sarajevo into the twentieth century. Even our patriarchal Bible shows traces of mother-centered cultures from pre-biblical times. In the Book of Ruth, Naomi tells her daughters-in-law after the deaths of their husbands, "Go back, each of you, to your mother's house" (Ruth 1:8).

Merlin Stone in When God Was a Woman supplies more historical information to upset common notions of how things have to be. Herodotus wrote that in Egypt,

Women go in the marketplace, transact affairs and occupy themselves with business, while the husbands stay home and weave.

Sophocles wrote:

Their thoughts and actions all are modelled on Egyptian ways, for there the men sit at the loom indoors while the wives work abroad for their daily bread.

A professor Cyrus Gordon wrote in 1953:

In family life, women had a peculiarly important position for inheritance passed through the mother rather than through the father.

According to S.W. Baron, Egyptian papyri reveal that

many women appear as parties in civil litigations and independent business transactions even with their own husbands and fathers.

Archaeologist Sir William Flinders Petrie wrote,

In Egypt all property went in the female line, the woman was the mistress of the house, and in early tales she is represented as having entire control of herself and the place.

Theologian and archaeologist Roland de Vaux wrote,

In Egypt the wife was often the head of the family, with all the rights such a position entailed.

The precepts of Ptah-Hotep advised husbands to obey their wives. An E. Meyer wrote that until the fourth century BCE a wife in Egypt chose her husband and

could divorce him on payment of compensation. In Egypt the wife was often the head of the family, with all the rights such a position entailed.

Love poems from Egyptian tombs suggest that women did the courting, even using intoxicants to help them woo the men.

More data to upset preconceptions about male/female roles come from the animal world, which for years was misinterpreted as following patriarchal patterns of male domination and female submission. Herds of elephants and schools of whales are led by females, and the praying mantis female eats the male during copulation. Among large cats the females do most or all of the hunting.

Animal behavior also overturns the notion that females naturally must win the attention of males. In most species, males put on a display to win the favor of females, either combating rivals or strutting their beauty. Most birds have more attractively colored males than females. The adornment of males in some animal species, similar to that of human females, impedes their freedom of movement but they put up with it for the sake of sexual allure.

Recent primate research indicates that pure aggression is less the biological drive than formerly thought. Primatologist Frans B.M. de Waal found that the more feminine traits of cooperation and the search for harmony are woven into aggressive moves of animals. Socially successful apes have the ability to make friends. Today's observers of the animal world realize that past observations were colored by incorrect patriarchal assumptions. Male dominance and aggression are not biologically determined but historical phenomena, the causes of which are still debated.

Conclusion: Sexist/patriarchal marginalizing of women is not only unfair; it contravenes Nature.
PS. Don’t miss this devastating portrait. In his NCR essay, Eugene Kennedy analyzes with devastating accuracy some psychologically underdeveloped men now becoming priests, calling them set decorators trying to reconstruct the hierarchical system of the early 20th century Church.

Canaanite woman & General Lee, August 16
The gospel and homily Sunday morning in Sacred Heart Chapel relate to my recent blogposts. Both promote an opening-up, a radical shift to a new perspective. In the gospel story (Matthew 15: 21-28), Jesus rebuffs a Canaanite woman asking him for help, saying his mission is exclusively to the “house of Israel,” that is, to fellow Jews. “It is not right to take the food of sons and daughters and throw it to the dogs.”

To this insult from Jesus the woman sends a clever rejoinder, “Even the dogs eat the leavings that fall from their masters’ tables.” It brings a compliment from Jesus and having her wish granted. The woman has successfully converted Jesus from an exclusive, closed-circle stance to a new, open and broader view of things—including non-Jews.

Our homilist told another story promoting this theme. In 1865 the congregation in a Richmond, Virginia, church witnessed a shocking scene. At communion time, a black man rose up and strode to the front of church from the back, where Blacks belonged, before anyone else had a chance to get up to receive communion. A terrible breach of custom, of manners, of what everyone knew was the way things had to be. Whites waiting to see who would put the insolent black man in his place were astounded when, instead, a white man got up and joined the black man to receive communion alongside him. The white man was General Robert E. Lee.
Lee and the Canaanite woman opened doors and windows of perception to include the excluded—Blacks and Gentiles. I invite Christians to open doors and windows of perception to include the formerly unthinkable thought—that Goddess is as good an image of Divinity as God.

I invite readers to Jesus as Goddess Advocate , a guest post by Karen Tate, who tells why she left Catholicism but went back to Jesus, reclaiming him as the Sacred Masculine. Also scroll down and review my brief outline of historical material at the beginning of this “Goddess Mary” series.

It is quite likely that some readers will refuse to accept it since it upsets so drastically the view to which we have been trained. The very idea of a Goddess is distasteful to people. Reactions when I refer to Goddess with respect include shock, indignation, outrage, fear, ridicule, scorn, embarrassment, and confusion.

The problem is not lack of evidence but conditioning. Overturning my own training took years of effort and dozens of books. I suggest the same for readers afraid to step out of the familiar frame of reality. While reading Goddess materials you may notice what I did—the damage done by patriarchy to our sense of womanhood. Menstrual bleeding, for instance, signified power in prehistoric times.
Male envy of blood power is indicated by a strange practice anthropologists have uncovered in diverse locations. Judy Grahn explains in The Politics of Women's Spirituality:

Men have developed blood mimic rites in which they slit the underside of the penis to make an imitation of the female genital. The idea is that when the split penis is held upright against the man's abdomen it resembles a menstruating vagina

This practice, called "man's menstruation," occurs in New Guinea, Australia, the Philippines, and Africa.

Juxtapose it with Thomas Aquinas saying woman is

defective and misbegotten, for the active force in the male seed tends to the production of a perfect likeness in the male sex; while the production of women comes from defect.

Augustine taught men to hate women and sex.

Until recent decades, Catholic women had to be purified after giving birth. Christians blamed women and sex for passing on the evil of sin and in effect defined women as naturally subservient because they bear children. Moderns have not gotten over the association of menstruation with shame and femininity with weak subservience. Goddess spirituality can turn the tables on this male-centered view by declaring that, because they have the power to bear children, it is natural and appropriate for women to have power in other areas.

We cannot know to what extent egalitarian societies existed or to what extent Goddess cultures gave power to women. But there is no basis for denying that pre-patriarchal societies revered the power of woman's body, that women played a central role in them, and that power in many primal cultures was not understood to be domination.
Coming up: Does it matter whether we imagine the Ultimate Value of all reality to be male or female? I say YES.

Great Mother Mary

noreply@blogger.com (Jeanette) — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 14:15:00 +0000

Our Goddess Mary 1, July 20
Maxine Moe Rasmussen:

Years ago I had a split-second vision of a large (not large as in heavy, large as the mountains around her) woman rising from a nap in a valley among the mountains. The message received was that She was awake and things would be different now. Ever since that vision I've noticed how the feminine face of God is becoming more and more apparent.

The broad scope of religious history demonstrates an irrepressible need for a divine Mother. Extremely ancient myths and materials from archeological digs tell us that the Goddess was supreme and Her worship widespread, if not universal, in human societies around the globe for thousands of years before the male deities took over.

Among the oldest art objects found are forms of the female body—thighs, buttocks, genitals, breasts, and pregnant bellies depicting Woman as the Source of Life. Goddess figurines numbering in the tens of thousands have been unearthed from Ireland to India by archaeologists, who find relatively few male forms.

Scholars molded by male-centered thinking did not know what to do with these astonishing finds. Some arrived at the opinion that the so-called Venus figures were Paleolithic erotica. But Charlene Spretnak in The Politics of Women's Spirituality points to

the difference between the powerful Paleolithic figures and current pornographic portrayals of women as coy, vulnerable toys.

The figures were found in shrines and clearly meant to be venerated. Joseph Campbell in The Masks of God commented sardonically,

"[It is] not unusual for extremely well-trained archaeologists to pretend that they cannot imagine what services the numerous female figurines might have rendered.

He volunteered the answer that they provided the same services our male deity provides: receive our prayers, initiate "meditations on the mystery of being," aid women in childbirth, guard children, protect farmers, sailors, merchants, and all workers in the tasks of life.
Stone comments that debating whether ancient Goddess worship existed is akin to debating whether World War II actually occurred. She points to,

evidence of seven thousand years of artifacts and the three thousand years of historica (i.e., written) material, as discovered, deciphered, and described by archaeologists and historians.

Archaeological digs also indicate that women played a central role in early societies. They led ceremonies in honor of the Great Mother, as shown by the same unearthed ritual vessels, altars, temples and paintings that show reverence for the female as Creator. Art historian Merlin Stone, who traveled the world in search of information about the Goddess, writes in When God Was a Woman,

[Female religion] flourished for thousands of years before the advent of Judaism, Christianity, and the Classical Age of Greece. Some female figurines date back to 25,000 BCE, indicating that the Mother-centered years far outnumber the Father-centered years.
It is indisputable fact that our earliest human ancestors worshipped the Great Holy Mother, and Goddess worship has never been completely repressed by the campaigns of male religions against Her.

Myths add a striking piece to the history of Goddess transmuted to God. Comparing the most ancient with less ancient myths, mythologists see a shift—from perceiving woman as powerful to perceiving woman as mere helpmate and sex object. Hera, like all the great Goddesses, was Virgin, Mother, and Queen of Heaven. In later myths She became merely the jealous wife of Zeus, angry at his many sexual conquests. In a similar demotion, the Bible's second creation story, Genesis 3, tells woman, “He shall be your master.”

Male Gods even took the role of producing offspring. How well we Christians know THAT with our Father/Son myth!

Jennifer and Roger Woolger continue the story in The Goddess Within:

As the various northern and Aryan tribes imposed their more patriarchal gods upon the older Mother religions, the Great Goddess and her powers were split up. This process led to the retention of the goddess, but in a weakened form.

She still played a prominent role in Hellenistic religions when Jesus of Nazareth entered history, and in some regions Her preeminence had a remarkably long life. In the third-century Danube region, lead plaques feature the Great Mother as the principle figure with lesser gods surrounding Her. One in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art has the sons of Jupiter and Helios attending Her (Thomas Mathews, The Clash of Gods).
Not until the Christian emperors of Rome and Byzantium shut down the last Goddess temples, about 500 CE, was Goddess worship totally suppressed.
Then the archetype found expression in Mary.

Our Goddess Mary 2
Mary has exactly the same role in the lives of many Christians as the Goddess played in pre-Christian times, a conclusion unanimous among scholars familiar with archetypal manifestations. The most direct forerunner of our Goddess Mary is Isis, the Egyptian Goddess who bears Horus in a virgin birth. Titles in honor of Isis were transferred to Mary: Mother of God, Virgin-Mother, Queen of Heaven, Star of the Sea, Seat of Wisdom.

To avoid misunderstanding, I will be clear. Goddess and God are equally appropriate God-images. Either one can warm and guide humans who relate to Spirit as to a humanlike person. I no longer do but recognize the need. Christians willing to grow in spiritual awareness must shed the prejudice that Ultimate Reality may only be imaged as male, because the way we image Spirit makes all the difference in the way we relate to others. More about that later in this “Our Goddess Mary” series.

Now back to history. Like Mary, the cosmic Goddess of early myth was virgin and mother, which "was indeed the way in which all the Mother goddesses of the high matriarchal era were regarded " (Woolger).
But the myths teach us a concept of virginity radically different from the sexless Christian virgin. Edward Whitmont in Return of the Goddess, writes that “virgin” had nothing to do with sexual abstinence; it merely meant an independent woman not beholden to a man. The great lover Aphrodite was a virgin. Therapist Roger Horrocks in The Absent Mother expands on the concept:

Virginity, which has been taken usually in its literal physical sense, and used to denigrate sexuality, can be seen at the psychic level as denoting completeness, wholeness, self-sufficiency, the marriage of human and divine. The virgin is like the virgin forest or virgin territory—untouched by human hand, but fertile, fruitful, perfect.

This idea of virgin gains weight when we recall the role of woman and Goddess in prehistoric times. Myths from Sumer, Babylon, Egypt, Africa, Europe, Australia, and China image Woman as Creator of the universe, a natural image for primal cultures who saw how new life comes. They saw that the powerful female could produce a monthly flow of blood without harming her body, she could grow babies in her body and give birth to them, and she could produce food out of her own body.
If the link between sex and babies was unknown, wrote Joseph Campbell, males must have seemed,

within one jot of being completely superfluous . . .
The female body was experienced as a focus of divine force, and a system of rites was dedicated to its mystery.

A common misunderstanding about Goddess cultures needs to be corrected. They were not matriarchies. Patriarchy or male domination did not replace female domination—women had not been dominant. The early cultures imaging Woman as Creator organized society in what anthropologists today call matriliny or descent traced through the female line. The bloodlines of children are traced through their mother, and the husband dwells with his wife’s family and wife’s possessions. Children inherit their names and wealth from their mother.
Christopher L. C. E. Witcombe gives examples:

In the well-known story of Helen, when Menelaos first marries her, he travels to live with her in Sparta where he rules as king, even though Helen has two worthy brothers, Kastor and Polydeukes (Castor and Pollux). Menelaos attains the kingship of Sparta through his marriage to Helen who carries the bloodline of the Lakedaimonian throne.

