Understanding God's Relationship With Us

My New Testament professor once said in class, "Give me 15 minutes and I can find a proof text in the Bible for anything you want to justify."

You'll have noticed by now that I treat the Bible with a great deal of caution. For me and for many others, the Bible is a lot like a pit bull with a hair-trigger temper. One minute it's wagging its tail at you, spouting happy thoughts. The next, it's trying to rip your throat out.

I'm not one of those mystics who thinks the Bible is a lap dog that will always treat you kindly -- an immortal, timeless lap dog whose eyes are always filled with serenity and bliss if you know the secret of looking at it the right way. Spiritual talk of secrets -- secret knowledge (gnosis) and secret interpretations (symbolic readings of the Bible) -- makes me very nervous. I'll tell you why. It's because spiritual leaders who say they can teach you how to unlock the secret biblical interpretations are making some powerful claims about God. They're claiming that God isn't a very loving God or a very nice God at all.

Take the example of the book called Song of Solomon (also known as Song of Songs). Here is a lyric poem about human love (eros). It's filled with erotic imagery and metaphors that nobody can miss. Scholars think the poem (or collection of poems) was probably written in the 4th or 3rd century BCE. Despite the extremely obvious fact that the Song of Solomon is part of an ancient tradition of erotic love poetry written for a pre-Viagra age, the Song of Solomon started to be interpreted symbolically by religious teachers sometime around the start of the Common Era.

For about 2,000 years, then, theologians have been teaching the faithful to read Song of Solomon symbolically -- as an account of the love between God and Israel. Pious and devout people are expected not to notice or respond to the explicit sexual content. And fourteen year old boys are not to read it late at night by candlelight.

If this is a sacred text about the relationship between God and God's people, I'll eat my hat.

I'm very unhappy that this symbolic interpretation can only be arrived at through some pretty twisted mental gymnastics. I'm also wondering why it's only through a special secret scholarly key that regular people can see the "light of truth" hidden in this poem. As many mystics would have you believe, the majority of people -- regular people who aren't privy to the secret key -- won't be able to see and understand the wonderful "truth" buried in this erotic text. Regular people are too dull to see the "truth." Their corrupt, inferior human senses make them too stupid to understand what's actually written here.

And, of course, that's the way God wants it to be! (according to Gnostic teachers). God, in God's infinite wisdom, decided that most human beings are just too darned stupid and weak and untrustworthy to be entrusted with divine truth. So God hid it. God hid the light of truth in the deepest, darkest swamps, where regular people can't find it, and then God chose a few select warriors to go out and find the light and guard it. Because God is too weak and stupid to protect it. God, Creator of all Creation, is too weak and stupid to parent trustworthy children. God is too weak and stupid to share divine truth with all children equally. God is too weak and stupid to tell the honest truth honestly. God is too weak and stupid to communicate clearly to all people without the help, aid, or benefit of that trusty band of "specially chosen warriors of light."

Maybe it's because God is too busy thinking lascivious thoughts about the luscious gazelles and wild does in the Song of Solomon.

I hope the last sentence creeped you out. I know it creeped me out. But don't yell at me. I'm not the one going around claiming that Song of Solomon has an elevated message about the sacred love God feels for a few chosen children.

We have a term we use today for parents who engage in sexual conduct with their own children: we call them child abusers, and if we catch them, and succeed in convicting them in a court of law, we put them in jail. As we should.

The God I know is nothing like this. Nothing like this at all. The God I know and talk to every day as part of my mystical practice are my divine parents. God the Mother and God the Father are wonderful people. They're kind and thoughtful and generous and funny. They're extraordinarily patient. They always explain things in a way I can understand with my very human brain. If I don't understand something, they don't call me weak or stupid, but instead they always try a new tack to help me "put it together." They love me as their child, but I know I'm not loved more than anyone else. They love all their children with as much ferocity as they love me. It's the ferocious love that all loving parents know towards their children. It's lifelong devotion, commitment, sacred trust. It's safety. It's eternity.

There are precious few passages in the Bible that convey this sense of God's relationship with us as angels-in-human-form. The passages that do exist are almost buried under the holy mountain of piety, righteousness, law, fear, and obedience.

I say "almost."

Beautiful things grown in marshes. These blue flags from the iris family grow in many wet spots in Ontario. Photo credit JAT 2014.

 

The really cool thing is that the truthful passages "somehow" survived all the cuts, revisions, and ruthless doctrinal choices made by narcissistic theologians in the past. "Somehow" the Letter of James made it into the Christian canon, although many influential theologians (including Martin Luther) were openly hostile towards this letter. "Somehow" the Gospel of Mark was preserved, despite the best efforts of the authors of Luke and Matthew to eradicate its message by "improving" on it. "Somehow" the non-elitist Psalm 116 got tucked in there among the more famous Royal and Zionist Psalms.

I just love the way these truthful messages are "hidden in plain sight" where anyone with an open heart and a lick of common sense can find them.

Even better, these passages say what they say in an open, honest way. No special training is required. No promises are made to you about the hidden truth that will one day be revealed to you if only you submit to blind faith.

Divine truth needs no embellishment. It's beautiful just the way it is. Today. Not centuries from now, but today.

Which is pretty much what you'd expect from a wonderful, loving God.

Who Is the Snake in Genesis?

I make no apologies to anyone for trying to put the Book of Genesis in its proper historical context.

