Category Archives: A spiritual journey from NEED to LOVe
Sexual Morals and Love in our Day
I’m turning 89. My generation grew up not even knowing what queer meant. We knew boys who seemed feminine. My brother, who is very religious, dated a woman for ten years who was happy to be treated like a sister. At 40 he gave up and accepted that he was gay because he wanted to love someone his whole life. He and I discovered that we had lesbians in two generations of both sides of our family. We discovered the first, a great-great aunt who in the turn of the century in the late 1890’s became a pediatrician and founded a clinic for poor children in California. I saw a beautiful woman in a long dress in a photo of my cousin’s family album and asked who she was. When told of her achievements at a time when she would have had to been amazing to do this, I asked why I had never heard of her. My cousin pointed out another woman in the background of the photo and said, “Well, she lived with this woman all her life.” My brother and I also agreed that on our other side, a great-aunt who was very masculine and lived a very sad solitary life was also gay though she chose to live her life alone. My brother and his spouse have been together over 35 years. So, I was prepared then when one of my sons came out after college and moved to California where it was more acceptable. He and his husband have been together thirty years. Another son also decided he was gay at about thirty. My husband has one gay cousin that we know of. So, I’ve become pretty sure it’s a recessive gene that has to be on both sides of a family. We now have a grandchild that is trans. My brother and one of my gay sons have always been very religious and kind. And my other son and my grandchild are two of the kindest people I’ve ever known. In my spiritual journey and my sixty year heterosexual marriage, my experience has led me to see marriage as the best opportunity to make the journey from the neediness of a baby to the spiritual maturity of being able to love another person more than yourself. Our current sexual permissiveness for heterosexuals is much more likely to create children born into situations that are tragic. I personally did not choose abortion as a Catholic though I almost died having a fifth child by Cesarean Section when my church taught me it was wrong to use birth control. I have come to see NOT using birth control as one of the greatest evils we are currently doing since more children are suffering from that. Interestingly enough, if being gay had been accepted all along, so gays didn’t marry women and lesbians didn’t marry men trying to conform, maybe the genes would have died out by now! My first experience personally of becoming aware of gays was when taking art classes from gay teachers, which opened my eyes to how much better gay men treat women, even ugly women and old women. They treat us as interesting individuals and friends. Gays often have more women friends than men, because they treat them as people, not sex objects. I am a born again Christian, who has experienced the unconditional love of God expressed in Jesus and many miracles, including in my last years becoming free of judging people, even the judgmental people who find safety in the rules as they have learned them. I don’t agree with them and I see the terrible harm it does, but I understand them. Once you understand people, you may not agree and may work hard to make society more loving of minorities, but understanding frees us of hating and judging.
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.
Overcoming an Exclusionary Faith
Sikh activist and author Valarie Kaur recalls an experience of a childhood friendship ending because of a difference in faith:
I was in eighth grade, sitting in the library with my very best friend in the whole world. Her name was Lisa. We were working …, but we were really giggling and passing notes to each other and messing around, when Lisa gets really quiet for a moment. She has this far-away look in her eyes and she says, “Valarie, I just can’t wait until judgment day.”…
I said, “What do you mean?” She said, “Well, then it’ll just be us. It’ll just be us. I can’t wait until it’s just us who are left.” I said, “Well, where will everyone else go?” Then she looked at me, very uncomfortable. She said, “Well, you know, down there.” It was that moment that I had to break to my very best friend the fact that I was not Christian…. I could see the blood drain from her face…. How could her very best friend not be saved? Not be good? Not be Christian?…
She had inherited a theology that divided the world into good and bad, right and wrong, saved and unsaved. Her theology severed her from her own deep knowing that her best friend was good and beloved. It’s like her theology stole me from home. She was trying to make it all make sense, try to hold both, but she couldn’t hold both. She had to let me go. [1]
In the wake of that loss, Kaur visits a church where she can confront a Christian about the belief in a God who discriminates against people of other faiths. There, she meets a church organist and recalls saying,
“I just can’t believe that there could be a God who would send me to hell,” I said. There was a pause as she looked at me. I was ready to fight.
“I can’t either,” she said. She saw my shock and explained. “I think that there are many paths. It just doesn’t make sense otherwise….” Her name was Faye and she was the first Christian I had ever met who did not believe I was going to hell. I would go on to meet many more people like her and learn that there are many ways to be Christian, just as there are many ways to be Sikh. Our traditions are like treasure chests filled with scriptures, songs, and stories—some empower us to cast judgment and others shimmer with the call to love above all….
Fifteen years after I thought our friendship was over, Lisa would reach out with an apology. She would still be Christian and I would still be Sikh, but she would have long abandoned the particular theology that had tried to sever us from one another. She had gone on her own journey … and had eventually come back to our friendship. In the end, we learned that love was the way, the truth, and the life. [2]
The Broken Body of Christ
OUCH!
