[Dialogue] 9/26, Progressing Spirit, Oppelt: Jesus: A Mutation of Consciousness - Part 2; Spong revisited: Evolution and Homosexuality: Twin Errors of the Christian Church
Ellie Stock
elliestock at aol.com
Thu Sep 26 08:43:38 PDT 2019
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!important;line-height:150% !important;} }@media screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv0093154852 #yiv0093154852templateBody .yiv0093154852mcnTextContent, #yiv0093154852 #yiv0093154852templateBody .yiv0093154852mcnTextContent p{ font-size:14px !important;line-height:150% !important;} }@media screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv0093154852 #yiv0093154852templateFooter .yiv0093154852mcnTextContent, #yiv0093154852 #yiv0093154852templateFooter .yiv0093154852mcnTextContent p{ font-size:12px !important;line-height:150% !important;} } If we take the Godhead out of Jesus, what are we left with?
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Jesus: A Mutation of Consciousness - Part 2
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| Essay by Joran Slane Oppelt
September 26, 2019
Click here to read Part 1.
For most Christians, the question is, “Can you strip Jesus of his supernatural powers and still achieve salvation through Christ?” If we take the Godhead out of Jesus, what are we left with? Is there some other element that we enter into or move through by knowing him? Other than the transfinite mashup or disruption of spacetime that he represents, is there something else that we encounter or achieve by dedicating our lives to “The Way?”
This is one of the redeeming qualities of religion, the power of faith or belief, and the impact that a community of practice can have on the individual. It obligates the singular to the plural and puts the responsibility on the individual, not only for their own destiny but for one another – socially and politically. It puts the onus on us.
Religion may give us an identity and a box to check, but spiritual community (and real accountability) asks that we play out the actual ideas by which we live. It means that we will resist and rebel against ideas that don’t fit our worldview – a worldview that is constantly dynamic and changing. And, ideally, we will transcend those ideas and give birth to new ways of idea generation.
We become responsible for Creation – ecologically. As we evolve, God evolves with us – biologically and cosmologically. As we know a greater Love, we love greater – ethically and psychologically. Humanism and panentheism are just the beginning of a religious innovation and spiritual evolution that represent the visible (and invisible) multiplicity of form and faith that we experience today.
THE RESURRECTION
“The Resurrection,” wrote Patriarch Athenagoras, “is not the resuscitation of a body; it is the beginning of the transfiguration of the world.”
Jesus’s death and resurrection (like Krishna and Osiris before him) is one of the most argued ideas in Christianity. With no evidence or eyewitness accounts of this miracle, it is tempting to find scientific explanations for Jesus’s anastasis. Regardless of its historicity, by attempting to explain away his resurrection on a physical level, we rob the event of its meaning and its impact.
Mythically, we rob Jesus of his ability to “overcome the world.” The primacy of the resurrection and the days that follow are pivotal in this story. Jesus “lived on” in the hearts and visions of those who knew him. That is where we must still look for him today.
Metaphysically, we rob ourselves of the ability to achieve salvation through Christ. This momentous healing (actualization, forgiveness) can happen once-in-a-lifetime or it can happen daily. We must be able to surrender ourselves and give over all of our pain and suffering and “sin” to Jesus in his ninth and final hour. We must commit ourselves to entering the dark night of the soul – the via negativa – with Jesus at his crucifixion. Because on the other side of that is the via creativa. On the other side of that is something new in ourselves, something resurrected and reborn.
Finally, we rob the women who witnessed the resurrection of their stories. Why were these women the first to see (and hear) Jesus after his death? Why were they chosen? What did they have in common? What is the feminine experience of this witnessing and this resurrection? There is a social and spiritual significance to the shared vision of these women who were the first to enter into the fulfillment of the Kingdom of God. And there’s been enough silencing and robbing of women of their stories throughout history.
If Jesus is a mutation – a leap in consciousness, politics and humanity – then how is that mutation being expressed today? Where are Jesus’s ideas alive? Where is his movement (liberation, radical love, direct connection to the divine) growing and flourishing?