The Book of Genesis is one short piece of human writing, written for a specific purpose almost 2,300 years ago, and it's not reasonable, fair, or honest to place so much authority on this book. To insist that Genesis is the inspired word of God is to show a profound lack of trust and faith in God. If you want to continue to proclaim that Genesis's truth is more important to you than all the other evidence available to your mind, senses, and common sense, then please go ahead. But don't tell me in the same breath that you believe with your whole heart in God. Because you don't.

It's not acceptable for people in the 21st century to read Genesis as if it were written yesterday by well-meaning modern theologians. It wasn't. Genesis has to be understood in an ancient context -- a context that no longer exists in the modern Western world. It wasn't written for a postmodern world that believes in Newtonian science and human rights legislation. It was written for a world that believed at its core in occult magic and slavery.

Genesis was not written for Rabbinic Judaism or Christianity. Neither Rabbinic Judaism nor Christianity existed until the second half of the 1st century BCE. By that time, Genesis had been making the religious rounds for over 300 years. It was a very old text by the time both Jewish rabbis and early Christian preachers began to radically alter the way in which people were allowed to relate to God.

What was so different about early Rabbinic Judaism and early Christianity in comparison to other religions of the time?

No Temple.

Judaism had to radically re-envision itself after the Romans destroyed the Jerusalem Temple in 70 CE. Christians, too, were supposed to pay more attention to their spiritual commitments and less attention to imperial temples. Neither 1st century religious group would have been recognizable to the people who wrote Genesis.

I don't give a hoot that the people who wrote Genesis may have been Jewish or may have spoken Hebrew. They weren't Jewish in the way that Judaism is practised today, any more than Alexander the Great's armies were Macedonian in the way that Macedonians understand themselves today. It's ridiculous to try to put 2,300 year old writings under the umbrella of political correctness. These writings were used in their early years for the express purpose of perpetuating HDM myths. For this reason, they need to be brought into the light of critical scholarship and examined honestly for what they actually say, instead of what we want them to say.

Among biblical scholars, there seems to be an almost fanatical self-imposed blindness when it comes to talking about the snake/serpent in Chapter 3 of Genesis (the snake that beguiles Eve). Many scholars will tell you that the snake shouldn't be read as a metaphor for Satan/the Devil, and I agree with them. In place of the snake-as-devil reading, the preferred explanation these days is that the story about the snake describes the "broken relationship" between humanity and God, a brokenness which is in turn the cause for our suffering as human beings.

I'm all for the big moment of psychotherapeutic interpretation, when, after many months of quiet listening, the therapist suddenly drops a major insight onto the unsuspecting heart of the suffering patient. But, you know, I'm not getting the sense that the authors of Genesis really cared that much about your suffering.

And usually the transformative interpretation comes at the end, not at the beginning. At the beginning, nobody's listening. It's only after a patient has heard him/herself talking for a while that he/she is ready to hear what the therapist has to say. (Reality TV shows, while not always ethical or kind, have at least shown us time and again that insight follows relationship, not the other way around.)

There's a much simpler and more obvious reading for the snake/serpent in Genesis, one that relates directly to the historical context of the Alexandrian authors.

The snake is Hellenism. Pure and simple.

Based on the evidence of Genesis, it seems that the Jewish scholars who lived in Alexandria, Egypt (a Hellenistic hot spot) were furious about the corrosive influence of Hellenistic religion and philosophy on their own traditions and beliefs, so they decided to fight back. They decided to give their faith community some ammunition to strengthen them in the great cultural war that Alexander the Great had unleashed on Egypt (and on many other places). This is a perfectly understandable motive. When outsiders push aggressively at you, you push back. Sometimes you push back with iron weapons. And sometimes you push back with words.

The Laocoon Group is a famous ancient marble excavated in Rome and now displayed in the Vatican. Laocoon was a Trojan priest who, according to myth, was killed, along with his sons, by serpents sent by a Greek god. (The identity of the Greek god, along with other details, varies from version to version of the myth.) Photo credit I. Sailko. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

In the early 3rd century BCE, nobody would have needed an explanation as to the snake's identity. If I were to say to you today, "the Eagle did it," you're probably going to think "American eagle" (or maybe Roman legions, if you're a real history buff). Same thing with the snake in the ancient world. The snake meant Greek ideas -- Greek myths and Greek magic -- which had had a HUGE impact on people's thinking all around the Mediterranean, and not always for the better.

Biblical scholars profess to be puzzled about the great void in the canonical Hebrew scriptures around Alexander the Great and his conquest of Syria-Palestine. They see many accurate, verifiable references to other known historical events, historical persons, and military campaigns (e.g. the Assyrian conquest, the Babylonian conquest, and the return of Jewish exiles to Jerusalem). But there's nothing -- not a thing -- in the canon about those Hellenistic bastards in the late 4th century.

Of course, Alexander's successors created empires. And emperors never look sympathetically on explicit criticism, do they? In any dangerous religio-political climate (as Alexandria would have been in 275 BCE), writers of polemic have to tread carefully for their own protection and the protection of their communities.

So you disguise your polemic in metaphors. You never mention specific pharaohs (in this case, Ptolemaic emperors) by name. You identify your enemies through metaphor (the wily Greek snake who entraps vulnerable Jews). And you pretend to set your claims in the far distant past (the Patriarchal Age) so nobody can accuse you of current sedition.

And you conclude your story in Egypt. Not in Judah or Israel, but in Egypt. And the hero of your story -- Joseph -- is technically a slave, but he's a slave with so much power and prestige that he has the ear of the (unnamed) Pharaoh. And God favours Joseph and his family, even though they all have to travel to . . . Egypt. And the hero and his kin inherit the fruits of God's first covenant with Abraham (Gen. 15:1-21; there's also a second covenant between God and Abraham in Gen. 17:1-27). And lo and behold! the first covenant says that Abraham's descendants are promised all the land between the Nile and the Euphrates River -- not coincidentally the choicest parts of Alexander's empire!

