Tag: church

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.

Baby steps.

I have a 13-month old daughter. Her name is Evelyn, and she is one of the many reasons I believe wholeheartedly in a divine source of life.

One day soon (maybe my next post) I will write much more about this, as it certainly deserves it’s own elaboration, but for now all I want to offer is this theological shorthand: I believe that Jesus’ most salient – and most misunderstood – message to humankind was one of our shared divinity. Meaning, that while we are all fully human, we are all also of completely divine origin, and we may choose at any moment to surrender into that equal inheritance and receive “the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding” (Philippians 4:7).

But back to my daughter. I believe it is my job to introduce her to both the full range of humanity and the full depth of her divinity, and I want to try to do this by way of the person, the example, and the teachings of Jesus Christ. I would especially like to be able to do this without the baggage of literalism and legalism I so often find in mainstream church culture. Yet, I also want to be careful not to create some kind of weird, home-grown, fringe movement, “Logan-family-only” religious identification that would keep us (her) from being able to connect sincerely with other faith-practicing folks.

So.

I’ve been church shopping here in the Kansas City metro area somewhat vigorously.

For some stubborn reason – despite my misgivings about organized religion – it’s important to me to TRY to make “a go of it” in a good old-fashioned, well-organized, well-attended Protestant church. Maybe this is connected to a feeling about how I was raised, or maybe I just know that churches with deep roots in the community and lots of organization on the ground provide a lot of services for families that you just cannot get anywhere else. There are mom’s and couple’s groups, kids programming and youth groups, community service opportunities, pastoral care and counseling services, and mission trips. As a parent, I feel strongly that these types of resources offer something invaluable to the families that make use of them.

Last week, I went to a Mom’s group through one of these local churches in order to talk about how to include faith in the  daily structure of our family’s lives. I worried that this might become a slightly awkward conversation for me, as I’m no longer very comfortable with a lot of Christian phraseology, and am downright opposed to adopting any spiritual rituals or practices into our lifestyle that would create anything other than religious and social inclusivity in our hearts and minds. And while I did wind up feeling a little bit like a fish out of water at times, I also felt welcomed and respected. In turn, I felt a warm and full feeling in my own heart towards all of the other women in the room. It seemed to me that we had all shown up that night because we wanted to talk about how to “safe-guard the souls” of these precious babes we all love so big and so deeply.

During the meeting, I had this one moment in which I realized that I had not started using the word “God” around my daughter yet. She is a very verbal kid, and works pretty hard to repeat nearly everything we say to her already, and so I found it somewhat noteworthy that I had been shying away from using this word with her. It’s a pretty loaded word for me given my personal relationship with the church and church culture over my 32 years, and I suppose I hadn’t wanted to burden her with it yet. Upon some reflection, however, I remembered that my daughter is not me. She does not have the same psycho-social-spiritual history with the word “God” that I do, and now that I was face-to-face with this linguistic conundrum, I wondered if I might be able to give her that word in a different way than it was given to me.

Throughout my career as a psychotherapist, I have met so many teenage and adult persons that have described a tremendous amount of psychological suffering related to the absence of a genuine spiritual life. Consequently, I cannot – in good faith – withhold any opportunity to expose my daughter to the concept and the presence of the divine. I also know that her brain will not be able to process the ambiguous, abstract, amorphous concept of God that I myself have adopted until she is much, much older. And I do not feel that it is wise to wait to introduce to spiritual life to her at “a later date”. I want to give her a spiritual language as early as she can receive it, and help her to weave these miraculous notions into her understanding of herself as soon as possible.

The day after I attended this mom’s meeting, while my daughter and I were going through the usual list of people that love her (“Mama loves you, Dada loves you, Nana and Papa, and Gamie and the other Papa love you, etc…”), I decided to say “and God loves you too”. Without missing a beat, this tiny little person looked right at me and said “God. Yeah”, and nodded her head enthusiastically. So then I asked her “And where is God? Where do you think God is?” She didn’t look around the room like she typically does when I ask her something like “where’s Dada, or where’s Mama?”, but remained looking straight at me. So I answered as best as I could for now saying, “God lives in your heart. Right here in your heart; that’s where God always is”.