THE FUTURE
As some churches move away from Jesus’s original teaching, and others move ever-Christward, the spiritual direction (and value) of Christianity will always be in question. We do know that it sprang from a Jewish community in the Middle East at a time when people needed to hear this “good news.”
Is this not the same evolutionary leap we see in the emergence of Buddhism from the hierarchical and caste system of Hinduism in its own age and ZIP Code (i.e. awakening to attachment and liberation from suffering)?
Postmodernism has given us ideas like the “Cosmic Christ” or “Universal Christ” that equate the spirit of Jesus to a sense of everywhereness, akin to the Buddhist dharmakaya (ground of being) and the teachings of the Christian Mystics (Aquinas, Eckhart, Hildegard). Perhaps this is to lay the spiritual groundwork for the next unfolding of the fractal in physical space.
The evolution of technology, after all, points to a world filled with cybernetic organisms – half-man, half-machine – perpetually plugged into an “internet of things.” If the future of spirit is everywhere (including this matrix) and Christ is universal, then we will need programs to run on this new spiritual operating system. We will need stories of “superhuman” ability, liberation and transcendence. We will need new moral and ethical systems that include the most truth.
We will need both history and mythology. One is a timeline of facts, agreed upon by scholars and academics. The other is a living library of rich mental archetypes that hold the power to transform simply by us being near them and hearing their story.
We need the square, rigid, steel and concrete forms of institutions (these are how we scale) and we also need the green, mossy stone circles of a self-directed spiritual practice (this is how we transform).
Matter and spirit arise together, co-evolving as both psychic objects and responses to the current reality.
The “liminal” spaces (spaces between worlds) of the 19th century were Earth-based (looking down and in). The dark green hedgerow was where children were warned not to venture. They could fall down a hole into some other realm or be abducted by fairies. The veil between those worlds was thinner at certain times of day (and certain times of the year).
The liminal space of the 20th century, as Carl Jung wrote, was extraterrestrial (looking up and out). What we feared was the darkened sky, the vast and unknown inhabited by strange technology (unidentified, flying silver objects). We feared the backroads and bedrooms where adults might be stolen away by those objects. We feared what this new, alien technology might do to our bodies.
These spaces (what we believe, fear, or are fascinated by as a collective) are a response to our changing world and a hall of mirrors of our own design. The alien technology is here. We use it and wear it every day and it is, indeed, affecting our bodies and minds.
Social media has introduced a new fear for the 21st century – the stranger and the “other” (the individual and the community). As our world becomes more diverse, connected and immediate, we are experiencing a rise in political extremism, nationalism and hate-based violence. As we move toward a global society, more people are willing to lay down their lives to preserve borders and boundaries, as well as their own customs and traditions. They are moved and motivated by fear – the first rung on Maslow’s hierarchy.
The first step to peace is by claiming victory over this fear.
We must go willingly into that hedgerow or night sky, entering into the void of grief and suffering, knowing that after we are submerged, we will be resurrected. We must march into jihad (our internal struggle) knowing that there is a future version of ourselves struggling to be born.
We must allow the virus of the mind to wreak havoc on the collective unconscious. A new multiplicity of forms (and faith) is straining inside the cocoon, waiting to unfold.
The question is not, “How might I identify as a Christian or an Atheist or a Buddhist?”
The question becomes, “How might I live and embody The Way – whether it’s through the Kingdom of God movement, the eight limbs of yoga, The Four Agreements, the Four-Fold Path, non-violent communication, the Tao, the Torah or psychedelics?”
Are you walking confidently into joy, reverently toward mystery, mindfully with creation and faithfully following justice?
What is the one transcendental idea that you are contributing to the future mutation of consciousness? What is the new idea that you will birth and bear and invite us to live inside of together?
