Monthly Archives: June 2023
A Seriously Dysfunctional Family Are We!
Did you ever cringe over the scripture where Mary and the family of Jesus are outside where he is and worried about him and when people tell Jesus that his family wants to see him, his response is that his family were all those that ‘”get” him enough to follow him. As a mom that bothered me. But today I “get” it. Family is the basic unit of humanity. Now, as is obvious in the Scriptures, being human they often do not get along well. But the ideal of family remains. And Jesus says that those that “get” what he is saying enough to actually follow in his footsteps are his family. But there are many who have come to know and live what Jesus taught without knowing Jesus, but by hearing the Spirit of God within. And many who technically follow Jesus, but do not follow the Spirit within. “You will know them by their Love.” And that’s a love like Jesus loved when he died on the cross.
What does it mean to follow Jesus? To be a disciple? What did Jesus mean when he said that He is the WAY. Does it mean a momentary commitment asking Him to be not only our Savior, but our Lord? Is that like a magic incantation? Or is it just the beginning of our journey like it was to those confused disciples who thought it meant freedom from the hostile rule of Rome, freedom from suffering, freedom to be special and important, to be empowered and protected, and having the keys to the kingdom of God (or at least to the Sky room at the airport!).
What does it mean to pick up our cross to follow him?
Not ANY of the above.
What does the cross symbolize? Dying to self. It’s that simple and that scary and that inescapable.
Does being the family of Jesus mean we immediately have the truth, all the truth, and nothing but the truth? NO!
Peter who was the closest friend of Jesus argued with Paul about circumcision and Jewish rules. God had to intervene and show Peter both in a dream and by sending him to witness Cornelius and all his Gentile family experiencing all the gifts of the Spirit not only without being circumcised, but without being baptized! If that doesn’t make you question a couple of thousand years of theologians’ rules, you are clinging like the “good” Jews to thinking we can limit/control God and coast if we just play the game by the rules.
A relationship with God starts within. The Spirit of God is within us if we open to it whether we have met the technical game rules or not. It’s a relationship between the kind of human that we see in Jesus and the God that created everything and is still creating disciples like Jesus even through other teachers. Jesus is the Son of God. That’s a relationship. Jesus is our brother. That’s a relationship. The same Spirit of God within Jesus also connects us all as brothers and sisters. We ARE family. Like it or not! And the WAY of Jesus is the Spiritual Journey that he took where he started out thinking he was sent for his religious family, the Jews. And step by step the Spirit freed him from limiting the Spirit to just men, just the clean, just the righteous, just the Jews, just the conquered, just those that did NOT torture and crucify him. “Father, forgive them. They know not what they do.”
Watch whom he heals and recognize how each step of the way he broadened his understanding of the “People of God.” And look around you and see whom you consider your enemy and be afraid, very afraid, that you are missing the point.
SPIRITUALITY OR RELIGION? A JOURNEY OR LAWS? THE CALLED OR THE CHOSEN?
Spirituality grows out of personal experience, not someone else’s theological interpretation. It’s a lifelong journey. Being Called is not the same as being the only Chosen. Spirituality is not a Religious Country Club or a Get Out Hell Free Card. No person or group has all the truth and nothing but the truth. We are imperfect and unfinished and we need each other, particularly those different from ourselves. We are all pieces of the puzzle we call God.