Genesis is focussed on Egypt because it was written for Diaspora Jews who lived in Egypt.

What's the big deal about that? It makes perfect sense in its own context. Let's just accept that and move on.

The Book of Genesis

It's hard to argue with the reality that the Book of Genesis has had a profound influence on the growth of three major world religions. It's a powerful tale that evokes intense emotions. It's been retold over and over to breathless new audiences over many centuries. Its images appear in great masterworks of art. If its authors were here today, they'd be very proud.

 

Ancient myths about trees of power, knowledge, healing, hidden things, and creation pop up in cultures all over the world. Photo credit JAT 2014.

 
Of course, I'm one of the small minority of people of faith who read Genesis using the standard tools of socio-historical criticism (form criticism, source criticism, redaction criticism, social-scientific context) and end up concluding two things: (1) that Genesis is a cut-and-paste work of theological polemic and (2) that Genesis was redacted much later than most of the historical and prophetic books of the Hebrew canon.

Let me be clear: I believe the Book of Genesis is NOT the inspired word of God given to an anonymous prophet thousands of years ago. I believe it is largely an extended myth. A work of fiction with some bits of historical truth. A book that has much more in common with J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings than with other Hebrew works such as Ezra-Nehemiah or Leviticus.

When I was doing research for my Master's research essay (short thesis), I came across the most wonderful book in the university library. I was actually looking for a different book, which I couldn't seem to find, when suddenly my eyes fell upon a strange title: Berossus and Genesis, Manetho and Exodus.* Say who? (For those who are interested, the full bibliographic data is below).

Russel Gmirkin, the author of this admittedly highly academic book, uses careful research into early sources to suggest quite convincingly that the first part of Genesis (chapters 1-11) couldn't have been written before 278 BCE. He also shows why it's likely that Genesis was first written in Alexandria, Egypt -- not, as you'd expect, in the land of Judah.

Meanwhile, it's no coincidence at all that another important work known to scholars as the Septuagint was also written at almost exactly the same time (c. 275 BCE) in exactly the same place (Alexandria, Egypt). What is the Septuagint? The Septuagint is the oldest known collection of Hebrew scriptures -- an early version of the "Old Testament" (as Christians call it). But it's not written in Hebrew. It's written in Greek.

Much to the embarrassment of orthodox Jewish and Christian scholars, until the Dead Sea Scrolls were found in 1947 at Qumran (south of Jerusalem), scholars hadn't found any pre-Common-Era versions of the Jewish Bible written in Hebrew** (or any major chunks of the Jewish Bible, for that matter). The next-oldest-known copy of the Torah (the Masoretic Aleppo Codex) dates from the 10th century CE -- a mere 1,000 years ago or so!

Until the late 20th century, then, everyone -- even Jewish scholars -- had been relying on various ancient translations of the Hebrew texts as they tried to reconstruct the process of canonization of the Jewish Bible. They had to rely on ancient translations because they didn't have any actual ancient Hebrew manuscripts to study. Thanks to the Dead Sea Scrolls, scholars now have much more material to work with, but it's important to note that among the hundreds of scrolls found at Qumran, almost all are individual scrolls that contain only a single "book" (such as the Book of Genesis or the Book of Exodus).

Almost all of the 24 "books" that are found today in the Hebrew Scriptures have been recovered individually at Qumran (proving their early origins). But many other kinds of texts have been found there, too -- non-canonical works that bear little resemblance to today's Rabbinic Judaism. And, despite everyone's curiosity, it seems there's no evidence in the Qumran material for the existence of a fixed canon in the 1st and 2nd centuries BCE (in Judean Qumran, at least). There's no Hebrew equivalent of the Greek Septuagint to be found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. No big honkin' "Old Testament" to lug around and quote from (though, to be realistic, and fair to the scribes of the Qumran community, there's only so much text that can fit onto a single papyrus scroll.) Scholars found many Hebrew and Aramaic scrolls at Qumran, but no relatively stable canonical list to define and shape them. Meanwhile, the Septuagint was already "a going concern" in Greek-speaking Jewish communities outside Judea. (These communities are called the Diaspora). One of the biggest of these Diaspora Jewish communities happened to be centred in . . . Alexandria, Egypt.

This is important because the evidence available to us suggests very strongly that sometime around 275 BCE (in the early Hellenistic period that followed Alexander the Great's conquest of vast territories, including Egypt), a group of scholars got together in Alexandria, Egypt, and assembled a collection of pre-existing theological writings into a "canon." They decided on a list of scrolls or "books" that belonged together as part of this canon. The Alexandrian scholars certainly didn't write all the scrolls or "books" themselves. They merely collected together some scrolls that had been written by earlier Jewish thinkers, probably several centuries prior to their collation in the Septuagint.

These earlier scrolls had something important to say about God, in the view of the Alexandrian scholars. But when these assorted teachings were put together, they made a mishmash. The collection was disjointed -- really just a bunch of prophecies and histories strung together. They didn't make much sense when read one after the other on their own. So the scholars had to do quite a bit of editing and rewriting to tie everything together (a process called redaction). Then they added their own contribution: they wrote an introduction to the collection -- a myth that would tie together all the earlier prophecies into a cohesive theological book that would make sense (well, sort of).

Enter the highly influential book of Genesis, pieced together from bits and pieces of earlier material, written at the same time in both Greek and Hebrew versions, and placed at the very beginning of the collection to serve as a theological "preface" for everything else that would follow.