The Power of the Cross
Now I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you be in agreement and there be no divisions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and purpose.
Christ sends us to proclaim the gospel simply, so that the cross of Christ might not be emptied of its power.
For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved, it is the power of God.
Jesus died and rose for all, but many want a savior who is about power for this world, this life.
The power of the cross is the resurrection, which shows us that this life is not all there is.
The power of the cross is that it is the ultimate expression of unconditional love for us imperfect, unfinished people.
The power of the cross can free us to die to our self-centeredness, our self-righteousness, our false sense of superiority, our judgmental spirit, our delusion of infallibility. These are the mindsets that twist our belief that we belong to the people of God into the blinding sin of pride. The power of the love of God expressed in dying on the cross can free us from our blind spots of pride, so we can become peacemakers.
The Broken Body by Eileen
Reflecting on the Body
You, the hand, I, the foot
Christ, the head, perhaps the heart
Someone else, the hidden part,
I let the scriptures
Flood my mind with images.
Then suddenly one image
Is so harshly real,
I gasp aloud.
I see a person staggering
And stumbling toward me,
Arms flailing, head jerking
Back and forth in spasms,
Body parts all pulling
Different ways.
This then – reality
Christ’s earthly body now.
Forgive us! Eileen
OUCH!
For All God’s Beloved Imperfect Children
Releasing Any Need for Perfection
Drawing on personal experience, Father Richard offers an encouraging reminder that we don’t need to be perfect in order to be loved and accepted by God.
We don’t come to God by doing it right. Please believe me on this. We come to God by doing it wrong. Any guide of souls knows this to be true. If we come to God by being perfect, no one is going to come to God. This absolutely levels the playing field. Our failures open our hearts of stone and move our rigid mind space toward understanding and patience. It’s in doing it wrong, making mistakes, being rejected, and experiencing pain that we are led to total reliance upon God. I wish it weren’t true, but all I know at this point in my journey is that God has let me do just about everything wrong, so I could fully experience how God can do everything so utterly right.
I believe this is why Christianity has as its central symbol of transformation a naked, bleeding man who is the picture of failing, losing, and dying, yet who is really winning—and revealing the secret pattern to those who will join him there. Everyone wins because, if we’re honest, the one thing we all have in common is weakness and powerlessness in at least one—though usually many—areas of our lives. There’s a broken, wounded part inside each of us. [1]
In the Everything Belongs podcast, Father Richard explains how he has been freed from his tendency to focus on “what’s wrong” with himself, others, and the world:
As a perfectionist by nature, accepting that things aren’t perfect has been at the center of my life’s inner struggle. I’m always seeing the wrong of everything. At the same time, I haven’t wanted to let “what’s wrong” drive the show—in myself and others. I want to be perfect, and I want other people to be perfect—but of course, the only perfection available to us is the ability to embrace the imperfect.
What I like to call “holy dissatisfaction” gave me my instinct for reform, but it also chewed me up. In the first half of my life, I was constantly thinking, “It’s not supposed to be that way!” I was constantly noticing, “That isn’t it! That isn’t it!” It’s only in the second half of my life that I am finally able to live in the holy tension of accepting that a “remnant” or “critical mass” is enough. Scattered in each group are always a few who get it, a few who live and love the gospel. When that became enough, and even more than enough (even in myself), I was free. So, this scriptural image of “remnant” or “yeast”—to use Jesus’ words—is very important for me and my own liberation. If I’m going to wait for the reign of God to be fully realized before I can be happy, I’m never going to be happy.
Jesus Chose Love Over Power
Jesus chose love over power. And paid the price. Jesus fleshed out the Love of God. That was his WAY and the WAY we are called to also.
The early world of dog eat dog, of the fallen get left behind, of only the physically strong survive began to evolve into partnerships, into family, into tribe, into country, now into world, and soon into universe. It grows past hunter/gatherer to social networks of different skills working for the whole. Eventually we will all need each other across our differences, in fact because of our differences.
In our current world we often see greed as the root of all evil, but greed is just a way to power and power is still seen as safety.
Jesus was not about safety. Jesus lay down his life. He chose to be vulnerable even knowing the consequences. Because he knew that death was not the end. And survival is not the goal. Love is.
Jesus being fully human and fully divine is a paradox and our minds don’t deal with paradoxes well.
The problem for us is identifying with both. Divine implies bigger than life. And the human Jesus showed us what that means in the resurrection. Being human doesn’t mean bad or evil. It means “unfinished.” We come into the world dependent and needy and greedy. With the grace of knowing there is more than survival and pleasure we can become able to love, to value ourselves and others equally because life is not about personal survival but about humanity becoming Love which is Divine.
