God Is Not 3 Guys

March 29, 2010 To open the minds of Christians to a more inclusive vision, I like to cite pagan examples because they mirror Christian beliefs and practices. Pagan mystery religions had divine heroes whose lives were honored in large public ceremonies and in small private gatherings like Paul’s Christian communities, which assembled in homes for sacred meals. Christian meals commemorating Jesus’ gatherings with his disciples gradually evolved into the Mass, which has elements that apparently derived from the liturgies of mystery religions. Mystery religions portrayed a god’s or goddess’s life in ceremonies that incited a sympathetic union of participants with the deity. They felt with Isis in her struggles over Osiris, with Aphrodite in lamenting the deceased Adonis. They hailed the resurrected one, Attis, and sympathized with Demeter in her search for Persephone. I like to cite the story of Demeter and Persephone because this Mother-Daughter pair preceded the Christian Father-Son pair...

God is in the tall trees; God is in the wild boar; God is where the storm destroys And in the wind’s roar. Barbarians in “So Let Your Light Shine.” They were right, of course, but they were subdued by Christians who imposed a God-image with a certain name. Today Christians are learning to embrace the larger “barbarian” awareness of divinity in all. “So Let Your Light Shine” was an outdoor pageant performed after dark at the College of St. Benedict, St. Joseph, MN, every fall until the mid 1960s. It imagined Western civilization conquering boorish masses. What were the countries of the North? They were the wild unconquered spaces. They were the wild barbaric places, Where fierce tribes Knew not Christ, Knew not the light. St. Benedict brought the light of Christ. . . . St. Benedict brought civilization To Europe, where all was dark— To Europe, where all was wild. A swaggering lot of barbarians shouts, “We kill in the night, and we plunder,” and they dance to the throbbing beat of tom-...

The Transfiguration, the subject of last Sunday’s gospel reading (Luke 9:28-36), usually is used by preachers as a “proof” of Jesus’ divinity. The homilist where I attend Mass, Abbot John, refreshingly drew a different lesson: The task of discipleship is not to build tents and houses for Jesus. Jesus is not to be housed and worshipped. . . . As spiritual writer Richard Rohr notes, if religion is not fundamentally about transformation, it is pretty useless. [The Transfiguration] only makes sense in the light of transformation. Abbot John was talking about OUR transformation. . . . to give consent to the Spirit to transform us, to move us toward the white light, the gifts of the Spirit more visible; not the gifts we want, but the gifts that are given. He addressed “the spiritual poverty of postmodern culture,” and I add that fundamentalist literalism is one example. It reacts to information that stretches us past our accustomed religious information and imagery in a defensive way, thre...

. . . to unsettle presumptions, to defamiliarize the familiar, to reveal what’s going on beneath and behind appearances . . . Louis Menand, professor and literary critic making the case for religion as a curriculum requirement at Harvard, quoted in Newsweek (February 22), Harvard's Crisis of Faith Menand and others argue that university professors who sniff at religion box themselves into “slim silos of expertise,” trying in a “scientistic” approach to submit everything to empirical measurement. Religion—the world of faith, thought, ethics, and belief—does not submit to scientific experiment, but Barbara Bradley Hagerty found that in experiments it persistently shows its face. Spiritual reality will not surrender the field because it IS “ what’s going on beneath and behind appearances .” Steven Pinker, popular evolutionary psychologist, leads the case against a religion requirement at Harvard. He derides religion by reducing it to superstition, witchcraft, and idol worship, pitch...

A comment to Mind over matter came to me by email because it didn't fit into the comment box. It teaches, uplifts, and gives hope for the whole world, not only for our individual lives. I hope you like it as much as I do. Although it could also follow the posts under Science, I decided it begins a new category in my index—Post-Christian. Sondra's words launch a definite turn in my thought frame—a post-Christian frame for thinking about spiritual reality. Jeanette YOUR UNLIMITED POSSIBILITIES by Sondra It isn’t a matter of mind OVER matter. Matter is Mind in one of its many forms. Mind, consciousness, is the source of matter. Look around you at the nearest physical object, a chair, or a spoon. It is consciousness expressing itself in the form of the chair or spoon. In reference to the quotes in Mind Over Matter 2 – Wm. James, Eric Butterworth, and the quote from the bible: What all these people – and many others throughout the centuries, are saying, couched in the lan...

Thanks to my daughter, you can laugh at Jeanette on Facebook girl singer

I wonder how many still imagine Jesus pre-existing up in heaven and coming down to earth to save us. A quick Google search tells of Greek, Egyptian, and Hindu gods and goddesses who lived up in heaven and came down to help humans (echoing the cosmology spelled out in previous post). All of them pre-dated Jesus and Christianity. Belief in the myth is fading, and it was never taught by Jesus. In a doc’s office, someone grinned over an evangelist canvassing her neighborhood with the question, “Have you been saved?” and her neighbor’s answer, “None of your G*#%& business!” In God Is Not Three Guys in the Sky , I ask, Saved from what? Eternal damnation? Residence in a condemned neighborhood? Hell-fire? Few people read the ancient phrases literally anymore. I agree with Episcopal bishop John Shelby Spong: Jesus does not save us from a fall that never happened or restore us to a status that we have never had. He empowers us to be more deeply and fully human and to enter highe...