The temple.

Tonight, I told my daughter that God is alive

In her body.

No one ever said that to me.

Instead, people told me all about the Commandments,

Ten of them.

Also, Seven –

deadly sins.

Some handful of Beatitudes

And what a fuck-up Eve could be.

God breathed God’s breath into the human body,

in order to make a living being.

Genesis says so.

It’s the first written words about human beings

in my own tradition.

This gorgeous scene.

A man and a woman, made from dust.

Through their nostrils, they are filled

With God’s breath.

And when the breath of God leaves

them,

and each of us,

we are returned again

to dust.

But what of the time between?

While God’s breath is breathing Itself in us,

how holy can we be?

You’ve heard it said, “mercies are new each morning”,

but I tell you,

New mercies ride in on each breath.

God’s breath,

In each of us.

No one knows what to do next.

Me neither.

But, I told my daughter what I wish

someone had told me.

Listen for God in your body, sighing softly.

Sometimes rattling.

Feel God, too.

That rhythm, the movement in and out,

filling up and letting go.

Rupture and repair.

Expansion and contraction.

Life, Death,

Re-birth.

Every cell and atom in the universe is dancing like this.

Later, I will tell her even more subversive things.

Eve.

To be a woman in the church,

No matter the age.

Ah, that is a great source of shame.

Were you, like me, given the story of Eve

to blame?

That first woman, tempted by the power of knowledge,

Not smart enough to know her place.

And poor, innocent Adam,

So trusting of the woman,

Now defiled

After her tango with the snake.

Taking serpent’s words, and God’s fruit into her body

now changed.

Now naked and ashamed.

Man’s first words in his own defense,

“She tricked me!”.

What a witch.

Well, here’s another trick.

Blame.

Scapegoat a gender, get every last one of them.

Meanwhile, stripping God of any feminine traits.

If God is male, then male is god.

Father, Son, and Holy Ghost?

That which cannot be named.

Only felt.

In our bodies.

This knowledge of God.

Who among us knew it first?

Eve.

And of course, she was afraid.

How does a fragile human body withstand the knowledge of God

Once consumed?

For me, it’s always some tender blend

of grief and grace –

Mixed.

Like Eve,

I cannot keep it to myself.

And, yet I too am rendered a bit naked

And ashamed.

But shame, beloveds, is not the toxic terror you’ve been told.

Just the stripping back of one or two dead layers,

Much like the snake.

Nearly every woman on earth would now pay

For the peeling

Of old skin,

Unearthing something new.

But this is not a surface peel.

The encounter with God we’ve been offered

By the snake.

When we eat the fruit, we risk becoming

A graveyard

For all the people we thought we were.

Scales falling from the eyes of Saul,

A new name, a new life, and here we have

Paul.

Not my favorite apostle.

Some thorn is his side about women still.

But,

Then I suppose we all have to drag our own humanity

Along

with us,

Long after consuming what’s been given

by Grace.

I AM.

The day Moses met God, he asked,

“What is your name?”,

“I have no name”, comes the reply,

From a Source now unnamed.

All alone atop that Holy Mountain,

Moses worries after those waiting down below.

“Without a name”, he pleads, “How will my people come to know

You from all the other gods

Belonging to these poor, lost, wandering men?”

Was it courageous, or cowardice to stand there in that place,

And so boldly ask God for the Grace –

To become small enough for them?

“This, not that” was the first and only Law given

By God to those two humans in the Garden.

An instruction for an era lost,

The Garden now invisible,

And yet –

Just like Moses and his people, most of us here

Are still believing “this, not that” will save us

From the pain of our uncertainty.

Shaped by years of wandering through deserts

Of our own,

Are we not guilty of thirsting after the image

Of arriving –

Somewhere, each one of us a beggar.

“This, not that, black or white, Please Lord, make it simple”.

Moses could have said that.

I hear it in his question.

Yet, God, unchanged and ever changing, always sets the tone –

A riddle for an answer.

Or perhaps, an Answer for minds too riddled to hear it:

“I AM”.

Do you ever wonder what that sound was like in the ears of the man who heard it first?

Could it have been pronounced “A-UM”?

I’ve heard that sound fall from the mouths of people

Perched atop holy mountains of their own.

Spandex on their bodies,

Twenty dollars for enlightenment.

Do they know the Holy mountain upon which they are standing?

They’ve at least removed their shoes.

