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Celebrating the Curious Christ Soul
Essay by Kevin G. Thew Forrester, Ph.D.
June 14, 2018
When you come to know yourselves, then you will be known,
and you will realize that you are the children of the Living Father.
If, however, you do not come to know yourselves,
then you dwell in poverty and you are the poverty.
Gospel of Thomas
[Bodhidharma] was uncompromising in that he wanted to know what was true,
and he wasn’t going to take anybody else’s word for it.
His big discovery was that by looking directly into our own heart,
we find the awakened Buddha,
the completely unclouded experience of how things are.
Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart
I am the vine. . .
Gospel of John
You are no longer a Christian but Christ.
Gospel of Philip
Not long ago I was at the department of motor vehicles to get the tags for my motorcycle. As I sat in the chair, with my little numbered paper stub in hand, I noticed out of the corner of my left eye a broad-shouldered person sit down a row behind me. Shoulder length hair, lovely black pant suit with purple and mauve accents, my sense was that she was a transgendered woman. Here we sat in this common public space, in a relatively small and rural midwestern town, early in the morning, needing to transact our personal business.
My number was called, but I was informed I needed to have my insurance company fax a document. I left the counter to make my call and request. Upon my return, beside me with another attendant was the woman in the striking pant suit. There is not much privacy standing in close quarters at the counter, and so I became aware that she was seeking to have the gender of her driver’s license changed. I became very curious, as well as concerned. How would this play out? How would the female attendant respond? How safe was this woman? She had no idea when she had walked into the waiting area a few minutes earlier how she would be seen (if she would be seen) and received (or would it be ridicule and rejection)?
I search for words to describe the interaction, but it was simply ordinary – humane and human. A public servant was helping a citizen change the gender of her driver’s license so that it might reflect who she knew herself to be. Such a simple and straightforward interaction, and yet nothing about their conversation in that public space, in which the woman was utterly vulnerable and at the mercy of the many she did not know, was simple or straightforward.
I wonder now what this woman’s journey has been thus far. In viticulture for a vine to take root and flourish and produce luscious and juicy fruit requires intense and focused and sustained (we could say, uncompromising) labor. Threats to the vine’s health take various forms – from molds to pests to weather to ignorance. Without the wise cultivator, a healthy vine can wither or be mistakenly pruned and killed.
When we are young, our families and various communities are supposed to be present in a way that nurtures our growth. To play with the Gospel of John’s metaphor, they are to guide the planting of our soul in rich and loamy soil, watered with the tears of joy and sorrow and loss and hope, so that we might take root and flourish. So that the juices of our soul flow freely and fully. So that we come to enjoy and relish and trust the unfoldment of our soul as sacred and beautiful. We are to be tended so that we ourselves – in all our uniqueness – become the precious fruit.
Who nurtured this woman as a child? Who encouraged her to attend to her mysterious emerging life? When did her curiosity arise as to whom she liked, to whom she was drawn, whom she loved? When had she first realized the disparity between her genitalia, the culturally expected gender roles laid upon her, and her own soul’s longings? At what point, like Bodhidharma, had she begun to become uncompromising in wanting to know what was true about her soul and not take anyone else’s word for it? When had she begun to realize she was an irreplaceable vine, a Christ coursing with vitality? When had she begun to awaken to the truth that being the poverty of ignorance would be no life?
As Pema Chödrön so poignantly writes, when did she trust herself enough to begin to look directly into her own heart and become her own mother and father to her own birth as a beautiful woman who could one day walk clearly and crisply into the public space of a small, rural, midwestern town, and casually and confidently ask that the gender of her driver’s license be changed?
Curiosity. I clearly have no idea when her awakening began to unfold. Yet I was the recipient of her graceful presence. I was witness to the fruit of her unfoldment – unmistakably bold and bright. But the unfoldment began years before with curiosity within her soul to come to know the truth about her own experience of herself. Might we speak of some kind of uncompromising curiosity to discover the source of her desires? A thirst to know the pulsation and flow of her longings, and the sacred beauty of her wantings, that manifested in the strong and sure lovely woman – Christ – who conversed with an attendant on an early morning in a midwestern town?
The Gospel of Thomas reminds us, When you come to know yourselves, then you will be known, and you will realize that you are the children of the Living Father. Sooner or later, if we are to realize our Christhood, we must come to know ourselves. No one else can do the knowing for us. But – what a tremendous grace it is when we don’t have to ceaselessly contend with supposed faith communities about the sacred fruit we are, nor fear that they desire to prune away our life.
