CC46: 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.

CC45: 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.

CC39: Confessions of a Blonde Mystic

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

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, if geeky, 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 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). They were also 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 that 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 from 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.

"When evening came, the boat was out on the sea, and he was alone on the land. When he saw that they were straining at the oars against an adverse wind, he came towards them early in the morning, walking on the sea. He intended to pass them by. But when they saw him walking on the sea, they thought it was a ghost and cried out; for they all saw him and were terrified. But immediately he spoke to them and said, 'Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid.' Then he got into the boat with them and the wind ceased. And they were utterly astounded, for they did not understand about the loaves, but their hearts were hardened" (Mark 6: 47-52). This passage from the Gospel of Mark makes little sense to the modern mind, but if you think of it as something a 21st century science fiction author might write while trying to describe a true mystical connection to God, you'd be close. 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. 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.

CC31: How God Listens To Your Soul and Not To Your Idiocy

I remember the day when I finally accepted the fact that God could hear all the nasty thoughts I was thinking. I wanted to throw up.

Up until then, I'd been trying hard to convince myself that "what happens in my head, stays in my head." I was sure that my nasty, judgmental thoughts about other people were my own little secret. Sure, I felt guilty about those unkind thoughts. But as long as I didn't express them out loud, nobody would know about them but me.

But then I decided I wanted to learn to be a mystic. It was a conscious decision. Nobody forced me to become a mystic. Nor did I have any big epiphanies or any life-altering visions or any sudden calls from God (i.e. conversion experiences). I simply thought it would be cool.

I confess now, with the full benefit of 20/20 hindsight, that ten years ago, when I made the decision to learn to be a mystic, my motivation reeked of status addiction. This was not the best of motivations, as I've pointed out in earlier posts. I wanted to be "special," and it seemed to me that "the mystical path" would be a good way for me to become "better" than others. I confess now that this was my motivation at the time, but ten years ago, I wouldn't have been willing to admit this to myself. I desperately wanted to believe that I was becoming a mystic "for the benefit of others." I wanted to believe that I was only a humble servant of God -- a humble vessel of God's will. Really, though, what I wanted at the time was the status that comes with being a mystic.

"Then Jonah prayed to the Lord his God from the belly of the fish, saying, 'I called to the Lord out of my distress, and he answered me; out of the belly of Sheol I cried, and you heard my voice. You cast me into the deep, into the heart of the seas, and the flood surrounded me; all your waves and your billows passed over me. Then I said, "I am driven away from your sight; how shall I look again upon your holy temple?" The waters closed in over me; the deep surrounded me; weeds were wrapped around my head at the roots of the mountains. I went down to the land whose bars closed upon me forever; yet you brought up my life from the Pit, O Lord my God, as my life was ebbing away'" (Jonah 2: 1-7a). Photo credit JAT 2018.

I wasn't entirely devoted to my own selfishness, however. There was a part of me that genuinely yearned for a deep sense of connection with God. There was a part of me that was very . . . lonely. Very sad. There was a part of me that felt small and quiet and vulnerable, that wanted to reach out to God, but didn't know how. This part, of course, was my soul. But I didn't know that at the time. I was too busy filling up my head with New Age idiocy to recognize the voice of my own soul.

Good news, though. God was much smarter than I was, and God didn't pay any attention to my ridiculously vain and selfish New Age/devout Christian prayers. God listened only to my soul. My soul was saying, "I want to remember how to love," and that's the only choice I made that God was willing to help me with. I must have offered up 20 selfish prayer requests for every time I asked God to help me learn how to love. God ignored the many selfish demands I made (thank heaven we have a God with common sense!), then God put my nose to grindstone on the one prayer I'd asked that was worth asking.

I had no idea that this one sincere prayer would be such hard work for me, my family, and God. I had no idea that I was literally asking God to help me rewire my entire biological brain.*

You would assume, naturally, that the process of rewiring a person's entire biological brain would take a great deal of time. (It did). And a great deal of experienced help. (It did). And a great many changes in daily lifestyle. (It did). And a great many conscious changes in attitude. (It did). And many moments of painful insight. Plus setbacks. And moments of quiet healing. And tears along with great joy.