To be sure, many elements of Genesis can be traced to Ancient Near East sources (elements such as the Flood narratives), but all this proves is that the authors knew their sources and wanted to draw on them. It's part and parcel of theological writing: you always try to draw on earlier sources in order to establish your own authority.

Unless, of course, you're Job or Jesus.


*Russel E. Gmirkin. Berossus and Genesis, Manetho and Exodus: Hellenistic Histories and the Date of the Pentateuch. Library of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies 433 and Copenhagen International Series 15 (New York: T & T Clark, 2006).

** The books that have been included in the Septuagint for at least 2,000 years were not all accepted into the tripartite Jewish canon when rabbinic scholars in the late 1st century CE made some final decisions about which books to include in the Jewish canon. Jewish scholars, followed later by Protestant theologians, decided to exclude from the canon such Apocryphal books as "The Wisdom of Solomon" and "The Wisdom of Jesus, son of Sirach." (The latter book is usually just called "Sirach" -- the Jesus referred to in the full title is not that Jesus, but an earlier man who had the same name.) The Septuagint, though modified many times over the centuries, is still the official Old Testament of the Roman Catholic Church.

The Hole-y Bucket of Humility

"There's a hole in the bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza, there's a hole in the bucket, dear Liza, a hole." 

"Then fix it, dear Henry, dear Henry, dear Henry, then fix it, dear Henry . . . " 

"With what shall I fix it, dear Liza, dear Liza . . ." 

The hole-y bucket of religious humility. There's a big hole right in the middle (or worse, the bottom) where the good stuff gushes out. You always feel half-empty in your relationship with God, instead of full to the brim with courage, trust, gratitude, and devotion. Photo credit JAT 2014.

You probably know this song from your childhood. We used to sing it at Brownies and at summer camp. It always made us laugh when we got to the punchline of the song: the bucket that started the song because it had a hole in it was the tool that was needed by Henry and Liza to fix said bucket. Without an un-holey bucket, they couldn't fix the hole-y bucket. But they only had one bucket -- the one with the hole in it. It was a circular argument.  

The orthodox Western Church's teachings on humility are exactly like this childhood song.

Before I talk about the Church's teachings on humility, though, I want to talk about a different core virtue, one that's never discussed in the church. This is the core virtue of humbleness. Humbleness is what Jesus taught. 

By contrast, humility is what Paul taught. Humbleness is a feeling that sort of settles into the middle of your heart after you find redemption. Humbleness is the natural state of thinking, feeling, behaving, and understanding that you end up with when you accept the redemptive power of God's forgiveness in your life. Humbleness is your natural soul state. It's who you really are underneath all the bullshit layers of status addiction. It's a deep sense of trust in yourself -- not a sense of pride or hubris, but a sense of trust. It's an unshakable sense of acceptance. It's a sense that God made you to be a particular person, and that's the only person you can be. So you stop fighting your inner self. And you become free to become your inner self.  

That's what humbleness is. It's a state of absolute freedom from the tyranny of status addiction. Once you're free from the constant voice of status addiction in your head -- the constant judging of yourself, the constant comparing of yourself to others, the constant criticism of others, the perfectionism, the self-pity, the lack of common sense, the lack of peace, comfort, and safety in your life -- once you're free of all that you can begin to like yourself as a person. (Wouldn't that be a refreshing change?)  

A humble person is free to make choices based on a whole new set of criteria. A humble person isn't worried about getting more status, so a humble person is free to practise the virtues of common sense. A humble person isn't trying to be somebody he's not, so a humble person doesn't feel guilty about following his calling. A humble person thinks it's wrong to accuse of God of being too stupid or too lazy to make souls that are all different from each other yet all equally beautiful and worthy. A humble person shows her love and respect for God by trying every day to be who she really is, instead of trying to be somebody she's not. A humble person knows his limits.  

This is not what the Church means when the Church talks about humility.  

The traditional orthodox Western position is that no human being (except that Jesus dude) has ever been truly worthy of God's love and trust. The Church starts with the assumption that you are a bucket (aka "a vessel") with a big, fat hole in the bottom. 

You are a bucket that needs to be fixed. All your courage and your faith have been draining out through the hole. Obviously, the hole needs to be patched. You must use your free will and your self-discipline to patch the hole so "the vessel that is you" can contain the love of Christ. But you must also practise humility. Humility demands that you not consider yourself a bucket at all, because then you'd be able to carry your own portion of courage and faith, which you're not allowed to have, because that would be presumptuous. Only when you rejoice in the fact that you're a bucket with a humongous hole in the bottom will you be able to feel Christ's love flowing through you and out into the world through the hole. You must therefore be a hole-y bucket in order to fix the hole-y bucket that is you.  

Catch 22, anyone? 

Let's imagine instead that the hole-y bucket is your biological brain/central nervous system. This bucket admittedly has a few holes in it by the time you've grown up. But these holes are fixable. More importantly, the holes are not you. They're not the real you. They're damaged biological parts that need to be healed (same as clogged arteries or a broken arm). So you find some qualified people who can help you heal them. Slowly, one by one, the holes begin to heal. You begin to discover somewhat to your surprise that you -- you, yourself, and you -- are capable of startling feats of compassion. The more healed your bucket, the more love and courage and faith your bucket is able to hold.  

Go figure. Who would guess that a bucket without a big hole in it would actually hold more of the good stuff (like love and forgiveness) than a hole-y bucket? 

Gee whiz, Mother and Father, that's, like, totally unfair of you to make our reality as humans so logical! 

Mother and Father, you rock!