You are no longer a Christian but Christ. We are not facsimiles; each of us is an original vine of luscious Being. We enjoy the taste of our soul when it is relaxed, spacious, creative, spontaneous, joyous and free. This is the taste of truth – not truth as theory or as abstraction, but truth as a concrete and utterly intimate realization. Thomas, Bodhidharma, John, Philip, are all speaking of this journey of realizing our basic humanity, coming to know that the truth of our being is a vine coursing with the very vitality of Being. This woman is realizing I am the vine, I am the soul through which Being pulsates with life, my life. My sense is that for her to do the utterly ordinary act of walking into the public space of the department of motor vehicles is an embodiment of uncompromising courage flowing from the uncompromising curiosity of a child – whose desire to live as the Christ is now the heart of an amazing woman.
~ Kevin G. Thew Forrester, Ph.D.
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About the Author
Kevin G. Thew Forrester, Ph.D. is 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“.
Question & Answer
Q: By Andy Alexis
I read Bishop Spong's fine book "Unbelievable"; in one chapter, he talks about advances in science (such as the size of the universe) that have forced us to reconsider the tenets of our faith that were codified before those things were understood.
I also read Neil Degrasse Tyson's most recent book: he says the universe is estimated to be 90 billion light-years across and contains 100 billion galaxies.
My question: where is God in the universe? Is God bigger than the universe? How can God be both so big but small enough for us to have a chance of comprehension?
A: By Rev. Lauren Van Ham
Dear Andy,
Thank you! Your provocative questions encourage our minds and our hearts to bend toward one another; a great spiritual practice for us all. In my understanding, this is the holy ground where theology, social transformation, and astro-physics (no kidding) happens.
We know that science and academics diligently strive for proof, statistically-significant data, peer-reviewed checks and balances, and empirical evidence. In many places, this effort is needed and valuable. It also erodes ancient wisdom held by indigenous minds, other species and even sacred texts explaining astronomy, geology, and botany in ways that science might initially dismiss. Within in our intuition, our star-gazing, or sunset watching, we stumble upon truths. The revelations offered in our dreams, song-writing and poetry often point us toward a deep-knowing that our imaginations have been holding for the moment when we would be ready to appreciate them.
Herein lies the answer. God is everywhere in the universe because God IS the universe. The singularity (Big Bang, or Flaring Forth), was God (Godhead) and the indwelling of God. Meister Eckhart, the 12th century mystic, wrote, “God’s darkness is a superessential darkness. A mystery behind mystery, a mystery within mystery that no light has ever penetrated.”
Today, we know our universe (God) has been expanding for 13.7 billion years. All that has been, is and will be is born of this one source. As you’ve mentioned, depending on the day, this awareness can feel awe-inspiring, gigantic and pretty impersonal until….
Until we recall that God is IN all of it. Carl Sagan said, “We’re made of star stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.” As co-creators with God (cosmos), it suddenly becomes very personal. All of it. My encounter with the crow in the grass is intimacy with Creation. The deep sigh I feel when I hold my friend’s child close is a brush with Divinity. The uplift or relief that overtakes me when I leave the street to enter the hallowed hush of the cathedral, is God’s whisper reminding me that I am safe, whole, and loved. Our acts of love, engagement, and curiosity are precisely how God sees God…and continues to expand.
And so, Andy, in this creative tension between the vast and micro, I want to offer a closing suggestion: your reading list is inspiring. If you’re not already in a book group, please form one! When small circles gather to create space and reflection for questions like yours, social transformation happens. May we all bow to the Mystery and celebrate our co-creative responsibility with reverence and wonder.
~ Rev. Lauren Van Ham
Click here to read and share online
About the Author
Lauren Van Ham was born and raised beneath the big sky of the Midwest; Lauren holds degrees from Carnegie Mellon University, Naropa University and The Chaplaincy Institute. Following her ordination in 1999, Lauren served as an interfaith chaplain in both healthcare (adolescent psychiatry and palliative care), and corporate settings (organizational development and employee wellness). Her passion and training in the fine arts, spirituality and Earth’s teachings has supported her specialization in eco-ministry, grief and loss, and sacred activism. Lauren’s work with Green Sangha (a Bay Area-based non-profit) is featured in Renewal, a documentary celebrating the efforts of environmental activism taking place in religious America. Her essay, “Way of the Eco-Chaplain” appears in the collection, Ways of the Spirit: Voices of Women. Lauren tends a private spiritual direction practice and serves as Dean for The Chaplaincy Institute in Berkeley, CA.
Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited
Jewish Fundamentalism
Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong on September 21, 2005
Religious fundamentalism is built on the assumption that the truth of God has been captured for all time. It comes in many forms including inerrancy for the words of scripture, ex cathedra utterances of a religious leader and the conviction that the ultimate truth of God has been captured in one’s developed creeds. Fundamentalism is found in both Catholic and Protestant Christianity, in Islam and in Judaism. When any religious system believes it speaks with the ‘Voice of God’ it inevitably turns demonic. Fundamentalism has supported slavery, condemned homosexuals and killed those it defined as ‘God’s enemies.’ Recently, in a full- page ad in the New York Times, Jewish fundamentalism overtly entered the public arena.
This advertisement was in the form of an open letter to President Bush urging him to stop the planned exodus of Jewish settlers from Gaza. The letter opened with a text from the Book of Genesis (12:3) that contained nothing less than a veiled threat. In this verse, God was quoted as having said to Abraham, “And I will bless those who bless you and he that curses you will I curse; and by you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” The authors of this open letter seem to believe that quoting the Bible is all one must do to convince others to endorse their cause, suggesting rather pointedly that if they do not, God will curse them.
Fundamentalism was apparent in the body of the letter where its authors asserted “that God” had dictated “to Moses 3317 years ago,” that sovereignty over this land was given “to the people of Israel” in perpetuity. “The Word of God,” they contended, “can not be contested.”
This advertisement appeared just as the world saw heart-rending pictures of the Israeli army evicting Jewish residents from Gaza. That action represented a huge gamble on the part of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. By sacrificing this tangential and hard to defend parcel of land conquered during the Six Days War in 1967, Sharon hopes to justify the West Bank settlements that he is not about to surrender. Dislocating the Gaza citizens was a price he felt able to pay without alienating his own right wing constituency led by his political rival Bebe Netanyahu.
The verses referred to in this letter are found in Genesis (12:1-4 and 15:18) describing God’s call to Abraham to leave Ur of the Chaldees to form a new people. Reading these texts, however, one discovers that the land God was said to have promised Abraham’s descendants was to stretch from the Nile River in Egypt to the Euphrates in what is now Iraq, including both the Sinai Peninsula and most of present day Syria, dimensions for Israel beyond any reasonable political expectations. The authors of this letter, however, were only concerned to demonstrate that the eviction of Jews from Gaza violated the stated purposes of God. It was neither the first nor will it be the last time that a quotation from the Bible has been twisted to fit the issue.
The use of these literal texts displayed no recognition of the history of that region and ignored some two hundred years of biblical scholarship. This area, now occupied by both Israelis and Palestinians, has never really been uncontested or the sole possession of any ethnic group. As the land bridge linking Africa to both Asia and Europe, it has always been a major thoroughfare for both trade and advancing armies. Seldom has it been free.
When Joshua led the Jewish people in their biblical conquest of what was then called Canaan, they justified their aggression with the same mythology reflected in this open letter. God had promised this land to the descendants of Abraham. However Abraham, if he was in fact a person of history, lived about 1850 B.C.E. His ‘great grandson’ Joseph was said to have led a Jewish migration from that “promised land” into Egypt to avoid a famine. There the descendents of both Abraham and Joseph lived for some 400 years, first as an underclass and finally as a slave people. It was therefore 16 generations later when they were claiming that their conquest of Canaan, a land populated by other Semitic people, was justified on the basis of God’s ancient promise to Abraham. This strange claim then became the basis of the Jewish “theology of land ownership.” After Joshua secured militarily a Jewish presence in Canaan, Semitic Jews and Semitic Canaanites actually lived side by side as neighbors until the arrival of some Greek settlers called the Philistines or the Palesti (hence the name Palestine), on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea. These Philistines created a threat so deep that it drove the Jews and the Canaanites into an alliance at the time of King David. The combined reigns of David and his son Solomon, lasting about 80 years, represented the only time in this region’s long and troubled history that it might be fair to say that the Jews actually ruled the land they now claim, and even then they did it in alliance with the Canaanites. During the rest of their history both the Jews and their Canaanite neighbors were vassals of the Egyptians, the Syrians, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Persians, the Macedonians and the Romans.
