Bible update

There is a really neat book that is helping me. It is called How to Read the Bible by James Kugel.

"After six days--God rested on the seventh day--the first sabbath rest in history. Most people are so used to this account that they scarcely see the powerful assertion underlying it: our world is fundamentally God's world--everything in it, including ourselves, was made by Him. To say this is more than to report on the origin of things: it is to set out a whole way of perceiving."

Is it easier to be a Christian if you don't read the bible?

I have been reading parts of the bible that I haven't read in years.... and whoa, man.

My partner says my problem is that I am reading it like a fundamentalist and that i need to look at it like more figuratively, more like literature, etcetera. Well sure. Some parts are more easily read in that way than others.

So... what if all the stories in the bible are just morality tales?
What then are the morals?
Don't get mad if God plays favorites? (Cain and Abel) Why wasn't Cain's sacrifice better? After all no innocent animals were killed in the making of Cain's sacrifice.....

What kind of God doesn't know a better solution than mass murder (the flood)? The God I believe in is smarter than this! Why does the smell of burning people/animals/whatever make God happy?

Wait I know why! It's because the religious cultural norms of the day gave a big thumbs up to all of that stuff.

Here are some other hopefully productive observations:

-the whole thing reads like a science experiment gone wrong... ok that's not productive!
-what was the actual "fall" about? Is God anti-knowledge?
- the kjv actually says that God repented? (Gen 6:6) Sort of goes against the God-is-perfect stuff.
-the old "why" didn't God know the people would do that, why did God punish people so harshly for something when it seems like the people were set up from the beginning
-why is God's insane seeming rage appeased by burning birds (Genesis 8: 20-21)? this is crazy!

Here is the difference: before I accepted this too deeply as a large part of Christianity and chucked the whole religion. Now, I understand my own life experience, and still believe in God, just not in this interpretation. More than saying anything about God, this says a lot of things to me about people, humanity and the need to find purpose/ create stories that define and guide our lives.

I'd be curious to know how others deal with some of more "insane" stuff in the bible. Do people just kind of ignore it and pretend like its not there? Do people sort of nod at it and then change the subject, as though entire books of the bible are unstable relatives not suitable for dinner conversation?

Or maybe the moral is more like this: Don't get frustrated when you read the Bible because the people who wrote the Bible were, like all of us, bound by their time and thus did a great job of making God look like an insane person when viewed from the perspective of thousands of years later.

that's about as generous toward a faith perspective as i can get.

\o?

i have been thinking more about praise and worship music as it relates to the emergent church. In my last post I quoted from Paul Mayers excellent writing on why we're not singing anymore.

Last night I went to a Compline service. At this weekly service a small choir stands at the back of the church chanting prayers and singing hymns while people meditate, chant along, or pray etc. I really don't have adjectives that do justice to this service. The sound of the choir singing is so beautiful that it is very, very difficult to explain what exactly is really happening. I have really never experienced anything like it before.

Anyway one of songs they sung last night was "As the Deer".

the way they sang it was like water.

After some research for this post it turns out that this song is actually not a "hymn." The compline choir sang it as though it were a hymn. But, hmmm, clearly the wikipedia article says it was written in 1984!

What makes something a hymn as opposed to a "worship song"? Its age?

For me personally I associate positive and negative experiences with different kinds of church music. For example, songs like Lord I Lift Your Name on High, My Life is in You Lord, or Open the eyes of my heart Lord.... (sorry there is no nice way of saying this) make me want to jump from a moving car. This is because I associate them with church fakery, false piety, mega church gatherings, corruption and just in general, they have the tendency to be repetitious and even used in some cases as a kind of assault on the people.

I am not trying to attack charismatic churches, I am just saying that for me personally, I see this repetition as a kind of mental violence. Conversely, songs such as As the Deer and others, for me, are associated with positive church experiences, so they sort of get a pass as being authentic. How convenient for me!

To get back the main point of this post, certain songs carry different meanings for different people. Different people have different experiences and that's great. God knows I don't want to be "intolerant"!

I guess I am just trying to figure out why certain worship styles agitate me so much? Is it because I am secretly jealous that some people experience spirituality differently ? I don't think so, well I sure hope not. Is it because I think that people who have what appears to be transformative spiritual experiences to songs like "O Lord, you're sweet let's wash each other's feet" are insincere just because that does not match the way that I experience God? Yeah I think that might be part of it, for me at least.

This is going to sound really, really bad, but I don't like it when people raise their hand like they are "feeling the spirit." That is not the way I feel "the spirit", not that I am even claiming to be able to understand what "the spirit" even is.

