Month: April 2016

Sin

I think the word “sin” is one of those words that has become so misused, misdirected, and misunderstood that it’s almost taken on a new colloquial meaning, quite different from it’s original conception. Most often, I have heard this word used like a weapon with which to wage a character-attack on oneself, someone else, or whole groups of people.  99 times out of 100, when I hear this word used by Christians, I cringe almost involuntarily. There’s just something I don’t like about how it sounds in most peoples’ mouths.

The most recent example of this occurred during a meeting with a minister on the eve of my daughter’s baptism ceremony. This man – a wonderful man, and a kind, generous, gracious host to our family during this event – wanted to make sure we understood what a baptism ceremony was, and what it was not. We had a lovely conversation about spiritual rituals in general, and I was very moved by the humility with which he approached his role in his church.

At one point in the conversation, he wanted to make sure that we understood that a baptism ceremony wasn’t some kind of “magic” transformation event, and that we would be leaving church that day with the same little baby we had brought with us. He said this warmly but seriously: “she will still cry, she will still be a sinner” –

I bristled.

He paused.

“It’s my understanding, sir, that the Hebrew word for ‘sin’ means to ‘miss the mark’. I don’t believe that my 7 month-old daughter can yet be aware that there is ‘mark’ for which to aim, and it doesn’t feel quite right to speak of her this way”, I said.

I knew this wasn’t a completely rational feeling, but I felt like he had insulted my tiny daughter’s reputation. Some fiercely protective instinct rose up from my belly, into my chest, and out of my throat a bit faster than my brain could mediate it. He was gracious, and while he offered a defense of the word use, I believe he also saw that I intended be unmoved about it, and gently backed away. If this had been a contest of character, he would have outperformed me in patience, gentleness, and self-control without the tiniest hint of pride or exasperation.

My point, however, remains a solid one. The Hebrew word most often translated as “sin” in English is the word chata’ah, which means to “miss the mark”, the way an archer might miss a target with his arrow. Chata’ah, or “sin”, is a mistake, an error, a big ole OOPS! To be committ a sin, you must be aiming for something and miss it.

I think that this word, and it’s associated imagery, is such a lovely, inviting, and compassionate way to understand the limits of our own humanity. We all know what it’s like to want to be – or behave – better than we are, and yet still keep making all kinds of little (or big) missteps along the way.

Perhaps that’s what this minister intended to suggest to us as he explained how the baptism ritual wouldn’t rid our daughter of her human limits. And frankly, I’m not sure I was listening well enough to have ascertained his precise meaning (well, would you look at that? That’s actually a perfect example of ‘sin’).  Nonetheless, if someone wants to call my daughter a ‘sinner’ – or one day explain to her precisely how she is one – I just want to be sure they understand exactly what they’re saying.

How to Pray

A group of people once asked Jesus how to pray, and he answered with poetry.

Poetry, which presumably got translated many times over since then, and may or may not be accurately represented by the current versions we have available to us today. You can find many rendering’s of the ‘Lord’s Prayer’ through a simple google search, ranging in tone from the feudalistic language of King James’ Version:

Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name.

Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread.

And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.

And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil: For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever.

Amen.

To a more mystical, middle-eastern Aramaic translation:

O cosmic Birther of all radiance and vibration.

Soften the ground of our being and carve out a space within us where your Presence can abide.

Fill us with your creativity so that we may be empowered to bear the fruit of your mission.

Let each of our actions bear fruit in accordance with our desire.

Endow us with the wisdom to produce and share what each being needs to grow and flourish.

Untie the tangled threads of destiny that bind us, as we release others from the entanglement of past mistakes.

Do not let us be seduced by that which would divert us from our true purpose, but illuminate the opportunities of the present moment.

For you are the ground and the fruitful vision, the birth, power and fulfillment, as all is gathered and made whole once again.

Amen.

But my question is this: how do you train yourself to sit in the ground of your own heart-swell, and let yourself be swept up into union with the divine source of life and love Itself?

Holy Spirit

Jesus said,

But I tell you the truth, it is to your advantage that I go away; for if I do not go away, the Helper (Comforter, Advocate, Intercessor—Counselor, Strengthener, Standby) will not come to you; but if I go, I will send the Holy Spirit to you.  — John 16:7

After nearly a decade of psychological study, I read this and hear a man saying, “Let me leave this earthy realm so that I might give back to you your own projections of divinity.”

Being God, I believe that Jesus came all this way, entering into the experience of being fully human – loving and grieving and rejoicing and suffering alongside us, that we might be able to see ‘how it’s done’. In other words, how it’s possible to be fully entrenched in this human form, and yet experience the presence of God within us.

