God Is Not 3 Guys

During my senior year in college Fr. Jerome, later Abbot Jerome, introduced us to historical-critical study of scripture. It was the permission I needed to begin my lifelong quest in search of what’s wrong and what’s right in religion. I’m not satisfied learning something for myself, I want others to know the fascinating truth too. I have read hundreds of books on Christian teaching and its evolvement, none clearer than Richard Rubenstein’s When Jesus Became God: The Epic Fight over Christ’s Divinity in the Last Days of Rome . It reads like a thriller novel, full of suspense and violence, hostile accusations, and surprising plot twists. But these events really happened; they were not contrived for a novel. Here I continue the tale started in the previous post. The first followers of Jesus were mesmerized by his unique teaching and, to use a modern term, his charisma. He seemed to have a privileged connection with God. Like all shamans, he put people in touch with Holiness. Jes...

January 28, 2015, The Word "Christ" I don’t say “Christ” when I mean Jesus, but most of the world uses the word “Christ” as if it were the last name of Jesus. They mean a man Christians worship as God. So “Christ” is a God-image. In discussions of religion, Jesus Christ means Jesus-God or Jesus-god, depending on your beliefs. When I was little I lived on a farm in the middle of Stearns County, encased in a German-Catholic cocoon. I do not remember praying to Jesus when I was little. Before we kids entered first grade we didn’t know English and I do not remember learning about Jesus in German, only praying in German, but those words didn’t mean anything. I do remember having a God-consciousness, a kind of childhood mysticism. At that early age I did not imagine God to be a humanlike person. While knowing nothing about pronouns then, I think I would have preferred the pronoun “It” to “Him” or “Her.” In a non-verbal, inchoate way I understood God to be infinitely beyond...

Even if you don’t agree with Gloria Steinem, this can make you laugh and lead you to re-think some assumptions. It leads me to think: WANTED           Pregnant women at the altar to symbolize creation. If Men Could Menstruate by Gloria Steinem Living in India made me understand that a white minority of the world has spent centuries conning us into thinking a white skin makes people superior, even though the only thing it really does is make them more subject to ultraviolet rays and wrinkles. Reading Freud made me just as skeptical about penis envy. The power of giving birth makes "womb envy" more logical, and an organ as external and unprotected as the penis makes men very vulnerable indeed. But listening recently to a woman describe the unexpected arrival of her menstrual period (a red stain had spread on her dress as she argued heatedly on the public stage) still made me cringe with embarrassment. That is, until she explained that, when fi...