“OM”, it is written, but as it moves from breath, to throat, to tongue, to lips

It sounds

Fully Human & Fully Divine

“I’m convinced that the discovery of a true God, and the discovery of the true Self are simultaneous journeys; they feed one another. When you meet the true Self, you’re most open to a bigger, truer name for God. When you meet a bigger, truer, more loving God, you surrender to that same identity within yourself.”

— Richard Rohr

Nothing is wrong with you: an Easter message.

Earlier this week, I had the opportunity to hear Anne Lamott speak about her new book, “Hallelujah Anyway”. The conversation was so honest, and soul-stirring that I followed it up with a couple days of binge-listening to several different interviews Anne has done in the last few years. During one of these interviews, she mentioned something a Jesuit priest once said to her about what he called the “5 rules on how to be a Good American”, which we are all forced to learn as early as possible.

1. Don’t have anything wrong with you.
2. If there is something wrong with you, fix it immediately.
3. If you can’t fix it, hide it.
4. If you can’t hide it, stay home—just don’t show up or you’ll make other people uncomfortable.
5. If you insist on showing up anyway, at least have the decency to feel ashamed.

Some of my earliest, earliest memories involve a growing, nagging, sweat-inducing certainty that something was terribly wrong with me. One of the primary reasons I fell so completely head-over-heels into the psychological refuge of Christianity was that it seemed to possess the answer to this precise problem.

“Yes”, Christianity said to me, “there is indeed something very wrong with you. Of course, this will continue to be painful for you and everyone who knows you for as long as you live. But, BUT: if you believe in exactly precisely this one thing, in exactly precisely this one way, and try your best to imitate exactly precisely the attitudes and actions prescribed by this one thing, your reward will be this: immediately AFTER you DIE, you will then finally become perfect”.

What a relief.

So, naturally, I swan-dove into this ideology at 12 years old, and really didn’t start to look underneath the hood of any of it until I was about 22 years old.

Eleven whole years of messy, beautiful, clumsy, miraculous, painful, healing, mentally ill, and spiritually sublime moments later, I have decided that this is not at all what Jesus tried to teach us. In fact, I now believe that to the degree with which we have confused his actual message with the nonsense described above is the degree to which we will wind up abusing ourselves and everyone around us.

So then, if not that painful personal pretzeling our way to salvation, what do I think Jesus did try to teach us?

Well, when I read the gospels now, I hear – over and over – a message that sounds more like this: “Oh, you beloved over-anxious, grasping, clinging children. I need you to try really hard to put your listening ears on for a whole minute while I explain this to you again. Heaven is not somewhere else, it’s right here. Communion with God is not later, it’s now. The Holy Spirit is not behind a curtain in the temple, it’s in your own body”. (Paraphrasing, hi).

Don’t believe me? Read it all over again for yourself. Start with Matthew, finish with the first part of Acts. Consider setting aside your preconceived or previously conceived interpretations, and going very slowly through the story again. Because it’s all right there – every beautiful, relieving, grace-soaked word – hidden in plain-sight.

I love Eve.

Eve, my favorite bible character, or otherwise known by the patriarchy as “Adam’s wife”, showed up in a TIME op-ed piece co-written by one of my heroes, Glennon Doyle Melton. This particular bit or writing right here (click link) is the whole reason I couldn’t stand being a woman in the church any longer. In fact, I think I have now spent a cumulative 7-8 years in therapy working this poison out of my own self-concept.

More pressing still, I now have a daughter, and I’m genuinely afraid to bring her up in the church for fear she might receive the same messages I did. In fact, I go visit churches by myself like an adult pre-screening a PG-13 movie to make sure it’s not going to be too corrupting for my child’s eyes and ears. Sometimes I actually picture myself sitting in the back of her fictional Sunday School classroom, and when we get to the whole bit about Eve, standing up and saying something like:

“Alright. That’s enough of that then.

Listen up kids, let me give you a brief little background about ancient semitic oral tradition and language, and how that fits into a much larger puzzle of religious and cultural context than the story itself reveals on the surface.

You tracking with me?

Okay, cool, next up: the ‘serpent’ as a symbol of feminine spirituality and the cycles of life-death-and-re-birth innate in a woman’s developing consciousness.

Any questions so far?”.

(Somehow I’m still waiting for my invite to be a guest Sunday School teacher at any church in town?!).

As Christian women (and men) start to wake up and demand better for themselves and their daughters (and sons), the church is going to have to decide how to respond. And as they do, I sure hope they look to JESUS instead of Mike Pence for guidance. Because Jesus spent plenty of time with women, all by himself, without a chaperone. In fact, they were some of his closest companions.

This.