Humility: Vice or Virtue?

Ah, the joys of humility, that most cherished of Christian virtues! O ye wondrous affliction, scourge of my heart, desiccator of my soul! How could I envision Original Sin without you, you who from ancient times have trampled all that is good and true and beautiful within me! You who are the very face of Christian orthodoxy! You who demands that I obey my earthly leaders! Fair Humility, you are an idol beyond compare!

Humility, your justness and righteousness have been proved again and again within orthodoxy's precincts. To you we owe a great debt, for you have protected the Church throughout the centuries from the evils of independent thought. Even more important, you have locked the door to Jesus' Kingdom of Heaven to ensure that people of true faith and good heart can't get in. Verily, you are one of the rocks upon which the orthodox Western Church stands.

Hear now a modern summary (written by this humble author) of the famed Rule of St. Benedict, first written in Latin in Italy in the early 6th century. (The reader is referred to the following text: Timothy Fry, ed., The Rule of St. Benedict in English (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1982)).

Abbey of Monte Cassino, Italy, site of the early 6th century CE monastery founded by St. Benedict of Nursia. Monte Cassino was the first monastery founded by Benedict, author of the highly influential Rule of St. Benedict. The buildings were reconstructed after being largely destroyed in the WWII Battle of Monte Cassino. Photo credit: Monte Cassino – wide view by Pilecka – Own work. Licensed under CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

FIVE CORE CHRISTIAN VIRTUES IN THE RULE OF SAINT BENEDICT
For St. Benedict, author of The Rule, the most important Christian quality is to place the love of Christ before all else, a point he returns to several times in his book of instructions for beginners (for example,Chapter 4:1, 20; Chapter 72:11). Benedict takes a two-pronged approach – faith combined with good works – to this religious vocation (an approach which turns out to be particularly effective, too, if we are to consider the fact that his Rule is still used by many religious orders today). First, he creates guidelines that affect how the monks will think and feel about their relationships with themselves, each other, and God; in other words, he tries to fulfill the needs of faith. These are the instructions that pertain to renouncing the self and to humility, both great virtues in Benedict’s opinion. In order to follow Christ, monks must renounce themselves, taking no notice of anything good in themselves except to give the credit to God, not themselves (4:42). No one is to follow his own heart’s desire (3:8). Neither should monks expect to have free disposal even of their own bodies and wills (33:4; 58:25). Private ownership is a vice (Chapter 33), and, along a similar vein, a monk may not exchange letters, tokens, or gifts with anyone – or be found to be in possession of such items – without the abbot’s consent (Chapter 54). These rules, if followed, draw the monk’s thoughts and feelings away from anything that makes him distinct or different from his peers, and make it easier for him to practise humility. "Humility" is one of the core features of Benedict’s Rule. Chapter 7 outlines the 12 steps of humility, and many other chapters of the book exalt humility as well. A monk who ascends Benedict’s ladder of humility will find at the twelfth and highest stage an awareness that he is always guilty on account of his sins, and through this awareness of his true unworthiness, he will be able to receive cleansing of his vices and sins through the grace of the Holy Spirit (7:62-70). In this way, the monk will finally know the perfect love of God.

Second, Benedict creates a set of strict guidelines that governs what monks do, when they do it, and how they do it. In other words, he tells them exactly how to perform good works – how to act. Monks who agree to these rules, which can be thought of as the day-to-day tools and practical routines necessary to the vocation of loving Christ, will acquire the essential Christian virtues of obedience and self-discipline. Obedience to the abbot and the rule is profoundly important in imitation of obedience to Christ. Indeed, the abbot is believed to hold the place of Christ in the monastery (2:2) Moreover, obedience must not be blighted by the evil of grumbling (5:14; 34:6; 53:18) but must be given always with gentleness (Chapter 68) and purity of heart (20:3). Monks who take their final vows must promise three things: stability, fidelity to monastic life, and obedience (58:17). From that day forward, they are no longer free to leave the monastery (58:15), although they may be cast out or excommunicated after due process if they are sufficiently disobedient. It is therefore in the monks’ best interests to exercise self-discipline, which could perhaps be defined as being "not slothful, not unobservant, not negligent" (the vices that Benedict lists in his concluding chapter, 73:7). In Benedict’s monastic communities, this self-discipline meant more than just "a little strictness in order to amend faults and to safeguard love" (Prologue: 47). It meant remembering all the rules, and practising all the rules, even on rare occasions when monks were travelling or were working far away from the oratory; so, for instance, monks on a journey could not omit the prescribed hours (50:4), nor could monks sent on a day errand presume to eat outside the monastery on pain of excommunication (Chapter 51). Self-discipline may also have been helpful when it was time to get up in the middle of the night to celebrate the Divine Office! [from an unpublished paper by the author; italics added]

The apostle Paul would be proud of you, noble Humility. For you are the theological sleight of hand that keeps good, pious Christians in their place, doomed to feel unworthy, sinful, desperate to be saved, and constantly separated from God.

You are a proud and cruel goddess, Humility.

It Takes a Village -- A Non-HDM Village, That Is

What does HDM mean? It's short for Hierarchy-Dualism-Monism (hence the need for a simpler moniker that people can actually remember and pronounce). But I'll come back to that in a minute.  

2017 marks the 150th anniversary of Canada’s founding as a nation. I found this Canadian maple leaf, a “mosaic” created from waxy leaf begonias, at one of Toronto’s soul-healing public gardens. It reminds me of what Canada is all about. Photo credit JAT 2017.

