[Oe List ...] 11/14/19, Progressing Spirit, Forrester: The Courage to See; Spong revisited
Ellie Stock
elliestock at aol.com
Thu Nov 14 07:35:43 PST 2019
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!important;line-height:150% !important;} }@media screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv7642291706 #yiv7642291706templateBody .yiv7642291706mcnTextContent, #yiv7642291706 #yiv7642291706templateBody .yiv7642291706mcnTextContent p{ font-size:14px !important;line-height:150% !important;} }@media screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv7642291706 #yiv7642291706templateFooter .yiv7642291706mcnTextContent, #yiv7642291706 #yiv7642291706templateFooter .yiv7642291706mcnTextContent p{ font-size:12px !important;line-height:150% !important;} } What an existential conundrum it is for us human beings as we long for someone to see us for the truth of what we are.
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The Courage to See
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| Essay by Kevin G. Thew Forrester, Ph.D.
November 14, 2019What an existential conundrum it is for us human beings as we long for someone to see us for the truth of what we are, while at the same time fearing to be seen for the truth of what we think we are and that others might perceive. A very tiring dance.
There is the all too resonant story told in 2 Kings of the Hebrews scriptures about an army commander, Naaman, who is suffering from a skin disease the author describes with the ancient catch-all leprosy. He is, we are told, a great man held in high favor. But he is plagued by this deplorable disease visible to all. Naaman travels to the entrance of the prophet Elisha’s house with the hope of being cured. The prophet sends him a messenger with instructions for cleansing.
But Naaman becomes incensed and angry, turning away in a rage. The issue: Doesn’t Elisha know who he is? Can’t he recognize Naaman’s greatness, which is there for all to acknowledge if they simply look? But why feel enraged about being overlooked? Because the issue is the tissue of a deep and searing wound, which even if not visible, festers and enslaves the great man.
There is more than a bit of Naaman in all of us. His condition is our own. We bear a mostly unconscious wound that twists our soul in knots of fear and confuses the longing of our heart, and often we erupt in anger or even rage when we are not taken as the image we project and hold so dear. Yet, we are also terrified of being seen for our truth. As I said, a very tiring dance, and it begins when we are so very young.
Bliss and Wound
To behold a mother cradling her newborn infant as her own heart regulates and settles the breathing of the child, as the two merge into one field of graceful relaxation that is warm and expansive and at complete ease, this union is a wonder of life. A newborn knows her mother’s voice amidst the cacophony of sounds rushing upon her infant ears. Very soon after, this little one’s eyes recognize the countenance of her mom. The mother’s and infant’s eyes behold each other in a river of love that eases into a graceful lake of which both are simply two peaceful waves.
I believe in this experience lies much of the origin of what we call the beatific vision. The divine is self-expressing as two beautiful beings beholding one another: Deep unto Deep. The bliss is boundless. The child’s body completely relaxes, expanding as a sweet pink essence, as her soul is seen as its true nature: she is nothing but the Holy Mystery being embodied here and now. The soul’s deep longing is satisfied, and this complete satisfaction saturates this tiny being. The soul has been kissed from within by her deepest truth and intuitively knows it.
Because the bliss is completely soulfully satisfying, its loss is a searing wound. Sometimes the loss comes at once as a traumatic rupture, but oftentimes it accrues slowly as the sensitive touch of Being upon the soul diminishes to a memory (a memory both alluring and haunting). The toddler between 9 and 14 months, with the newly discovered capacity to first crawl then walk, begins to separate and become an individual on an adventure. The infant’s life, once restricted to a relatively black and white spectrum of ankles and shins and table legs – explodes into the toddler’s technicolor panorama of life’s infinite expressions.
Our Conundrum
She steps out. She stops. She turns. Does mom see what an incredible thing is happening? Does mom see her? She does. The toddler is beside herself with joy. Mom is beholding her magnificence – not only what she is doing but who she is as the one that is doing it. Her being registers the mother’s beholding as a soulful seeing. But then, there inevitably are the times when she turns and mom does not see her. Mom is looking, but not appreciatively present. Mom is elsewhere (and there is no one to blame). Perhaps she is preoccupied with last night, or with tomorrow, or with tensions with her partner. Maybe simply exhausted. And so, the little toddler wonders, unconsciously, what must I do to get her to see me?
This little child becomes someone who learns to perform so that mom will look her way. What surface activity will draw mom’s attention? We learn to act, regardless of how we feel, in such a way that mom, or dad, or whoever the important other is, will notice us, our greatness, our uniqueness, our beauty. But the trap for the soul has been laid – the action no longer reflects who we are, but who we believe we need to be for someone else to look our way and affirm our value. And, we come to believe that we are valued not for who we are, but for how we perform – how we appear. In fact, we become unconsciously terrified that who we are is not valuable enough, not beautiful enough, to be seen. We become afraid of being seen for what we believe is our true nature – something woefully deficient and unworthy of being beheld. We long and we fear what we long for.
I find no better description of this human conundrum, this wounding of the soul, than that of A. H. Almaas in The Point of Existence. This loss of contact with our true nature, with Being, or with what I call the Holy Mystery, is the human narcissistic wound. We lose contact with the truth of who we are, and the result is a wounding hole in our soul which is unbearable. And so, we bandage over the wound, unhealed, with strips of the various identities we take on, identities that have garnered us the attention, the approval, the admiration, of others. The looks of others provide us with an endless supply of bandages. But the wound remains, and it festers without the air of truth to heal it.