When Helen is abducted by Paris and taken off to Troy, Menelaos, his position as king thereby made insecure, makes every effort to get her back, enlisting the help of all Greece. When during the course of the siege of Troy Paris and Menelaos agree to fight in single combat, the prize is not only Helen but "all her possessions." Later, after Helen's death, it is her daughter, Hermione, and not one of Menelaos' sons, who becomes the next ruler of Sparta.

Helen was the daughter of Leda who was ostensibly married to Tyndareus. Tyndareus, however, was not the father of Helen. Later tellers of the story, no doubt uncomfortable with Leda's evident promiscuousness and lack of adherence to patriarchal laws of male inheritance, interpolated the myth of Leda's seduction by Zeus as a more satisfactory explanation of her behaviour.

Leda's case is by no means unique. Bronze Age myths and legends are filled with important children whose mother is named but not their father. These children obviously had a human father, and one who wasn't necessarily the husband of their mother, but when the stories were retold this affront to patriarchal sensibilities was softened with the explanation that each child was in fact fathered by a god.

My research also led me to this fascinating fact: In Jewish tradition you are technically Jewish only if your mother is. Apparently, the ancestors of Jews lived in matrilineal societies.

Vestiges of the ancient reverence for the female body appear in the Bible despite its fulminations against Goddess worship. In fact, those very denunciations of it provide evidence that Goddess worship existed. I invite readers to my posts collected under Goddess in the Bible giving special attention to the work of Phyllis Trible.
In her book, God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality, Trible offers linguistic evidence that the Hebrew word for womb saturates the Bible, most especially in passages singing praise of divine mercy and compassion. In spite of their heavily male emphasis, the Hebrew Scriptures (what Christians call the Old Testament) refer in many passages to the comforting divine womb and breasts, indicating that people imaged Divinity as feminine.

In our time, Catholics turn to Mother Mary for divine comfort and security, asking Her to intercede for them, like children asking Mother to soften up Father so that he will be likelier to grant their requests. Mary is today’s Goddess. This explains the science-defying doctrines of the Virgin Birth and the Immaculate Conception. It is pressure from the people, from the collective psyche, that keeps these odd beliefs alive, beliefs that embarrass Catholic theologians, as does her title “Mother of God” (Theotokos) given her at the Council of Ephesus in 431. Mythologists know it was no coincidence that Mary received the title in Ephesus, the site of a renowned Goddess temple. The Christian Church responded to pressure from the people; it responded to the felt need for a Divine Mother.
Shrines to Mary dot the Catholic region where I live, and periodically our national media report that our Goddess Mary has again been sighted. I take these as signs that the Divine Feminine is rising.
To be continued . . .

September 27, 2011
I’ll be clear. I’m not preaching that Mary is God as I link Mary with Magna Mater, the Great Mother.

“Mary” is today’s name for the Great Divine Mother (Magna Mater) that humanity revered in prehistoric times and subconsciously reveres in the present. Therapist Roger Horrocks expands on this in The Absent Mother: Restoring the Goddess to Judaism and Christianity.
He was educated in Protestant theology but was alerted to Mary’s significance by his clients—both men and women. They were "indifferent or hostile to Christianity" but were having dreams or visions of Mary, and these "were life-transforming symbols." The emotional response to Mary, writes Horrocks,

has been quite at odds with the rational delineation of her role in theology. . . . Although theologically she is not a deity, existentially, psychologically, symbolically, she is a Goddess.

How better to explain the extraordinary devotion to her? Books about Mary and present-day visions of Mary along with the media attention they stir signal that something’s up.
Horrocks thinks the visions are surely

some kind of warning about the present threat to the natural world . . . significant of our rupture with nature and the need for healing of that split. . . .
Mary usually appears in rural surrounds, often near trees, points out streams which become places of healing, and is often associated with plants, or with the earth in some way.

Mary was not always the submissive figure described in male theology. There are more appealing Mary’s in the Christian tradition. Our Lady of Guadalupe is confident of her authority and submissive to no one. Statues of the Black Virgin in France and other European sites, found Roger Horrocks,

were totally unlike the rather sacccharine, simpering statues of Mary I had seen in England. Here was no symbol of feminine submissiveness and piety. They were stripped down, archaic, fierce. In places like Chartres and Rocamadour, I was also amazed at the popular devotion to the Black Virgin. There was a tremendous aura round the statue—people knelt, prayed, contemplated.

Most Catholics have never encountered this strong, fierce, and authoritative Mary who was the Goddess before She was washed out by patriarchy.
Horrocks quotes this splendid piece from an eighth-century liturgy of the Ethiopic Church:

O Mary, immensity of heaven,
foundation of the earth,
depth of the seas, light of the sun,
beauty of the moon,
splendour of the stars in heaven.

Here Mary is the all powerful Goddess, source of all that is. Her worship flowered again in the Middle Ages when about five hundred churches were raised in her honor, those in France named Notre Dame (Our Lady). In the 1950s we prayed a litany to Mary that must have been the "Litany of Loreto" that Joseph Campbell quotes:

Holy Mother of God
Mother of Divine Grace
Mother of Good Counsel
Virgin most renowned
Virgin most powerful
Virgin most merciful
Virgin most faithful
Mirror of Justice
Seat of Wisdom
Cause of our Joy
Gate of Heaven
Morning Star
Health of the Sick
Refuge of Sinners
Comforter of the Afflicted
Queen of Peace
Tower of David
Tower of Ivory
House of Gold

I remember as a child wondering how such exalted titles could be given to Mary, sensing already at that age the discrepancy between official theology and popular devotion.
In 1990 I was writing a local history book. One of my senior informants bemoaned the changes of Vatican II because it demoted devotions to Mary, effectively eradicating them. "She was my favorite," mourned the septuagenarian.

Again, Mary is not God. Imagining the SOURCE of ALL THAT IS to be a humanlike individual is one of the great shortcomings of Western religion, which pounds into minds and hearts the male God-image with its relentless “HeHimHis.” A feminine image of Divinity could disrupt this; it could propel us out of the childish habit of praying to a deity and begin to appreciate the nature of Transcendence. This is how Great Mother Mary can inform our Church.

Opra & Betty Ford

noreply@blogger.com (Jeanette) — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 14:50:00 +0000

Virgin Birth, Immaculate Conception? July 7, 2011
Historian Simon Schama in Newsweek deplored the fact of,

. . . the Founders routinely canonized in the current fairy-tale version of American origins that passes muster for history by those who don’t actually read very much of it.

. . . Thomas Jefferson denied that Jesus was the son of God. Worse, he refused to believe that Jesus ever made any claim that he was. While he was at it, Jefferson also rejected as self-evidently absurd the Trinity, the Virgin Birth, and the Resurrection. . . .

. . .[Jefferson also] argued, generations of the clergy . . . invented the myth that [Jesus] had died to redeem mankind’s sins. . . . He thought the Immaculate Conception a fable.

Were Catholic theologians questioned today, most would also deny literal belief in these doctrines, as I do. But with them I would insist that religious doctrines are not just silly nonsense, as atheists aver.

There’s more than I can say about this here—interested readers can find elaboration in my book and past blogposts (see index). Here my purpose is to free readers steeped in Christian culture to examine beliefs about spiritual reality.
I notice that people feel less free to challenge dogma than to challenge institutional authority—arrogant bishops are easier to spot than abstract ideas. The official Church’s shabby treatment of women, gays, victims of clergy abuse, divorced people, and so on, is obvious, but if you don’t think much about science, the Immaculate Conception, the Trinity, the Virgin Birth, and the Resurrection don’t concern you.

I’m guessing. Frankly, I don’t understand the kind of mind that doesn’t question these doctrines because I couldn’t rest until I’d figured out what I truly believe, but it took years of consuming non-Christian spiritual fare.
Readers will find more on the Excerpts page of my main website, and of course in my book, God Is Not Three Guys in the Sky.

To which my nephew Florian commented:
You continue to come back to this idea that science somehow prevents us from accepting many traditional religious beliefs. This is strange, since I'm sure you know that that science is really not such an enemy of religion. It may have been more so in the time of Thomas Jefferson. But, today, science is demonstrating with the Big Bang theory that the universe has a Creator. It's finding evidence for Jesus' resurrection in studies of the Shroud of Turin. Of course, you yourself cite evidence for reincarnation.

One reason I comment on your posts is to constantly remind you that I and other people like me exist. I am the big elephant in your room that you always try to ignore. Obviously, I have thought about science; and I have studied/examined/questioned church teachings. Yet, I am a genuinely believing Catholic. How do you explain that? I think you are guessing that if we teach science and encourage believers to question church teachings then we can finally get rid of literal Christianity. My existence proves you wrong. Why don't you finally admit that you are wrong here?

Jeanette: Actually, I have frequently said that science and religion do not contradict each other but complement each other. For my latest synthesis of science and spirituality, see Astrophysics spiritual.

Opra & Betty Ford
When I was at the School of Theology, my major was systematics, the study of doctrine or system of beliefs, and my minor was spirituality. Normally my advisor would be a systematics instructor but, because I asked for a woman, I had an advisor in spirituality. It turned out that she and I disagreed in the most fundamental way about spirituality.

I thought then and think more definitely now, 25 years later, that emotional health is identical to spiritual health. She didn’t. She thought a person could be spiritually healthy while being emotionally crippled. Over the years her belief has seemed ever more preposterous to me. How could she say that a severely depressed or fearful or rageful or—you name the debilitating emotion—how could a person in such a state be in possession of spiritual health?

I think the answer gets to the heart of my disagreement with Christianity, which also gets to the heart of Christianity’s disagreement with Jesus’ message. Too often the Christian religion focuses, not on broadcasting Jesus’ wise spiritual counsel, but on directing people to worship him. I believe this was my advisor’s thought process: Hurting or bad or totally mixed up people have spiritual health if they perform pious acts like praying and staying devoted to God.

What does this have to do with Opra and Betty Ford?

Since Freud and Jung started opening up awareness of thoughts, feelings, attitudes, and beliefs below the conscious level—ideas we hadn’t known were directing us—psychology has been replacing religion as the guide to a fulfilling life. The human potential movement, the self-help industry, and most media reports on healthy, helpful, and happy lives showcase the principles of psychology rather than religion.

In therapeutic culture, the inner self, not an external god, demands attention, reverence, and obedience. Ultimate authority lives, not in a force totally outside us, in religious or communal power, but inside us, a self-director given various names—Higher Power, Higher Self, Soul, conscience, Christ, etc.

Opra, the most revered guru of our time, told people to live their best lives in greater self-understanding and self-care. In sharp contrast to religious authorities, she made herself vulnerable to the public, freely admitting her weaknesses. Publicly she struggled with having taken sexual abuse, with food addictions and negative body image. Wearing these badges of courage, she ministered to others seeking guidance and strength for working through their traumas. It reminds me of Henri Nouwen’s concept, the wounded healer, also of Twelve Step groups, which offer help by vulnerably discussing one’s own experience with weakness.

Betty Ford also possessed the courage of candor. By speaking publicly about her breast cancer and substance addiction, she saved millions of lives and continues to do so in the Betty Ford Center for Addiction Recovery. Her courage extended to admitting and describing her hurt and resistance when family called her on her addiction. Her courage extended to campaigning for two things opposed by her own Republican Party—the Equal Rights Amendment and the legalization of abortion. Of abortion she said it was “time to bring abortion out of the back woods and into hospitals where it belongs.”

Opra Winfrey and Betty Ford stand as models of integrity in the eyes of many, and for me they stand in favorable contrast to religious officials who have an aversion to admitting their mistakes and who promulgate formulas for worshipping an external deity. Today I could be stronger in defending my belief that psychological health is the essence of spiritual health.

Dear Republicans,

noreply@blogger.com (Jeanette) — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 14:44:00 +0000

Republicans of conscience, May 19

The Republican Party used to be an honorable party, but today it is corrupted by the Tea Party. I promised to write about Republicans of conscience. Here are a few.

David Frum, conservative journalist and former speechwriter for George W. Bush , is angry at “conservative talkers on Fox and talk radio” who whip Republicans into “such a frenzy that deal-making [is] impossible.” He points out that the Health Care Act, what the right calls “Obamacare”:

“. . . builds on ideas developed at the [conservative] Heritage Foundation in the early 1990s that formed the basis for Republican counter-proposals to Clintoncare in 1993-1994.”

So what Republicans of today denounce as “socialism” is a rather conservative Health Care Act largely based on Republican ideas.

David Stockman, the budget director responsible for engineering the Reagan tax cuts, the largest in American history, now says all the Bush tax cuts should be eliminated—even those on the middle class. And he says his own Republican Party has gone too far with its anti-tax religion.

“. . . It's become in a sense an absolute. Something that can't be questioned, something that's gospel, something that's sort of embedded into the catechism and so scratch the average Republican today and he'll say "Tax cuts, tax cuts, tax cuts.”

Republican President Dwight Eisenhower sounded a theme that Republicans today would term "socialist" and "liberal":

Workers have a right to organize into unions and to bargain collectively with their employers. And a strong, free labor movement is an invigorating and necessary part of our industrial society.” [We cannot afford to reduce taxes until] the factors of income and outgo will be balanced.