Later, in the second century (132-135 C.E.), a Jewish rebellion under Simon Bar Kokhba resulted in the Romans expelling all Jews from Jerusalem to Galilee while repopulating Judah with Gentiles, even erecting a temple to Jupiter on the site of the Temple of Solomon. When Christianity became the dominant religion of the Western World in the fourth century, Christians began to move into Palestine to claim the holy sites of their faith story. The Muslims in turn displaced the Christians in the 7th century, that region until the Crusaders banished them only to see the land reconquered by the Muslims when crusading fervor began to fade away in the 13th century.
Most Jews, largely exiled from this land from the 6th century BCE on, became a dispersed minority living far from the homeland they claimed. A persecuted religious and ethnic group; they were banished from or ghettoized in the nations of Christian Europe. The Holocaust in 20th century Germany brought the plight of these Jews to the consciences of the West and served to feed the long-held Jewish dream of being restored to their homeland in fulfillment of what they claimed was God’s eternal promise. That restoration took place in 1948 under the terms of the Balfour Declaration from 1918. Since Palestinian people populated this land, they had to be evicted from their homes to accomplish this resettlement, a task achieved only by military might and western dollars. That action led directly to the killing bitterness that marks this land today.
Many people thus claim citizenship in that part of the world. The Jews are but one of the claimants. Others are the descendants of the Canaanites, the Samaritans, the Philistines, the Edomites, the Moabites and many others. Few people, other than Christian fundamentalists, salute the Jewish claim that they alone have exclusive, God-given rights to this land. That claim is not dissimilar from the same tribal mentality that marked United States history under the slogan “Manifest Destiny.” Not only did Europeans displace the well-established indigenous population in this new world, but they also kept expanding their claims until the limits of the Pacific Ocean were reached. The Louisiana Territory was bought from France and later Alaska was purchased from Russia, both under threat of our arms. We defeated Mexico in a war of aggression in order to solidify our claim to Texas and to annex New Mexico, Arizona and California. Our expanding nation then threatened the British with war until the Northwest border, dividing Canada from the United States was established on a specific parallel to complete the sweep “from sea to shining sea.” In our history books, we justified each conquest and acquisition with noble sounding rationales just like militarily dominant people have always done the world over. National boundaries have shifted from time immemorial as conquerors dictated terms to the conquered. Poland has come in and out of the maps of Europe. Finland has had its boundaries drawn and redrawn. So have Germany, Sweden, France, The Netherlands, Belgium and the nations of Eastern Europe. People may not like it, it is neither pretty nor moral, but that is human history. The suggestion that quoting from an ancient and sacred text could or should win approval for a national agenda represents an ancient tactic to which no one has ever paid serious attention. They will not on this occasion either.
People have moved through history from clan to tribe to city-states to nation states. Tribal identity is deep in the human psyche but it ultimately and always leads to the conflict of rival claims. If tribal thinking is followed consistently the only and inevitable outcome is a war that leads to mutual annihilation. That was the governing principle in the rise and fall of empire after empire in world history. That is what we see in microcosm in the Middle East today. The time has surely come for human beings to move beyond this primitive tribal mentality into a world consciousness and to begin at long last the task of recognizing that a single humanity must be accommodated in a shrinking planet. To accomplish this, the fundamentalist idolatry that claims scriptural authority for acts of violence must be challenged wherever it appears. It matters little whether that fundamentalism is Christian, Muslim or Jewish.
Gaza will now become Palestinian. The tinderbox that insensitive world leaders created in the Middle East after both World Wars I and II will continue to express itself in the tensions that always arise when claim meets counter claim. Invoking God to make the aggression of each group appear to be both righteous and holy will only heighten feelings. Perhaps the only positive thing that can be gained from this strange religious mentality is that when people are repulsed by this expression of Jewish fundamentalism they just might be lead to be equally aware of and thus equally repulsed by the counter claims of Islamic fundamentalism and begin to see that the claims made by Christian fundamentalists about our nation and its role in the world are also repulsive. This developing new world consciousness may be the only path that leads to world peace.
~ John Shelby Spong
Announcements
The Wild Goose Festival
July 12th - 15th
Hot Springs, N. C.
The Wild Goose Festival is a 4-day Spirit, Justice, Music and Arts Festival. But it’s so much more than that.
“At Wild Goose, people flock together to celebrate a way of life rooted in faith, justice, creativity, and beauty. It’s like a family reunion where you meet relatives you never knew you had. It’s a wild and wonderful convergence of stimulating conversations, campfires, music, kids, art, lawn chairs, prayer, fun, dance, frisbees, tents, food, sunshine, rain, laughter, and fresh air. There’s nothing like it, and I look forward to it as one of the best weeks of my year.”
Click here for more information/registration.
