[Dialogue] 4/15/2021, Progressing Spirit, Rev. Fran Pratt, Easter People; Spong revisited

[Ellie Stock]

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Easter People
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|  Essay by Rev. Fran Pratt
April 15, 2021
This past Lent I practiced lying fallow. I avoided news and social media. I wrote all my Lenten liturgies ahead of time. I gave myself permission to do the bare minimum of work (I’m a pastor and parent, so this part was flexible). I imagined myself as a field, unplanted in a year of Jubilee. I imagined myself as a seed, waiting for Spring, gathering resources for my eventual sprouting. I imagined myself as a caterpillar cocooned, transforming in silence and stillness. 
 
I rested in ways I don’t remember having done in my life before. And I’ve emerged from this period with a new knowing: I don’t want to go back to the way things were before. I want this unhurried ease and unworried calm as my home-base way of being. “Unhurried and unworried” is one of my mantras for 2021. This is my intention for my life. 
 
I acknowledge that is it a privilege to even consider wanting an unhurried and unworried life. I believe it’s a gift and privilege any time we are able to move away from productivity/grind culture. But also that we collectively have a responsibility to move away from it, which is another conversation. Anyway, I am in gratitude for the opportunity.
 
As I’ve contemplated the rhythms of Lent moving into Easter, new layers of insight have come to me. Lent is an invitation into penitence; and my own definition of penitence has shifted. I’ve come to understand it, not as a practice of self-punishment, but as a practice of self-examination and shadow work. I define penitence as a posture of willingness to go into shadow and address what is there. In this way, Lent is a powerful guardrail against spiritual bypassing. 
 
Lent culminates in Good Friday and Holy Saturday, in which Christ resides entombed. During which his followers weep and mourn. Until. What looks like silence and stillness turns out to be a cocoon of transformation! What looks like death turns out to be life! 
 
So, because we know the whole story, we can hold this tension of observing what is, what broken systems and paradigms exist, what patterns of harm, what false beliefs, working to uncover and dismantle them; even as we do not give them our fullest attention. Even as our consciousness is drawn to the grander story of a good and loving Creator who is able to transmute every death and every agony into beauty, hope, joy. And so are we. 
 
I am willing to do this work, which often involves digging deep to unearth these old patterns and paradigms of thought and behavior that no longer serve me or the collective; which often involves authentic lament and grief. But I don’t want to live in Lent, or in shadow work, or in grief, in perpetuity. Lent is not my ultimate reality.
 
The reason for this is: I am an Easter person. I integrate the lessons of Lent, and I willingly go into the practices of Lent; but in the end I choose to live inside the energy of Easter. I take Christ up on the invitation to live with him in this energy of resurrection, of new life, of abundance, of joy, of peace.
 
I observe strong scriptural and historical precedent for this attitude (which is, again, another conversation). But I admit that I and the white evangelical faith tradition that raised me got this wrong again and again, in large part by its unwillingness to embrace a theology of liberation. Instead of preaching liberation and jubilee as so many faith communities of Color have rightly led the way in, white evangelicalism preached purity culture, exclusion, patriarchy, and white supremacy; and is now reaping the reward of irrelevance. 
 
Still, though, I feel the echoes of that Puritan pessimism in the more progressive circles I run in today. We don’t preach hellfire and damnation anymore, but we are often weary and jaded anyway. Constant “resisting,” constant attention to social media, social problems and very real injustice leaves us hopeless and embittered. Of course it does.
 
But here’s the question that plagues me as I look around at the world. If we, followers of the one we call the Christ, truly believe that Christ completed the work of Easter, and we believe that work completed cycles of suffering, punishment, sacrifice, shame, and debt; then why do we still acquiesce to structures of suffering, punishment, sacrifice, shame, and debt? Why do we still choose to live inside those structures? Why do we not claim our God-given power to imagine and build a better, more joyful, more easeful, more equitable, more abundant way forward?
 
Ok, I know why: because we (I, too often) more readily believe in the reality our senses perceive than we do the reality of Heaven on Earth. In that case, what are we fooling with Christianity for? If Heaven on Earth, the Kin(g)dom of God, the Community of Heaven is just a pipe-dream, then why pay attention to Jesus at all? 
 
