Category Archives: a Jesus kind of love
From Religion through Agnosticism to Jesus
I became an agnostic but came back to a very alive and relevant relationship with Jesus not connected to any religion. I went back to the Catholic church as a missionary. But Vatican II had changed the church enough that I could celebrate the spiritual journey of Jesus and the Holy Spirit there as our own. Years later I left again, because I wanted to share my experiences of freeing love and women couldn’t preach there. The liberal Presbyterian USA gave me that freedom. Though they stress mostly feeding and housing the poor or broken, more than the transforming grace of a relationship with Jesus that helps us in following Jesus’s life pattern of expanding our understanding of whom God loves. I think every original creator of any religion “got it.” But by the third generation, religion becomes about power…. thanks in a large part to being controlled by men. Fear is the root of all evil. When religion becomes about safety or power it loses the point of being about love. To me we enter a journey from the need of a baby to the freedom to love our unfinished selves and like Jesus eventually to even love those that disagree with us, the friends that abandon us, the enemy, and ultimately even God in those times when we feel abandoned by God also. To me the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. God is ALL. We are part of God and the Spirit of God is part of us and can along the spiritual journey become a larger influence in us. We are ALL in this together, believe it or like it or not. It’s about love, not salvation or power.
Questions for Believers
What is the difference between saved and loved? Does being saved mean being finished? Is the Bible the Word of God or is Jesus the Word of God fleshed out for us?
Was Jesus making choices to love more and more people other than his own religion and nationality, even the Roman enemy, a major part of Being the Word of God? Is the WAY of Jesus’ life and willingness to love even those that killed him supposed to be the WAY of Christian’s lives? Did Jesus love unconditionally? Does God love unconditionally? Do we?
What is the difference between need and love?
Could our life journey from the neediness of a baby be a process of becoming able to love unconditionally? Does loving our neighbor mean only loving others whom we know and who are like us? Does loving Jesus mean we get to be rich? What did Jesus say about the rich man? Are our heroes rich? Are they kind? Are they like Jesus?
If, as he was dying, Hitler recognized the horrors he had caused and was stricken with sorrow and regret, would God forgive him?
Is our Spiritual journey more than following a set of ten rules basic to the survival of humans living together? In fact, are the Beatitudes the challenges that Jesus gave us for our adult Spiritual journey to loving BOTH ourselves AND others unconditionally, because Jesus fleshed out the unconditional love of God for all?
Do you love all your children even when they fail, hurt you, and abandon you?
Does God?
Have you ever failed God?
Earth Has No Sorrow that Heaven Cannot Heal
In my sixties, it hit me that most of my misery comes from a misunderstanding about what life is actually about. This life isn’t about being happy, it’s about being transformed. Happiness is the dessert, not the main course. Unfortunately, I ( and probably most of us) don’t change easily. So, it’s the challenges in life that cause us enough pain to accept the need to change and to also admit we need Grace. Later life seems to be about stages of letting go of the many things, pleasures, people, and even achievements that we think we need to be happy. Letting go of these idols is painful. And my desire to protect both myself and even those I love from any suffering often circumvents what God is trying to do in my and their lives. But, Whatever the challenge is: 1. If God is allowing it, there is a purpose. 2. Jesus has been there, experienced it, grown from it, and is in it with us. 3. If it’s happening in this life, it is temporary. 4. There’s a “pony” in it for someone, even if it’s not us. My mother’s fourteen year losing battle with Alzheimer’s was the hardest test in my past life. She came to live with us at the age of sixty-six before we knew what Alzheimer’s was. After seven years, we were in a financial crises so both of us were working, our oldest three children were in college, so we used Mom’s social security to pay for her caregiver during the day. But then she began to run away at night, so we wired our nine doors shut. Then in the middle of the night, she would try to cook and forget and leave things burning on the stove. Finally, we realized that she needed to be in a nursing home for safety. Everything in me protested. The Sunday after we put her in the nursing home, I was driving home in the evening from my job as DRE of Catholic Education at Ft. Campbell, Ky. I had not managed to get to Mass that morning and our church didn’t have a Sunday evening Mass. I felt a great need for the Spiritual and emotional support of Church. Driving home through a poor rural area, I notice people going into a tiny sort of ramshackle church. I thought of stopping and joining them, but they were all black, so I felt a white stranger might make them uncomfortable and I kept going. It had begun to drizzle and I noticed an elderly black man dressed in his “Sunday go to meeting” suit walking toward the church, so I stopped and offered him a ride back to the church. When we reached it, he cordially invited me to join them, so I took it as a nudge from the Holy Spirit and did. The God moment for me was when they sang a hymn about someday understanding their troubles. When I thought of black history in the South, their hundreds of years of struggles put mine and even mom’s in perspective and helped me hang in there with both mom and God in the next seven years of her increased suffering. But shortly after her death I was waiting in my car to meet a friend and her suffering and the sorrow of all those years overwhelmed me. I was shouting angrily at God in my mind, “WHY? WHY?” I didn’t want to be crying when my friend came, so I wiped my eyes and went into a small shop where I was parked. As I walked in the first thing that jumped out at me were the brightly colored words on a card right in front of me. It said, “THERE IS NO SORROW THAT HEAVEN CANNOT HEAL.” God is in the timing. And I cling to these memories as I face my own journey through Alzheimer’s. Neither Mom, nor I knew for many years what was causing her problems. Though knowing is scary, so far awareness seems to be a blessing for me and those who will help me make it through. And I cling to the hope that my awareness may help not only myself, but somehow might help others who are dealing with this.
