God Is Not 3 Guys

A provocative series is airing on PBS: “Bible’s Buried Secrets.” The most subversive segment, “Did God have a wife?” (video) captured the most attention from me. I wondered whether it would spill intoxicating information I have garnered over years of doing feminist research.     “Did God have a wife?” did not seem feminist to me during most of the hour, although its female scholar, Dr. Francesca Stavrakopoulou, reaches for provocation. Her main point is that common perceptions about the Bible and God as taught by the Judaeo/Christian tradition are upended by archaeological finds. They show that Hebrew ancestors of the Jews did not practice monotheism. Jews also did not invent monotheism, but that point was less clear in the documentary. For hundreds of thousands of years, what is called God was a woman. She had many different names, but She was not rivaled by males. They were her consorts, not her superiors. The Great Mother gave life, and what we would call...

December 30, 2016   New Year hope despite chaos Since the election I have been veering back and forth between fighting despair and being the one to console others near despair. I counted ten Trump appointments of persons apparently committed to destroying the departments they should manage. They threaten justice, labor, money policies, environment, education, energy, commerce, housing, and health care. We are on the cusp of change coming from chaos. I fear the center cannot hold. William Butler Yeats, a poet of yesteryear, has a poem for our time: Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. Looking for hope, I had a talk with a mentor/friend of mine who would hesitate to call...

As a writer about religions and spirituality, I have tried to avoid writing about politics, but right now I cannot get politics out of my mind. And when events become as momentous as those occurring today, politics merge with spirituality. A man whose foremost talent is selling himself, who aspires less to lead the country than to glorify himself, was elevated to the most influential political office in the world. As an American facing the world, I am embarrassed. I admit I rejoice that Trump’s approval rating is tanking. Maybe, I hope, maybe, maybe his supporters are beginning to discern the truth …………. At this point in my writing I started guessing which developments since the election might have opened the eyes of formerly deluded voters, but that’s a futile exercise. The signs pointing to Trump’s true character were quite evident before the election. As I go through my days, I console myself and fellow mourners with the astonishing image of the rising sun. A mentor/friend of m...

Parker Palmer offers a song   that can appeal to both religious and non-religious people. Scroll down to the lyrics of Sara Thomsen with the guitar.    I cried when watching this next video.  A young Arab-American sets himself up across the street from a Trump Tower, blindfolded with a sign saying that he trusts passersby, inviting them to give him a hug.   Nothing happens for a while, and then . . . I ended my reflection on nones by asking, “Why [in our increasingly secular culture] does our entire culture embrace the religious feast of Christmas?” Don’t we all love newscasts of people being exceptionally generous during this season? Don't we love stories of spreading love and cheer?  I do. I think we all need these stories even more because of growing secularism with its despicable focus on buying stuff to stuff people who already are stuffed with stuff. Spiritual values during the Christmas season provide relief from mandatory gift-g...

November 14, 2016 The number of religiously non-affiliated people, according to the Pew Research Center, is rising. In 2007 they comprised 16 percent of Americans. In 2015 their percentage rose to 23 percent. Meanwhile, the number of Christians fell from 78 to 71 percent. I do not mourn this, although I regularly attend Mass with Catholic religious sisters. Not all these nuns are so very different from nones. Both groups have spiritual values that transcend conventional bounds, but nuns express their spirituality in religious terms while nones express spirituality without religion. At the same time that I feel at home with nuns, I identify with nones’ getting more inspiration from nature than from God-talk. Like nones, I have lost respect for institutional religion. My biggest criticism of Christianity is its God-images turned into gods by patriarchal language imposed on churches by the Vatican. I hold it responsible for Pope Francis' lack of vision regarding women. I...

Soon after Pope Francis was elected and the refreshing changes in his leadership style were being celebrated, I wrote that he doesn’t get the issue of women . That became abundantly clear this last week when he again closed the door on women’s ordination. Yes, he’s a wonderful man. Yes, he’s humble and courageous in his determination to right wrongs, even to a limited extent on the treatment of women.  But he just doesn’t get it. He does not understand patriarchy; he does not understand its impact on human thought, attitudes, and expectations.  Francis is not uninformed, just unenlightened. He has not accomplished the shift in consciousness that is required to accept women in roles previously delegated exclusively to men. Christian God-talk keeps Francis and other good people from realizing what patriarchy has done. He needs a strong dose of Mary Daly (“If God is male, male is God”) and Rosemary Radford Ruether, whose book Sexism and God-talk motivate my writings and p...

We all need to get away from political garbage. To cleanse our minds, I offer the words of Parker Palmer, a spiritual leader whom Krista Tippett likes to interview for  On Being . [W]hen I went to Union Theological Seminary in New York City for a year, . . . God spoke to me and said he wanted me to get the hell out of the church.    Palmer does not trash religion or cling to religion. He recognizes its worth for some but knows that today he can awaken spiritual awareness in more people by not going through religion. He joined an intentional Quaker community where he was given the gift of understanding,  that the value of a person has absolutely nothing to do with status, power, income, leverage. . . . I made the exact same base salary as an 18-year-old coming to cook in the kitchen or work in the garden. . . Parker sees each of us having to find our own way to our true self. He calls this self the soul.  And if the word “soul” doesn’t work f...