If Jesus’ vision for the world is a pipe-dream, then I may as well become a secular humanist social justice warrior. Which is a fine thing to be - I love y’all - it just isn’t what I am. I am a follower of a spiritual teacher whose main claims to fame are non-violence, forgiveness, and RESURRECTION; and I believe hope, peace, and joy are our birthrights.
 
Surely, SURELY there is a way to be both realistic and engaged with the world without spiritual bypassing (Lent), AND keep hold of joy, peace, and (dare I mention it) happiness (Easter). 
 
If we are Christ followers even in the broadest sense, then I think the invitation is for us to be Easter people. Here are some characteristics of Easter People as I imagine us:
   
   - We are dedicated to gratitude and harness its transformative power. 
   - We spend time imagining the Heaven-on-Earth world and working to build that reality out. 
   - We regularly rest from our labors and take intentional breaks for renewal. 
   - We value creativity and seek to foster it everywhere. 
   - We value the earth, resolutely practice earth-care, and seek to live lightly here.
   - We learn to live in the Now, in the present moment - learning from the past but not clinging to it.
   - We listen to our intuition, and to the Spirit within us. 
   - We choose non-hierarchal organizational arrangements, knowing that the future is communal.
   - We make plenty of space for joy, pleasure, enjoyment, and heart-level good cheer. 
   - We attend to the needs of the societally marginalized, not out of pity but out of excitement to learn what these voices have to teach and to witness their thriving. 
   - We support one another’s individual soul and spiritual journeys, celebrating uniqueness and diversity of path and experience. 
   - We learn to observe our egos, and to laugh at their antics. 
   - We savor our sense of humor. 
   - We give preference to the least-privileged out of our steadfast faith in abundance.
   - We value contemplation over knee-jerk reaction. 
   - We live in a posture of trusting expectation that goodness and mercy will follow us all the days of our lives. 
   - We understand that each human is traveling their path to the best of their ability, therefore we have no need of cultish or controlling cultures.
   - We know that there’s “nothing to prove and nothing to defend.”
   - We value integrated, sustainable systems and know that exploitation and over-consumption are part of the old ways. 
   - We consider imperfection a gift.
   - We regard privilege as an opportunity to share and raise others up.

 
You could probably list some of your own. I put these imaginations out into the universe with great hope and love. I put my energy and intention behind them. And I strive (even imperfectly) to align my actions and use of resources with my words. In these ways, being an Easter Person means I speak of myself in terms of what I am for, rather than by what I might be working against. In fact, it’s not my intention to push or struggle against anything; rather, I intend to simply go the way my heart and the Spirit of God pull me - into Heaven-on-Earth reality. 
 
I’m done with practicing pessimistic religion even as I’m holding it accountable. I can look at the news or social media to find plenty of duality, struggle, anxiety, anger, and death-consciousness. I’m not looking for an escape hatch from these aspects of reality - I’m looking for a fulcrum of transformation. And I’ve discovered that fulcrum inside my own self, my own mind, by way of the Divinity that indwells me and by way of my capacity to use my free will to shift my focus. 
 
I’m captivated by the story of Christ because of its beauty, winsomeness, imagination, transformative power, and creative hum. I’m taking in Saint Paul’s words freshly: “...[Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things” (Philippians 4:8, NRSV).
 
An old version of myself (or a younger version, as it were) often dismissed these words as spiritual bypassing, and often experienced and observed the harmful effects of that bypassing within my ancestral faith tradition. My younger self rightly perceived systemic harm going unaddressed and was (and is still) grieved by it, and believed that she had no choice but to live in that perpetually grieved and disempowered state.  
 
But the Now-me is able to approach these words - Easter words - from a more mystical perspective. I can see now how powerful and radical these words were and are, and what serious spiritual work they point to. 
 
And this is why I permit myself to daydream about Easter People - what are we? What are we working toward? What are we focusing on? What true, honorable, just, pure, pleasing, commendable, and excellent aims are we working toward? What joy and laughter are we experiencing? Whose wise voices are we listening to? 
 