~ Joran Slane Oppelt
Read online here
About the Author
Joran Slane Oppelt is an international speaker, author, interfaith minister and award-winning producer and singer/songwriter. He is the owner and founder of the Metta Center of St. Petersburg and Integral Church – an interfaith and interspiritual organization in Tampa Bay. Joran is the author of Integral Church: A Handbook for New Spiritual Communities, Sentences, The Mountain and the Snow and co-author of Order of the Sacred Earth (with Matthew Fox) and Transform Your Life: Expert Advice, Practical Tools, and Personal Stories. He currently serves on the board of Creation Spirituality Communities and has spoken around the world about spirituality and the innovation of religion. |
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Question & Answer
Q: By Brian
This is about prayer. As a Buddhist (40 years), I would practice an oral meditation every morning and evening. It was, as one writer mentioned, a kind of physical workout – using the voice while sitting bolt upright facing a mandala.
Although I’m now trying to be a Christian, I would like to be able to do something to bring myself closer to our Lord, other than sitting still while trying to keep invasive thoughts from disturbing my prayer session.
What could you suggest? I’m a case requiring a lot of work (a long story) – if you understand what I mean. I just want to have God’s mercy and feel him with me in my struggle to express that mercy in all what I do.
A: By Jennifer Berit & Skylar Wilson
Dear Brian,Thank you for your question. I'd like to respond to your question about prayer, but first I want to address something else you said that caught my attention. You said that you have been a Buddhist for 40 years and now you are "trying" to be a Christian. What I'm most interested in is your use of the article "a" here. Being "a" Christian seems like such a final, permanent and immovable thing to be. I am afraid it means you are putting yourself, or trying to, into a box - the box of what it means to be "a Christian" and therefore you could be limiting all of the other many ways that Spirit could be wanting to express through you. Perhaps this is what is happening with your prayer practice, and why you are finding it difficult?
I don't believe that being Christian, or being Buddhist, or praying needs to be any one thing, or looks a certain way. Mary Oliver says "I don't know exactly what a prayer is. But I do know how to pay attention." If sitting silently, letting your thoughts get the best of you doesn't feel like praying, then maybe for you it is not. Maybe for you praying is chanting, or singing? Maybe it is walking through the woods and noticing the way the light hits the treetops, or paying attention to the ant crawling across your toe. Maybe sometimes praying is simply tuning into your heart and feeling the simple desire to connect with the Great Mystery? Maybe that desire is God speaking to you, telling you "I am here." I wonder if accepting yourself and your own spiritual process is God's mercy acting through you? You say you require a lot of work - I believe you are doing the best kind of work, continuing to quest for a deeper connection with your unique sense of the Divine. ~ Jennifer Berit and Skylar Wilson
Read and share online here
About the Authors
Jennifer Berit is the co-author of Order of the Sacred Earth: An Intergenerational Vision of Love and Action and works in book publishing as a private consultant for authors assisting with manuscript editing and book publicity. She is also the co-director of Wild Awakenings, an adult Rites of Passage organization dedicated to fostering the thriving of Earth, life, and humanity. Jennifer was on the Board of Trustees at the Unity in Marin Spiritual Community for three years, serving as the Board President for 18 months. Also at Unity in Marin, Jennifer was a guest speaker for Sunday mornings, she led Rites of Passage groups for teenagers, and founded a young adult interfaith group committed to conscious connection, community service, and social activism. She is a passionate hiker, reader, writer, and public speaker.
Skylar Wilson, MA is the founder of Wild Awakenings, a conscious community of change-makers dedicated to the thriving of Earth, life, and humanity. He has led wilderness rites of passage journeys as well as ecological restoration teams for 18 years, specializing in creating sacred wilderness immersion experiences and interfaith ceremonies. Skylar is the cofounder and co-director of the Order of the Sacred Earth, a network of mystic warriors and activists dedicated to being the best lovers and defenders of the Earth that we can be. Skylar is the coauthor of the book by the same title as well as the co-host, with Jennifer Berit, of the podcast: "Our Sacred Earth" on Unity online radio. Skylar works closely with schools and organizations including the Stepping Stones Project in Berkeley, CA over the last 8 years while guiding organization-wide retreats, mentoring youth, group leaders, parents and elders. He also produces transformational events for thousands of people around the country including the Cosmic Mass, an intercultural healing ritual that builds community through dancing and the arts. He lives in Sebastopol, CA with his wife, son, two affectionate cats and a white wolf named Luna. |
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Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited
Evolution and Homosexuality:
The Twin Terrors of the Christian Church
Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong
Mary 28, 2008
Where is it that Christian people today focus their anger? One has only to look at the content of current ecclesiastical debates, listen to the rhetoric of church leaders or examine the issues upon which the church divides into two competing camps to have your answer. The two things that elicit the most fear, that bring the deepest threat to Christian people, are evolution and homosexuality.