Humanity has the seed of the Divine within …….the Spirit of God , of Love. Like the fig tree we can yield the fruit of that Spirit. But it’s a spiritual journey from need to Love and that takes the grace of being Loved. And that’s where Jesus comes in. The journey of life is a hard one with hard choices and without the grace of knowing Love up close and personal it’s impossible. But we are different from one another from birth, so the journey won’t be exactly the same for us. But it is always a journey from need to Love.
For me that has been graced by knowing that imperfect and unfinished as I am, I am Loved by the creator of all , the whole, the great I AM and Jesus fleshed both that Love and the WAY , (the choices) to become Loving out for me.
I don’t personally think a creator, a father, a mother, would only have one way of loving and giving grace to love, so billions of their children would never know that Love. But for me it has been Jesus. I could not have come this far without that grace of being known and Loved. I don’t think we come into the world equal in ability, opportunity, freedom, cultures, so we are not cookie cutter children of God. Each of us comes with different strengths and weaknesses; physical, mental, emotional, situational, cultural, etc. which is what makes judging impossible.
The seed of the Spirit is in us. What awakens it and strengthens it will differ, like with Cornelius and his family. No one has a monopoly on God or grace. We can share our source of Grace, such as Jesus, but unless we Love like Jesus, it will not find soft fertile ground.
Scripture contradicts itself, such as the difference in the Gospel accounts of Jesus carrying or needing help carrying His Cross. The Gospel of John says Jesus did not need help carrying His cross. When I first hit a time when I felt I simply could not go on, I opened to the story of Simon of Cyrene helping Jesus carry his cross and realized some times we all need help and got an immediate phone call offering the help I needed. Years later when feeling overwhelmed again by circumstances, I opened to the Gospel of John that said Jesus carried his own cross and heard that as God telling me that now His grace was sufficient. And it was.
The Spirit speaks to us through the Scriptures in different ways at different times in our journeys. Do not make a God of one part of Scripture. Our personal journey’s from need to Love are different from each other’s and even at different times in our own lives. Jesus’s life is the WORD of God fleshed out for us and different people at different times need to hear different things. Do not set a Scripture in Stone and make a God of it.
Ultimately, each day has challenges to grow in Love in our own personal journey. But not necessarily in the same way as our parents, our pastor, or our best friend, but always in one of the ways and choices that Jesus made sometimes through tears, heartbreak, frustration, and even anger…..but ending with Love. “Father, forgiven them. They know not what they do.”
Jim Palmer’s “What I Do NOT Believe” and Eileen Noman’s “Yes! I Agree! But What I DO Believe, Because I Have Experienced IT and It Is Life Changing.’
Jim Palmer
“I can’t believe in a “God” who condemns people to eternal conscious torment for not believing the correct theology, which is based upon the interpretation of an ancient book that predates modern science.
I can’t believe in a “Gospel” that claims the human species was afflicted with a genetic sinful condition, originating and passed down from a literal Adam and Eve as the primordial parents of all humankind.
I can’t believe that a woman was directly impregnated by God in order to give birth to a sinless child who would qualify for the perfect human sacrifice to complete God’s salvation plan for humankind.
I can’t believe that men are divinely anointed with special qualities, skills and wisdom that women do not have, which allows men to hold positions of leadership and authority in the church, but not women.
I can’t believe that the Bible, which is an assortment of chosen ancient writings that have been edited several times and approved by church councils out of political expedience, should be considered the infallible, binding, and only truth from God to humankind.
I can’t believe that the only hope for our world is that one day Jesus will descend from the sky on a white horse to claim his own and leave the rest behind for tribulation and suffering.
I can’t believe these things because they all violate rational thinking and the law of love.”
Jim Palmer , Notes from (Over) the Edge
Eileen Norman
I too don’t believe those things. I have also been on a spiritual journey that freed me from those, but I opened my heart to “God’s” (whatever “God” is) unconditional Love fleshed out in the Spiritual Journey of the person Jesus , who grew in understanding and empathy until he was able to Love not just the neighbor like himself, but all others, including his best friends who abandoned him, and even the “religious” leaders that had him tortured and killed. “Father, forgive them. They know not what they do.” Life is a journey from the neediness of a baby to the ability to love even our enemies. Ultimately, we are all one, whatever we do to anyone, we do to all. But there is a reality of a “force” of unconditional Love that is grace for the journey when we can be open to. It is both outside us and inside us. And though I experienced that grace/Love fleshed out in the person of Jesus, I do not believe God’s Love only comes through Jesus. Most of the prophets that began any religion said the same thing: We are all one. And the journey from the selfishness of need to the freedom to Love is what it is all about.
Laughter: Carbonated Grace 