Eisenhower's Republican Party platform of 1956 called for expanding Social Security, broadening unemployment insurance, and improving health protection for all. It called for full voting rights, equalizing pay for workers regardless of sex, expanding the minimum wage, and improving job safety for workers.
When Eisenhower was president, the top tax bracket for the richest people was 92 percent. He defended that tax bracket, insisting that taxes on the rich are the way to achieve a balanced budget. Three nights before the end of his presidency in 1961, Eisenhower warned of a scientific-technological élite that would dominate public policy and claim,

our toil, resources, and livelihood. . . .
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.

Going back further still, Republican president Theodore Roosevelt understood that, to preserve the free enterprise system, we have to reduce the monopolizing power of the richest in the country. Roosevelt famously curbed the gilded power of his age. He would be aghast at the grotesque imbalance of power and wealth in our country today.

In Washington state, Bill Gates Sr., wealthy father of the Microsoft founder, says the rich don’t pay enough in taxes, and the poor pay too much. On 60 Minutes he said,

This notion that all innovation is the function of private funding, . . . that’s just sheer nonsense. . . . . Taxation creates little things like a great university, and like a competent, rigorous high school . . . like early learning for kids three-years old . . . That’s innovation. . . . The notion that public money is somehow anathema to innovation is just plain wrong.

Campaigning against wealthy business interests, Bill Gates Sr. pushed for a state income tax, but the push failed because the tax-raising proposal included the middle class.

Minnesota's Progressive Republican Tradition includes Governors John Pillsbury, Harold Levander, Elmer L. Anderson, Jim Ramstad, Arne Carlson, and Al Quie. The last three have spoken out against the extreme right’s attempts to cut social programs while protecting profits of the obscenely wealthy.
Andersen called himself a liberal and progressive Republican, as an obituary described it, “a vanishing if not already extinct breed.”
Former Republican Senator David Durenberger merits mention as a national health care expert who says Democrats do a better job with health care. He no longer supports Republicans, and he vigorously opposed the Iraq War.

There’s nothing dishonorable about being a Republican or a conservative if the term includes fairness and respect for government, both of which the party used to support. What happened? I think Big Money took over.
More on this subject next time.

DEAR REPUBLICANS, May 27

Compromise: Give some and get some. So please move off the no-more-taxes position, just as Obama moves off his positions. Please meet in the middle. Consider:

• Relief for small business owners requires raising taxes on top incomes. Those making hundreds of millions and even a billion dollars a year are taxed at the same rate as those making less than a half million ($379,150)!
• While the unbelievably wealthy look for places on Wall Street to invest hundreds of millions, the bottom 90% worry about health care, education, safe food, other basic needs, and taxes.
• Food banks and homeless shelters see a sharp rise in use of their services—by the employed!
• Close to a quarter of America’s children live in poverty, and nearly 15% of households are food insecure. Consider the talent wasted!
• Social service programs yield returns in dollars up to 20 times the original investment. To be blunt, not investing in social programs is fiscally stupid.
• Financial executives who helped to cause the recession get pay raises in the hundreds of millions. But unions, once representing a third of American workers, now weak and unable to protect workers, are under attack.
• Income inequality in the U.S. approaches that of “third world” economies we deplore. Consequences are beginning to appear—crumbling infrastructure, neglected schools, neglected elderly, disabled, and unemployed, neglected mineworkers, homeless on the streets, health care worries, bulging prisons, financial catastrophes in states . . . the list goes on.

Authentic “fiscal restraint” requires fair taxes on those who have not shared in the sacrifice. The grotesque imbalance of money reflects the grotesque imbalance of power that money wields in our money-driven society. Please summon your courage and resist the right-wing ideologues who scream, “Tax cuts, tax cuts, tax cuts.”

JUSTICE IN AMERICA? June 24
The June 27 issue of The Nation has excellent ideas for inserting real competition and initiative into capitalism to create an authentically free market.
I suggest reading it in the library because this site doesn’t include the best idea given—a small financial-trades tax to curb excessive speculation in pursuit of outlandish profits, which produced the near meltdown in our national and international economies. We pay a sales tax when we buy necessities like appliances, but financial speculators pay no tax for gambling on trades worth hundreds of billions. Even a 1% financial-trades tax could generate enough to fill Social Security shortfalls.

King Banaian, whom Minnesota Republicans appointed to the Commission on Planning and Fiscal Policy, wrote in an email exchange with me,

Government policy has always redistributed income towards lower income groups. We spent $679 billion in the US on transfers to the lower third of the income distribution in 2008.

That’s hardly impressive, considering the trillions every year given in tax breaks to corporations and billionaire individuals.

An email reminded me to post my article in the local paper. Once published there, it belongs to the paper and I can't place the text here, only the link to Economy needs democracy. My message:
The extreme anti-tax position contains this contradiction—“Cut taxes,” and also “There’s just no money.” It is completely oblivious to the wealth wasted in our country in the form of tax breaks—essentially welfare for the wealthy, which runs into the trillions.

We can also chew on Wall Street's Dirty Business.

“I learned that the level of casual corruption, at least in the world of hedge fund traders and managers, is astonishingly high. . . .

Just the way in which people would make the decision to break the law, to commit a felony, to trade on inside information . . . as if it was part of the way they did business.”

Bobby McFerrin & Bishop Regina

noreply@blogger.com (Jeanette) — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 15:11:00 +0000

Bobby McFerrin defies patriarchy, June 20, 2011
Bobby McFerrin, a ten-time Grammy winner who improvises in various musical traditions, was interviewed by Krista Tippett.

We got to talking about the heavy patriarchal element of, you know, religion . . .
I thought, well let me write something with the feminine gender . . . because when we think about God's love it should encompass, you know, the mother and father . . . the feelings of a man, the feelings of a woman. They are different, you know. . . .

I just wanted to remind people . . . some of them might not have had great relationships with their dads. And also mothers too, you know; some of them don't have great relationships with their mothers. But sometimes we forget just the feminine element in religious service. And I just wanted to bring that out.

He brought out the feminine when he set Psalm 23 to song:

The Lord is my Shepherd, I have all I need,
She makes me lie down in green meadows,
Beside the still waters, She will lead.

She restores my soul, She rights my wrongs,
She leads me in a path of good things,
And fills my heart with songs.

Even though I walk, through a dark and dreary land,
There is nothing that can shake me,
She has said She won't forsake me,
I'm in her hand. . . .

Glory be to our Mother, and Daughter,
And to the Holy of Holies,
As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be,
World, without end. Amen

Also on the theme of patriarchy, readers might enjoy this hilarious and also serious song Kate, sit down, sit down, to the tune of “Que sera sera, whatever will be will be.”
Samples of the lyrics:

When I was just a little girl,
I asked my mother, what could I be.
Could I be bishop, could I be pope? . . .
Whatever you dream can’t be
The future’s for men to see.
Do not question me. . . .

We know what’s best for you. We’re infallible too.”

Now back to serious scholarship. Fr. Richard McBrien corrects the pope’s claim that the denial of ordination to women is infallible teaching.

I wonder how much longer the hierarchy’s repression of women can withstand provocative challenges like these.

Woman ordains another woman a Catholic priest, July 1, 2011
The Community of Mary Magdalene, First Apostle, based in St. Cloud, MN, supports and plans liturgies with Catholic womenpriests. Kelly Doss, one of our group, witnessed a Womenpriest Ordination for the first time on June 26 and wrote this:

As the procession began, I remember my eyes welling up with tears. I thought, “I cannot believe I get to be part of this! This is really happening before my eyes—a woman being ordained.”

. . . Everyone’s love and spiritual presence filled the room! It was a diverse crowd, and yet I could sense the unity and how truly welcome we all felt in that church. I could even sense it in the music. The choir sounded heavenly and all sang with such harmonious force. I believe that for everyone there, this just seemed so natural and beautiful.

There came a harsh reality. By women answering the call to the priesthood, they become excommunicated. How saying “Yes!” to Jesus and ministering to the people warrants excommunication, I will never understand. Bishop Regina brilliantly reminded us that while some of the patriarchs of Rome choose to use threats, we must listen to our conscience. . . .

At the end of the Mass, as the womanpriest was thanking those who supported her on her journey, she reminded me of something profound. There are some in her circle of support who were not able to attend her ordination because their vocations and careers would be in jeopardy.

. . . There are men and women in the Community of Mary Magdalene, First Apostle who take risks by worshipping with us and supporting us. . . . you are truly a gift and I admire your courage. You make the community all the more extraordinary!

Later that evening I attended Mass. Everything was the way I had always known: same motions, same responses. For a moment, I had to question if anything was changing and if it ever will.

When I think about what I witnessed today, I know that the spirit of change has been set in motion, and it will not cease. . . . Keep hope alive! God Bless, Kelly

And here are excerpts from the homily by Bishop Regina Nicolosi:

There should be sheer joy that we can celebrate the ordinations of Monique and Maria on the feast of Corpus Christi. However, the sound of their names alone makes it apparent that there is tension and pain interlaced with the joy in what we are about to do, a tension which would not exist were their names Michael and Marvin.

There is a poem by Frances Croake Frank which powerfully expresses this pain. I have never met anyone who knows this woman, Francis Croake. Rumor has it that she is a Catholic nun. Once you hear this poem, you may understand why she remains anonymous:

Did the woman say,
When she held him for the first time in the dark of a stable,
After the pain and the bleeding and the crying,
“This is my body, this is my blood”?

Did the woman say,
When she held him for the last time in the dark rain on a hilltop,
After the pain and the bleeding and the dying,
“This is my body, this is my blood”?

Well that she said it to him then,
For dry old men,
brocaded robes belying barrenness,
Ordain that she not say it for him now.

Why, I ask my brother Benedict and my brother bishops, or better, why not?
Where does this archaic, relentless sexism come from? When will you stop stressing the maleness of Jesus rather than his humanity? When will you refrain from turning symbols into doctrine?

When will you end exercising power over, rather than with the people of God, with your segregating clericalism? When will you discontinue to see yourselves as dispensers of grace? When will you refrain from excluding those who listen to their conscience?

When will you stop demanding that all of us speak to our God in the form you prescribe and forbid us to call Her Mother?

When will you look at the world without this dualism that pits spirit against nature, historical fact against present experience, sacred against profane?
When will you stop using the Eucharist as a political weapon? Above all, when will you appreciate women and their experiences in the same way you cherish those of men? When will you stop harming women, children and men, too, and our earth with your archaic understanding of, and destructive rules on sexuality.

And specifically, today on this day of ordination, I ask you: When will you respect the body of a women as holy enough to stand close to the altar? Is it not one of your dogmas that God respected the body of our Mother Mary enough to raise this body into heaven?

Let us focus our minds and hearts on that which we can do to renew the church we love. When we say: Corpus Christi / Body of Christ, is it only the bread and wine, the body and blood of our brother Jesus that we envision? Or is there another powerful image coming into our minds? I am thinking of the image of the church community as Corpus Christi.

Maria and Monique, what can you, a newly ordained deacon and a newly ordained priest, contribute to bring life and nourishment to the body of Christ, our church?
. . . Jesus invited all to the table. Do as he did.
Inasmuch as you find yourselves on the margins, it makes sense to serve those who are on the margins as well. Follow the example of one of your sisters who recently at the Cathedral served the body of Christ to those who had been rejected because they were wearing rainbow sashes. Center your liturgies and actions around hospitality.
Feed the people of God. Feeding and nourishing, including from our own bodies, is something we women have done since the beginning of time. Respect the priesthood of all believers.

If people ask you how you can request ordination and at the same time believe in the priesthood of all believers, you may answer: We are willing to live with that ambiguity. As a matter of fact, a greater acceptance of ambiguity is something we as women can bring into a church mired in dogma, rules and definitions.
May your priesthood and diaconate be inspired by the washing of the feet. Do not seek power but rather empowerment of others. Remember that Sarah's circle leads to heaven as surely as Jacob's ladder. But also, do not yield to unjust power. Don't excommunicate anyone, including yourself.

When you preach and teach, ask your sisters and brothers to respect women's bodies, including the body of our mother earth. Hold our Mother Mary in your hearts as an image of priesthood. If they tell you that you cannot act in persona Christi, then tell them that you act in persona Mariae. Her female body carried him for nine months after all.

The Spirit Sophia will empower you to accomplish what Isaiah in our first reading describes:
"Give them a wreath of flowers instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of tears, a cloak of praise instead of despair."

I had intended to shorten the statements of Kelly and Regina but I couldn’t bear to cut much and reduce their eloquence.

Astrophysics spiritual

noreply@blogger.com (Jeanette) — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 23:42:00 +0000

Lord Martin Rees, cosmologist, astrophysicist, and recent past president of Great Britain's scientific Royal Society, is an atheist, but for me Krista Tippett’s conversation with him held more spiritual meaning than a typical church service does.

He has little interest in science versus religion battles, but his reflections on scientific discoveries imply the existence of spiritual reality. Rees said,

There's evidence, which has come about in the last 10 years or so, that even empty space, when you take away all the dark matter and all the atoms, still exerts a kind of force. It exerts a sort of push or tension on everything.

Immediately I think of spiritual reality, which physical science ignores but for which it has encountered evidence since the dawn of the quantum age. In the manner typical of scientists, this possibility never occurs to Lord Rees. He speculates about purely physical possibilities.

This therefore means that even empty space has a kind of structure, and we don't understand that at all. . . . most of us would guess that empty space does have a structure but on a tiny, tiny scale, a scale a billion, billion times smaller than an atomic nucleus. . . .
One of the fascinating ideas is that if you could chop up space on a very tiny scale, you would find that what we think of as just a little point in space is actually a tightly wrapped origami of extra dimensions. . . .