First, look at the data regarding evolution. The ink was not dry on Charles Darwin’s book The Origin of the Species before the Christian Church mounted a counterattack. It came in the person of Samuel Wilberforce, the Anglican Bishop of Oxford, who challenged a Darwin spokesperson, Thomas Huxley, to a debate, held at the Oxford Museum of Natural History. The record of that debate, however, reveals that Wilberforce engaged in the tactics of ridicule. Unable to deal with the message, he attacked the messenger. From that day to this the English speaking world has been increasingly aware of Darwin, while Wilberforce has long been forgotten. That is what happens to losers.
Between 1910 and 1915 Darwin’s thought began to trickle down to Middle America, giving birth to a new attack. This time it was evangelicals associated with Princeton Theological Seminary, who felt compelled to counter evolution in the name of “true” religion. They began a world wide assault on Darwin by publishing weekly tracts that went to hundreds of thousands of religious leaders across the world making their case for biblical literalism and its anti-Darwinian bias.
Two things were noteworthy about this early 20th century effort. First, these evangelicals called their tracts “The Fundamentals,” thus giving that word its birth as the name of literalistic Christianity. Second, this effort was funded by a massive grant from the Universal Oil Company of California, or Unocal. It would not be the last time in American history when oil money would unite with right wing religion to achieve a political agenda.
Next came the Scopes Trial in 1925 in Dayton, Tennessee, that pitted Clarence Darrow against William Jennings Bryan, riveting the nation’s attention to a battle described as pitting Satan and evolution against God and the Bible. John Scopes was found guilty of teaching something “contrary to the revealed word of God in Scripture” in the public schools of Tennessee. He was fined $100, a fine that was never paid. The primary effect of this trial was to cause evolution to be discussed around American dinner tables across the land.
Then came the evangelical effort to get “Creation Science,” later repackaged and perfumed as “Intelligent Design,” taught by command of State Legislatures as an alternative to what they called the “Theory” of Evolution. Massive money was poured into this effort, but it also failed when these state laws were struck down as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court on which seven of the nine sitting judges were the appointees of conservative Republican presidents. There can be no doubt that Christian leaders felt and feel threatened by Darwinism.
The second threat felt in the church today is over homosexuality. In every church throughout the nation a debate rages that is so intense that churches are literally splitting apart. International Anglican leaders have sacrificed their moral competence and their credibility by suggesting that “church unity” is more important than confronting ignorance and prejudice. The Vatican consistently issues statements calling homosexuals “deviant” and refusing to support ordinances at every political level requiring homosexuals to be treated equally in areas of employment and benefits.
Roman Catholic rhetoric has attempted to defend that church against child abuse by blaming it on “a few homosexual priests,” as if pedophilia were the same as homosexuality. Benedict XVI’s first act as pontiff was to announce a purge of homosexuals from the priesthood. After the priestly abuse scandal faded a bit from the news, this order was modified to keep “aggressive homosexuals” from “entering” the priesthood, a tacit admission that if homosexual clergy were to be removed from the church, the number of priests, bishops and cardinals, already in short supply, would be diminished to unsustainable levels.
Evolution and homosexuality are clearly the twin terrors that grip Christian emotions negatively today. I believe these two fears are more deeply related than most imagine. Darwin’s threat to Christianity went far beyond the perceived assault on the accuracy of the seven day creation story, which was the focus of the first Christian attack. The real threat lay elsewhere. Darwin had challenged the fundamental Christian understanding of both human life and salvation in so profound a way that he could not be ignored. If Darwin was correct, Christianity was wrong. Christianity talked of a God who had created a perfect and finished world. Darwin spoke of an ongoing creative process, continuous evolution, and a universe still expanding. Christianity defined human life as “just a little lower than the angels.” Darwin saw human life as arising out of a four plus billion year process involving a tooth and claw struggle until we achieved the status of being defined as “just a little higher than the apes.” Christianity said human life began in perfection, but soon fell into sin by disobeying God’s command, which resulted in our alienation from God.