First I want to say thank you to the people of my village -- Canada. I want to say how grateful I am to the people here. I'm totally aware that I wouldn't have a snowball's chance in hell of being a practising ethical mystic if I didn't live in a community of people who just blow me away with their compassion, common sense, and high ethical standards. 

 It's been common for the mystics of history to thank God for the blessings of their journey, and sometimes there's also been praise for specific religious mentors or spiritual teachers who have guided the initiate along the way.  

But I think it's bigger than that. A mystic doesn't sprout up from nowhere. I think it's important to look at the whole context of a person's upbringing before you can understand his or her spiritual context. If each person is, metaphorically speaking, a plant growing within a much larger garden, you need to know what kind of garden that person grew up in. Not just the immediate family environment (although that's very important, of course), but the wider community environment. You need to know about the village which raised the child. What lessons did the village teach the child as he or she was growing up?  

The village I grew up in -- Canada, and more specifically the province of Ontario -- was a place where people didn't always agree, where political arguments were fought on major issues, where the painful lessons of recent history were still being processed and incorporated into both the law books and the daily lives of Canadians (lessons that stemmed from two World Wars and the Great Depression). The tension between French Canadian and English Canadian interests created several political and cultural firestorms as I was growing up. More recently, First Nations interests have reminded us that we all have to try harder to be a more inclusive, respectful society. 

But we've got a few things right here. We have a pretty workable balance between the rights of the individual and the rights of the community, the responsibilities of the individual and the responsibilities of the community. We make mistakes, to be sure, but we're open to the idea that we've made mistakes, and we're open to the idea that mistakes can be fixed. So together we try to fix them.  

We have publicly funded education and publicly funded health care that's accessible to most Canadians. (I'm not going to say "accessible to all Canadians" because the truth is that some people are slipping through the cracks. But slow progress is being made.)  

As a woman, I can attest to the fact that I've had the kind of opportunities that few women have had throughout the course of history or culture. Like many Canadian women, I've had two major blessings: the blessing of choice and the blessing of safety. Because my village was saying it was okay for me to choose, I was able to choose my own life path -- my own education, my own husband, my own family size, my own career. Because my village was saying it was NOT okay for me, as a woman, to be abused, I was able to feel safe (most of the time) as I walked (literally and figuratively) down the streets of my community.  

I didn't create these blessings for myself. My village (including my family of origin) created the environment that allowed these blessings to flourish for me and for others. My role, as an individual, is to appreciate these blessings, to give back to others what I myself have received, and to teach those who follow (i.e. the younger generation) how to live with compassion, common sense, and high ethical standards.  

Only after I began to explore philosophy -- a necessary part of being a true mystic -- did I come to understand that Canada is one of a small number of countries in the world whose culture is not bound together by one of the HDM myths that have plagued civilization since the get-go.  

You can have a reasonable, balanced dialogue with a typical Canadian on just about any inflammatory topic such as homosexuality, refugee rights, gay marriage, gun registration, and access to health care, and you won't come away from the discussion in fear of your life (not usually, anyway). You don't have to worry that a religious or military death squad will show up in the middle of the night and take you away. (Unfortunately, advocates for social justice in other parts of the world still face these profoundly inhumane threats on an ongoing basis, as a perusal of any Amnesty International newsletter will quickly reveal.)  

There are several reasons why Canada is a safer place, on the whole, in comparison to many other countries. One important reason is that most Canadians don't get up each day and volunteer to put their brains through a meat grinder.  

Yes, a meat grinder. HDM myths act like a meat grinder on your biological brain. You put a perfectly good holistically balanced brain/body/heart/soul into one end of the grinder, and out comes status-addicted mincemeat at the other end.  

Ooo, yummy.  

Sure, this kind of damage doesn't happen overnight. It takes years, years of being told that you and your village are "better" than other people and other villages, and have therefore been chosen by God to save everybody else (i.e. Hierarchy). Or years of being told you and your village are "good/right," whereas all other people and all other villages are "evil/wrong" (i.e. Dualism). Or years of being told that there's actually only one village in the entire world, and all people are required to belong to it (i.e. Monism). These myths are abusive -- spiritually, emotionally, and psychologically abusive. Eventually, they also become physically abusive.  

Where's my proof?  

Here's my proof. 

In the early to mid-20th century, a group of Germans got it into their heads that they ("Aryans") were "better" than other people and other villages, and they also got into their heads that they were God's chosen people who deserved to rule. This myth of Hierarchy led to the European Holocaust.  

In 1994, a group of Hutus in Rwanda got it into their heads that Hutus were "good/right" and Tutsis, along with peaceful Hutus, were "evil/wrong" people who deserved to die. This myth of Dualism led to the Rwandan Genocide. 

In the 1970's, a group of Cambodians in the Khmer Rouge Communist Party got it into their heads that it was okay to execute, starve, and more or less enslave anyone who was unsympathetic to the new ideals of "radical equality." This myth of Monism led to the Cambodian Holocaust.  

These examples are only the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Unfortunately, our history books contain all too many examples of mass suffering and oppression created by human leaders whose brains were/are totally addicted to the status that comes from these myths. It explains why these leaders seem to us to be psychopaths. They are psychopaths. They're psychopaths because they've stopped listening to their own inner wisdom -- their own soul -- and instead have started listening to the "voice" of status addiction. 

For status addicts, the very idea of balance in a political system is anathema. 

In contrast, there's no hierarchy to be "proven" in a social democracy where people willingly pay taxes (within reason, of course) to cover the cost of roads, schools, and hospitals. There's no dualism to be "justified" in a social democracy that embraces a multi-party system of government held to account through transparency, checks and balances, ethics commissioners, and law courts. There's no room for monism to even be considered in a social democracy that builds its laws and conventions on that sturdiest of all foundations: human rights legislation that respects and values the differences among people of different ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, etc. 