It did.

How I Felt At First. Although most of the time my brain felt rigid and full of selfish weeds, God saw the spring flowers waiting to bloom. My sincere wish to remember how to love was the trillium God saw and nurtured. Photo credit JAT 2014.

That's what it felt like, and many spiritual seekers have described similar feelings. But inside my biological body, at a neurophysiological level, changes were taking place. My neurons and glial cells were changing, adapting, making new connections, breaking old connections. My immune system was changing along with my entire nervous system. I was getting a gradual "nervous system makeover." This happened because my body was rewiring itself to accommodate my new regimen -- my new regimen of remembering how to love.

If I've learned anything about the spiritual journey, it's this: no human being anywhere on Planet Earth at any time in Earth's history has ever been exempt from this biological reality. You are a package deal. You are a soul intertwined with your biological body, and you can't find spiritual enlightenment if you're punishing or mistreating your physical body (for example, through ascetic practices). It's a scientific reality that nobody can escape, though most mystics want to pretend they're exempt from these rules.

Eventually I realized that I was -- am -- a package deal, and that as part of this package deal, my thoughts and feelings are not hidden from God. My thoughts and feelings are an open book. I can try to fight this reality, or I can work with this reality. It's my choice. If I try to fight it, I hurt myself, and I end up hurting the people I love. If I decide to work within this paradigm, and trust that God forgives me even when I make a mistake, then I'm using my free will in the most loving way possible. I'm using my free will to trust in God's love and forgiveness. I'm using my free will to be in full connection and relationship with God. I'm using my free will to be open to their observations and suggestions for constructive change.

Of course, this paradigm pretty much implies that change is part of the healing process.

So . . . this runs smack into the painful truth that religious leaders who reject change in favour of the status quo (status addiction) are not part of the healing process.

I'm very grateful to God the Mother and God the Father, plus the soul who once lived as Jesus son of Joseph, for being so patient and so firm and so consistent with me. They got me on track -- the track I'd chosen of remembering how to love -- and they never gave up on me. They stuck right with me, and they put up with a lot of abuse from me, until I got it through my thick head that my soul was -- is -- okay.

As for those nasty thoughts I used to have . . . I don't have them anymore. Eventually I learned that those nasty thoughts were the "voice" (as it were) of status addiction. I was looking for a way to raise myself up inside my own head by putting other people down. (Yeah, it really is that simple!) When I confronted my own status addiction issues, and stopped denying the harm I was creating for myself and others, I no longer needed the "high" of thinking nasty thoughts.

So I stopped.

It's a great cure for that feeling of wanting to throw up because you're carrying so much guilt, remorse, and embarrassment about your own nastiness.


* Only recently have neuroscientists come to understood how malleable and changeable the human brain is. This new field of research is known as "neuroplasticity."

CC20: Further Update on the Vatican's "Sin Within"

Last Friday, on June 11, 2010, Pope Benedict XVI addressed 15,000 priests who were in St. Peter's Square to mark the end of the Vatican's Year of the Priest. In his homily, Benedict asked forgiveness from God and from affected people for the sins of the sexually abusive clerics in the Roman Catholic church. He also promised "to do everything possible to ensure that such abuse will never occur again" (Nicole Winfield, "Pope Begs Forgiveness, Promises Action on Abuse," The Globe and Mail, June 11, 2010).

While I'm quite certain that God the Mother and God the Father do, indeed, forgive Benedict for his own errors, and do, indeed, forgive the priests who've intentionally harmed the faithful in their care, I'm equally certain that hidden abuse will continue in the Roman Catholic church.

Many Christians want to make this a question of theodicy: how do we explain evil in the world while at the same time preserving our image of God as good and loving? If God allows abuse to continue in the church, does it mean that God is powerless and ineffectual? Impotent against the powers of the devil? Or does it mean that God is actually not a very nice person?