That's part of it too. How can these people know they are really experiencing God when they raise their hand or whatever? Are they trying to let everyone else know they are experiencing God? To me that seems like some kind of religious gesture done for the benefit of other people, probably because if I were to raise my hand, that's what it would mean!

Well, I am sure I sound like a judgmental, terrible person. Lately I have been thinking how amazing it is, the things I will justify doing in the almighty name of being "honest".

Lord I lift your name on high: Lord I lift your name on high: Lord I lift your name on high: Lord I lift your name on high :

There is a pretty neat guest post from Paul Mayers over on Jason Clark's blog about praise and worship and "why we're not singing anymore" in regards to the emergent church:

"ok 3 areas that strike me straight away about why worship makes me want to do anything but sing…1. What’s in a name… worship .....should be about how we live 24/7, what we do with our life...2. Jesus is my boyfriend… If it’s not the actual singing that we object to, it’s what we sing about - all those trite love songs, you know: “Jesus loves me, I love Jesus, we hold hands and skip down the street, we’re smiling at each other, and i know he wants to towel my feet…”3. For an audience of one - me… So rather than making it a homoerotic thang i wonder how much it is just an autoerotic one - songs sung for the benefit of me and my emotional insecurity/well being/emotional high [want an example, here’s a whole CD worth :) - HT to Kamsin]

Hmm.....interesting. Mayers continues:

Singing together songs chosen for us is a powerful cultural response to our western individualistic focus - where let’s face it a song comes on our iPod that we don’t like we just hit skip (some days i spend more of my time skipping tracks than listening to them). Actually taking part in such an activity poses for me a cost - will i put aside my struggles with words/tunes/the whole shebang and enter in or will i stay on the outside and spectate from a position of smugness or refuse to enter in and sulk that i can’t have my own way?

I often feel this way at church. Either sing songs and conform even though the songs might be highly personally or otherwise questionable.... or don't sing, stand there and "sulk", as Mayers puts it. I feel like I do a lot of both. At least with hymns there is not the "repetition factor" as with "contemporary" worship music. Anyone that's heard "Lord I lift your name on high" unleashed knows what I am talking about.

Stopping at a Roadside Rest in Beach, North Dakota by Christine Jacox Kyle

"Thunder and the West indicate a highly sacred or powerful vision and signify revelation, introspection, and deep change" --Black Elk Speaks

This is no land I know from any map.
All day the air has bristled with thunder
and still there is no sign of oncoming
darkness in any quadrant of the sky.
Seven hundred miles ago, the gray cliffs
of St. Paul dropped down to a sheer prairie,
my car slipping through the arroyos and grasses:
Blue Earth, Humboldt, Kadoka, Interior,
beads on a map I've devoted the day
to learning. At the Missouri, a wound
in the heaving hills, a nighthawk tumbled
out of the brimming blue of the noon sky.

Am I always at the edge of something
about to crumble? Once, two thousand miles
from here, I belonged to the sea, the incessant
curling of waves. I crouched in the high dunes,
gathering beach palms, the delicate shells
of animals I could once name. I leapt
the pure line where the wavering grasses
etched each days wind in a new direction,
the wind tipping the dunes leeward each year.

A road sign points to a rest area:
I pull off and hear the trees beginning
to rustle, leaves in a light wind turning
toward the banks of the river. I get out
to read a sign nailed to a tree. It spells
this land's history: first, over bedrock
laid down six million years ago,
a broad swamp widened where the dawn
redwood flourished, the ginkgo, tall palm trees.
The water deepened to a sea. You still
may find, I read by the steady lash
of lightning now, fossils of gastropods,
the sturdy bivalve, squeezed between layers
of coal and shale. After the mountains rose,
the sea withdrew, leaving the rivers that etch
this land. I stumble down through wild plums
and reach the frothing river as thunder splits
the clouds. I shiver, slide out of my skin.

A seam of coal burns red within the sky.
Hail spatters the ground. Far off, a coyote
cries, the last voice from a mountainside.
Two kestrels eye upwind. I take a cup
from the wooden well. It's full of water
where the sky blazes still. I lift the cup
with both hands and drink as deeply as I can.

Destroying all the sunny days

I appreciate the sunny days. A lot. They are so rare here it seems as though there are never enough of them. When I was a student at Evergreen, I really looked forward to the first few weeks of school when sunlight would still be a common sight.... actually I still look forward to it. Winter inevitably always arrives too early, and then for the next 7, 8, or 9 months depending on the year, it rains.