Okay. Here’s where I probably alienate some or most of my few readers. I listened to a “chat” with Jamal Rahman on a site called Charter of Compassion.org. He wrote a book called Sacred Laughter of the Sufis. And to be honest, it described my spiritual journey and what is real for me in many ways. My journey started, continues, and will end with Jesus Christ as the Love of God fleshed out for all of us. But I figured out quite a long time ago that God is not limited by any group or to any person. We humans have done the limiting, not God or Jesus. And each branch of Christianity or any other religion goes from the Love of God that the original person tried to share through their experience to a religious country club with people interpreting someone else’s experience of God and turning it into theology and laws because we want so very much to control God and life and death. The journey begins with a person who tries to share their experience. But almost immediately the next generation tries to lock everything into law and theology and set it in stone, literally. The reason I’m sharing this “chat” is that it describes Grace and a spirituality of Love that isn’t limited to any person or group or nationality or ethnicity or religion. Please think about how many billions of people have lived on this planet that God created…both the planet and all the people. Would only a relative handful be chosen to survive it? What kind of love is that? It’s a human kind of love that wants to feel good about itself by feeling better than others, to be the “Chosen.” That ain’t it, guys. Would you do that with your children? Life is mostly mystery and we do not understand it enough to think we have a monopoly or control of it or God. HUBRIS! By listening to others we sometimes get a glimpse of the truth that is the essence of all our different attempts to make sense of life and to become more loving. This doesn’t threaten belief in God or his expressions of his Love like Jesus. Just don’t make a God of anybody’s Scriptures or any group’s limited understanding. The Christian Scriptures have come alive for me and when faced with either decisions or suffering or challenges they help me. But, listening to God includes listening to everything around us with a heightened awareness and then looking for confirmation, because we are really good at hearing only what we want! Cheer up if this is scary. You are surrounded by the love of God. God is FOR you. God wants you to know inside out that you are loved, so you can feel safe enough to grow free to love even your enemies. To realize they aren’t playing with a full deck either and they are doing the best they can with the hand they were dealt, but they need your compassion to open their hearts to trusting what you know from the hand you were dealt. They need the gifts they have to be valued and used in balance with the gifts you have when and where EACH is needed. Unless we feel valued/loved for who we are, we cannot value those who are not only different, particularly if they think they are better than us. I so hope this make sense. Praying it will do no harm, but will open all our eyes to God’s love for his whole motley crew. We need each other because our own gifts are good, but limited.
Since Julian died, I have been beating myself up in retrospect for how hard my particular personality was for someone like my husband to love those sixty years. As he used to say in our talks on Marriage Preparation Weekends, “I don’t understand her. Haven’t got a clue! But I accept her as she is.” Sadly, I wanted to be valued for the things about me that I valued. I realize now that he allowed me to change some basic prejudices he had from his acceptance of how things were in the world in his growing up. But, in the hindsight of old age, I cringe over how he had to live with so many everyday things that had to be totally irritating to him. His trouble expressing verbal appreciation for me was hard on me, but the many normal things as a wife and mother that I didn’t give a shit about had to drive him crazy! I did realize today in listening to this blog post chat, that God actually used all our differences for Grace. Often Grace for the change needed for the journey comes in the hard stuff. Watch for it! Remember the beautiful Monarch butterflies I saw on the ripe pile of cow dung getting what they needed to grow. I sometimes have shared another experience where God physically showed me that Jesus was with me sharing my moment of feeling crippled, abandoned, and rejected. He has been there, done that, and has the scars to prove it, so we can know we are not alone in those awful moments. Love you guys. Sorry for my limits in sharing the beauty, tenderness, and presence of God even in life’s manure!
1hr “Richard Rohr on The Awakening of Spirit, Part 1 | Archival Recording (1987)” on YouTube – Beginnings of his Center for Action and Contemplation –
I don’t know if you can listen to this, but the still quite young Richard Rohr’s expression of spirituality covered my fifty-five years of spiritual journey. But, this oneness has not been limited to contemplation. I experienced it several times when alone in nature, but also when tired and irritated, I put my husband’s need for physical affirmation and oneness ahead of my own needs. It brought a oneness in spirit with the oneness in body and morphed into an overwhelming oneness with ALL. This is the heart of spirit……we are all one….what we do to anyone, we are doing to all, including Jesus. This is the Spirit of God within us connecting us to LOVE, which is God the Father and God the Son.
Christian Meditation/Spiritual/Mystic Interests
Interests
Fr Richard Rohr speaks extensively about the right side of the brain, and how modern technology has made it possible for Science to discover more things about the right side. His discussion exposes the violent evil of Psychiatry regarding what is sometimes called “Psychosurgery” or “Surgical lobotomy”. This surgery destroys the right side of the brain through the invasive procedure and actually removes a certain portion of the right side of the brain. Many people use cruel or derogatory words such as “vegetating” for the mental condition of people who have had such violence done to their brain. They are a testimony to the fact that the right side of the brain is necessary for body wholeness. The body and mental functioning is severely diminished by this unnecessary surgery that violates the purpose of the Creator of the human body for the spirit and the soul to be in harmony…
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The Trinity Can Only Be Experienced
On Trinity Sunday in 2013, Father Richard had just returned from an interfaith gathering with the Dalai Lama and representatives from many world religions. Richard shared:
Perhaps the most quoted line from the Dalai Lama is, “My religion is kindness.” Isn’t that simple? “My religion is kindness.” He asked, really challenging us from other world religions, “How do you teach kindness or compassion and how does this come from your understanding of God?” I had the job of representing the Christian tradition; I thought the job was rather easy, because of the feast we celebrate today of God as Trinity.