This Easter season how will we live? Will we look around at the Good Friday happenings all around us and choose those as our primary reality? Or will we look ahead into the Resurrection before us - whose shoots are springing up and may take a practiced eye to find - and live there, as Easter people? There is no right answer for you in your particular season of life, but I believe we each are given the choice. 

~ Rev. Fran Pratt


Read online here

About the Author
Rev. Fran Pratt is a pastor, writer, musician, and mystic. Making meaningful and beautiful liturgy to be spoken, practiced, and sung, is at the heart of her creative drive. Fran authored a book of congregational litanies, and regularly creates and shares modern liturgy on her website and Patreon. Her prayers are prayed in churches of various sizes and traditions across the globe. She writes, speaks, and consults on melding ancient and new liturgical streams in faith and worship. Fran is Pastor of Worship and Liturgy at Peace of Christ Church in Round Rock, Texas.
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Question & Answer

 

Q: By Ron

I wonder if fiddling around on the periphery on the issues of gay and lesbian rights can ever yield what the Church lacks: a compelling vision which, if received and fulfilled, would improve humanity as a whole. Christianity has no unique truth and its claims, like those of all various religions, is that it must rest upon a "Thus saith the Lord.”


A: By Rev. Irene Monroe
 
Dear Ron, Churches must open their front doors to LGBTQ+ worshippers, or else these churches will continue to treat us as second class.  

Here are a few examples:

Last week, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican's orthodoxy office, issued a formal statement instructing its priests not to offer blessings for same-sex couples. The church's reason: God cannot bless sin. The Catholic Church still excludes the LGBTQ+ community from officially receiving any sacraments.  With COVID-19 death rates hitting the LGBTQ+ community around the world especially hard, one would hope the church could put aside its homophobia.

For decades there has been an ongoing struggle in the United Methodist Church (UMC) to adopt a policy of full inclusion of its LGBTQ parishioners and clergy and all the spiritual gifts we bring to the church.  In the hopes of avoiding a schism, the Council of Bishops had recommended the One Church Plan that would grant individual ministers and regional church bodies the decision to ordain  LGBTQs as clergy and to perform LGBTQ weddings. It was believed that such a decision on a church-by-church and regional basis would reflect the diversity as well as affirm the different churches and cultures throughout the global body of UMC. 

UMC's decision to oppose same-sex marriage and the ordination of LGBTQ clergy is both wrong-headed and wrong-hearted.  However, as LGBTQ people, we must know that this religious intolerance and spiritual abuse are antithetical to the social gospel of Jesus Christ: that all people under God have the same sacred worth — even if the United Methodist Church doesn't practice it. Were it not for the pandemic, a church schism would have ensued. 

Pastor Franklin Graham's anti-LGBTQ nonprofit organization, Samaritan's Purse, operated a tent hospital in NYC's Central Park to help with the coronavirus pandemic.  Graham said his organization wouldn't discriminate against the LGBTQ+ community in need. A gay man says they refused him. 

The Black church applauds its LGBTQ congregants in the choir pews yet excoriates us from the pulpits. It pimps our talent yet damns our souls with the theological qualifier of "love the sinner but hate the sin." Our connections and contributions to the larger black religious cosmos are desecrated every time homophobic pronouncements go unchecked in these holy places of worship. However, our pull to gospel music is seen as a calling, a distinctive gift to the church, and an expression of queer pain and hardship

What all these churches miss  is the universal message that "love is love." However, if these churches don't understand anything else about LGBTQ+ Christians, it needs to understand this: Gay people love Jesus just as much as straight people. Our love should be acknowledged, our unions blessed, and our gift welcomed.  

~ Rev. Irene Monroe

Read and share online here

About the Author
The Reverend Monroe does a weekly Monday segment, “All Revved Up!” on NPR's WGBH (89.7 FM). She is a weekly Friday commentator on New England Channel NEWS. Monroe is the Boston voice for Detour’s African American Heritage Trail, Guided Walking Tour of Beacon Hill: Boston’s Black Women Abolitionists. A Huffington Post blogger and a syndicated religion columnist; her columns appear the Boston LGBTQ newspaper Baywindows, Cambridge Chronicle, and the Boston Globe.