It's true that within Canada there are some smaller HDM villages, some places and some groups and even some religious communities that have fallen prey to the HDM myths. But, as a whole, we seem to want to work together as a team to build a non-hierarchical, non-dualistic, non-monistic society. And that's a good thing. 

See you at Tim's!

How My Experience as a Chemist Has Influenced My Mysticism

Theology at its best is a language -- a language that helps individuals understand their relationship with God while not contradicting or denying one of God's other important languages: science. 

It's important for God's children to have access to the language of uplifting theology. This is because not all of God's children can easily understand or relate to the language of science. This is okay with God. In fact, it's more than okay. God's children (one of whom would be you) are not all the same. God's children are all different from each other, although we share some traits in common, such as the ability to love and forgive.  

Your soul wasn't created by God the Mother and God the Father with a batch of dirt and a cookie cutter (Genesis 2:7 notwithstanding). In all of Creation (and it's a pretty darned big Creation!), there's no other soul quite like you. There's no other soul who thinks exactly the way you think, no other soul who expresses love exactly the way you express love. You're one of a kind.  

This means you "get" some languages better than you get other languages.  

Maybe you totally get music, which means you feel the rhythms and harmonies deep in your bones without anyone ever really teaching you how to do it. You just "get" it so deeply that your whole life is transformed by it, each and every day.  

Maybe you totally get poetry. That's a language, too. It's not the same as prose. Somehow it triggers different feelings and different responses in you than prose. You read a few verses of exquisite poetry and BAM -- powerful insights descend upon your soul and you're forever changed.  

Now don't laugh, but I react to chemistry the way many people react to music and poetry. It's not that I don't like music or poetry, it's just that, well, I really, really "get" the language of chemistry. 

“Tremble, O Earth, at the presence of the Lord, at the presence of the God of Jacob, who turns the rock into a pool of water, the flint into a spring of water” (Psalm 114: 7-8). Photo credit JAT 2017.

If you've studied a lot of chemistry, you know that chemists don't think in quite the same way as physicists, or biologists, or computer scientists, or mathematicians. Physicists get excited about field theory. Biologists get excited about energy transfer in living organisms and ecosystems. Computer scientists can think in binary code (an amazing skill!). And mathematicians live and breathe for the wonder of tautologies (showing how two sides of an equation are actually equal).  

But chemists spend most of their time dealing with bonding. Molecular bonding. They want to know what holds atoms together into molecules. They want to understand the relationships between the constituent parts of both atoms and molecules. They spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to coax one little ion or electron from one spot to a different spot so it can do a different job. A chemist's stock in trade is the probability wave functions of electrons, those tiny little negatively charged particles that are so much smaller than an atomic "nucleus" and are so damned fussy about where they're willing to be located at any one time. Yet where would our material world be without them?  

Even though physicists now estimate that "ordinary matter" (that is, atoms and molecules) accounts for no more than 4-5% of all known energy in the known universe (they call this ordinary matter "baryonic matter"), baryonic matter has a lot to tell us about the nature of God. And this baryonic matter is what chemists really "get."  

A number of physicists these days are pulling out all the stops to try to find a unified theory of nature. (Hence the construction of the multi-billion dollar Large Hadron Collider). But, you know, for my part, as a chemist and as a mystic, I'm wary of anyone in any field who starts to look for a simple unified theory about anything. This smacks of monism, the longstanding religious belief that when you get to the very heart of Creation, there exists only a singular, undifferentiated, divine "oneness." Plato's middle writings, such as Phaedrus (247c), speak of this colourless, shapeless, all-inclusive oneness, and many neo-Platonic Christian mystics have followed suit in the monism department. 

Needless to say, I'm not a monistic or apophatic mystic.  

Me, I think it's okay for us to listen to what God is saying to us through the language of chemistry. Even though baryonic matter (including the ordinary atoms and molecules that make up Planet Earth's waters, lands, and atmosphere, plus all life on Planet Earth) represents only 4-5% of the universe's energy, it's the only part of Creation we can directly access as human beings, and it's the only part of Creation that God seems to think we need while we're living here as angels-in-temporary-human-form, so I figure it's worth paying attention to! 

And as I said above, chemistry is all about bonding. 

It's all about the relationship and balance between the tiny negatively charged particles we call electrons and the much larger positively charged particles we call protons. It's all about the relationship and balance between certain probability wave functions and certain forces such as gravity, etc.. (I'm simplifying here, and am purposely skipping the whole subatomic particle thing, as it would needlessly complicate the discussion at this point).  

When you think about a molecule such as sodium chloride (table salt), you probably think about it as salt. Me, I think of God the Father's negatively charged electrons dancing a beautiful electron orbital dance of harmony, balance, intentional cooperation, and divine love with God the Mother to help her unite her much larger sodium ions with her equally large chloride ions in a very specific and useful scientific way that helps them together, as God, create the necessary biological building blocks used by the many forms of individual life that have lived here at one time or another over the past 3.85 billions years or so.  

There you have it -- my one-sentence rebuke of Creationism.  

In my opinion, Creationism is an example of the language of theology at its worst.

Confessions of a Blonde Mystic

When I was growing up, I had no inkling that one day I'd become a mystic.

I was pretty geeky, but not that geeky. When I was 10, I wanted to become an archaeologist. By the time I was 12, I was sure I was going to be a writer. By age 18, I wanted more than anything to fall madly in love and focus my whole being on the love of my life (whoever the heck that was!). By age 22, I was married and enrolled in graduate studies in art conservation. By age 25, I had settled down as a stay-at-home mom.