This loss of perfection was called “Original Sin,” from which we were told that we could never extricate ourselves. Only an invasive act on the part of a supernatural deity could rescue us from our brokenness. Jesus was that divine rescuer. He was referred to as the savior of the sinful, the redeemer of the lost, and the rescuer of the helpless.
Darwin’s thought countered this idea. Life for Darwin had never been perfect so it could not have fallen, which of course means that it also could not be restored to a status it had never possessed. Original sin was thus out, the depravity of human life was out and the necessity for divine rescue was out. Human evil did not emerge from the fall, said Darwin, it was a product of our evolutionary history, an expression of the fact that we are still struggling to achieve full humanity. God’s act in Jesus could not be for the purpose of rescuing the fallen. Thus Darwin challenged the basis on which the Christian religion was understood and proclaimed.
Only by convincing human beings of their fallen, sinful states could the church’s message of divine rescue be possible. In the theology, liturgies and hymns of the church the sense of sin and depravity was drilled into the human consciousness. No Christian was allowed to escape the chronic sense of unworthiness. Throughout history the Church has trafficked in guilt, the gift, we note, “that keeps on giving.” Christian theology begins not with the love of God, but with human sin and its fall. When we sing of God’s amazing grace, we discover it is amazing only because it saves a “wretch” like you and me. Our liturgies pronounce us “miserable offenders,” people in whom there is “no health” or wholeness, those not worthy to gather up the crumbs from the divine table. Worshippers are made to say “Have mercy on me” constantly. The church has told babies that they were “born in sin” and thus must be baptized lest they perish, and that as adults that they can do nothing good without God. It is a debilitating message and it comes at us from every corner of church life. Protestants are told that “Jesus died for your sins;” Catholics are told that the mass reenacts the sacrifice that Jesus made for their sinfulness. Both are little more than guilt messages. One sometimes wonders how congregations absorb this negativity so passively or why it has any appeal.
>From the insights of psychiatry we now know the powerful truth that people who are abused, hurt and violated tend to become those who abuse, hurt and violate. It should not surprise us, therefore, to find in Christian history a pattern of constant and consistent victimization. Victimized people must always have a victim onto whom their defined negativity can be transferred. That is why the Christian Church throughout its history has always had a “designated victim” who could be publicly persecuted, someone to absorb the self hatred that this understanding of God forced us to bear. First it was the Jews and we Christians made anti-Semitism a shameful fact of history. Then it was the heretics whom we burned at the stake with clear consciences. Then it was the scientists who keep whittling away at our certainty. Next, in rapid succession, it was people of color whom Christians enslaved, segregated, dehumanized and isolated; then it was women who were forced to accept second class status; and finally, it was the homosexual persons, who became the newest victims of our guilt-laden religion. Our definition of homosexuality as “a deviant, immoral and evil lifestyle” justified our hostility. Darwin’s ideas threatened this strange, hostile theology on which the Christian Church built its power. Homosexual prejudice is thus only the newest battleground on which the church seeks to preserve its view of life and to justify its continued negativity toward its human victims. It is no wonder that resisting Darwin and repressing homosexuality elicits both the energy and the anger that it does in Christian circles today.
What is really going on underneath the church’s attempt to defeat evolution and to repress homosexual persons is a struggle between a dying theology, based on false premises and manifesting itself in centuries of abuse, and a new, human, celebratory theology that is struggling to be born. In this new theology the call of the Christ figure is not to rescue the sinner so that the sinner can become the abuser of others; it is rather to empower us to become so fully human that we do not need a victim to victimize, but can become a new humanity, people who are not struggling to survive, but who are capable of giving our life and love away. A fully human Jesus, a new way besides sacrifice to view the cross and a new meaning to be found in the earliest Christian creed that in Jesus God has been engaged will be the hallmarks of this new theology. It is time for the Christian Church to make this shift in a conscious way.~ John Shelby Spong |
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