Every so often something pushes up hard against it and the pain can be both searing and crushing. We angrily demand to be looked upon and appreciated for all our accomplishments, for they reassure us of our wobbly worth. Like Naaman, we can explode with such hot rage, because we are so hurt. The wound runs deep within and way back to our childhood. What we are longing for, in part, is for someone to see us for the truth of who we are; to show us a way to recover and realize our soul’s vitality; to see through the false bravado of bandages; to behold our beauty undetermined by any accomplishment and untarnished by any failure; to behold us for the truth of who we are. And yet, we are terrified to be seen so naked and vulnerable.
Faith: the Courage to See
Such is the gift Luke’s Jesus offers the lepers in his story of chapter 17. Whereas Naaman’s bandaged persona has enabled him to be looked upon as a great man, these lepers are people stripped bare even of names. They are looked upon as a blatantly raw category. They are a disease that causes dis-ease. No beauty. No value. Eyes look upon the surface only, in order not to see. Their presentation appears both dismal and abhorrent for the onlooker.
Surprisingly perhaps, unlike with Naaman, the story speaks of no anger or rage in these nameless ones. That is because the soulful collapse of these homeless beings is almost total. They have no land, no place, no people. Their infinite soulful depth has been crushed to a scarred dermal surface. They believe that the story about who they are is true. They feel they are nothing.
Until Jesus, the story goes, saw them. Like wobbly toddlers, these human beings take tentative steps, look up and --- Jesus does not look at them. He sees into them. He beholds their beauty. Beauty of the same divine essence as his own, which is why he can see them. There is no gap, no distance. They are of the one Deep and his seeing is an invitation to their souls to awaken to this inherent truth. His gaze is a direct and tender and strong beholding. His seeing is the Christic heart of perception born of the realization of his own unsurpassing beauty as an expression of the Holy Mystery.
To awaken is neither easy nor for the faint of heart. We have lived with our anger, our rage, our collapse, for decades. The bandages may be old and ineffective, but we are used to them and they’ve come to feel like part of us. And so it is, for only one of these human beings does the gaze of Jesus land upon the soul as the Christic kiss of peace. This person, too, begins to see, to behold, their own beauty. There is no performance here to capture a glance. No need to look a certain way in order to receive love. The seeing is the initial realization of self-worth and self-beauty, of authentic selfhood. This is a gracious beginning made possible because Jesus saw them.
Luke’s story ends with Jesus saying, your faith has made you well, which means the courage for ourselves to see into our own soul and discover its inherent and integral and unsurpassing beauty is wholeness making. This is the path of realizing our Christic nature. Faith here is the willingness to trust what we experience, not caring what others think or judge us to be, not caring what we have thought ourselves to be in the past. We move beyond looking, a move made possible because another was present and capable of seeing us as our true nature, regardless of our performance. And, we begin to trust what our Christic soul sees, and she sees unsurpassable beauty as her essence.
~ Kevin G. Thew Forrester, Ph.D.
Read online here
About the Author
Kevin G. Thew Forrester, Ph.D. is an Episcopal priest, a student of the Diamond Approach for over a decade, as well as a certified teacher of the Enneagram in the Narrative Tradition. He is the founder of the Healing Arts Center of St. Paul’s Church in Marquette, Michigan, and the author of five books, including I Have Called You Friends, Holding Beauty in My Soul’s Arms, and My Heart is a Raging Volcano of Love for You and Beyond my Wants, Beyond my Fears: The Soul’s Journey into the Heartland. Visit Kevin’s Blog: Essential Living: For The Soul’s Journey. |
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Question & Answer
Q: By Christina
Why do some progressive Christians seem to ignore what the Bible says on gender, race and sexuality?
A: By Rev. Jacqueline J. Lewis, Ph.D.
Thank you for that question, Christina from New York.
I will declare for myself as a progressive theologian: I believe God is still speaking. Why would God stop revealing herself to us? She wants to be seen, known and loved (the Gospel according to Alice Walker in The Color Purple.) When the canon was closed on scripture, a committee decided on what would be in the Bible and what would not. Yes, they were inspired, those committee folk. Yes, Holy Spirit was hovering close by helping them to hear each other, but, more importantly, to hear God. And they were also human; maybe they put in the Bible what already resided in them. A bible birthed by human hands will inevitably fall short of the Glory of God.
So, I try to bring my full self to my love of God. I listen with heart, soul and mind. I study the historical context of the writing and listen for what was being said or seen in that time. I prayerfully ask, what do these sacred ancient texts say to me now? How are the words script for my life? I cross reference words—what do they mean elsewhere? I don’t ignore the Bible, I love it. But each of us needs to be a critical reader, and a great listener, diving into texts with emotional intelligence. What does this text say to me or about me and my friends? To me? How can I live better?
Most importantly, I ask, what’s love got to do with this text? This theology? I interrogate the Bible through the lens of love. Jesus made that hermeneutic abundantly clear. What’s love got to do with it? Everything!
~ Rev. Jacqueline J. Lewis, Ph.D.
Read and share online here
About the Author
Rev. Jacqueline J. Lewis, Ph.D. is the Senior Minister of Middle Collegiate Church in New York City. She is a nationally acclaimed activist, author, public theologian, and organizer of an anti-racist multicultural movement of love and justice. She has been featured in The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and on The Today Show, CBS, and MSNBC. She write The Power of Stories: A Guide for Leading Multiracial and Multicultural Communities, and also wrote a book with her husband John called The Pentecost Paradigm: Ten Strategies for Becoming a Multiracial Congregation. |
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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
March 2, 2008Where 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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