Category Archives: Empathy is understanding.
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.
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!
Is Our Suffering Redemptive for Others?
To me the root of sin is fear. We dull fear with pleasure and we try to fight it with power. And human power is an illusion…..as Adam and Eve found out. A tiny, microscopic germ can wipe us out. The question of why the good suffer is confusing. Perhaps accepting suffering and trusting the grace of God to get us through it is somehow redemptive not just for us, but possibly for those that don’t get it together with God until the last minute or even until they see God. This may be wishful thinking on my part because of being the matriarch of five generations, some of whom don’t seem to be getting it together with or without God in a world that is increasingly scary. Perhaps our suffering somehow helps those we love unconditionally. Perhaps like Jesus, we can say, “Father, forgive them. They know not what they do.” If we who are imperfect can hurt for them and forgive, surely a God who is Love does.
Empathy, the Key to Love
No one has all the truth and nothing but the truth even with the Holy Spirit. That would make us equal to God and that’s what in the creation story got Adam and Even into big trouble from the beginning. We are physically vulnerable and sentient creatures desperately wanting the safety of power. And knowledge is power. And power almost always corrupts and get’s misused. Jesus had knowledge and power! He could have used it for himself or just his own people. What did Jesus have that made him use it differently.
He had empathy.
When foreigners, sinners, turncoat Jewish tax collectors, the lepers of his time society, and even the enemy Roman soldier came to him in need, he saw them as fellow human beings, fragile, imperfect, frightened and in pain. Ultimately he even saw the self-righteous religious leaders who got him tortured and killed with empathy.
“Father, forgive them. They know not what they do.”
This came even after the terror of foreseeing his own suffering made him sweat blood and plead for there being an easier way.
Acceptance came not through faith, but through empathy which frees us to love the unlovable. It freed him to love even his best friends who denied and abandoned him. Jesus had empathy, the gift of understanding even those without empathy. He understood those different from him both inside and outside.
Empathy for others involves a dying to self, to the limits of our own ways of seeing and understanding, to our own values and way of being in the world. Empathy frees us to understand not just those like us, but even those whose ways of seeing and being in the world are totally different from ours.
Empathy doesn’t make us see the world the same way, but it allows us to understand and forgive and to care.
And that is LOVE.
Laughter: Carbonated Grace 