A Universal Christ
Christianity is the most radical of all world religions
Franciscan sister and scientist Ilia Delio focuses on the theology of the incarnation and the universal nature of the Christ mystery:
The Christian message is that God has become flesh [sarx in Greek or “matter”]—not a part of God or one aspect of God but the whole infinite, eternal God Creator has become matter. The claim—God has become flesh—is so radical that it is virtually unthinkable and illogical. Christianity is the most radical of all world religions because it takes matter seriously as the home of divinity. [1]
So does everyone have to become Christian to know the Christ? Absolutely not. Christ is more than Jesus. Christ is the communion of divine personal love expressed in every created form of reality—every star, leaf, bird, fish, tree, rabbit, and human person. Everything is christified because everything expresses divine love incarnate. However, Jesus Christ is the “thisness” of God, so what Jesus is by nature everything else is by grace (divine love). We are not God, but every single person is born out of the love of God, expresses this love in [their] unique personal form, and has the capacity to be united with God…. Because Jesus is the Christ, every human is already reconciled with every other human in the mystery of the divine, so that Christ is more than Jesus alone. Christ is the whole of reality bound in a union of love.
We are transformed by experiencing the presence of Christ in all things.
Eileen: (And all people.)
I believe this. But find expressing it difficult without it becoming so complex that only theologians can “get” it. In the fifty-eight years since I experienced the incredible unconditional Love of God fleshed out in Jesus, my view of Jesus and Christianity has been expanded, rather than changed, until I realized that we have mostly missed the point of Jesus. Our importance is as a part of the whole…..we are part of God with God’s Spirit within us, but we limit the Spirit because of fear. Fear is literally the root of all evil. It’s the root of Musk’s need for power and my need for pleasure as escapes from the reality of our human vulnerability. We are fragile physical beings in a huge universe beyond even our understanding, never-the-less, our control. Unconsciously, we are all aware that the possibility of heartbreaking disaster lurks in the next minute. We do all we can to make this life pain free……our idea of heaven. We miss the point of Jesus. We want Him to be a “get out of this life’s possibility of being hell free” card. And we consider Him our key to the spiritual country club of escape from it. And we miss the point of both His life journey and His death as the prototype for ours. He grew spiritually. He became aware of the need to balance achievement with simple kindness through his mom. He was literally pushed into the increased danger of becoming known for doing miracles by His mom’s caring about a family’s social embarrassment. He was challenged over and over to love the least of these (lepers, tax collectors, fallen women, Roman Soldiers, people unwilling to help themselves, cowardly best friends, and the leaders of His own religion who had Him tortured and killed) and even God when He felt God had abandoned Him.
This life is not meant to be heaven. It is school. It is the journey from Self as number one, to being willing to lay down our lives for not only those who are different from us, but those that would kill us. That takes Growth through Grace with a capital G! Ultimately it takes a willingness to die to what we value most in our lives and ourselves.
This may not sound like the “good news,” but it’s a letting go that ultimately frees us from the fear that controls and corrupts us, so that we can ultimately Love all others unconditionally.
Accepting Jesus as Savior Takes a Minute. Accepting Jesus as Lord Takes a Lifetime.
I want to explain something about having a relationship with Jesus and about saying the prayer accepting Jesus as Savior and Lord.
For me, as an agnostic, it was a new beginning. Jesus became both a partner with His life as a guide, and a presence as a source of God’s Love that is the grace to grow more loving all along life’s spiritual journey.
I began to recognize the pattern Jesus had of opening up to more and more people as those Loved by God…..until it included not just good Jews, but the Jews that used the power of the enemy government to get rich, the slut at the well, the guy at the pool who wouldn’t help himself, Soldiers of the hated enemy government, his closest friends who abandoned Him, and even the Jews that thought they had a monopoly on God and were instrumental in his torture and death. And as He died, Jesus chose to trust God even when He felt abandoned by Him.
