God Is Not 3 Guys

“When the fruit is ripe, it falls.”   Ralph Waldo Emerson For more than five years I have devoted energy and time to serving Mary Magdalene, First Apostle, a Catholic womanpriest community—writing for it, writing about it, talking about it, promoting it. It has been fulfilling and satisfying. I think women priests are the most effective challenge to the Vatican as it continues its unjust treatment of women. I will continue to promote MMFA and Roman Catholic Womenpriests (RCWP). They have enriched my life and I expect this to continue. MMFA has been a way for me to find out about myself. It has been a good chapter in my life, one that helped to shape me into the person I am. But when the fruit is ripe, it falls. T he time became right for me to leave the community as an active member. While the decision was forming in me, I expected sadness to cloud my days afterward. Instead, relief and excitement bubbled up even before I left the meeting that clinched it. In the...

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...