And then he enters a field exciting to me because it corresponds with the Seth material I’ve blogged about:

On this very, very tiny scale there may be extra dimensions over and above the three that we are familiar with. And that indicates the mathematical challenge of trying to understand space at the very deepest level. . . .
There may be other universes, other regions of space/time, which are separate from ours, because they're embedded in a common higher dimension.
Another universe may be just a few millimeters away from ours. But if those millimeters are measured in a fourth spatial dimension and we're imprisoned in our three we wouldn't know about it.

Rees, in typical scientific fashion, does not entertain the possibility that dimensions other than our space/time one might occupy no physical space at all while still exercising power. The evidence propels him toward admitting the possibility of unfamiliar dimensions, but as a typical scientist, he cannot admit the possibility of immaterial or spiritual dimensions.

In Seth Speaks we read about realities that do not coalesce into matter; we read about intense concentrations of energy entirely separate from matter. Material form, which occupies the whole of scientific inquiry, does not, however, exhaust the total sum of power that exists.

There is a force indescribable that religions try to describe. It overwhelms with thrilling power both religious and non-religious persons. It inspires holiness, and it also generates odd phenomena such as the paranormal experiences normal people experience—seeing deceased people, hearing bodiless voices, receiving just the right idea while engaged in writing or some other creative activity (an experience familiar to me).
This power/force/energy is beyond the capacity of science to explain. Scientists like Lord Rees and other atheists are touched by it without acknowledging it.
Next time, Lord Rees on strident atheist hostility toward religion.

June 14
In her conversation with astrophysicist Lord Martin Rees, Krista Tippett said he is “very vocal about not seeing science and religion as adversarial aspects of human life.” She asked him about ancient religious traditions that “have moral reasoning at their heart” and bring depth to public life. But Rees associated religion with dogma:

I am not a person who adheres to any religious dogma. [I am]skeptical of anyone who claims to have the last word or complete understanding of any deep aspect of reality.
The most we can hope for is some incomplete and metaphorical understanding and to share the mystery and wonder whether we are believers or not. . . .
I find myself very out of tune with old dogmatic religions, which . . . includes the three Abrahamic religions. . . . I can see a closer affinity with Confucianism and systems of thought like that.

His thoughts ring in tune with me, and I add that the deepest expressions of Christian thought also might ring in tune with him. But they are less accessible than literal expressions—the U.S. bishops’ attempt to ban S. Elizabeth Johnson’s Quest for the Living God demonstrates their inability to even grasp deeper expressions, much less teach them. Consequently, scientists like Rees fail to see much depth in religion.

Lord Rees respects,

some very distinguished scientists who do have traditional religious beliefs…. I find it hard to understand how they can adhere to these beliefs in the way they do, but plainly they do.

He recommended maintaining “peaceful coexistence” with religious believers. Tippett noted,

We have a lot of listeners who are atheists and agnostic, [leading] ethical and spiritual lives. . . . They are asking these questions of meaning.

She deplored the lack of middle ground in public discourse:

There’s the new atheist revival or there’s religion . . . You are . . . at least defusing the idea that the relationship is adversarial.

Rees commented that strident hostility toward religion is not typical of non-believing scientists. He regards mainstream religions, which have no problem with science, as allies against the “real danger to the world”—fundamentalism.
Tippett asked about an ongoing debate:

[Some say] it's so unlikely that everything came together to create this hospitable biosphere . . . there must be some purpose behind it, whether they call that God or not. [Others say], it's a random accident. It's an incredible, exquisite random accident.

Rees understood the issue differently from the debate raging in the U.S.

I regard this as . . . a scientific question … not a metaphysical question, albeit a very speculative scientific question. . . .

We do want to know how much is there, in physical reality as it were, beyond the part of the universe we can see . . . Are there completely disconnected regions of space and time? And if so, are they all governed by the same physical laws or could it be that there are different physical laws, so that what we've called the universal laws are really just bylaws? . . .
only one form of space or many different forms of space. . . . That’s an important question, which string theorists worry about.

Physical reality with laws and forms different from ours again gets close to information in the Seth material, but Tippett persisted in getting his take on the question roiling Americans:

Do you rule out . . . the possibility of purpose or of a, you know, a creative intelligence or what … Einstein divined behind the universe?

Rees answered,

I just don't understand what could be meant by purpose. I think if there was a purpose, I wouldn't expect human brains to be able to understand it. . . .
We exist and are conscious and able to wonder about how we came to be here. But I regard the rest as a mystery, and perhaps it will have to await the evolution of some species more advanced than humans to make more sense of it. So it is just a mystery to me.

I can’t wish for a better spiritual reflection than this!
Tippett seized an opportunity to discuss a subject she has probed in past interviews.

You just mentioned consciousness, . . . How do you as an astrophysicist, a cosmologist, observe that development and think about its possibilities? Does it inform what you do and how you make sense of it all?

Along with Krista Tippett, I regard consciousness as a threshold between science and spirituality, but Lord Rees did not accept her invitation to enter that field. He talked about the brain:

. . . the highest summit in studying the complexions of our world. And how far we will get in solving that I don't know, but there are many mysteries still obviously. . . . We should not be surprised that there are many mysteries, because we are just beginning and the world is very complicated and our brains may not be up to solving all of them.

Then he halfway acknowledged his dodge.

Scientists obviously are aware of the big problems, but they don't tackle the big problems head on. They work on a problem which they think they can solve. . . .
no scientist gets credit for failing to solve problems beyond their competence . . . So scientists tend to work on a sort of bite-sized small problem. But the occupational risk then is that they forget that their small problem is worthwhile only because it's helping to illuminate the big picture. . . .

Robert Wilson . . . made one of the greatest discoveries of the century . . . tinkering with the antennae of a radio dish and making sure he got rid of all the background [which led to the Big Bang theory]. He was doing detailed technical things, and he was so focused obviously on doing that because that was his expertise that it didn't really sink in what a great discovery he'd made.

And — and so I think that's why it is important for scientist to engage with the public. Because if you talk to a general audience, then the questions they ask are, of course, the big questions. They don't care about these tiny technical details. . . . they remind us that the big questions are important and also they remind us that most of those big questions haven't yet been solved.

Krista Tippett’s persistent return to the big questions revealed that, embedded in scientific discoveries, can be spiritual implications beyond the capability of many, both religious and non-religious, to see.

"Free" enterprise?

noreply@blogger.com (Jeanette) — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 18:23:00 +0000

When I started this subject a month ago, I thought I’d have two posts. This is six posts later. I can’t stop stewing about this.

“America, land of the free” sounds hollow today, and “Free enterprise” sounds hollow.

The misnamed “free” market actually enslaves most when it grants unlimited power to the already powerful—those with hundreds of millions to invest, not in job-making enterprises, but in more-money-making ventures for themselves alone.

Money is power. We see money power flaunted when Congress dismantles regulations on industry, when it grants tax privileges to the wealthy, when it fails in fairness. Unregulated, the market lets some people exploit others, acting out the truism, “Absolute power corrupts absolutely.” We need reasonable regulation to limit power, rules to govern the game of buy and sell.

Undeniably, our society presently fails in this: massive inequalities; crumbling infrastructure; education and health services in trouble; underfunded police and fire departments; streets littered with homeless, many of them veterans and the mentally ill, some of them employed. All this and we bear the title of richest nation on earth!

In itself, wealth is good. When used for the common good, wealth is good. But every society needs rules that direct wealth properly, and that’s the job of government. Only thus can a society provide freedom and opportunity for everyone; only thus can it protect our common rights, our freedom, and our common property—our air, water, and soil.
Carol writes:

From my study and teaching of U.S. History (in particular the Gilded Age Era), I agree 100% with your comments about the mal-distribution of wealth problem. We are surely back with a vengeance into the spirit and practices of the Gilded Age…new robber barons in our midst!
How strange that the populace as a whole does not seem to notice this. But then, again, Americans generally do not have a good grasp of history and too often see only what they want to see. Sad—

Derek writes:

Thanks for sharing this. I’ve connected with a group of wealthy folks who are trying to raise awareness of income inequality. One of them is Nick Hanauer; you might be interested in his little book The True Patriot, , which argues for greater contributions to society from the most well off

To save our democracy, we must correct the imbalance of wealth in the U.S.
Biblical warnings about money have never been more relevant. Would that Christians paid attention.

Injustice in America

noreply@blogger.com (Jeanette) — Thu, 05 May 2011 17:53:00 +0000

Wealth disparity in America disturbs me more than religious wrongdoing. I’m particularly upset that our public air waves are drenched in rhetoric from the right, the tax-cutting extremists who blast social programs that make life tolerable for some of the poor.
Facts I wish our media would broadcast:

• Incomes in the U.S. are less equal than in Guyana, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. We have roughly the same inequality as Uruguay, Argentina, and Ecuador. Latin American incomes are actually equalizing, but inequality continues to increase in the United States.

• Our income tax code essentially ignores top incomes—those making hundreds of millions, even a billion dollars a year! These billionaires are taxed at the same low rate—35%—as those making $373,650 a year, less than half a million! Our tax code fails to distinguish between them. Insane!

• The richest 1 percent owns 34 percent of our nation’s wealth—that’s more than the entire bottom 90 percent, who own just 29 percent of the country’s wealth. The top one-hundredth of 1 percent makes an average of $27 million per household per year, while the average income for the bottom 90 percent of Americans is $31,244.

• Despite an economy that's twice as large as it was thirty years ago, the bottom 90 percent —if they’re employed—gained less than 1 percent over more than a third of a century, earning on average only about $280 more a year than thirty years ago, adjusted for inflation.

• Two-earner families fare better, but, today, single parents with average incomes cannot provide housing, health care, food, and other necessities. Poor and middle class people, confused by anti-tax propaganda, vote for tax cuts that actually lead to big tax increases on themselves.
• Anti-tax extremists argue that redistributing wealth or trying to transfer wealth from rich to poor doesn’t work and is bad for everybody. But transfer of wealth is exactly what has happened in the last years, transferred from the poor and middle classes to financial wizards who enjoy playing with money. And these are the people who created the financial crisis.
This is America, supposedly the land of opportunity. If top incomes were fairly taxed, if our entire tax code didn’t direct wealth upward to a few financial heads, how much of our nation’s economic mess could be relieved! And our infrastructure needs. Our educational, environmental, and social needs.

Common sense as well as our inherent sense of justice should make us cry out with shame that our society savages the needy while sheltering obscene wealth. No society with vast disparities of wealth can long endure.

Injustice 2, May 13
In a comment, Florian argues that it’s “sort of a law of the universe” that 80% of the population does the work while 20% manages and rules. He concludes,

“… in the field of management . . . it is often said that 20% of your workers will do about 80% of the work. . . . Sure, everybody works, but only a fraction of all of us (say 20%) actually make such impactful contributions to society as creating jobs, creating new inventions, or being civic leaders. Perhaps it is ‘justice’ that the top 20% reap 80% of the rewards,” [and this happens] “naturally in free society with a free economy.”
“Liberals want to impose redistributionist policies to make things more ‘fair’ or ‘just’ . . . That might sound just, but it is not so natural. . . .
We don't equate the free, voluntary transfer or exchange of wealth in a free economy with the imposed, non-voluntary redistribution of wealth by a government.

His arguments one at a time.
1. “Redistributionist policies” are precisely what happened in the last 30 to 40 years, but in the wrong direction—toward injustice. Since the 1950s, at a gradually accelerating rate, wealth has been transferred from the poor and middle classes to top incomes. This upward direction of wealth happened as a result of deliberate tax and regulation policies.

The national debt quadrupled between 1980 and 1992 (during the terms of Presidents Reagan and first Bush). George W. Bush would repeat Reagan’s policies and double it again between 2000 and 2008.
Meanwhile, the share of national income going to the top 1% more than doubled, from 9% to 24%. The share going to the top one-tenth of 1% of income earners more than tripled.
We now have the most unequal distribution of income in the developing world and the inequality is growing rapidly.

During the term of George W. Bush, before the near economic meltdown, Nobel laureate Paul Krugman analyzed the dramatic shift toward concentration of wealth in the hands of a few.

Thanks to the right’s well-funded and organized effort, corporate executives now feel no shame in lining their pockets with huge bonuses and gigantic stock options. Such self-dealing is justified, they say: Greed is what made America great, and greedy executives are exactly what corporate America needs.

. . . there has been a concerted attack on the institutions that have helped moderate inequality — in particular, unions. . . . Business interests went on the offensive against unions. . . . once Ronald Reagan took office, the anti-union campaign was aided and abetted by political support at the highest levels.

2. “Free, voluntary transfer or exchange of wealth in a free economy” is NOT what concentrates wealth in our country; it is imposed on the many by a few. The rich protect their privileged positions by swarming Congress with lobbyists.

“ . . . he worried that the lobbying prowess and financial resources of Wall Street firms . . . had the potential to outmuscle their opponents, which want greater regulation.”

Members of Congress rely on their own riches plus money from other rich to get elected and re-elected. Vast armies of corporate lobbyists infest Capitol Hill while members of Congress spend substantial amounts of their time soliciting campaign contributions.

“Yes, we peddle political influence, but, hey, it's not illegal, . . .”

