It's okay to question

A buddy of mine was brought up out in the woods, literally, he and his siblings.  The family’s attitude was, “If you don’t finish school or have a good job you’re not going to die.”  That went along with, “If you don’t have sex you’re not going to die.” But you’re not really going to live either. There’s nothing wrong with hunting and gardening to put food on the table.  In fact, it’s a lot healthier than the way most of us feed ourselves these days.  But I question the attitude that intellectual curiosity and spiritual growth are “optional.” When Jesus spoke of the “bread of life” he wasn’t talking about pumpernickel.  He was speaking of living a spiritual life, a life that is connected intimately with our individual understanding of God.  Just as our love for parents or partner grows and changes over time, morphs like the patterns of a kaleidoscope, so too our love and understanding of our creator should develop from new knowledge and new interpretation. Sometimes this life-journey is like work, sometimes it seems almost life-threatening.  But overall it should be pure joy, and we will have life in it.  I think the human soul wants this, and without it loses spirit just like we lose physical energy when we are starving.  It’s okay to question.  It’s okay to speak out our doubts and fears.  That’s how we make room for the shy God who is out there.

Imagination and Faith

Imagination and faith are dancing partners and I think there’s some confusion about which of them is to lead. We all like certainty.  We all like to be in the position of “having arrived.”  Of course spiritually this is a figment of our imaginations.  It is spiritual laziness and a reluctance to pick up our crosses and follow Jesus.  I just don’t think there’s any religious position a person can take that exempts us from spiritual growth, including, and especially, the religious ritual of “being saved.” “Being saved,” does nothing but license a person to sit at leisure in false certainties, in his or her own imagination.  It inclines people to look out at others who are struggling or exploring with God as condemned sinners.  It provides an excuse to suppress fact and the pursuit of facts that may confront the false certainties.  Witness recent efforts at legislation to restrict scientific inquiry for political or religious reasons. My imagination is something I recognize for what it is, that is, imagination.  It is my vision of how things should or could be.  But there is no guarantee that the fruits of my imagination are a good thing since I’m inclined to be lazy, self-serving and a pleasure-seeker. Faith, on the other hand, is trust.  It’s trusting that someone outside myself, a Higher Power, knows better and is better disposed toward my life and health.  Faith allows, actually requires, that I trust another entity, and am dependent on that entity for life itself.  Faith opens the door to learning from the very embodiment of love. Trusting God then, I can use my imagination to envision a better world.  And it’s ironic, it seems, that visions sometimes have a way of becoming reality.

My Family Twisted Me...

I can’t believe how my family twisted me as a kid. Oh that’s harsh.  I was brought up in a loving home.  It would be better to say “formed” instead of “twisted” but then nobody would be interested in the rest of this. I think I got it from mom’s side mostly…  a sense of the sacredness of blood.  The expectation was that family members were less likely to have arguments out of respect for that bond. But let’s get real.  People are people with or without a genetic tie.  Parents can make mistakes.  Parents can misunderstand their own kids and vice-versa.  It wasn’t until after his death that I began to understand the suffering my father endured as a child, and how that formed him as an adult.  Dad and I never broke down that clumsy barrier between father and son, a barrier that prevented us from speaking openly about ourselves.  Oh we talked theology, we slandered the neighbors, but we never spoke about the reasons for his unrealistic expectations of me and my heroic efforts to meet them and would that we would have. Every living thing is born with a genetic code and we all carry genes from our families right back to a tiny group of proto-humans that didn’t resemble us much at all.  The code has changed over the aeons, it must for survival.  My father’s, and my mother’s codes changed just a little bit before I was conceived, the result of their environment and experiences.  This, in theory, provided their children better survivability.  When people talk to me it changes me just a tiny, tiny, microscopic bit. And now we have a crisis.  In terms of history, the last few thousand years of human development has been but a “blip.” It’s been one “tic” on a clock that’s been running for a long, long time.  And in this short time we have to change our notions of justice and of a Higher Power from patriarchal or authoritarian models to that of collaborative, and a significant part of the human population is opposing this direction with violence.  It is change.  It is difficult, and it will become part of our genetic makeup only if we as humans accept it over a long period of time.  Jesus’ prophetic call to true repentance is a call to changing one’s thinking, not changing one’s piety.  It’s exactly what was needed in his time and remains what is needed in our time.  It cost him his life and I can only pray that myself and enough other humans are willing to devote our lives to this cause.  For me, “salvation” isn’t deliverance from sin, but rather the shedding of false values in order to embrace God’s universe instead of exploiting the world and the people around us.