“If change and growth are not programmed into your spirituality, if there are not serious warnings about the blinding nature of fear and fanaticism, your religion will always end up worshiping the status quo and protecting your present ego position and personal advantage as if it were God.”

― Richard Rohr

To my eyes, ears, and heart, this could be our current, collective spiritual diagnosis.

#DearWhiteChristians:

“…I have been disappointed with the church. I do not say this as one of those negative critics who can always find something wrong with the church. I say this as a minister of the gospel, who loves the church; who was nurtured in its bosom; who has been sustained by its spiritual blessings and who will remain true to it as long as the cord of life shall lengthen. When I was suddenly catapulted into the leadership of the bus protest in Montgomery, Alabama, a few years ago, I felt we would be supported by the white church. I felt that the white ministers, priests and rabbis of the South would be among our strongest allies. Instead, some have been outright opponents, refusing to understand the freedom movement and misrepresenting its leaders; all too many others have been more cautious than courageous and have remained silent behind the anesthetizing security of stained glass windows…In the midst of blatant injustices inflicted upon the Negro, I have watched white churchmen stand on the sideline and mouth pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities. In the midst of a mighty struggle to rid our nation of racial and economic injustice, I have heard many ministers say: “Those are social issues, with which the gospel has no real concern.” And I have watched many churches commit themselves to a completely other worldly religion which makes a strange, un-Biblical distinction between body and soul, between the sacred and the secular.”

– Martin Luther King, Jr.

Arrogant, Overfed, and Unconcerned.

(… continued from here):

My next opportunity to take a class with this professor was in the fall of 2004. The title of the course read “Prophetical Books of the Old Testament”.

For many weeks the class proceeded quite predictably. There were reading and writing assignments, and wonderful class discussions about historical and contextual criticisms of the text. I remember spending many enjoyable moments discussing the Hebrew-to-English-to-modern English problems of translation. For a big ole Bible nerd like me, this was all perfectly sublime.

One day, while reading through the book of Ezekiel, our professor asked the class to participate in an out-loud reading exercise. I felt transported back to elementary school as I listened to others read from the text, paying extra attention to each word, in order to be ready to do my part when the moment arrived. Before I had the opportunity to impress my peers with my spoken word skills, someone read the following verse aloud:

“Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy.”

(Ezekiel 16:49)

Immediately after the last syllable of the last word in that verse was spoken by my classmate, my professor interrupted. “Wait, wait, wait a minute”, he said.

We waited.

“Could everyone please take out your pens?”, he asked. “Pens, not pencils. We should be sure to make this permanent”, he added.

He didn’t speak again until every single person’s pen was poised over their new, expensive, annotated Old Testament textbooks.

“Alright then, if you would please start crossing out all of the words following ‘the sins of Sodom were…’”.

No one moved.

“Go on. Put your pens through the words ‘She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed, unconcerned, etc., all the way to the end of that sentence”.

Some people tentatively appeared to draw lines through the words.

“And then write in the word ‘HOMOSEXUALITY’”.

No one moved again. (Thank God).

“I mean, that’s what I heard in church, didn’t you?”, my professor said with the slightest, almost imperceptible hint of mischief in his voice.

“I mean, God’s good but he’s not always right, right?”. The mischievous tone was a bit more obvious.

A few people put down their pens.

“I mean, sometimes I’m arrogant, overfed, and unconcerned. I’ve certainly ignored the poor and the needy at times”, he confessed while pointing his finger into the center of his chest with each confession. “But – and this is important – I am not a homosexual”. As he said those last five words, “I”, “am”, “not”, “a”, “homosexual”, he reached out his arm and began to deliberately shake the same finger, previously pointed inwards at himself, outward and away from himself.

After a moment or so of stunned silence, someone sitting a few chairs to my left let out a slow, self-recriminating whistle.

I felt like scales had fallen from my eyes.

If there was a lengthy class discussion that followed this exercise, I don’t remember the details of that interaction now. However, I do know that ever since that moment I have become incapable of seeing the church’s decision to police other peoples’ sexuality as anything other than a smoke screen. A smoke screen designed – specifically – to deflect attention from the ugliness of our indifference towards the suffering of others.

** For a bit more on this topic: click here.

From book, “Healing My Religion”.

During the spring semester of my freshman year of college, I decided to enroll in a class being taught by one of the most popular Religion professors at my university. The class was called “Psalms and Old Testament Wisdom Literature”. The course title alone was enough to convince me that by the end of the semester I would become a 19-year old near-expert on ancient biblical wisdom.