Sadly, the doctrine of the Trinity hasn’t exercised much influence in the Christian understanding of God. If most Christians—Catholic or Protestant—are questioned about their real image of God, it’s generally an old man sitting on a throne. He’s upset half the time and it’s our job to make this god happy. This, of course, has almost nothing to do with our actual doctrine on the nature of God. What our tradition believes is that God is a fountain fullness of love, a water wheel flowing constantly in one direction: Father to Son, Son to Holy Spirit, Holy Spirit to Father—always outflowing, always outpoured, always giving, never taking, but only receiving what the other gives. It would take the rest of your life to try to comprehend what that means!
Many of us say we believe in the Trinity—but we really don’t, because we don’t know what to do with it. We can’t even imagine it; all of our metaphors are simply words trying to grab at the reality, at the experience of God that ultimately can’t be verbalized. It can only be experienced.
Eileen’s reflections on this.
I have experienced the Spirit’s Presence both within me and in others along with the Gifts of the Spirit.
When I was searching for God, I read the scriptures and the only ones that really intrigued me were the ones about the Apostles receiving the Holy Spirit’s and the Spirit’s gifts on Pentecost and throughout Acts and other Epistles. But when questioning friends who were active in various denominations, I didn’t find anyone who was experiencing those. After my accepting someone’s challenge to say a prayer this way, “Jesus, if you are who you say you are, please be my Savior and Lord,” I experienced a sense of being loved unconditionally so real that I was overwhelmed by sheer joy. I then became part of an ecumenical prayer group made up of women who shared this experience . Most of the predominant Christian denominations were represented. We focused on growing closer to Jesus through Scripture and prayer and seeking the grace to become the people God created us to be. One day a woman in the group asked for prayer for her mother who had emotional issues and always got stressed at Christmas and ruined the family’s holidays. Out of the blue, I blurted out, “NO! We need to praise and thank, because God is already healing her.” Everyone was surprised, but the daughter, Jenny, accepted this with great joy. Somehow at that moment I knew this beyond any doubt. But after I got home that night, my conviction left me and I panicked, aghast at what I had done. To my great relief, Jenny called me the next morning and said she had talked to her mother long distance and that her mother had finally admitted that she had a problem and was already getting counseling and sounded much better. I was greatly relieved, but still confused about saying that. But, Jenny told me that what had happed was that I had received the Gift of Knowledge from the Holy Spirit. And that there were other gifts of the Spirit. Would I like her to bring a friend at 9am the next morning to pray for me to be baptized in the Spirit and receive the other gifts? Well, I didn’t want to miss out on anything God wanted me to have, so I said, “Yes.” But that evening I began to worry about getting off track again, since I had lost my faith when I became disillusioned with my religion. I didn’t want to lose my connection with Jesus and the joy and grace I was experiencing. So, I prayed for a sign that this experience of Pentecost was meant for me too. Well, by midnight nothing had happened, so I went to bed thinking I would call and cancel Jenny coming in the morning. But about 2am, our phone rang. My husband was a sound sleeper, so I quickly answered it with anxiety about family disasters. A man’s voice said, “Is this the Pentecost?” I stuttered out, “I, I, ah beg your pardon?” He replied, “Is this the Pentecost residence?” I managed to answer, “This is the Norman residence,” and he apologized and hung up. I took this as a positive answer to my prayer and with great joy received prayers for the Holy Spirit to come in power with all His gifts. Once our eyes are opened, we begin to recognize the activity of the Spirit both within us and around us. That journey has continued for me for fifty-five years. It doesn’t make life heaven, but it empowers us to persevere through the joys and the sorrows of our journey and want to share the Good News with others.
Laughter: Carbonated Grace 