Many of the Christians I know would much rather blame the problem of evil on God and/or the devil than put the blame where it belongs: on the values and moral beliefs held by both individuals and by cultural groups.

The Roman Catholic church is a cultural group. It teaches particular cultural beliefs. (These comprise its theological doctrines). It has a consciously promoted schedule of active teaching. Its goal is to teach its people early on in life how they should conduct themselves in relationship to God, church hierarchy, and empire. Traditionally, it has punished members who question its teachings or its authority (the Inquisition). It has conferred upon itself the mantle of infallibility. It claims it is the one true church, the only legitimate path to salvation. 

The Roman Catholic church has long held a vision of how society should be -- how society should look, act, and "feel." Its body of theological doctrines has been carefully cultivated so that only kind of garden can grow in its presence. The church has no one but itself to blame for this.

At the Vatican. Photo credit J MacDonald 2011.

 

The conditions in a garden dictate what kinds of plants will thrive there. A garden that has full sun, lots of water, and lots of nutrients (nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, etc.) will grow very different plants than a garden that has shady conditions or a high pH in the soil or low nitrogen. If you restrict certain nutrients, you restrict which plants will flower abundantly. If you water some plants and not others, you control which plants will flourish, and which plants will live a miserable life of bare subsistence before dying a premature death. 

Throughout its history, the orthodox Western church has been heavily committed to the lessons learned from gardening. Hewing closely to the principle that the person who controls the conditions of a garden will control the ultimate harvest of said garden, the church has intentionally chosen a specific blend of nutrients for its religio-political garden. The nutrients in this case are its doctrines. The doctrines are what "feed" the hearts and minds of the faithful. If you precisely control the "mix" of doctrines available to your people, you precisely control the rate at which people's hearts and minds can grow. If you balance this mix with the precision of a master botanist, you can ensure that the people in your congregations grow just enough to offer you the occasional flower without ever getting big enough to overshadow you.

It's a new idea, this idea that the introduction of particular belief systems can alter the physical structure and biochemical functioning of a person's central nervous system and brain. I suppose I should amend that to say it's a new idea among neuroscientists -- unfortunately, it's not a new idea among history's power mongers.

Long before the advent of brain scanning technologies, would-be tyrants had empirically observed that people's behaviour could be altered through the careful repetition of certain ideas. These tyrants didn't understand the changes at a biochemical or neurophysiological level, and they didn't need to -- all they needed to understand was the result, the harvest of their ideological campaigns. Early orthodox Church Fathers understood this principle well.

Early in the history of the church, orthodox Christian teachers made a conscious decision to take an axe to the teachings of Jesus as represented in the Gospel of Mark, and to overshadow Jesus' sunny, open "vineyard" with the giant magic beanstalk of spiritual ascent (a beanstalk seen later in the children's fairy tale of that name). They've been feeding this beanstalk of "elevation" for the "elect" with their repeated assertions that the devil exists, that Judgment Day is coming (soon, very soon! -- or at least sometime, maybe, we're pretty darned sure, because it says so in the apocalyptic books), that the soul is tainted by original sin, that Jesus is your only hope of salvation, that Holy Mother Church is the only portal through which you can gain access to the gold at the top of the beanstalk.

This set of teachings was well established by the mid-3rd century CE. It's not new (and it certainly didn't originate with Jesus himself!). The problem with the church's teachings is that their doctrines damage your biological brain. When you fully embrace these teachings as "divine truth," your brain stops working the way God intends. Your brain responds exactly like the plant that's been crippled because the gardener has intentionally withheld the water, nutrients, and care you need. Your heart and mind don't really grow. You spend all your life sitting in the shadow of the towering beanstalk and feeling like crap. You feel like crap because all the truth -- all the spiritual nutrients -- about the actual nature of your relationship with God have been artfully concealed from you. You wouldn't recognize the plants that grow in a sunny, lush, well-watered garden if they came chasing after you. 