Monroe states that her “columns are an interdisciplinary approach drawing on critical race theory, African American, queer and religious studies. As a religion columnist I try to inform the public of the role religion plays in discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people." Her papers are at the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe College’s research library on the history of women in America. Click here to visit her website.
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Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited


China Revisited, Part II

Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong
September 16, 2010
Visiting modern China during the summer of 2010 was a transforming, enlightening and even a fearful experience for me. I had not been to China in 22 years.

Our journey began in Shanghai, China’s second largest city with 20 million citizens. Embracing the size of China’s cities was the first surprise. Chongqing, known as Chungking during World War II, is the world’s largest city with 30 million people and covers an area almost as large as Austria. The Chinese do not call a city of ten million a major city. They described a city of 600,000 people as a “small town,” despite the fact that it was the size of Cleveland, Ohio.

The airport at Shanghai was clean, modern and efficient. As we walked through customs, each passenger was asked to vote on how politely the customs officials had treated him or her. The city itself was magnificent, modern and beautiful; lit up at night with lights shaped like flowers shining from every tree in the downtown area. Like every Chinese city we visited, there was massive building activity. The urban skylines were marked with numerous cranes as high rises seemed to grow like magic to house China’s burgeoning businesses in modern office complexes and its population in modern apartments and condominiums. I was seeing the effects of the economic miracle that is today modern China. This year is an off year for the Chinese economy. It is projected to grow by only 10.3% as opposed to 11.9% in 2009! Three years ago, China replaced Japan as the world’s second largest economy behind only the USA. Japan is now third with Germany fourth and the United Kingdom fifth. Other than China, the world’s other economies, including that of the United States, are today stagnant with hope for a 2% growth topping their expectations. While we were in China, the Chinese press announced that China had passed the United States as the nation with the highest annual consumption of energy.

How did this transformation happen? How widespread was it? Were the people living in the Chinese countryside flourishing as well as the urban dwellers? What was or is the human cost to this economic miracle? Is China still a Communist country? These were my questions as our journey took us to cities like Jingzhou, Wuhan, Fengdu, Xian and Beijing. During this trip I watched a Chinese-produced documentary on the Communist revolution and its leader Mao Zedong that was, surprisingly to me, anything but flattering. While giving Mao credit for the Communist victory, it portrayed him as an uncultured peasant leader who never bathed or brushed his teeth and who had a voracious appetite for young women, many of whom he apparently infected with venereal diseases. Talking to many Chinese people revealed that this documentary was not unusual. Mao is still a revered figure as the father of the revolution, but Chinese people today almost universally recognize his limitations. The hero of the economic miracle that marks modern China is not Mao, but Deng Xiaoping, who was Mao’s bitter political enemy, purged twice, but returned three times by the party. Deng Xiaoping ultimately succeeded Mao in power and introduced what came to be called “market forces.” In a telling comment, one lecturer observed that, if it had not been for Deng Xiaoping succeeding Mao, “China today would look like North Korea.” Mao’s major economic initiative, called “the Great Leap Forward (1958-1961),” was a disastrous failure.

Between my visit in 1988 and my return in 2010, however, a very great leap forward had occurred. China is not today the country I saw 22 years ago. In the last two decades, enormous wealth has been created and more than anywhere I have seen in the world that wealth is being invested in the well being of the masses of Chinese people. This is not to say that there is not still massive bureaucratic corruption and a rampant violation of human rights, but it is to assert that most Chinese peasants are better off today than they ever dreamed they would be.

This country is still a dictatorship. Most of us in the West would not tolerate this government’s tactics, but the results are nonetheless impressive. The rise in China’s standard of living has been massive; the confidence expressed in the future on the part of the common people was high and I detected almost no organized negativity toward the government.