Indeed, I am quite convinced that believing in a God who is also alive inside us will ‘help’ each of us much more surely than a belief that God is still exclusively ‘out there'”.

Church

“Jesus never asked anyone to form a church, ordain priests, develop elaborate rituals and institutional cultures, and splinter into denominations. His two great requests were that we “love one another as I have loved you” and that we share bread and wine together as an open channel of that interabiding love.”

― Cynthia Bourgeault, The Wisdom Jesus: Transforming Heart and Mind

Good & Evil

The voice that first introduced me to the Aramaic language is a man named Neil Douglas-Klotz. I heard him interviewed a couple years ago by Tami Simon of Sounds True, and they discussed some things in that 57 minute conversation that would serve to completely change my relationship with the Judeo-Christian sacred texts, and ultimately send me on a deeply rewarding journey of re-discovering the teachings of Jesus.

Douglas-Klotz gave me a lens through which to begin to understand that the English language version of the Bible did not have to be the end of the conversation I could have with these ancient texts. Nor did I need to stop with the Greek language from which Western biblical scholars have chosen to translate our current English texts.

Apparently, the main conflict about translation is connected to which written text is the oldest – Greek, or Aramaic – even though it’s agreed upon that Jesus spoke Aramaic. The problem, somewhat unfortunately, is that there isn’t a Galilean (the geographic area in which Jesus lived and taught) Aramaic version of the gospels out there in “circulation”. There is a Syrian one, but this was written down at nearly the same time as the Greek translation, and thus the ambiguity.

Truthfully, however, nothing about this language conflict bothers me that much. In fact, I find it relieving in many ways. Without an indisputable original word-for-word account of Jesus’ teachings, you can make a strong case for suggesting that we remain open to the possibility that none of us can claim to know what he said or did ABSOLUTELY. And well… this just seems like a much more humble vantage point from which to approach something so mysterious.

Anyway, this distinction between Greek and Aramaic is what I want to talk about right now. This is so compelling to me because there is such a marvelous difference in the translations between one language and the other.

For example, Douglas-Klotz explains…

…the meaning of the word “good” in Aramaic really means “ripe.” That is, r-i-p-e, meaning “at the right time, at the right place.” It’s essentially a planting image and one that is drawn from nature.

Alternatively, the word for “evil” or sometimes “bad” that we see in the Greek-to-English version of Gospels, in Aramaic means “unripe”.

Of course, as Douglas-Klotz goes onto explain, this can make a huge amount of difference in how we understand certain phrases Jesus is accredited with saying, such as “every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit” (Matthew 7:17-18). If what he really said was “every ripe tree bears ripe fruit, but an unripe tree bears unripe fruit”. The spiritual implication in that statement is something a bit more abstract. It’s more like a zen koan; you walk away having the sense that what has been said is powerful, but still scratching your head about exactly how to live in accordance with this wisdom.

**More about Jesus and his multitude of zen koans to come soon…

 

Psalm 100:1

One of the most striking things I’ve encountered during my attempt re-join the church, is how I feel about the music reverberating from inside it’s walls.

The first church service I attended after I decided I wanted to start going again was remarkably awkward for me (in part) because of the music. I was sincerely disappointed about this too, as some of my fondest memories from the church-going days of my youth involved singing to God with my whole heart: eyes closed, body swaying, hands raised, and my frequently tear-streaked face shining upwards at the God whom I was 100% positive could see and hear me.

It was beautiful, truly. I miss that feeling something fierce.

Yet, now that I’m attending church in my 32-year old skin, reading the lyrics of each song from the video monitor often gives me considerable pause. My body swayed along easily to the sweetness of the melody, and I probably could have danced about wildly to a wordless song of praise. Yet, singing along with the words I was reading felt pretty incongruous with my new way of relating to God.

So, what has changed?

For one thing, I forgot how militant the feudal symbolism in some Christian music can be, and I’ve spent too long working in trauma-informed social services not to bristle at the use of some words and phrases. Furthermore, I also failed to remember how unrelenting the use of masculine pronouns for God can be in church culture, not excluding it’s music.

During an earlier time in my life, I related to God with a kind of inexhaustible thirst for Him. I understood “Him” as a him then, and it didn’t bother me to speak or sing of him this way. Now it does. I think that it’s very likely that most reasonable biblical scholars, theologians, and God-fearing persons agree that God is beyond gender — however, I am almost never given an enthusiastic response when I suggest we update our language to something more gender inclusive when talking about God.

I’m not sure if that’s just because it’s an awkward linguistic transition for people, or if the human mind is so resolute in it’s need to beat back ambiguities that people just can’t go there, but here’s the thing: I have a DAUGHTER. And I need to make sure that she does not learn this particular implicit lesson about gender from her faith community: “if God is male, then male is God” (thank you Sue Monk Kidd for that one).