As an example of money’s power, a study found that the campaign for eliminating inheritance taxes was funded mostly by 18 super-rich families.

3. As for the claim that the rich earn their obscene profits by higher productivity and greater contributions to society, Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz demolishes that argument.

The corporate executives who helped bring on the recession of the past three years—whose contribution to our society, and to their own companies, has been massively negative—went on to receive large bonuses. In some cases, companies were so embarrassed about calling such rewards “performance bonuses” that they felt compelled to change the name to “retention bonuses” (even if the only thing being retained was bad performance).

Those who have contributed great positive innovations to our society, from the pioneers of genetic understanding to the pioneers of the Information Age, have received a pittance compared with those responsible for the financial innovations that brought our global economy to the brink of ruin.

CEO’s of large banks gamble with money laboriously earned by ordinary workers who invest in houses, pensions, and stocks. The CEOs of large banks and corporations enjoy manipulating money. That’s how they differ from ordinary workers—nurses, construction workers, plumbers, miners, clerks, technicians, and so on. Do those who enjoy investment games make a greater contribution to society? Of course not.

I'm not talking about the rich people that most of us know. Their wealth pales in comparison with the top 1 and 2 percent, and they have no designs like those who command Wall Street and are described by Stiglitz. They’re not intent on taking an ever-greater share of the pie but use their money to help others. We need to distinguish between the moderately rich and the obscenely rich.

Some of the most valuable members of society work for a pittance or no money at all—sisters and monks who enhance spiritual life, emergency-responders of all kinds, teachers who sacrifice for at-risk kids, garbage workers, nursing home workers who change diapers on the old . . . this list could go on for a very long time.

The triumph of greed in America cannot be attributed to “natural” dynamics in a “free” economy.

Correction: Florian protested that I misrepresented his comment by saying the 80/20 rule means that 80% do the work while 20% manage and rule. I accept the correction. He said, the 80/20 rule means that 20% own 80% of the wealth and 80% own only 20% of the wealth and “this has probably been the case in most large societies throughout history.”
I leaped to the implications of "own" by saying “manage and rule,” which generally is true and today has assumed grotesque proportions, as tax policies create mal-distribution of wealth incomprehensible to most people. The 80/20 theory ignores the slow but real trend toward ever greater democracy in world history, and it assumes injustice must accepted as inevitable in human societies—something decisively refuted by just societies throughout history.

Wealth injustice, May 23.
I sent the following to the PBS ombudsman and to an email group.
Dear PBS
I challenge you to defy your corporate sponsors and do a series on the squandering of our national resources through the concentration of wealth in the U.S.
• Examine the tax and deregulation policies that direct the vast wealth of our nation into the hands of very few.
• Investigate how corporate money influences federal and state governments, controls media, directs the flow of information, and forms public attitudes.
• Demonstrate the inefficiency of an economy that thwarts the talents of the many to enrich the few.
• Show how social programs yield returns in dollars many times more than the original investment.
• Expose the grotesque tax code that treats an income of less than half a million ($379,150) the same as incomes rising to hundreds of millions and even a billion.
• Compare the gross disparity of income in the U.S. today with other systems such as feudalism and the Gilded Age.

“America, land of opportunity” cannot be sung anymore. Please educate our citizens about the gross inefficiencies and injustices in our system, all deriving from misdirection of our national wealth.

This generated enormous email traffic for me, almost all of it supporting my message. Here are a few samples. Mary Lou:

I am reading Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States: 1492-Present.
A lot is still the same as relates to the rich making sure the playing field is slanted in their favor. That book and your letter are eye-openers that many in our world either don't want to know or are too busy trying to make a living so have no time or energy to search out alternative news because our media are also owned by large corporations.

Warren:

Why don't more of us speak out about tax unfairness? Because so many of us benefit from it in our own ways, and we don't want to take a chance on hurting ourselves. I am in Northern Minnesota now and for much of the summer, and I watch numerous small businesses, often family operations, who use every aspect of the tax code to their advantage. That's what accountants are for. Expensive gas? Not when all your travel is a "business expense." Expensive vehicles and boats? Not when every one of them is a "business expense."

David:

Jeanette, have you seen the documentary, “Capitalism, a Love Story” by Michael Moore? It was released as a movie in 2009 and it outlines most of your points about how capitalism is working in America. The problem is most middle class Americans like to think they are well off and buy into the lies told by the truly wealthy to keep them quiet. Warren Buffet when asked if there was a class war in America said, “Yes, Oh and by the way, we’re winning.” Buffet’s comment was widely quoted, and by many taken as a joke, it wasn’t. . . .

I have had friends who because they have a nice house and are comfortable, consider themselves well off. They buy into the republican dogma, the tea party dogma, without question, railing on about no new taxes and gov’t waste without ever realizing that they are way below the income level protected by the tax strategy of wealthy republican policy-makers. They were against health care reform because it was labeled socialized medicine. Big government to them is automatically bad, but big business they give a free pass. I don’t get it.
I don’t necessarily trust big government and I certainly don’t trust big business, but I do see that there needs to be a balance. Right now in America there is no balance.
People are losing homes, jobs, and their life because a few super wealthy individuals and corporations are more interested in profit than the well being of the American people. The government is the only thing big enough to do anything about the actions of this elite group. Unfortunately, many politicians are bought and no longer represent the people they are supposed to serve.

Don:

Jeanette, to explore in depth the consequences and implications of income inequality in Western society, especially the US, I recommend you read Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger (2009) by Richard Wilkinson & Kate Pickett, Foreword by Robert B. Reich.

An anonymous person responding to David’s friends who “buy into the republican dogma” wrote,

Well, if you are in a nice house and are comfortable, then you well off. So what’s to complain about?

This topic to be continued....
Next time—Republicans with a conscience.

Resurrection … Reincarnation

noreply@blogger.com (Jeanette) — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 19:25:00 +0000

Easter re-imagined, April 23
Easter and Christmas continue ancient celebrations of the sun’s annual resurrection in the northern hemisphere—the winter solstice and the vernal equinox. According to Christian scholar, the Venerable Bede, who lived around 700 C.E., Easter was named after Eostre, the Great Mother Goddess of the Saxon people in Northern Europe. There were many other names for her, among them Ostara, Ostern, and Eostre.

Every spring, ancient cultures around the Mediterranean celebrated fertility in ceremonies honoring goddesses with a variety of names. Some are mentioned in the Bible—Asherah, Astarte, Ashtoreth, and Anath. Modern people are more familiar with Aphrodite, well-known for her connection with fertility. My favorite non-Christian Easter story—favorite because it so perfectly balances the Christian Father-Son bias—is the one I tell in my post Easter symbolized. More about the Mother-Daughter rites in my post Pagan Easter.
The New Testament, of course, doesn’t mention Easter. There, the universal and timeless theme of death and rebirth pairs the Christian story with the Jewish festival of Passover. This commemorates the Exodus story in which an angel of God kills the firstborn male of every Egyptian household and passes over the doors marked by Jews with the blood of a lamb.
Christ was said to be the perfect Passover lamb who gave birth to Christianity as the original Passover lamb gave birth to Judaism. The symbols work beautifully. But mature Christians need to graduate past worship of a certain man-god to recognizing the universality of the Holy Week theme.

For me, there’s no motif more universally applicable to all of existence than that of dying and rising, because deaths and resurrections form the structure of existence. After our death to the present life, I believe we reincarnate into another life (see the previous post). Even in this present lifetime we go through many, many deaths and rebirths, a reality I meditate on in Resurrection.
Now a postscript. The many names for the Great Mother Goddess expose the fallacy in the Judaeo-Christian boast that our tradition first discovered monotheism. The evidence shows that recognition of one pervading Spirit irrespective of multiple names for what we call “God” existed well before Abraham.

And another postscript. I remembered that I forgot my promise in my April 13 post to distinguish womenpriests from male clerical culture. Holy Week and Easter intervened, but I hope to do it next time.

Resurrection … Reincarnation

"Jesus did not found a religion . . . When did religion enter Christianity?
. . . When Jesus became an object of worship."
Fr. Joseph Comblin, theologian who died in Brazil.

So Comblin implies the first Christians did not worship Jesus, did not relate to him as to a god. I agree. But the same issue of NCR that quotes Comblin also editorializes about the Resurrection:

What happened to Jesus changed not only history but the very cosmos and what we know of human reality on the time-space continuum. . . . [Jesus] opens up for all of us the possibility of life beyond the grave.

I don't believe this and a number of Catholic theologians do not. Comblin may have been one of them.
The man from Nazareth manifested holiness to a degree that spawned a movement devoted to him, which developed into Christianity, but Christian historians find evidence of many different Christian beliefs in the early centuries. Uniformity didn’t happen until Roman emperors forced it in the fourth and fifth centuries. Only centuries later, with enlightenment science, did the belief develop that Jesus’ life and death changed the cosmos and all human reality in our three-dimensional universe. I reject it.

I believe life after death has always existed and explain my belief in my blogspot Channeling & Reincarnation. Belief in reincarnation does not permeate Catholic theology now, but it was a common belief in the early centuries of Christianity and was never doctrinally rejected. Instead of citing evidence for early Christian belief in reincarnation, which is relatively easy to find, I cite something more surprising—a fairly modern prelate, Catholic Cardinal Mercier, who lived from 1851 to 1926, stated that belief in reincarnation is not incompatible with Christianity. Good thing, because about a quarter of European Christians and a quarter of American Christians believe in it.

One of three Americans raised Catholic no longer identifies as Catholic. A PEW study into the reasons for the exodus of Catholics did not ask about beliefs other than the hot button issues of abortion, contraception, homosexuality, treatment of women, and divorce. Social issues really drive Catholics out of the Church, but independent thinking about them encourages independent thinking about core Christian beliefs and about Christianity itself. It's now common to find Catholics and other Christians who question dogmas. That's excellent.

The last comment to my blogpost Channeling & Reincarnation accuses me of lying. A lie is a DELIBERATE false statement. If the early Church did not accept reincarnation but I believe it, my saying so is not a lie. In fact, there is much evidence to support my belief, as a quick Google search shows. So the comment is false, but I won’t accuse the writer of lying because he didn’t know better.

Women priests reject clericalism

noreply@blogger.com (Jeanette) — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 21:55:00 +0000

Rosemary Radford Ruether, April 7.
There are times I think I should just give up on the Catholic Church—I’m sure Benedict XVI wouldn’t mind. He and bishops appointed by him and John Paul II are doing their best to get rid of dissidents like me.

But since the 1970s or ‘80s—I forget which—Rosemary Radford Ruether has motivated me on my path of working within the Church because she remains a Catholic and she articulates what I think and feel. My term "God talk" comes from her book Sexism and God Talk."
A premier feminist theologian, Ruether sees Catholicism as incorporating the whole Western philosophical tradition, but she grew up learning to critique it with respect while remaining a Catholic. Her mother already criticized "superstitious, dogmatic Catholicism," notes Ruether. She believes we need “autonomous bases for women’s theologizing and worship” to counter the unspoken official position that feminist Catholics are “just deviant, immoral people.” I join her in being a Catholic who refuses to be confined by institutional Catholicism.

And so I have called myself a "Buddhist Catholic"; someone, to my delight, called me an "honorary Unitarian"; and someone else wrote, "You definitely sound like an agnostic or an atheist, so why not join our group, Minnesota Atheists?"

Apparently, conservative Catholic officials don’t mind that their actions drive Catholicism toward becoming a right-wing fringe group in the Western world. Well, there's nothing to do about that. In the meantime, there are millions still nurtured by the Church but chaffing under the present leadership.
Typical liturgical language doesn’t nurture me—in fact, the sexist language repels me—but thoughtful, open-minded Catholics keep me coming to liturgies. And I revel in the improved liturgical language we use in our Womanpriest Masses, while I shudder at the thought of the Vatican’s imposed language coming out at the end of this year. As my generation dies out, I expect the Church to be less open, less inviting for persons with an inclusive bent.

Ruether, however, also criticizes the women’s ordination movement, as does Mary Hunt, another premier Catholic activist.

Women priests reject clericalism, April 30

Roman Catholic clerical culture favors doctrinal rigidity, conformity, obedience, submission and psychosexual immaturity (mistaken for innocence) in its candidates. These are the personality elements that lead to advancement and power in the clerical system.
Single men are more easily controlled if their sexuality is secret.
Richard Sipe.

Do priests abstain from sex? Sipe, a psychotherapist and researcher into the sexual practices of Roman Catholic clergy, answers,

No researcher so far has assessed that more than fifty percent of Roman Catholic clergy at any one time are in fact practicing celibacy.

So much for mandatory celibacy.
Why do they get by with it? Sipe answers,

Secrecy about all clerical sex is sacrosanct within the system.

Tom Roberts also examined clericalism, quoting a Capuchin provincial minister who described it as

a form of elitism . . . reinforced by the distinctive education and formation, dress and titles that priests and religious receive. . . . [Elitism] can lead to a distorted sense of entitlement, the assumption that one is not bound by the rules that govern everyone else, and that other people (even the vulnerable) exist to serve one’s own needs.

Women priests model a form of priesthood that sharply contrasts with the clerical culture so devastatingly described in the statements above. Women priests are non-elitist. As such, they are non-hierarchical, non-authoritarian, and, of course, non-patriarchal; they don’t insist on their way. No parish council has the familiar headache of coping with a headstrong woman priest.