Two things were apparently responsible for this, neither of which I believe America would tolerate, but both of which define the new China for me. First, by law, they have curbed their spiraling population growth. It has been the policy of this government for about 20 years to allow only one child to be born per family. This policy is enforced by huge fines, including loss of home and assets that could reduce a violating family to poverty, plus freely dispensed birth control and free access to abortion when birth control fails. The results are successful, and the growth of the Chinese population has stabilized at about 1.3 billion people. There are exceptions to the rule, but they are rare and generally rest on specific human situations. This policy now seems fully established and is generally not contested. The tactics used to achieve this population control may offend many in the Western world, but it is working and every developed nation will someday have to address its own overpopulation problem. Ultimately, genocide is the only alternative to population control. There are clearly some consequences to this policy and China is facing them today. The cultural desire for a boy in preference to a girl has caused many girl children to be put up for adoption, abandoned or “accidentally” killed. The male to female birth rate in China is now 120 boys to 100 girls, a statistic that promises much instability in the future when some 10 million males will not be able to find wives in China. On the positive side, however, the shortage of girls has begun to raise the value of females in Chinese society and the prejudice against girls is being publicly addressed.

Second, the major principle on which the Chinese government operates is that individual desires and freedoms must always be secondary to the well being of the whole society. Only a dictatorship can follow this principle in a thorough way. If the people are served well enough, however, the individuals will find their basic needs met, and this mutes the negativity significantly. The Chinese government pursues this principle relentlessly. For example, the government built a massive and efficient public transportation system long before it allowed automobiles to become widely available. Then they subsidized the system to make it inexpensive to use. In Beijing, for example, one can go by train to any part of the vast metropolitan area of 18 million people for a fare of one to two US dollars.

The government has also demolished whole cities. We met a 27-year-old man in Xian who told us that in his childhood just 15 years ago, the paths between the densely populated houses in his neighborhood could only accommodate two people walking abreast, making the possibility of escape from a fire almost nonexistent. There was one roofless public toilet for every 20 families, and only two public bath houses serving the whole community, he said. Today, all of this housing has been demolished and its inhabitants moved into high-rise apartments, all of which have indoor toilets, cooking facilities, air conditioning and running water. This transition was government-ordered and the desires of individuals were not considered. It caused great dislocation, particularly among the older people and home owners who in many cases lost their equity, but we met no one who wanted to go back to the past. The wealth of this nation is being used for the benefit of the people, even if it is based on the principle that “big brother knows best.” The result is that the standard of living for the average citizen is soaring. One almost sees a new nation emerging. Everything is gleaming, modern and functional. There is still in China a yearning for personal freedom, but this lack is more than countered, for the time being at least, by the new China that is emerging. Pragmatic communism has replaced ideological communism. In fact, one could seriously question whether communism is still alive in China. It looks to me much more like a state-run and state-controlled capitalist system.

Democracy, as we know it, is simply not present in China, but the gap between the rich and the poor has been significantly diminished. Yes, there are people in China of enormous wealth, and there are also exploited workers, but, on the whole, the people appear to have bought into the idea that their individual well being depends on the well being of the whole people. The rich do not rail against the government for funds spent on the poor for housing, health care, transportation and dignity. It was also clear to me that the United States and the People’s Republic of China are the only dominant economic powers in the world today. How the economic competition develops between the two will, I believe, determine our long range peace.

The Chinese people seemed happy, proud and largely content with their lives. Ninety percent of the Chinese population lives well today — or at least better than they did 20 years ago. China is today a material and technological success story like none the world has ever seen before in so short a time. China has proven that communism can bring about a major positive shift in the standard of living of the whole population.

While I returned home admiring what I had seen of China’s material success, I was still troubled by the fact that I do not believe that any people can live “by bread alone,” no matter how impressive that material splendor is. The battle for economic success is won, but what has happened to the soul of the Chinese people? As Western society focuses more and more on materialistic success, I wonder what has happened to the soul of the people in the West. Perhaps we need to look at that question next as I conclude this series on China.

~  John Shelby Spong
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Announcements
 
Meaning, Purpose & Hope in Chaotic Times
 On Saturday, April 17, Marianne Williamson will guide us through the transition that is currently underway as one world disintegrates and another emerges. In Meaning, Purpose & Hope in Chaotic Times, Marianne will lead us to a deeper, and much greater spiritual engagement as we tap into our own strength, insight, and energy force.  READ ON ...  |

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