This is a non-negotiable for me as a parent. I need to find a faith community that will help me honor this evolution of language that is so desperately needed in our religious dialogue.

… Otherwise, my sweet girl is going to be singing a bunch of ‘at-home-revised’ lyrics to old, familiar songs. And I imagine that might set her up to run into some old, familiar walls that I’d really rather tear down for her before she even gets there.

Eve: the best First Lady.

Retrospectively, I can now identify the beginning point in my own inner movement away from a literalist religious perspective. It happened one morning when I was 19 years old during a college course on the Old Testament at a Baptist university in Texas. A bit paradoxical, I admit. But here’s the story…

While reading the bible’s two (yes, there are two) ‘creation narratives’ in the book of Genesis, the Baptist minister who was teaching the course let us in on this super significant detail: one of the two creation stories suggests literarily (not literally, but literar(y)-(i)ly) that Eve is the “apex of creation” (his words, not mine). Essentially, he said this to us: the literary movement of this story tells us that God ordered “His” creations to be increasingly more complex (“good”) throughout the course of those seven days of creation.

His crowning accomplishment? The woman (Eve).

This way of understanding this story struck me as supremely confusing at the time, and I actually did not know how to reconcile it with the rest of the things I’d been taught during my religious education up to this point. Consequently, it took years and years for that gem of knowledge to marinate in my mind alongside a wealth of other experiences and information to allow me to consider the rest of what I’m about to suggest to you now.

I don’t know about you, but I had been told repeatedly that when God created woman, he was creating a “helper” for man. Like a good little house wife or something! Right? A helper serves the person their helping, after all, and I imagined Eve being created to sort of “get Adam his slippers when he came home from work” everyday.

Well, as it turns out, God called woman a “helper” using the same language “He” also used to describe “Himself” in the role as “helper” to humankind. The Hebrew words for this are “ezer kenegdo”, and they are only used again throughout the rest of the whole Old Testament to describe the kind of help God offers to “His” people. [All those male pronouns referring to God are in quotations for a reason. It’s a colloquial habit of mine to refer to God as a “He”, but I also know that “The spirit of God”, Ruach Elohim in Hebrew, as referenced in Genesis 1:2 is a feminine noun].

I should probably pause here for a moment, and let all of these linguistic and literary morsels to sink in properly…

Okay, you got it?

Well, good for you. Because that stuff took nearly a decade to coalesce properly in my own brain.

Onward, then.

I can’t offer a definitive explanation for how the type of help that woman is able to offer man is similar to the kind of help that God is able to offer mankind, but I think it HAS TO BE the lens through which we read the next part of the Genesis narrative.

So. With this perspective in mind, let’s revisit the infamous conversation between Eve and the Serpent, in which she soon becomes “responsible for ruining paradise”. Through our newly informed theological lens, I don’t think we can necessarily assume that Eve is somehow dumber, lesser, or weaker than Adam, and therefore a more vulnerable target for that sneaky snake. So then what can this part of the story possibly represent to us that we haven’t maybe been able to consider before?

Well, here’s a fun fact: the serpent – or snake – in nearly every other ancient spiritual tradition is often considered a feminine symbol, as it (like a woman) has an intimate, embodied knowledge about the cycles of life, death, and re-birth through it’s molting (skin-shedding) process. Menstruating women are also intimately connected to the bodily experience of life, death, and re-birth cycles through the shedding of their uterine (endometrial) lining, which is how the two creatures got linked to one another symbolically. So curious, no?

At this time in my pontification, I would like to encourage you to take a little risk with me, and consider how the serpent – and his/her objectives – may not be all bad. You can decide to reject this notion altogether and read no further, or keep reading and reject it later, or chew on it endlessly like I have been doing for the last 13 years, and come up with your own conclusions. Nonetheless, for the sake of our conversational purposes, that’s the argument I’m going to be making here. Obviously, the story tells us that God explicitly forbid Adam & Eve from eating the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. And I am not dismissing this, I’m just going to put a pin in it, and re-visit it in a few paragraphs from now.

But first, let’s review this infamous moment between Eve and the serpent:

1″Now the serpent was more crafty (subtle) than any living creature of the field which the Lord God had made. And the serpent said to the woman, “Can it really be that God has said, ‘You shall not eat from any tree of the garden’?” 2 And the woman said to the serpent, “We may eat fruit from the trees of the garden, 3 except the fruit from the tree which is in the middle of the garden. God said, ‘You shall not eat from it nor touch it, otherwise you will die.’” 4 But the serpent said to the woman, “You certainly will not die! 5 For God knows that on the day you eat from it your eyes will be opened [that is, you will have greater awareness], and you will be like God, knowing [the difference between] good and evil.” 6 And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was delightful to look at, and a tree to be desired in order to make one wise and insightful, she took some of its fruit and ate it; and she also gave some to her husband with her, and he ate. 7 Then the eyes of the two of them were opened [that is, their awareness increased], and they knew that they were naked; and they fastened fig leaves together and made themselves coverings.”