Turns out, here is the only thing I remember from that 4 1/2 month long experience: President George W. Bush declared war on Iraq.

My professor, an Ivy League educated Baptist minister and Vietnam War veteran, walked into class the morning after President Bush made his announcement with a guitar under one arm. After closing the door behind him, he was silent for a long time. When he finally spoke, he invited us to pray with him. When he prayed, his words were thick with grief. After he finished praying, he got out his guitar and put melody to the most mournful of the biblical Psalms:

Be merciful to me, LORD, for I am faint;

O LORD, heal me, for my bones are in agony. My soul is in anguish.

How long, O LORD, how long?

Turn, O LORD, and deliver me; save me because of your unfailing love.

No one remembers you when he is dead.

Who praises you from the grave? I am worn out from groaning;

all night long I flood my bed with weeping and drench my couch with tears.

(Psalm 6:2-7).

My 19-year old self was stunned.

No “man of the cloth” – and certainly no professor in a business suit – whom I had ever known had engaged with a political crisis in this way. The only explanation I can really remember him offering to our class on that day was this: “How many of you have been to war? None? Well, I have. And let me tell you this: war is hell. Hell on earth”. He said this with a kind of solemnity that shocked me.

My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? Why art thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring?

O my God, I cry in the daytime, but thou hearest not; and in the night season, and am not silent.

(Psalm 22:1-2).

“You’ve heard people say, ‘there are no atheists in a foxhole’?”, he asked us. “Well, in my experience there were only atheists in foxholes. The idea of benevolent God seems impossible when you are surrounded by hell”.

My heart is severely pained within me,

And the terrors of death have fallen upon me.

Fearfulness and trembling have come upon me,

and horror has overwhelmed me.

(Psalm 55:4-5).

He continued to sing until his singing faded into silence. The silence that followed continued until the clock on the wall signaled the last second of our scheduled time together. I don’t remember who left the room first, or how we managed to do this at all, but I do remember that when I did finally walk out of that classroom, I felt ill.

“Of course war is hell”, I thought. “Why has no one else ever said this to me before?”, I wondered. “And why in God’s name have I never really let myself consider this before?”. The day before when I had learned about the President’s declaration of war, my response had been very detached. I remember that I said a quick prayer of protection for the troops, resolved to trust God with the outcome, and reminded myself of the promise of eternal peace in the after life. “What the hell was wrong with me?”, I marveled.

Suddenly – and I do mean suddenly – I was extremely troubled. Troubled by the thought of war, and troubled by the realization that I had never been truly troubled by it before then.

The idea of war was so far removed from me – both historically and geographically. Born in 1983, I only had vague recollections of yellow ribbons being tied around trees during the Gulf War. My dad had been drafted to Vietnam, but was excused from duty because of legitimate health concerns. My maternal grandfather had done clerical work in WWII, and my paternal grandfather had served in the Navy in WWII. Yet, neither one of them had ever discussed it with me – other than to tell me about their visits home, their relief when the war ended, and the people they met along the way.

The following Sunday while attending church, my pastor mentioned the war, and prayed that the men and women fighting in the war would “seek God’s face”. He then invited us to trust in “God’s sovereignty” and the promise of eternal life for those who believe in him, and then moved on to the regularly scheduled programming.

I sat in my row of chairs feeling supremely disappointed. “Is it possible that I learned emotional detachment from the church itself?”, I wondered.

After the service was over, I sat alone for awhile and tried to recall a time the church had invited me to weep and groan in response to human suffering the way my professor had earlier that week. I knew that I had cried quite sorrowfully over my own ‘sinfulness’ on many occasions, and that I had shed happy tears during baptisms and faith conversions, but I couldn’t remember having ever been shown how to get down onto the ground level of human despair alongside those who were feeling it.

Later that evening, during my regular end-of-day reflection time, I thought about how Jesus responded to the pain of the world.

I didn’t doubt that he had faith in God’s goodness, of which he preached about regularly. Nor did I doubt that he trusted God during times of great pain, which he demonstrated quite dramatically. And yet, when confronted with human pain and suffering, he wept. He healed. He reached out. He cried out. He touched the people no one would touch. He talked to the people no one else would talk to. He lived amidst pain. He died in pain. He went willingly into hell himself, and he emerged with physical, touchable scars. Nothing about his life, ministry, death, or resurrection was removed from the pain of being human.

He was human himself, after all.

It took me weeks, maybe months, or perhaps years to understand why and how my “Psalms and Wisdom Literature” professor’s real-world engagement with the Bible impacted me so viscerally, but it made me feel thirsty for more of the same.