They bear no titles like “Mother” or “Reverend,” wear street clothing in public and simple vestments during liturgies, and they receive little or no stipend for their service to the Church, that is, service to the people, not the hierarchical structure. They have to work for their living, and their work often serves persons neglected by the official Church—the GLBT community and victims of clergy abuse.
They are not hung up about sex, being married or not, as they wish, and they are deliberately ecumenical.

Oh, and in answer to the question, "Why would you want to participate in the hierarchical system? Isn’t this a sell-out?" women priests say women's ordination is necessary in this transitional time. As I interpret this, it means they don't regard any ordination above lay status to be necessary but only necessary now for the sake of justice, to show that women can stand in persona Christi.
As indeed they do.

Women priests & apostolic succession, April 13.

According to the gospels, Jesus chose 12 disciples in his life time. After his death, one of them, Judas Iscariot, the traitor of Jesus, was replaced . . . But these 12 disciples have left little record of evangelizing Gentiles and founding churches around the world. In fact, the original idea of the 12 disciples probably was intended to represent the 12 tribes of Israel, not a group of worldwide founders of churches from which a succession of bishops descended.
Rosemary Radford Ruether

In fact, most scriptural historians don’t believe that Jesus chose exactly 12 men, only men, to be his disciples. The importance of women in his ministry, especially Mary Magdalene, strikes anyone who reads the gospels with open eyes.

The Roman Catholic Womenpriests (RCWP) movement, begun in 2002 with the ordination of 7 women on the River Danube, claims apostolic succession because its women priests and bishops were ordained by bishops claiming valid succession in the Catholic Church. But a Women-Church movement begun in the 1970s rejects the idea of ordination in apostolic succession because, in their view, it cooperates with institutional clericalism.

This concept of women priests imbues the Mary Magdalene Apostle Catholic Community begun in 2005. It ordained a woman in a collective action of their faith community and based this on their reading of early church history. Some Christians in the early centuries had called priests and ordained them by such collective action of their local communities. Hippolytus was elected bishop of Rome in this way, and he described the apostolic tradition as “all the people” together with presbyters (priests) and bishops giving their consent and laying hands on the elected.

Monarchical or hierarchical episcopacy—a bishop with power over others—also existed in the early Church; many different Christianities existed in a fluid mix of diverse beliefs and diverse practices. Competing groups claimed apostolic succession, including Gnostics. Orthodox bishops tried to eliminate differences—from this period come the terms “heresy” and “orthodoxy”—but their kind of order didn’t succeed until Roman emperors, beginning with Constantine, imposed it on the whole empire.

The earliest and best model of a bishop claiming special powers was Ignatius of Antioch, who on his way to voluntary martyrdom early in the second century wrote, “I am God’s wheat . . . to make a pure loaf for Christ.” In other words, the bishop represented God and had teaching authority. But apostolic succession claims in the early centuries had nothing to do with priestly power to make bread and wine turn into the body and blood of Jesus Christ, and Ignatius never mentioned Peter as a founding apostle.

To summarize, the idea of apostolic succession has no historical validity. The supposedly unbroken line of succession from certain men chosen by Jesus to be priests and bishops is “historical fiction” (Ruether’s term) used to keep unbroken the lines of power in the institutional Church. For this reason and because they despise hierarchical abuse of power, Rosemary Radford Ruether and Mary Hunt, both of whom I admire as Catholic feminist leaders, reject RCWP.

So why do I support RCWP which claims “unbroken apostolic succession within the Roman Catholic Church”? Because nothing, besides the issue of clerical sex abuse, so effectively challenges the Vatican’s grip on power. Automatic excommunication of participants in RCWP evinces the hierarchy’s fear of RCWP.

Yes, the claim of apostolic succession is baseless, but that women can make it adds to their power in the eyes of the Vatican and in the eyes of Catholics ignorant of history. I have no doubt that many womenpriests know the facts regarding the myth of the twelve apostles, and their own model of priesthood sharply contrasts with male clerical culture.

PINK SMOKE OVER THE VATICAN
To learn more about women’s ordination, view scenes of the film Pink Smoke over the Vatican and listen to a fascinating interview of the journalist who made the film. Articulately and cogently, she informs us of the Church’s efforts, sometimes extreme, to enforce sexism. And you may want to read a review of the film.

LARGER Reign of Divinity

noreply@blogger.com (Jeanette) — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 14:54:00 +0000

I'm so lucky. Friends and acquaintances say they have no one with whom they can discuss deep spiritual questions. I have many such persons.
Recently, a group of us met to discuss a book that fascinates, challenges, perplexes, frustrates, and satisfies us. If you've followed my blog, you've "heard" me talk about it before. To continue my mystifying description, we even said that the book is not well written—“convoluting” was one good adjective offered. And Seth uses sexist language. You know how that offends me.

The book is Seth Speaks; the Eternal Validity of the Soul. Yeah, I know. You thinkers who are atheists just felt your stomach lurch on the word "soul." I'm sorry. It's not what you think.
As I replay our conversation that evening, I find myself smiling. What intelligence! But, no, a different kind of intelligence from the usual meaning. What was it we were saying? Reaching toward the unreachable brings us massive presence, frightening vastness, depth that both warms and alarms. Indescribable.

I’m so lucky that I have people in my life who share my desire to go deeper, people from whom I can learn about the depth, people as bewitched and drawn to the Mystery as I am.

Now darn, this will seem offensive to my atheist friends, but I will say it. I think this is the Reign of God (in the midst of us) that Jesus of Nazareth kept talking about—the reign whose meaning was so abominably corrupted by official Christianity.

You cannot tell by careful watching when the Reign of God will come. Neither is it a matter of reporting that it is ‘here’ or ‘there.’ The reign of God is already in your midst.
(Gospel of Thomas 113 and Luke 17: 20-21

Deuteronomy 30 hints it as well. (Imagine! Deuteronomy!)

It is not up in the sky, that you should say, “who will go up in the sky to get it for us and tell us of it, that we may carry it out?’ Nor is it across the sea . . . No, it is something very near to you, already in your mouths and in your hearts; you have only to carry it out.
Deuteronomy 30:12-14

And here is my paraphrase of a passage in an Edgar Cayce book:

There is a Greater Reality, there are higher purposes, there are more enduring truths than day to day activities represent. The existence of this Greater Reality is verified in substantial, objective, and scientific data as well as in personal experiences.

But this LARGER Reign of Divinity includes a far greater reality than any of us can imagine. Many non-Christians understand it better than Christians. Whatever our orientation, we need to open our minds and hearts to ever greater possibilities.
*************************************************

CRADLE CHRISTIAN AWARE, March 25
Two email comments that came to me demonstrate the superior quality of spiritual reflections today. First David:

I’ve been following the discussion on your blog.
Atheists don’t admit they have a belief system, yet they want proof of god in accordance with their belief in science, which is impossible by their own definitions. Then because such proof is impossible, atheists declare that they have won the argument. Sounds like circular reasoning to me.
I have a problem with belief myself and would like proof but at the same time one cannot deny one’s feeling without being a hypocrite. I feel the existence of something beyond understanding, something supernatural.

Cradle Christians who’ve become aware that the Christian story is myth are searching for spiritual answers. Tom’s meanderings perfectly illustrate the deep and intelligent thinking that’s occurring:

I think calling oneself agnostic can be a cop out, depending on a lot of things.
I know people who call themselves Christians, atheists, agnostics, or whatever, who give religion and spiritual matters little more than superficial attention. It can be just as much a cop out—maybe more—for someone to just say they are Christian. It’s safe, and can be very thoughtless in our culture. It’s just what we all are, right?
I’ve sat around campfires listening to friends saying they know nothing more about religion and “all that stuff” than that we have the Bible. “We at least know that’s true,” one friend told me. “We do?” I exclaimed—and then changed the subject. It’s as deep as he cared to go in his life as far as religion was concerned.

I say, “Right on.” I can’t express it better.

I have been on a life-long quest for some kind of spiritual clarity. I was a very strong believer in the Catholic religion as a youth, but fell away as the myth aspect became quite apparent to me. I read a lot about world religions in my early 20s, learned TM (Transcendental Meditation) talked and conversed and argued with many for years and years, then looked at New Age mysticism—beads and crystals, reincarnation, channeling, meditation—which can be totally separate from religion or spiritualism—and more.
I have really good friends who are very born-again fundamentalist Christians, and I admire them in their lives and families and worship services. I’ve been around them a lot, and love the way they live, but can’t really participate because I don’t share the belief system. I have read about the Dalai Lama for years, and have been reading one of his books (How to Practice). I’ve looked at the lives of religious leaders from across the years and globe, listened to and read Joseph Campbell and many others, and tried to process it all.

I have had (like many) striking incidents of possible spiritual connection—premonition dreams; a personal visit after a fit of rage from a very real and mystical young man dressed in a long, white garment in my father’s shoe shop that had me looking at a shattered window on the front entry door of the store; synchronistic episodes of coincidence that are pretty unexplainable; and more. Like everyone.

Do you really think they're entirely "unexplainable"? Seems to me they're obviously messages from the other side. Sure, there are mysteries. We don't know the “technology” of the happenings, but we know these experiences come from a dimension beyond the visible world.

I can’t bring myself to claim I can define any of that in defendable or definitive terms. I could say it’s from obvious spiritual connection, but it is really a matter of faith. And what is faith but a lack of the defendable and definitive, but believing anyway?

When asked if he believed in God, Jung said, "I don't believe; I know." That's where I am and it seems you are. We KNOW that spiritual reality exists; we are drawn to it; we like to read and talk about it, etc.

I’ve come away with a firm belief that it is all beyond our comprehension, and any attempt to define is not much better than a personal opinion. As I read in a book, it’s like the single cell in a huge system that has no comprehension of what it is part of. Can a single cell have comprehension of its place in a tissue that’s in an organ of a body in an environment that nourishes it, and is part of a cosmic reality that goes beyond our own comprehension, and will someday be freely exchanged within that environment as dead skin flakes off, or its host body dies, or by other means? I don’t know.

Yes, it’s beyond our comprehension. Still, it's so fascinating and there's so much nonsense to correct, that we go on discussing.

Can we know these things of our own lives and consciousness, and even in a deeper unknown and unseen energy or force or deeper consciousness that has been defined for us in countless ways for countless centuries? Does that deeper force even exist? I don’t know. Can we know? I’m at a point in my life where I believe we cannot know. That is just my belief, and it may evolve. But right now I guess that would make me an agnostic—but a fairly tortured one, wanting so badly to know the truth of life and beyond, a truth that I now believe we will not and cannot know.

Do you really doubt that a deeper force exists? In light of your experiences, I don't see how you can doubt that. As I suggest in Agnosticism, a certain core of belief about spiritual reality can be espoused even by agnostics.
William James in Varieties of Religious Experience comments on experiences like Tom’s,

They are states of insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect. They are illuminations, revelations, full of significance and importance, all inarticulate though they remain; and as a rule they carry with them a curious sense of authority for aftertime.

Tom again:

I should just stay out of it! I stopped discussing religion with family and friends many years ago. Everyone is locked into their own version of reality, and it takes a lifetime to get there—one way or another (regardless of actual age).

I don’t think Tom or others like him should stay out of it because they think more deeply than most. But I know from personal experience that discussing religion and spirituality with people who don’t want to hear unfamiliar interpretations can have unpleasant consequences. I'm fortunate in having a large circle of people with whom I can discuss these matters. And I confess that I like to insert kernels into conversations that set traditional believers to wondering a little, pondering, throwing them off their comfortable groove of thinking.

I am just about done with your book . . . I am so enjoying it, and am so amazed by your thoroughness and reasoning.

Thank you.

David Brooks & atheism

noreply@blogger.com (Jeanette) — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 14:19:00 +0000

David Brooks on things spiritual--March 11
I’m intrigued by a trend in our society that no one else has noted. Stories about religion losing ground flourish in the media, but has anyone else noticed a concurrent rise of interest in things spiritual? Religious and moral disagreements—often called “social issues”—as well as deeper questions concerning spiritual reality also fill the media.

Ironically, one signal of the rising interest in spirituality is louder sounds coming from atheists. How so? I’ll repeat what I’ve said often—atheists become atheists BECAUSE their spiritual integrity is offended by the flaws, foolishness, and outright corruption in religions. Atheists today force spiritual discourse past religions, past specific, narrow beliefs to a more inclusive, more eclectic, generic and secular spirituality.

The latest development exciting me is a new book, The Social Animal, by David Brooks. No one better typifies the American secular and intellectual culture that is emotionally distant from religions and spirituality. In fact, Brooks gets a laugh by repeating his wife’s comment that David writing about emotion is like Gandhi writing about gluttony. He calls Washington, D.C., his home and main target of comment, “the most emotionally avoidant city in America.”

On the PBS Newshour, Brooks said,

We have a very shallow view of human nature in the policy world. We're really good at talking about material things, really bad at talking about emotions, really good at stuff we can count, really bad at the deeper stuff that actually drives behavior. . . .

Emotion is the basis of reason. We really have to trust our emotions, which are much smarter than our reason in some ways. . . . [We make decisions] on the basis of things we're not even aware of. . . .