In my opinion, there’s more than two ways to read this, but I want to highlight the positions on either end of that interpretive spectrum for now. You can choose to read this literally, and that’s fine, that’s your prerogative – Godspeed. OR you can read it as if it were an attempt to communicate some complex and mysterious truths about the origins of human beings using a kind of symbolic language. As evidenced by the way in which Jesus himself used parables (symbolic stories) to teach people about the nature of God, I don’t think I’m reaching too far into the realm of sacrilegious sentiment by suggesting this. After all, story telling and poetry, music, art, and other forms of symbolic language are often the only way we can communicate about things too infinitely unknowable for our finite language expression.

If you’re still with me here, I’m going to step even further into the abyss, and suggest that from a symbolic perspective, that this “conversation with the serpent” could be understood as the woman’s first uniquely feminine initiation related to some phenomena of change occurring in her womb. Maybe her first menstruation, maybe the birth of child… I don’t presume to know this, and won’t try to nail it down either, but I like the idea that this might be talking about menstruation, as it lends itself to the loss of innocence we often associate with the onset of adolescence.

Somehow this feminine initiation experience then gives birth to a kind of adolescent doubt on Eve’s behalf. She begins to question (represented symbolically by the dialogue between herself and the serpent) the prohibition against eating from “The Tree of The Knowledge of Good and Evil” (another symbol).

I don’t know what to make of the tree nor the fruit as symbols yet, but the description of the tree itself, and the suggestion that eating from it would give someone the knowledge of the difference between good and evil is pretty obvious to me. Isn’t this the kind of knowledge that separates humans from animals? Animals just do. There’s no reflective processing of their behavior, or even of themselves as separate from their own instincts. This seems clear as day to me in the story of Eden, as we immediately see both Adam and Eve become “aware” of themselves; understanding their own nakedness is a reflective mental process that was previously unavailable to them before eating from this tree.

I suppose the next symbolic question to then ask ourselves then is how this new awareness gets them kicked out of the garden? Is it all just because they broke the rules? And what do we make of the snake’s seductive little statement to Eve about how eating the fruit would make her “like God”? Here’s my best guess: being able to think reflectively is a divine kind of mental and spiritual capacity, and therefore we could no longer exist in the garden of blissful unconsciousness anyways.**

From a developmental perspective, it would be easy to understand the symbol of the Garden itself as one of fertility, new life, the womb – maybe even the whole of the female reproductive organs – the lap of the Mother, the place of fusion with Caregivers, and a consequential innocence about our own responsibility in the world, which leads me right back to my hunch that in some ways this a tale about human development, and more stunning still: a tale about the inexplicable human capacity for a kind of god-like consciousness among all the other sentient beings on earth.

It’s a privilege and a burden both. And Eve walked that path first because she’s a badass. (Also because she needed to be able to “help” Adam get there too).

If – like me – you are at all familiar with popular culture’s version of the Christian narrative, you may now be asking yourself “okay, then why did Jesus have to come and ‘save us’ all from our sinful natures, which we supposedly inherited from Eve after that whole banishment from paradise fiasco?”. Well, here’s what I think about that in a very small nutshell: Jesus showed up to heal us from our own shame about being separate from God, and lived his life in a way that would compel us to remember that the Garden we are ever-seeking still exists within us. As Jesus himself said, “The kingdom of God is not coming with signs to be observed or with a visible display; nor will people say, ‘Look! Here it is!’ or, ‘There it is!’ For the kingdom of God is [already] among you” (Luke 17:20-21).

… I believe that trying to wrap your heart around THAT mystery is the heart of the whole spiritual path.

 

 

** Another thought: when Adam and Eve got kicked out of the garden, God told Eve that one of the personal consequences she could expect to experience as a direct result of eating the forbidden fruit was super painful childbirth(s).

So, I would like to point out that humans – with their fancy divine-like consciousness capabilities – have the biggest brains (in relation to their body size) of any mammal on earth, which means they also have the biggest heads per body mass, and this makes it very difficult to push the human head out of the human pelvis, which = MAJOR, MAJOR OUCH (trust me, I’ve been there, and it felt a lot worse than dying).

Prayer

“Praying

It doesn’t have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patch

a few words together and don’t try
to make them elaborate, this isn’t
a contest but the doorway

into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.”

― Mary Oliver, Thirst