Jesus fleshed out both the Love of God for ALL of us and the WAY for us to become Loving. That Love is the grace for us to grow more loving every inch of the way until we die.
I don’t know what God is… I don’t know what heaven is. Sometimes I’ve felt like this life was hell. But I do know we are all different and have different limits. I’m not sure we all die loving like Jesus, because we are not dealt the same hand. We only have to play the hand we were dealt the best we can with the grace of that Love. I cannot judge ANYONE, even myself. At 88, I’ve realized that I wasn’t dealt as great a hand as I thought I was. But I’m still here, so I’ve got more growing to do. Sometimes when I see really GOOD people suffer horribly, it mirrors Jesus to me. Maybe they love enough to bear what the weaker people they love couldn’t. I don’t know. NO one knows! If we think we know the truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth, we are claiming to be equal to God. Being human is living and, even by the measure of perfection, dying unfinished.
We want so badly to feel safe, and we think either worldly power/riches or religion will guarantee it. This life is not about safety or perfection. It’s a journey from our own NEEDING to LOVING. Some of us are born better at it than others. It’s a personal journey, so some of us need more grace than others. Some of us, like me, even need miracles among the heartbreaks. It’s a JOURNEY of learning to LOVE like Jesus did to the best of the grace we are given. Though the journey varies from person to person, groups of us start out more like each other than others. The challenge isn’t getting to heaven, it’s becoming the loving person God created us uniquely to be. And often our failures are in what we DON’T do, because of limiting our love to only people like ourselves. And that includes both conservatives and liberals in any society.
I KNOW I am LOVED, but that doesn’t mean I’m perfect or will ever be perfect. And the same goes for every single child of God. I know that by the pattern of the life and death and Love fleshed out in Jesus.
DREAM, PRAY, ACT
 By mark lloyd richardson 2025This poem came to me, I believe, as a kind of counterbalance to the necessary activism of this moment in our country’s history. Each of us needs to take any actions we can to help thwart the encroaching authoritarianism of the Trump administration and to reclaim this country that we love. As a person of faith, I also rest in the knowledge that there is a Divine intention within all of creation, and that a part of my calling as a human being is to cooperate with what the Spirit is already doing in the world. There is a certain peace that comes in remembering that I am one among many who are doing this work of repairing the world, and that each of us brings our gifts to offer to the One who is Lord of all Creation. A Familiar Peace A light mist lingers over the prairie, releasing the purest scent of fall – a fragrant offering spreading gently over the wild greening fields. This land holds a familiar peace, nestled among these forested hills, as pillowy clouds in shades of gray drift unhurried across the noiseless sky. No threat of storm, no approaching calamity, only the quiet calm of morning, the silence nearly audible, an invitation to breathe. What blessing rests here in the early hours of this day to believe that all will be well, in the fullness of time, to imagine this world mended and made whole. |
Deconstruction Theology
by Jim Palmer (An Excerpt)
It is okay to feel what human beings feel. We laugh, cry, dance, feel ecstasy, even feel despair. It is how we know the world. It is how we live inside of our hearts and not dissociated from them.
Jesus didn’t theologize or spiritualize people’s suffering. Jesus faced suffering and tasted the depths of it. He leaned into it, endured it, and fully met others in their suffering. Jesus cared. Jesus wept. Jesus felt it all deeply. There’s something between living in denial and being swallowed whole by the pain and suffering of human existence, and Jesus lived there.
Being Jesus means that we go through life embracing it all fully and feeling it all deeply. That we don’t hide and try to protect ourselves. That we live. That we show up. That we laugh. That we cry. That we hurt. That we heal. That we care. That we love. And we wake up the next morning and sign up for it all over again.
Why did Jesus do this? Why do we? Because this is what it means to be human. You don’t get to pick and choose. It’s all of it.
There is a bliss that no amount of ache can steal away. And there’s an ache that no amount of bliss can rescue you from. Enlightenment doesn’t spare you from being human. You are supposed to be here. You are supposed to be human. You are supposed to feel both the bliss and the ache.”
Though I am not a Christian and dispute virtually all traditional Christian theology, I still find meaning in Jesus. One of those ways is seeing Jesus as the wounded healer.
Jesus can be understood as a radical companion, not a distant savior. His wounds symbolize solidarity, not supremacy. He walks with us through rupture, grief, and reconstruction. His crucifixion becomes a symbol of divine solidarity with suffering, not divine punishment. He is the one who bled with us, not the one who demands we bleed for him.
You don’t need to believe in literal resurrection to honor Jesus as wounded healer. You can walk with his archetype through grief, rupture, and rewilding. His story becomes a map for mutual liberation, not a mandate for conformity. His wounds become a vow to walk with the wounded—not to erase them. The cross becomes a fault line, tomb as compost, resurrection as vow.