Nothing very mystical about that.

Where there hints about my mysticism-to-be? Did I have unexplained episodes of "transcendence" as a child? Did I "see" things that weren't there? Or "hear" things that weren't there?

Nope. I was a normal kid. I was a bookworm, and I wasn't good at sports, and I was way too mouthy for my own good. (Still am.) But I didn't have any unusual "episodes" when I was growing up; nor would I have received any encouragement for such from my family. There was no enthusiasm in the family for religiosity. My family were nominal Christians, which meant we went to United Church services at Christmas and Easter. Sometimes my sister and I were sent to Sunday School, but these church experiences left little impression on me. The word "spirituality" was never mentioned.

Both my parents were eminently practical (having grown up during the Great Depression) and quite liberal and inclusive in terms of their values. So there was no talk around the dinner table about God's true nature, or salvation, or apocalypticism. Acceptable topics of discussion included business and politics and law-abiding citizenship. I was a teenager in the early 1970's, so, of course, there were numerous lectures about staying away from drugs, lectures which I took very seriously. To this day, I've never used street drugs, and I'm one of the few people I know who's never tried pot. Not even once.

Yup. Still a geek, and proud of it.

The thing about genuine mysticism -- the Real McCoy, as opposed to verifiable states of psychiatric dysfunction -- is that genuine mysticism is not about random and unpredictable "transcendent episodes" sprinkled like chili peppers into an everyday bowl of bland and tasteless cream of potato soup. A genuine mystic (and frankly there aren't a whole lot of them out there) is somebody who's hardwired with a particular package of traits, learning styles, and talents. When these particular traits, learning styles, and talents are examined as a whole, a discernible pattern emerges, and if this pattern can be shown to be consistent over many years, then, and only then, can you say that a particular man or woman is a true mystic.

In other words, you can't call somebody a mystic because he or she reports one or two unusual "episodes" of seeing or hearing or feeling the presence of the Divine.

This is just common sense. You wouldn't call someone a professional artist on the basis of one or two beginner's paintings. You wouldn't call someone a professional mechanic on the basis of one flat tire correctly changed. Similarly, you shouldn't call someone a mystic on the basis of one or two self-reported "events." There should be a long track record of professional development and committed endeavour for practising mystics, as in any other field. This is the only way to prevent charlatans and fraud artists from ruining other people's lives with their "predictions" and "divine assurances."

What makes me a mystic (or a contemporary channeller, as I sometimes call myself), as opposed to a spiritual person or a person of deep faith?

Well, to turn it around a bit, is it possible for a spiritual person or a person of deep faith to also be a professional artist? Or a mechanic? Or a farmer? Or a teacher?

Of course! In fact, many people would suggest that if you hope to be a really gifted teacher (or mechanic or whatever), you need to bring all your faith and all your spirituality into your calling in a holistic way so you'll be able to teach (or fix engines) from the heart. This, too, is just common sense.

For me, it's the same thing. I'm a spiritual person and a person of deep faith, which makes me no different than the mechanic who starts and ends his day as a spiritual person and a person of deep faith. But where the mechanic delights in working on engines, and the teacher delights in guiding the minds of growing children, I delight in the work of a mystic, which is so philosophical and intellectual and esoteric that it would bore the living crap out of 99.9% of the people I know.

It's my passion to delve each and every day into the deepest mysteries of Creation -- questions about God, about the soul, about quantum biology, about who we are at both the quantum level and the emotional/creative level. My passion is to ask annoying questions, and my skill is to be able to hear the answers when they come down the quantum pipeline from God the Mother and God the Father. (And from Jesus, but that's another story.)

Make no mistake -- I both see and hear God. But it's not random, and it's not occasional. It's an everyday part of my life as a mystic. It's an everyday part of my life because I practised and practised and practised until I'd fully developed the talent I was born with. Through a combination of natural soul hardwiring plus committed human effort, I gradually "came into" my calling. It's an unusual calling, to be sure, but it's a genuine calling.

One way to find a true mystic is to ask about favourite stories and films. True mystics always have a special fondness for well-crafted speculative fiction. Painting "Solar Sailor" (c) Jamie MacDonald 2013. Used with permission of the artist.

Everyone is born with natural intuition. I'm NOT saying I'm one of the few people who has intuition. Just the opposite, in fact. I think everyone can more fully develop their intuitive faculties and incorporate that aspect of their being into their daily lives. But intuition isn't the same thing as mysticism. I want to be clear on that point. Like everybody else, I have normal intuition. But alongside that normal intuition I have another skill, a different skill, that not everyone is born with. I have what might be called, for lack of better terminology, an ability to accurately and consistently tap into the space-time continuum while in a fully conscious non-hypnotic non-drug-induced mystical state of connection to God.

Yeah, yeah, I know. Space-time continuum . . . it sounds like something you'd hear on Star Trek. The original Star Trek. And you'd be right. You're going to have to forgive me, though, because I can't think of any other way to describe it. And besides, where would the Blackberry be today if not for the inspiration of Captain Kirk's flip-phone communicator to urge inventors onward?

Did I mention I love the original Star Trek series? And TNG ain't half bad, either? (I may like designer clothes, but, as you can tell, I'm still a geek at heart.)

P.S. I'm not a medium or a psychic, and I don't believe in ghosts. So don't ask me if my life is like "Medium" or "Ghost Whisperer" or "The Listener" or "Rescue Mediums" on TV, because the answer is NO.

My life is way more exciting than that.