Such as forgiveness. Would you be able to recognize forgiveness if it entered your life? Probably not. Most Christian's can't. That's because the orthodox Church has never taught people about forgiveness (which is why I'm somewhat sceptical about the Pope's current pleas for forgiveness).

Why hasn't the Church taught people how to forgive when it's obvious from reading the Gospel of Mark that Jesus insisted on the message of forgiveness? The Church doesn't want to teach people how to forgive, because once people catch onto the feeling of forgiveness, they'll be able to figure out for themselves that divine forgiveness is the antithesis of "salvation" and "grace." They'll realize that the church has been lying to them for centuries about their souls. The garden of orthodoxy might start to look like a thorny patch of weeds and thistles instead of the prophesied paradise!

It's no mystery why some church clerics have been sexually abusing vulnerable people in their care. You can't expect a human being's brain to produce a harvest of compassion, integrity, inclusiveness, and enlightenment when all you do every day is try to fill that person's brain with a steady diet of dissociation, lack of forgiveness, hierarchical control, and suppression of learning.

If Pope Benedict really means it when he says he wants to do "everything possible to ensure that such abuse will never occur again," the only truly effective strategy will be for him to call a Council along the lines of Vatican II, and embark on the painful path of rescinding some of the church's most cherished doctrinal beliefs.

Somehow I'm not holding my breath.

CC8: The Question of Suffering

This week I was checking out the remaindered book section at Chapters, and I found a copy of Bart Ehrman's 2008 book God's Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question -- Why We Suffer. As I mentioned in my post of March 6/10, I really like Bart Ehrman's books (though I don't always agree with his conclusions). So I bought God's Problem.

I knew a bit about it before I started to read it this week. That's because last year -- in July 2009, to be exact -- I bought and read Ehrman's 2009 book Jesus Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (and Why We Don't Know About Them). In Jesus Interrupted, Ehrman talks about his earlier book on suffering. Still, it's always better to read the original book rather than the precis of it, even if the precis is written by the author him/herself. So I was glad to find God's Problem on the sale rack.

In God's Problem, Ehrman explains why he lost his faith and now considers himself an agnostic. It wasn't a sudden decision on his part, nor an easy one. He says, "I came to the point where I could no longer believe. It's a very long story, but the short version is this: I realized that I could no longer reconcile the claims of faith with the facts of life. In particular, I could no longer explain how there can be a good and all-powerful God actively involved with this world, given the state of things. For many people who inhabit this planet, life is a cesspool of misery and suffering. I came to a point where I simply could not believe that there is a good and kindly disposed Ruler who is in charge of it." (page 3) 

I think Ehrman clearly expresses a belief shared by a whole lot of people. And who can blame them? There's no disputing that suffering exists, and there's no disputing that centuries-old Christian theology has been pretty useless in helping thoughtful, compassionate people understand how to cope with suffering.

Mind you, Christian theology has been pretty useless in helping thoughtful, compassionate people understand a lot of things. Readers who, like me, attend the United Church of Canada (UCC) will understand when I say that the United Church scores a "B" and sometimes an "A" on social justice issues, but earns an "F" on questions about the soul, about death, and about spiritual practices. We don't get to hear sermons that tell us how to relate to a God who allows the suffering in the first place. But we're given lots of opportunities to help fix the suffering by rolling up our sleeves and supporting various social justice causes.

Don't get me wrong -- praxis is very important. Good works are incredibly important, and these days a lot of dedicated individuals who don't even believe in God put the rest of us to shame with their manifold good works. It's pretty obvious that Christians by no means have a monopoly on "Christian charity."

In the past 12 years, I've asked the same questions about suffering that Ehrman asks. I agree with his questions, and I agree with his willingness to point fingers at the parts of the Bible that simply don't help. Yet, for me, the end result has not been a loss of faith. For me, the end result has been a sense of frustration and sadness at the obstinate refusal of most Church leaders to be honest -- honest with themselves and honest with their parishioners about the history of church doctrine, and the extent of the damage that's been caused by this body of doctrines.

