Category Archives: Empathy, the Spirit of Jesus
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.
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?
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.
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!
My Journey from Agnostic to Christian
As a Catholic from childhood, I had four children in the first five years of marriage. Unfortunately, I had to have them by Caesarean Section. Then the doctor told me I would die if I had another C section in the next few years. When I asked the priest what to do since birth control was considered a mortal sin, he said,
“Many children have good stepmothers.”
I decided that men who had never married or had children shouldn’t be making that kind of decision for women. Since I unknowingly had made the Catholic Church my God, when I left the Catholic Church, I threw Jesus and God out with it.
I was not a typical woman who loved to cook and bake, sew and make flower arrangements. In fact, I felt totally inadequate as a wife and mother. We were affluent then and I had help and we both enjoyed giving parties. So, for several years we led a party life, and I began drinking even before the parties and on weekday afternoons when we didn’t have parties.
I got scared that I was losing control of my drinking and found a therapy group for alcoholics. After several months of reading and going to therapy, I broke down weeping one night, admitting that I felt totally inadequate as a wife and mother and didn’t think I was capable of loving anyone, even my husband and children. The group did not judge me, but rather seemed to hurt with me. Somehow it was a beginning of healing.
The next day as I was vacuuming, I had a sense of someone standing behind me with their hand gently on my shoulder. My first thought was that it was Jesus, but then decided since I didn’t believe in Jesus it couldn’t be. So, I just put the feeling into my “need more information file.”
Unexpectedly my father died.at fifty-two years of age. I closed down my feelings, so I could deal with it intellectually and cope with life. I took a course at Vanderbilt Divinity school on the Christian View of Death and another on other World Religions. Neither made much impression on me, so I began to visit various Christian denominations and reading the bible. The book of Acts was an eye opener and made me a bit wistful that Christians might still have life changing experiences. About that time some affluent friends of ours gave up their lifestyle and his Vice Presidency in his family’s company to be missionaries in a non-denominational ministry, Campus Crusade for Christ. I hoped they had kept some investments for the future for their three children, but I was intrigued by their willingness to change their life so drastically.
Sometime later they came back to town asking our group of friends to give a Christian coffee where several women would talk about how Jesus had changed their lives. I laughingly invited women to come, saying I didn’t know our current gatherings weren’t Christian, but come and enjoy the great food we were going to have.
Several women gave talks about the changes in their lives and relationships when they said a prayer asking Jesus to be their Savior and Lord. Then they invited us to say the prayer with them. I was impressed with the changes they described, but since I didn’t believe in God or Jesus, I didn’t say the prayer. As the other women who prayed the prayer were being embraced, I started washing dishes.
One of the women came in and asked if I had said the prayer. I said I didn’t believe in God or Jesus, so I had not. She didn’t hesitate, suggesting I say the prayer this way, “Jesus, IF you are who you claimed to be, I want you to be my Savior and Lord.” That seemed like a win/win, so I said the prayer and went back to washing dishes wondering if this would make any difference.
Suddenly, I was simply over come with the feeling of being totally loved with no small print. The joy was so great, I was afraid I’d burst from it. And that began my fifty-seven-year spiritual journey that has had awesome times of joy and very difficult times when I sometimes felt that loving presence even when in great pain.
It has not been easy. And there were times when temptation was so strong that God literally intervened in amazing ways to keep me from screwing up my own and others’ lives.
I have learned that saying the prayer isn’t a magic incantation. For some of us it makes an immediate difference, but it doesn’t make us perfect. And for some it doesn’t make a difference for years. Asking Jesus to be our savior is one thing. Letting Him be Lord is a whole other ball game and for me it’s taking a lifetime. Different personalities experience the Spiritual Journey in very different ways. Some of us are relationship people. Others are worker bees and doers. Some are thinkers and questioners. God did not make His children with a cookie-cutter.
Following Jesus means literally following in His footprints in His journey through the Gospels. And that takes grace in our emotional, intellectual, physical, and spiritual lives that changes us in many different ways over the years.
We are loved unconditionally, but we are on a journey of change from being needy to being loving. And that is not easy and takes commitment, courage, and grace.
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 