She looked down at her chest, and then up at me and said “harr” (heart), and nodded her little head.

It feels like a good start.

Poems are better than prose sometimes.

Here’s the thing.

I grew up loving my religion.

 

It helped me to feel safe, and loved.

It offered me a moral compass,

And connected me to generosity.

 

It also taught me some unkindness –

Mostly towards myself.

 

And later still, it became too narrow

For my wild heart –

Much too reckless for these rules.

 

Doubting their simplicity, and mistrusting their cruelty.

Who gives me this authority?

 

There’s a questions I cannot answer,

Nor avoid.

‘Believe Like Me’

Did you know that when Jesus preached publicly he spoke in a language called Aramaic? To borrow an explanation from biblical scholar Neil Douglas-Klotz, “Most scholars now believe that by the time of Jesus, no one was really speaking the ancient Hebrew that would have been spoken, let’s say, by Moses or by King David. And everyone was speaking this lingua franca, or common spoken language, of the whole Middle East, which was Aramaic.”

Why is this important? It’s important because the modern English version of the Bible most of us have read or have had read to us is a translation from Greek. Greek and Aramaic are very different languages, and this is important if you care very much about the teachings of Jesus. It’s especially significant if you care about the literal interpretation of his teachings.

This distinction of translation winds up making a huge difference in some of the more widely repeated phrases of Jesus’.  I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve been told that believing IN Jesus was the whole spiritual task of Christianity. And yet, TURNS OUT: he never even said “believe in me”. According to these earliest Aramaic texts, he said “Believe like me”, or in other words “believe as I believe”. According to Klotz, when the Bible was translated into Greek, which is what the Western churches ended up utilizing, they chose to translate “believe like me” into “believe in me”.

To me, that seems like a grievous error.

Centuries of people have been motivated by the single task of convincing people to believe IN Jesus, rather than introducing people to the person of Jesus, and then letting them discover what this man believed in… for themselves.

[Much more on some other important Aramaic words later…]

 

Full Disclosure

I’ve been trying to write a book for nearly two years.

There’s a lot of volume there so far, and I like where it’s all headed, but frankly – it feels like being pregnant with an elephant. Elephant’s are pregnant for 23 months… did you know? When I was *literally* pregnant for a mere 9 months, I nearly combusted with anxiety about finally getting to meet my girl.

The passion I feel about this book is similar actually. In fact, my daughter and the idea for this book were conceived at almost exactly the same time. She’s 1 year and 1 week old now. I set the book largely aside once she arrived because raising her takes nearly every single scrap of my attention, energy, and focus.

When I do finally get a moment to sit down and write, I often get stuck wondering “JUST how inflated can one person be to think they have it in them to tackle the problems of one of the world’s largest religion in their spare time?!?!!”.

But, turns out: that kind of thinking doesn’t help the writing process. At all.

So, here’s what I’m going to do for now: I am going to quietly blog over here by myself. I may or may not tell anyone about it for awhile, but I’m going to choose to go ahead and write as if I had an audience because this helps me get the creative-heat out of my body and onto the page.

If this all goes according to plan – and of course, nothing truly wonderful ever does, I will eventually be sharing a very personal story about how (and why) I abandoned the evangelical Christian spiritual community of my youth, and then how (and why) I found myself wanting to heal my relationship with the church over a decade later.

Note: this is absolutely not a tale in which I will tell you about my regret over ever having left the church. I don’t regret that at all. In fact, it was one of my best moves.

 

So, in conclusion: I have no idea how to design a web page. I don’t imagine this blog will be terribly sexy by 2016 standards. It’s just gonna be words for now. Words you have to read all the way to the end. And it’s going to take more than 15 seconds to get there.

Feel free to hang with me as this all unfolds. For now, I’m grateful for your readership.