Jesus can be seen as the archetypal wounded healer not because his suffering is redemptive in doctrine, but because it’s relational, embodied, and symbolic. Jesus doesn’t bypass pain—he enters it fully: betrayal, abandonment, physical agony, existential despair. Jesus experienced a rupture in his own faith in “God” – “My God, why have you forsaken me?” His wounds are not hidden in resurrection. He shows them to Thomas. They become proof of presence, not power.
I walked away from Christianity many years ago, but there is a two-word sentence in the gospels that won’t let me give up Jesus entirely.
“Jesus wept.”
I finally learned why the statement, “Jesus wept” could only be a two-word sentence. There are no words preceding those two words, and there are no words following it. There are these moments in life where there is nothing more to say. Nothing that could be said. Nothing that should be said. It’s just a time to weep. Nothing fits before it or after it. Anything and everything that could be said rolls down you face in a tear and falls quietly to the ground.
I don’t know about a God in the sky who pulls strings, but I can relate to a Jesus who leaned fully into the lived human experience with vulnerability, courage, love and compassion.
For some years I have from time to time been working on the Religion-Free Bible (RFB). I rewrote that two-word sentence like this:
Jesus the Wounded Healer
“Anguish climbed from the bottom of his gut up through his chest and throat, and into his eyes with a power that even he could not contain. A lone tear quietly dropped from his eyelash. As it inched down his face, Jesus grieved the human condition, of which he was now inseparably a part. The heartache of humankind washed through him like cold rain. Jesus drank the cup of his true identity. He felt eternity in his soul, while human suffering coursed through his veins.
Life is beautiful. Life is agonizing. That was the deal, and there was nothing Jesus could ever do to change that. Gravity had it’s way with this solitary tear, and as it fell from his chin to the ground, Jesus was undone with sadness and compassion that stretched across every human wound and scar that had ever been felt. No divinity could save him now from his own human heart.
Jesus wept.”
– Jesus, John 11:35, Religion-Free Bible
The Why of Sharing our Stories
The Rosetta Stone of our Ebenezers
An Ebenezer isn’t a Biblical Geezer. It’s a reminder and a sign of God’s presence at a particular time and place, a reminder to ourself and a testimony to others traveling the same path.
In 1 Samuel 7:12, Ebenezer refers to a memorial stone set up by Samuel to commemorate Israel’s victory over the Philistines. But it also refers to the place where Israel had been defeated twice and even lost the Ark of the Covenant to the Philistines. 1Samuel 4:1, 5,1. So, an Ebenezer is not only a witness to Israel’s ultimate triumph with God’s help, but a testimony to the presence of God even in their defeats.
Having been an agnostic at one stage of my life, there was for me a specific conscious moment in which I risked asking Jesus to be my Savior and Lord. I can, in hindsight, see God’s footprints in my life during my times of denying Him and searching for Him. So, my moment of decision appears to me to be part of a lifelong process with God involved every step of the way. It has also become obvious that letting Jesus actually be the Lord of my life remains an ongoing challenge of becoming free of the addictions to idols: the pleasures, opinions, prejudices, grudges, pretenses, people, etc. that I cling to. The list is long.
At eighty-eight, I have collected a serious accumulation of both kinds of Ebenezers, the victories and the defeats. I’ve begun to see that the defeats are how we are stripped of our idol of self-sufficiency so we can learn to live grace-filled lives.
Dying to self seems to be a protracted and recurring struggle in the spiritual journey. It reminds me of a local production of Agatha Christy’s play, The Mouse Trap. My friend had her first part in a theatrical production. Unfortunately, her character was murdered in the first scene. On opening night, the killer was strangling her as she fell back onto a couch. But caught up in the thrill of her few moments of fame, she simply refused to die. Each time she went limp and he started to let go of her, she revived, dramatically gasping and struggling to sit up, prolonging the scene until even the audience began to snicker
I have a strong suspicion that many of our own dying-to-self scenes are similarly prolonged and oft repeated.
Our Ebenezers are our personal experiences of the presence of God in our lives. We are different people, with varied backgrounds and diverse personalities, so our relationships with God and our experiences of grace will not all be the same. God meets us however we are open to grace at different times in our lives. It’s wonderful to find others with Ebenezers like ours, but sometimes we are disconcerted when we encounter people with very different experiences. We need to remember that God is not through teaching any of us while we are still breathing. And only God knows how to bring each of us closer to Himself. When we listen with open minds and hearts to others’ Ebenezers, we can begin to create a Rosetta Stone for understanding each other’s spiritual languages. Then we can be open to the grace of God in the various stages of our own journey, even if it comes differently.
Laughter: Carbonated Grace 