The unconscious, not a common subject in policy disputes, figures prominently when Brooks talks about his book, for which he studied child development, sociology, neuroscience, and philosophy. He called it a “pretense” that we make decisions on the basis of what we rationally and logically think is right.
Interviewer Jeffrey Brown interjected,

But that means . . . going with your gut. It means some part of your unconscious is actually working real hard.

Brooks agreed and advised,

You have got to give your unconscious mind time to process. So, think about it. Study it. And then distract yourself. Take a nap. Go to sleep. Think about it the next day. And then go with your gut.

He also learned the value of relationships, of community, of the need to be understood by others. If the focus on relating doesn’t sound spiritual enough, how about this:

Our explanation of why we live the way we do is all on the surface. . . . It was part of my idea to go down, down, down to look at moral and spiritual creativity, the deepest issues.

Newsweek wrote that the word “deep” comes up a lot when Brooks talks about his book. Moving from surface and material concerns to “deeper stuff,” valuing human connections and feelings, mining the wisdom of the unconscious—all are ingredients in a recipe for spiritual renewal.

During the 1990s, I read a psychic prediction that the 21st century would focus on spiritual concerns. We are seeing the beginning of that.

**** A good comment came in on the previous post, one that disagrees with me. I intend to answer it later. I call it "good" because it gets at the heart of the "religion v. science" debate and exemplifies the reason I like to debate with atheists—they can think.
If secular guru David Brooks ever shared the beliefs of scientific materialists, he certainly changed his mind.

Answer to Atheist--March 14
I am always delighted when a thoughtful atheist engages me, as Will did in the comment to "Scientific materialism" below. This is the part I find significant:

. . . the scientific method can be the only judge of what is likely to be true or false and to claim that something is true that cannot be scrutinized by the scientific method is opens the door to all kinds of silliness.

First, we need to consider the difference between facts and truth. Scientists have proficiency in the realm of facts, but not in spiritual truth. We consult science for factual knowledge, but for wisdom we turn to spiritual seers, religious or non-religious, some of whom might be scientist/philosophers.

Knowledge belongs in the realm of scientists; wisdom belongs in the realm of spirit. It’s true that good is better than evil, but a scientist would have a hard time proving it. It’s true that literature awarded the Nobel prize has surpassing quality, but a scientist would have a hard time proving it. Truth, goodness, and beauty cannot be proven by science but certainly manifest in physical reality.
Abundant evidence of spiritual reality exists in plain sight in outer reality—the effects of thoughts and emotions, spiritual values, myths, dream memories, and paranormal phenomena. In their interpretation of these phenomena, scientific materialists express a belief I find preposterous—that material stuff generates spiritual reality.

Not only do these phenomena in the physical world show that spiritual reality exists, they demonstrate its autonomy. I have looked for but never found a credible explanation by materialists of precognitive dreams, of astonishing psychic accuracy (conveniently denied by skeptics), of scientists and other thinkers suddenly granted the answer to a question when they stop thinking intellectually, of writers and artists who depend on a “muse,” and of people nudged to an act that averts disaster.
A recent example of the last is the story of a woman getting into an elevator, then, because of a sudden thought, stepping back out before it left. The elevator cable broke, fell many stories to the ground, and killed all in it. What instigated the sudden thought that propelled her out of the elevator? Not the nerves and synapses in her brain. They merely manifested the thought generated by some spiritual agent. In these incidents, inner mind knows more than outer brain capacity.

Will believes that only the scientific method can judge what is true. The problem has been that spiritual reality did not easily lend itself to the scientific scrutiny that Will respects. When scientists try to measure paranormal phenomena, the results have been mixed because the intention of the skeptical scientist mixes with the intention of the believer. There was no way to avoid letting the consciousness of the skeptical scientist contaminate the result of the experiment. Until quantum physics emerged.

Quantum physics clearly demonstrates the agency of consciousness as the primary moving force, and consciousness is a spiritual element, not a material one. In each quantum experiment, the intention or decision of the scientist determines whether a particle or a wave will present. Our intentions, thoughts, beliefs, perceptions, decisions—our consciousness—create reality; they decide what form physical stuff will take. We don’t recognize this fact for two reasons: 1) because we are not aware of our INNER perceptions and beliefs (the unconscious), and 2) because our individual perceptions are mixed with those of everyone else.

As I grow older, I increase my recognition of and reliance on the Inner power of many names. It’s available to all.
*************************

Reply to atheists, March 19.
In the signed comments below, those by Will and Darren, I find ideas worth considering and agree with most of what they say. As I see it, we disagree on this fundamental point: I say spiritual reality generates material reality and they would say (correct me if I’m wrong) that material or physical reality generates spiritual reality.

Will, your last point, however, confuses me. We agree that spiritual qualities dwell within the individual and culture, but why did you say it doesn’t diminish us? Of course, it doesn’t diminish us; I believe it ennobles us, it’s the divinity in us.
Let me guess. Do you perhaps object to my “reliance on the Inner Power”? This may be another point of disagreement between us. I believe that the greater part of us, accessed through our unconscious, exists beyond our everyday thinking “I” or “you,” what is called the ego. It comes to our aid in the examples I give of “inner mind” knowing more than outer brain. I call it divine but it is not a god. I don’t believe in a divinity that's merely an individual great spirit separate from us; I believe in Divinity in all.

Darren, my dictionary gives this second definition for fact: “something having real, demonstrable evidence.” That corresponds to my use of it—something physically demonstrable or, to use Will’s phrase, what can be “scrutinized by the scientific method.” As a third definition of myth I find this: “a fictitious story, person, or thing.” And this corresponds to “myth” as used in our popular culture—a worthless lie.

But religious myths (the first definition in dictionaries) are perfectly honorable, despite their lack of factual content. God the Father and Son are mythical images, not facts. God is not a male individual who gave birth to another male individual without any female input. In the realm of facts, this literal belief is ridiculous, but as Christian mythology, it nurtured the Western world for two thousand years by assuring people of the truth that divine assistance always stands ready to guide us. Facts belong to science. The spiritual values of truth, beauty, and goodness are best expressed in imagery—metaphor, symbol, myth, and so on.

To sum up, fact and truth are not always synonymous. Regarding subjectivity, yes, it judges truth, beauty, and goodness in highly individual ways, but I respect the subjective in ways you apparently do not. The subject is too complicated, however, for me to tackle here.

Unsigned comments from “Cat’s Staff” contain negative, reactive emotion, which suggests that I could not have a conversation with the author. In God Is Not Three Guys in the Sky I present a more thorough case, with sources, for my interpretation of quantum physics, but a hostile attitude will render it unacceptable in any case.

With atheist friends I have conversations in which we express strong and opposing convictions. I think I could have such a fruitful conversation with Will or Darren.

Cat’s staff commented (March 20),
@Jeanette: "...but as Christian mythology, it nurtured the Western world for two thousand years by assuring people of the truth that divine assistance always stands ready to guide us."

It guided us right into the dark ages for most of those two thousand years. How did it act any differently than any other mythology? It wasn't until the renesainse and the idea of empiricism came along that reason was able to save us from the 'nurturing'.

@Jeanette: "I think I could have such a fruitful conversation with Will or Darren. Good luck Will and Darren."

The fact that I'm psudoanonymous doesn't change the fact that you are the one making the claim that needs to be defended. I'm not making any claims from a position of authority (my identity doesn't matter if you don't need to verify my authority on a claim I'm making). It's up to you to show that your claims don't contradict the current understanding of quantum mechanics (and everything else we know about how the Universe works). If you could do that it wouldn't matter who you were, you could be compleatly anonymous. The evidence would stand on it's own...that's the beuaty of science.

Scientific materialism

noreply@blogger.com (Jeanette) — Sat, 05 Mar 2011 15:41:00 +0000

February 20, 2011
I read—well, I stopped reading and moved to skimming and then quit altogether—reading a book that purports to be the Catholic answer to atheists. It’s not.
The authors claim that atheism enables sociopathic behavior and warn that “a significant number of people” who deny the existence of God could “do terrible damage to society.” As proof they list totalitarian atheist regimes under Hitler (said to be “Godless”), Stalin, Mao Tse-tung, Pol Pot, and others. Their exaggerated charges resemble Christopher Hitchens' charges against religion in God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. Such alarmist, one-sided observations inevitably distort reality.
My greatest disappointment is the authors’ inability to transcend the traditional, primitive concept of Divinity—an individual with a humanlike mind and will. Their routine references to “Him” reduce Infinite Intelligence to human dimensions, and they assume that all atheists deny ALL spiritual reality because they reject this deity that Christians pray to. I wonder what they would do with Shug’s,

Whenever you try to pray and man plop himself on the other end of it, tell him to get lost.

Trapped in the mindset formed by our liturgies, they play into atheism’s strongest suit—its scorn for the anthropomorphic god modeled on pagan gods popular during our religion’s infancy.

The authors do manage some great passages by quoting atheists with extreme materialistic positions—I call them physicalists. Paul Churchland, for example, believes, "We are creatures of matter." In Churchland's and others' statements we see physicalists assuming that there is "no you apart from your body." (I want readers to know that not all atheists have these extreme views.)

The most determined deniers of spiritual reality would have us believe that our desires, intentions, beliefs, pain, even our entire consciousness, is delusional and that only material realities—nerves, electrochemical reactions, etc.—exist. This is where atheistic materialism absolutely fails—it cannot explain our thoughts, beliefs, memories, and intentions. It cannot explain our YOU or I, the person behind our material existence.

Common sense tells us that our minds are more than the product of chemical reactions in our brains and our decisions are not determined by physical processes. I heard a much better answer to the follies of atheistic materialism last fall in a presentation by Dr. Vincent Smiles at the College of St. Benedict. This will be the subject of my next post.
**************************
March 1
In a Friday Forum at the College of St. Benedict, Dr. Vincent Smiles examined the position of scientific materialists that God is an illusion manufactured by human brains. Here are samples of their thought.
Edward Wilson, a biologist, in his book On Human Nature:

If humankind evolved by Darwinian natural selection, [then] genetic chance and environmental necessity, not God, made the species. … I believe that the human mind is constructed. . . [as] a purely biological instrument . .

Loyal Rue, a philosopher of religion, suggests that the belief in life having value and purpose is a “noble lie,” although we hope most people continue to act on that belief.

The universe is blind and aimless; it has no value in and of itself
. . . The universe is dead and devoid of meaning . . . The universe just is.

The famous atheist Richard Dawkins writes that the universe,

has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference. DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is. And we dance to its music.

Smiles observed that books advocating these views “are amazingly popular.” Wisely he added,

I suspect that anger and frustration at religion may well be a driving force behind this popularity.

Conceding that the anger over religious wrongdoing is understandable, he rejected the “purely materialist view of reality” that some atheists are promoting and termed it “their mythology.”

What then about our most quintessential human qualities—the desire for truth, the capacity for discovery and transcendence, moral purpose, artistic creativity and so on—why do we not take these qualities also as clues to understanding the universe?

Indeed. Smiles referred to Keith Ward, a Christian philosopher who observes that materialism ignores the entire sphere of value, purpose, and consciousness. Surely they exist, as scientific materialists admit. Perhaps because they exist outside the sphere of natural science, materialists fail to appreciate their proper value and origin.

More next time. I confess I’m distressed because my main site, that containing my information on God Is Not Three Guys in the Sky, suddenly disappeared, one of many challenges for me this past week.

March 5
As you can see if you click God Is Not 3 Guys, it’s up again, thanks to my trusted tech helper, Peter. Some images need work yet, but the information is all there. WHEW!
“Humbling” really fits in the case of technology vs. Jeanette. One way I keep a positive attitude toward technology is to remember the surmise of a scientist/philosopher that information technology is the brain of our planetary organism, the Earth.

But not its mind, which brings me back to scientific materialists. I stand in the middle between them and religious traditionalists, agreeing partially with both sides and disagreeing with both. Now it’s the materialists getting my arguments as I continue relaying the presentation by Vincent Smiles (scroll to previous post).

Michael Polanyi (1891-1976) was a chemist turned philosopher who researched the “art of knowing” (epistemology). He was a practicing scientist in Hungary when Stalinist Russia repudiated all things religious or spiritual to extol “scientific certainty.” But Polanyi noted that its “mechanical conception” of humans allowed “no place for science itself” and led to hundreds of millions being killed. The true scientist, faithful to science, cannot ignore religious and spiritual phenomena. Fleeing anti-Semitism in Europe, Polanyi landed in England, where he developed a theory that answers the scientific materialism he lived under.

He was convinced that human knowing, in its very structure, demonstrates the reality of spiritual values and meaning. He observed that we learn through what he called “indwelling”—trusting the modeling and informing of other persons, whether parents, teachers, mentors, community, or whole tradition. Not even the greatest geniuses function without relying on inherited skills and knowledge, on authority and tradition.

And it all happens through interpersonal relationships. Try learning anything without other persons. If we think long enough about any learning, we’ll find the human persons behind the transmission. The more personal, deeper, and closer the personal relationships, the more we learn. This indicates that mind is more than brain, more than chemistry or bits of matter flying about. Mind includes feeling, as all teachers know well. Try telling an elementary teacher that minds are just machines.

Consider the values of truth, goodness, and beauty. It’s hard to express why or how they transcend physical matter; we just know that they do; we know they are spiritual values. It’s beyond my mental power to figure out how a materialist can seriously believe that truth, goodness, and beauty are only the accidental products of material stuff. Thoughts and feelings with spiritual import vastly surpass in value the physical mechanism of brains.