Never in any of the UCC or Anglican churches I've attended have I heard a minister say to the congregation, "Today's readings will be taken from Plato's Phaedo. Let us now hear what Plato has to say about the soul." Yet the Church's formal teachings about the soul have far more to do with Plato than with the teachings of Jesus. Most Christians (including many ministers) just don't know this.

And this is to say nothing of the fact that the God of orthodox Western Christianity owes far more to Plato's ideas about God than to Jesus' teachings on same. 

Too often, we think of the human journey as a few fleeting moments of beauty and happiness that are quickly stripped away, only to be replaced by the pain of loss and grief. If we’re patient, however, and wait for the fruits of insight, meaning, and transformation to evolve, we see the many ways in which God’s love sustains us even during the harsh hours of winter.

 

I sympathize tremendously with Ehrman's struggle over God, faith, and suffering, and like him I've read books such as Elie Wiesel's Night and Viktor Frankl's Man's Search For Meaning, but in the end I decided that the problem for people of faith is not the question of suffering.

The problem, as I see it, is that Christianity has not been teaching people anything about God as God actually is. Christianity has instead been teaching its own portrait of God for purposes that have nothing to do with God -- purposes such as authority, political power, empire, cultural hegemony, and wealth.

Christianity in the third millennium must be willing to confront its own historical role as a creator of suffering if we are to heal our relationship with God the Mother and God the Father.

If I sound a bit like a Liberation Theologian, I suppose that's because I share some of their reasoning.

Honesty precedes healing. It's time for the Church to be honest about its past motives and actions, especially with regard to its body of doctrines (that is, its formally accepted truths). Only then can we proceed to a state of full healing.

Thanks be to God.

CC5: My Big Fat Idiot Stage

If you'd asked me when I was ten years old what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would have exclaimed, "An archaeologist!" 

I was in grade 5 when this fancy first came upon me. It seemed like a pipe dream at the time. I didn't know any archaeologists. Up until then, an occasional summer's day spent rock-hounding was the closest I'd come to the avocation of carefully sifting through ancient layers of dirt to uncover their buried stories. But when I was ten, I fell in love with the idea of archaeology. If the Indiana Jones films had existed at that time, I'm sure they would have been my favourites.

  "Again he began to teach beside the sea. Such a very large crowd gathered around him that he got into a boat on the sea and sat there, while the whole crowd was beside the sea on the land. He began to teach them many things in parables, and in his teaching he said to them: 'Listen! A sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seed fell on the path, and the birds came and ate it up. Other seed fell on rocky ground, where it did not have much soil, and it sprang up quickly, since it had no depth of soil. And when the sun rose, it was scorched; and since it had no root, it withered away. Other seed fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked it, and it yielded no grain. Other seed fell into good soil and brought forth grain, growing up and increasing and yielding thirty and sixty and a hundredfold.' And he said, 'Let anyone with ears to hear listen!'" (Mark 4: 1-9). Shown here is the house where my family lived until I was about 5. It was a modest home for a middle-class family who worked hard and took responsibility for their choices. It suited us fine.

I wasn't that far off, as it turns out. When I was in Grade 13, I was invited to participate in a two-week archaeological dig at an historical site in Toronto. When I was an undergraduate university student, I worked for three summers at a Toronto area museum. Then a dream come true . . . graduate school in the field of art conservation, with the chance to work on museum objects. I knew that if I had the chance, I could work on site as an archaeological conservator. So I was pretty close to my childhood fascination.

But, you know, the universe had other ideas about what I ought to be doing, and a week after I finished the research paper for my graduate degree, I was pregnant. By the time I was 25 years old, I was a full-time married stay-at-home mom (a choice I was very happy with).  

