God Is Not 3 Guys

Sexist prayer cleaned up, October 21, 2011 Those of us who are aware of sexism’s subtleties often cringe in church where we hear the SOURCE of All That Is reduced to a man-like being. But at Roman Catholic WomenPriest Masses, where we clean up the God-talk, we are relieved and renewed. The following Eucharistic Prayer shows what a difference language makes. Ruth Lindstedt took the Prayer we had been using and revised it to create this one that we like even better and now use at our monthly womenpriest Masses. Prayer Leader: God is with us! All: Amen! PL: Let us open ourselves to the transforming power of the Creator. All: We lift our hearts to God and one another. PL: Let us give thanks to the source of all life and love. All: It is right to give God thanks and praise. PL: Blessed are you, Creator God of the universe, through whom all life began, continues to grow and change. In the beginning, God Sophia spoke the Word, “Let there be,” and with a cosmic flash all creati...

Barbara Bradley Hagerty, NPR’s religion correspondent, wanted to know whether science can present evidence for a spiritual dimension. As she was researching the question, she was a little embarrassed, “spooked” to find herself experiencing transcendence. I count myself among those who believe that spiritual entities touch us at times, that the inner realm breaks into our outer lives with messages. What spooked Hagerty consoles me, and I like to collect stories of this phenomenon. Annelee Woodstrom was raised in Hitler’s Germany and after World War II came to Minnesota as the bride of an American soldier. She tells this story in her second book, Empty Chairs . Her daughter Sandy was looking forward to a promotion in May. With the raise in pay she planned to buy her parents a new car and they couldn’t talk her out of it. Annelee wrote, I was happy for Sandy but I was troubled. . . . Without reason, the death skeleton that depicted the Totentanz (Death Dance) in the cemetery chapel in my...

Oil spewing into the Gulf of Mexico and short attention spans have pushed off the front pages the Catholic Church’s embarrassment over the sex scandal, at least in this country. But I hope pressure on Catholic officials continues so that the wider Church can be liberated from official statements of belief and give attention to authentic promptings from Spirit within. Roger Haight, Jesuit theologian and past president of the Catholic Theological Society of America, wrote Jesus: Symbol of God , which rejects the same literal beliefs I reject in God Is Not Three Guys in the Sky —that Jesus is God and his death saved the world. Predictably, Haight was punished by the Vatican’s doctrinal agency that Joseph Ratzinger headed before he became Benedict XVI. Critics of Haight’s theology complain that it promotes relativism and religious pluralism, which accept the validity of other beliefs. One critic said that Haight reduces the Christian message to something even atheists can affirm, and Ratz...

I often say that every school of theology should require the works of Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell. They explain the origin of religious beliefs. No, they’re the first to say no one can really explain the depths of the human psyche, but they come as close as anyone. When I was trying to be an atheist—it was after I realized that Christian mythology resembles pagan mythology—I did what I see my atheist friends do. I chucked it all, all that crap in the Bible and in corrupt churches. And then I found Jung. And then I was given the gift of my Higher Power. And it all fell into place. I can’t remember the sequence of revelations but Joseph Campbell is certainly in there. Oh, and finding my way back to the monastery that had helped to mother me. With all this forming me, I now say “Amen” to both religious and atheist proclamations. I do this by translating religious language to a degree of symbolism deeper than most Christians can handle. The symbol of Christ, for instance. Jung teaches us...

Posted September 15, 2009 Fr. Richard McBrien : . . . it is a relatively new development that the pope appoints all the bishops in the Roman Catholic church. For most of the history of the church, especially during the First Christian Millennium, the selection of bishops rested with the clergy and laity of each diocese, in keeping with Pope Leo the Great's dictum, "He who is to preside over all must be elected by all." “Today's common practice in which bishops move up a career ladder from a smaller diocese to a larger diocese, and from bishop to archbishop, was explicitly prohibited by the Council of Nicaea in 325 and again by the Council of Chalcedon in 451. A reform movement in the 11th century tried unsuccessfully to restore the ancient practice where the clergy and laity as well as the neighboring bishops played a key part in the selection process. This is “consent of the governed,” a principle of democracy. In today’s Church, suppression is tightening instead of...

Power is the aphrodisiac, the hidden cause of this tragedy; everything else is symptom. Pat Marrin In analyzing what’s wrong with the Catholic Church , Marrin names power and another crucial ingredient: Isolation and lack of human affection, the absence of real friendship with both men and women . . . can produce trouble in a person. Loneliness, thwarted desire and a structure of obedience that renders a man impotent before his superiors to his own responsibility to choose his life at every stage, all of these dynamics can and do converge on a priest to force the question: Who am I? Who loves me? Why am I so angry and frustrated on the one hand, and so compulsive in my personal needs on the other? Compulsive celibacy is imposed on men who are divided from women and other men by a wall that proclaims their privileged position but really imprisons them in a shell/cell segregated from ordinary human decisions and growing experiences. No man ever came to terms with his sexuality, his spi...

A pious soul goes to heaven and gets to visit with Mary. He asks, "Why do paintings always show you sad? Is everything OK?” Mary reassures her visitor, “Oh, everything’s great. No problems. It’s just ... it’s just that we had always wanted a daughter.” I guffawed when I read this in Nicholas Kristof’s column, A Church Mary Can Love . And his serious points mesh completely with mine. He compares the “old boys’ club in the Vatican” with the boys clubs trading on Wall Street who get “similar results.” But there’s more to the picture than that. In my travels around the world, I encounter two Catholic Churches. One is the rigid all-male Vatican hierarchy that seems out of touch when it bans condoms even among married couples where one partner is H.I.V.-positive. To me at least, this church — obsessed with dogma and rules and distracted from social justice — is a modern echo of the Pharisees whom Jesus criticized. Yet there’s another Catholic Church . . . the grass-roots Catholic Chur...