I know that determined materialists will not be convinced by my argument and will continue to deny the existence of spiritual reality. To me it looks like their determination arises from emotional needs, perhaps in reaction to religious corruption and foolishness, which also disgust me, as anyone familiar with my writings can see. Their indignation, while justifiable, does not justify denial of what plainly exists—spiritual reality.

Shug on the male god

noreply@blogger.com (Jeanette) — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 15:15:00 +0000

I’ve had discussions lately with people for whom God is an anthropomorphized god. Having been conditioned to “Father” and “Lord,” it distresses them to hear more scientific, philosophical, and mystical terms for what we call “God”—Source, Consciousness, Infinity, Void, and so on. I think it gives them real pain to hear that a Christian does not pray to “The Father,” an individual being who, they imagine, rules the universe—“the big guy in the sky,” as a Buddhist Christian minster called the anthropomorphic god.

“Anthropomorphic” means humanlike. Anthropomorphism attributes human characteristics to things that are not human. Children delight in stories about animals that talk, trees that walk, winds that rock, wily foxes, wise turtles, and laughing lizards. Religious mythology teems with divine beings in human form having humanlike personalities with humanlike thoughts and making humanlike decisions.

We learned to scoff at pagan deities, but “The Lord” in the Bible behaves in equally human ways, very noticeably in Genesis 2 and 3. He forms humans out of clay, speaks to them and asks, when they hide from him, “Where are you?” He’s jealous and punishes people for disobeying him, commanding and reacting in petty human ways. He expropriates the exclusively female faculty of childbearing but acts like the ruthless male tyrant-rulers familiar to us (For a contrasting picture, see my Goddess in the Bible ).

I dare say most Christians imagine “Father,” “Son,” and “Holy Spirit” as three distinct human personalities, although they would be quick to deny it. I expect they find it befuddling that I call myself a Christian, do not pray to Jesus, and yet have an intensely personal and warm relationship with my inner Beloved. I like what Shug in The Color Purple tells Celie, a victim of incest,

Whenever you try to pray and man plop himself on the other end of it, tell him to get lost.

She explains to Celie that God in traditional churches is a white man’s god.

God ain’t a he or a she, but a It. . . . I believe God is everything.

That’s what I believe, as I stated in Mind & Matter.

I can have some compassion for and patience with those who cling to Jesus out of the need for a personal relationship with Divinity; I even tolerate their “he/him/his” terminology. I also realize that many priests and ministers cannot distinguish between the anthropomorphized god and the transcendent God. I have less patience with Church leaders who understand that “Father” and “Son” are images rather than facts, but who go along with conventional language simply because it’s easier.

There would be less sexism and fewer atheistic materialists if Christian leaders listened to Shug.

Vatican's translation fiasco

noreply@blogger.com (Jeanette) — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 23:11:00 +0000

January 25, 2011
This Vatican move, its about-face on liturgical language, may receive less automatic, unquestioning obedience than most.

For about thirty years, scores of translators, consultants, theologians, etc. had labored to add more reverence and awe to English-language Mass prayers that were hurriedly produced after Vatican II. It was agreed that the language of ritual needed a tone more elevated, more set apart from the familiar style heard in everyday speech. The product of decades-long work by the International Commission on English (ICEL), submitted to the Vatican with the expectation that it would be speedily approved, was rejected.

Instead, the Vatican imposes its own English translation, refusing to accept the work of the world-class experts assembled to carry out the liturgical reform launched at Vatican II. This time, reaction to Rome’s tyrannical move raises anger around the world in addition to the usual gearing up to obey.
Language experts find the Vatican-imposed translation of the missal awkward and obscure because it too slavishly maintains the structure of Latin, which renders the literal translations clumsy and hard to understand in English. Prelates around the world are affronted by this latest example of Rome reversing “collegiality"—the sharing of Church governance by the bishops begun at Vatican II. Some have responded with the words “scandal” and “outrage.” The National Catholic Reporter writes of liturgy wars.
Father Anthony Ruff, who worked for ICEL, complains that

a couple thousand passages in the new missal have to be in stilted, unnatural English to follow the Latin literally, . . . There is a major issue here of whether the Vatican has [a] coherent position in throwing 1998 in the wastebasket and then approving an incoherent mess like 2010.

[This appeared as an unverified comment that I should have verified. Anthony Ruff contacted me to say it doesn't sound like himself. I agree and actually wondered about the language in it—Anthony is highly articulate. I await his statement. Stay tuned. . . .
Here is Anthony's statement amending the one that inaccurately quoted him.]

I would say that many passages throughout the new missal use stilted, unnatural English in order to follow the Latin literally. There is a major issue in the Vatican rejecting a coherent translation in 1998 and approving an incoherent approach to translation in 2010.

Catholic womanpriest Bridget Mary Meehan writes:

It appears the Vatican is heading full speed backwards to medieval times. . . . the good news is that Roman Catholic Womenpriests use inclusive language and imagery for God in our liturgies. . . . Let me make a prediction—one day—the Vatican will adapt or perhaps even copy our inclusive liturgie (sic).

It will be interesting to see how obsequiously Vatican marching orders will be followed by local bishops and—what could prove more interesting—theologians and linguists around the world. This “liturgy war” creates one more opportunity for Catholics to question top-down governance in their Church. We can add it to the forces mentioned in the previous post.

When I was growing up in the 1950s, the pope was next to God. Catholics might disagree with a priest—my dad did on occasion—but disobeying the pope was unthinkable. Today, critiques of the pope’s actions and words are common; Vatican directives are dissected and often resisted. While Benedict XVI may not be personally responsible for this translation fiasco, he strongly pushes centralized Vatican power, as NCR informs us in an article calling the eminent theologian Hans Küng a straight arrow.

Küng . . . believes that the present crisis in the church shows that he was right [about his progressive theological views]. The whole Roman system is in question, he maintains, though neither the Vatican nor the majority of the bishops yet realize it.

Küng recalls how French theologian Yves Congar, who played a major part at Vatican II (1962-65), would tell him, “If you want to understand the Roman Catholic church today, look at the 11th century.” There one sees the break between West and East, the rise of “Roman absolutism” and “enforced clericalism—including the law of celibacy.” Küng thinks that Benedict is still wedded to that paradigm. “He is an antimodernist in the deepest sense of the word.”

I agree with Küng that the whole system is in question, and to Bridget Mary Meehan’s prediction, I add my own. One day the Vatican will be a clearing house for Catholicism instead of its seat of government; it will be a unifying symbol instead of a tyrannical force. Prelates will stop wearing the garb and carrying the insignia of Roman emperors. Catholicism will cease being a monarchy and move closer to democracy, perhaps even adopting practices such as congregations choosing their pastors.

I may not be around when these things happen, but that the present system is falling apart I do not doubt.

January 31
No issue adds more urgency to the need for change in the Church than the exclusion of women from ordination, governance, and imaging the DIVINE. After the Vatican did its about face on liturgical language, the new team it brought in officially included only one woman. It adds significance to Bridget Mary Meehan’s prediction (below).

I attended a fascinating presentation on the Vatican’s upcoming language changes. The morning was exhilarating, as we heard an informative and fascinating explication of "What's Happening to the Mass." One AHA moment came for me because I am familiar with the role in some languages of inflectional endings, which in English have almost disappeared—“who” and “whom” are left but rarely used correctly. We were shown how Latin's inflectional endings clarify relationships between words in Latin, and these meanings are lost in word-for-word translations into English—only paraphrases can convey them accurately. But the Vatican directive specifically avoids paraphrases—part of the reason for the fiasco.

But then came a midday prayer that, as usual in Christian prayers, reduced the Transcendent Source of All to a humanlike male individual, a "he." It was a typical Christian prayer, and I suppose organizers just didn’t bother to clean up the language for this setting, but after the morning’s presentation, non-inclusive language stood out more conspicuously and offensively. It was an insult to the women and men there who know better and are open to a broader vision.

Ron Rolheiser in the Sunday Visitor models clean, uplifting language for Catholics. Here is an excerpt from his column:

“. . . God who is the author of beauty, sexuality, intimacy, truth, justice, energy, color and pleasure. . . . the One of which these things are only a pale reflection.

I appreciate his avoidance of male pronouns in reference to God.
The religious sister who emailed this comment to me also uses language that enlightens.

I continue to enjoy your blog. You make a difference in my life by clear explanations. I find it fascinating that our Beloved Source is NO THING, and ALL IN ALL, as well as VOID and FULLNESS OF BEING.
Sending positive energy to you and into the universe, Mary Lou

How I wish we could hear terms like these in our liturgies! Instead of conjuring up the image of a humanlike individual, they induce wonder and awe, a genuine appreciation of Transcendence. I believe we’ll see more of this language in the future as Catholicism absorbs lessons from science, other religions, and even the carping of some atheists.

February 5
Here’s the latest, reported in America magazine:

Anthony Ruff, OSB, a prominent liturgical scholar and professor of liturgy at St. John's University in Collegeville, Minn., . . . publicly withdraws from all diocesan speaking engagements promoting the new translation of the Roman Missal. . . .

“. . . When I think of how secretive the translation process was, how little consultation was done with priests or laity, how the Holy See allowed a small group to hijack the translation at the final stage, how unsatisfactory the final text is, how this text was imposed on national conferences of bishops in violation of their legitimate episcopal authority, how much deception and mischief have marked this process—and then when I think of Our Lord's teachings on service and love and unity—I weep."

Ruff came to a larger realization:

"My involvement in that process, as well as my observation of the Holy See’s handling of scandal, has gradually opened my eyes to the deep problems in the structures of authority of our church."

Finally someone with authority in the Church has the guts to tell the truth! Reactions to Ruff’s stance include predictable variations of “he is not obedient to Christ because he is not obedient to the hierarchy”—the conflation of hierarchy with divinity.

Now what we need are more men like Roy Bourgeois with the guts to participate openly in the liturgies of Roman Catholic Womenpriests. We need liturgies that induce awareness of holy Transcendence, using the sort of terms used by Mary Lou below. To use a not yet overused phrase, I hope the Church chooses the right side of history.
**********************

Martin Luther King & Catholics, January 20
Martin Luther King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail is one of his most celebrated compositions. It was written in 1963 on jail-house scraps of paper to 8 white Christian leaders in Birmingham who criticized his work as “unwise and untimely.”
My present reading of his answer strikes me as remarkably wise, timely, and pertinent to the present conflict between the Catholic hierarchy and growing Catholic authority challenging the hierarchy. One center of such burgeoning authority is women religious with high status, responsibility, and visibility in health care, education, and other service areas. Another center is Roman Catholic Womenpriests (RCWP), and a third is the Catholic press, publications such as National Catholic Reporter and America.
Here are quotations from King’s Letter and their relevance to the conflict in the Catholic Church.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

Church rulings with unjust effects for some threaten unjust effects for everyone. The whole institution is undermined by these:
• excluding women from ordination and governance,
• punishing persons who demonstrate exceptional moral courage (Roy Bourgeois and others for supporting women priests),

• punishing Catholic health care institutions for disobeying bishops whose decisions run counter to the views of ethicists,
• Punishing theologians who question familiar beliefs.
These acts of injustice by the hierarchy rob Catholicism of its moral authority when it addresses the larger society. Why listen to the pope or bishops talking of peace or pornography when they show such poor moral judgment in their own house?

It is unfortunate that demonstrations are taking place in Birmingham, but it is even more unfortunate that the city's white power structure left the Negro community with no alternative.

It is unfortunate that Catholics disobey their religious leaders, but it is even more unfortunate that people with conscience have no alternative.

I must confess that I am not afraid of the word "tension." . . . we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension [that helps us rise] to the majestic heights of understanding . . .

To the gadflies I identified above as tension creators in the Church, I add theologians who enlighten us about the Divine Feminine.

Privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily.

We cannot expect Church hierarchy to surrender its privileges voluntarily.

As Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups tend to be more immoral than individuals.

Religious institutions (Vatican offices, bishoprics and parishes) are more immoral than individuals in them. How many of us have experienced compassionate individuals reluctantly laying down a rule they personally opposed? Individuals tend to perpetuate the norms of an institution they work for. It takes extraordinary discrimination and courage to discern its failings and act on them.

A just law is a code that a majority compels a minority to follow and that it is willing to follow itself. . . . A law is unjust if it is inflicted on a minority that, as a result of being denied the right to vote, had no part in enacting or devising the law.

The pertinence of this to Church laws discriminating against women and other lay people could not be more obvious.

Every day I meet young people whose disappointment with the church has turned into outright disgust.

Often I hear people express disgust with Christian churches. Catholics are leaving in droves. A Pew Forum study showed that about a third of American adults raised Catholic are no longer Catholic, 71 percent of them saying they left because their spiritual needs were not met. Until now I haven’t even mentioned the clergy sex abuse scandal, which exposed the clerical culture of privilege and the hierarchy’s growing irrelevance as a moral force.

I challenge Catholic leaders to apply Martin Luther King’s words about freedom “for the Negro” to freedom for our Church.

February 10
The events in Egypt remind me of the Catholic hierarchy’s tight hold on the reins of power. I do not promote or suggest revolution in the Church, but it’s good to see the parallels in our religious institution to a political system of oppression/repression. It’s good to look at the hard truth.