Not that I left behind my interests; I just took them in new directions. By the time I was in my early 40's, ready to start my full-blown mid-life crisis, I found some new layers of dirt with buried secrets to dig in. That's when I began my spiritual journey.  

You have to understand that until I hit the age of 40, I was the most ordinary middle-class Canadian you could imagine. My spiritual experiences had been modest, to say the least, even when my younger son died of leukemia when he was three years old (and I was 31). This had changed me, of course, but it had changed me at an emotional level rather than a spiritual level. I had become less harsh and less judgmental towards others as a result of our family's terrible trauma. But I can't honestly say I understood God any better when my son went through the hell of cancer treatments, and I can't say I liked God any better when my son died. My then-husband, who was a devout Baptist-High Anglican (go figure) seemed to have some pretty old fashioned fears about divine punishment being visited upon the sons, although he wisely didn't express such thoughts in front of our older son. I basically thought God was being pretty mean. I don't think that now, but that's what I thought in 1989.  

Some years later, in 1998, I started to ask spiritual questions. I didn't know what I was looking for. I just felt an inner impulse to search for, well, to search for answers. The fact that I didn't understand the questions was no impediment to my search for answers. This is how I led myself down the garden path. This is how I spent several years of my life -- right up until mid-2003, in fact -- in my Big Fat Idiot Stage.  

In my Big Fat Idiot Stage, I read tons of New Age material. I read most of the "big names" in the New Age field. I started with Brian Weiss (Many Lives, Many Masters) and Elizabeth Stratton. I took Reiki classes (this turned out to be a huge part of my Idiot Stage), and I avidly studied books by Barbara Ann Brennan (Hands of Light) and many others. When I read Neale Donald Walsch's first book in the Conversations With God series, I thought I'd struck spiritual gold. And when I stumbled on Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Now, I was certain I'd finally found the "answers." I was so busy looking for answers that I failed to notice I didn't yet have any good questions. 

I still own copies of these books in case I need to transcribe exact quotes from them, but I now keep these volumes in my "Toxic Book" section. I also added Rhonda Byrne's The Secret to my "Toxic Books." I tell you this so you'll know ahead of time that you won't see me promoting any of the ideas put forward by these New Age writers. 

Some of these New Age trends, interestingly, are not new at all, but in fact are very old -- much older than the oldest parts of the Hebrew Bible. So you also won't find me repeating damaging themes in the Hebrew Scriptures and New Testament that promise prophetic powers, ascension, Oneness with God, or cosmic laws of consequence. These teachings should come with a red tag on them: Warning: Scrupulously Following These Teachings Will Turn You Into A Big Fat Idiot, And Cause You to Embarrass Yourself And Your Family In Ways You Never Thought Possible.

Yes, I have no one but myself to blame for the time in my life when I embarrassed myself and my family by naively embracing the messages of these books. 

During my Big Fat Idiot Stage, when I believed in New Age teachings on abundance, I foolishly co-purchased this humongous country house with a Reiki master who prophesied that our spiritual healing centre would be a huge success. It wasn't. I lost a lot of money on this "divinely prophesied venture," but I never again made the mistake of believing there's an easy route to knowing myself or God. God doesn't hand everything to us on a spiritual platter just because we think we're privy to special cosmic truths.

As it turned out, I eventually found redemption in the teachings of Jesus, although how this happened, and why, is not the usual story.  

My journey of redemption began when I realized that I hadn't lost the scholarly skills of my youth, that I could bring the process of methodically digging away at different layers -- each with its own story to tell -- to the mysterious journey of spiritual healing.  

That's when my work really began as a scientifically oriented, liberal, blond mystic.  

That's when I turned to my academic background in hard science, especially Chemistry, plus my five years' of work experience in the mental health field to help me begin to ask what the questions were.  

That's when I finally started to grow up.

CC2: A Complaint About Orthodoxy: What Happened to the Redemption Theme?

If you've read my profile, you may have noticed I'm currently enrolled in graduate studies in the field of theology. This means I've spent a lot of time over the last couple of years learning the language of theological study. I want to say right here at the beginning of this blog that I've met many wonderful people in my graduate program, and I've learned a lot of things that would have been hard for me to learn on my own. I'm very grateful to the people who have helped me in my studies. 

I'm not a spring chicken, however, and I suppose it's fair to say that my personal index of suspicion is high with regard to theological claims. This is (I hope) a polite way of saying I've observed some major flaws in the church doctrines I've been studying. Those who know me from grad school will know that I'm not particularly shy about speaking up when I see inconsistencies and lapses in logic. (I recall one interesting class when I was the lone voice of dissent against Augustine's doctrine of original sin.) However, there seems to be a general, unspoken agreement, even at the university level in 2010, that theology students must not rock the doctrinal boat. I don't know about you, but I honestly don't know how the liberal Protestant church in Canada can survive if we're afraid to look unflinchingly at the history of our very complicated theology. 

So, like Luther posting his "95 Theses," I'm going to gradually post some observations about the differences between what Jesus seems to have said, and what the church said he said. (I think there's a big difference between the two.) 

To reassure you that I'm not just making things up to suit my own hermeneutical perspective, I'll try as much as possible to show references for my position. But you should probably know from the outset that, like all writers on the subject of theology, I have a strong personal position that influences my interpretation of developments in church doctrine. You might be able to guess what my position is if I tell you that my least favourite theologians are the apostle Paul, the early church theologian Tertullian, the highly influential Augustine of Hippo, and the early 12th century writer Anselm of Canterbury. I'm not too crazy about John Wesley, either. 

(I've read some primary source material from all these famous male theologians, which is how I know for sure I don't like their teachings.)  

"And as he reclined at dinner in Levi's house, many tax collectors and sinners were also reclining with Jesus and his disciples -- for there were many who followed him. When the scribes of the Pharisees saw that he was eating with sinners and tax collectors, they said to his disciples, 'Why does he eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?' When Jesus heard this, he said to them, 'Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick; I have come to call not the righteous but the sinners'" (Mark 2:15-17). Photo credit JAT 2017.

Anyway, the first complaint I have is about redemption -- as in, what the heck happened to Jesus' message about redemption? 

Redemption, as anyone will know who has experienced this life-altering transformative shift, is not the same as salvation or atonement. I'm so darned tired of hearing about salvation, and its bizarre cousin prolepsis, and I am so eager to hear a United Church of Canada minister tackle redemption head-on. This would require a bold statement to the effect that redemption is an experience of ongoing, present-day relationship with God. But redemption is doctrinally awkward because it clashes with the teachings of Paul, Augustine, and other orthodox Christian teachers on the matter of salvation. 

What is redemption for me? It is the unstoppable tsunami of gratitude that overtakes your life when you finally, finally, let go of your pigheaded refusal to accept God's love and forgiveness, and you're at last able to trust yourself as a humble and worthy child of God, a child who is made in God's image. That's when the hard spiritual work begins. 

I say this, of course, from painful personal experience. In my younger days, I was nothing if not pigheaded. 

Another weird thing about redemption is that it seems to need the "yeast" of relationship with other people. Being with other people, sharing experiences with each other, growing deep roots of empathy -- all these seem essential to the experience of redemption. It seems pretty much impossible for people to find redemption on their own without humble mentorship and guidance. (The founders of the Twelve-Step Program understood this clearly.) 

What does redemption mean for you? Have you had a transformative spiritual experience that has forever altered your relationship with God in a positive way? Would you be willing to share this with a few friends you trust? 

At the moment, mainstream Protestant Christians are not very comfortable with such sharing, but it's very hard for anyone, even Christians who are "saved in Christ," to stumble down the path of redemption without a helping hand from their fellow human beings. I vote to restore redemption as a major spiritual pursuit for today's Protestant Christians. 

If the United Church doesn't want it, the Concinnates will take it! (I'll have more on this in a future post.)