It rains and keeps raining. I have developed a love hate relationship with the rain. On the one hand, there is a certain kind of local pride that comes with being in the rain, accepting the rain as it drip drops onto your face and through your clothes day after merciless day. There is a certain sense of satisfaction a person feels after surviving that. Maybe it is more a kind of fatalism. People who insist on using umbrellas just haven't gotten it yet: umbrellas aren't going to help, no matter what it is going to keep raining and you are going to get cold, wet, and miserable. During the winter I turn into somewhat of a Buddhist, quietly chanting about suffering, unbeing and becoming one with the water. ;)

But then spring comes-- at first just a cruel taste because surely the rain will return and keep returning, sometimes through June or longer. But spring does come, the days get warmer, the sun returns and it is glorious. On these rare days we students would sprawl out onto the grass, sunbathe, play music, pound on drums, dance, glow in the sun. It is beautiful to experience.

Only, only, only, the fundamentalist Christians from an unidentified church would show up to protest. Why don't they care about Evergreen during the winter, when walking across campus means accumulating two gallons of water in your hair? Why must they come on the only sunny days, and scream at people and ruin Christianity for people, and cause so much pain for people? Why won't they admit what churches they attend so I can go protest their existence the next Sunday morning that it is SUNNY outside?

Lately I have noticed that they have been camping out at the planned parenthood downtown. This pisses me off to no end. I know it isn't good to feel so angry, but that's what I feel when I see these people-- pure rage! They hurt their own cause, blindside struggling already hurting people and they make anyone that believes in God look insane.

Scary as hell

Yikes:

"Charles Haynes, a senior scholar at the First Amendment Center, says the findings are particularly troubling during a week when the top diplomat in Iraq gave a report to Congress on progress toward achieving democracy there. "Americans are dying to create a secular democracy in Iraq, and simultaneously a growing number of people want to see a Christian state" here, he says."

o blah dee: no latin equivalent

well, I started this blog to write about spirituality and religion and now I don't know what to write about.

The kids at school were hilarious today as per usual. I am starting to connect more with some of them. One thing that makes me think though are the kids labeled as "problem" kids. My boss is very quick to point out the ones who come from "troubled" homes, the ones we should expect to "act out". This kind of annoys me. NO, it really annoys me.

I guess its good to know some history on the kids, but I don't like the way they are already permanently labeled at 6, 7, 8 years old as "problems". I guess I can see myself in them a little bit and have a lot of empathy because of that. I wonder if my school teachers and the staff involved working with me and my siblings stood around summarizing our "troubled" past each school year. It sucks to be so young and already labeled like that.

I also like listening to the kids. They have a lot to say! Today I talked to this one boy who told me about how he got into a fight with this other kid earlier in the morning. He said the other kid started it. I believed him. He looked like he was telling the truth. Anyway, this poor kid is stressed out because now he has to miss two full days of recess. I agreed with him that it sucked. He said it, I just agreed.

Saying something "sucks" is also another "rule violation", but the kid clearly wasn't conscious of breaking the rule, was in enough trouble already and I am frankly already tired of trying to enforce the 100 plus commandments of this particular school. I think the important ones are: don't hurt each other, don't hurt yourself and play nice.

As it stands at this particular school, there are 3 poster boards full of rules and many of the rules, well, the kid had it right-- they are ridiculous and yes -- they SUCK.

Hymn by A.R. Ammons

I know if I find you I will have to leave the earth
and go on out
 over the sea marshes and the brant in bays
and over the hills of tall hickory
and over the crater lakes and canyons
and on up through the spheres of diminishing air
past the blackset noctilucent clouds
         where one wants to stop and look
way past all the light diffusions and bombardments
up farther than the loss of sight
 into the unseasonal undifferentiated empty stark

And I know if I find you I will have to stay with the earth
inspecting with thin tools and ground eyes
trusting the microvilli sporangia and simplest
 coelenterates
and praying for a nerve cell
with all the soul of my chemical reactions
and going right on down where the eye sees only traces

You are everywhere partial and entire
You are on the inside of everything and on the outside

I walk down the path down the hill where the sweetgum
has begun to ooze spring sap at the cut
and I see how the bark cracks and winds like no other bark
chasmal to my ant-soul running up and down
and if I find you I must go out deep into your
 far resolutions
and if I find you I must stay here with the separate leaves

Christe eleison.

Today was a long day. After work this evening I went to a meeting. The meeting itself was okay, though I am still not entirely sure how my being there helps anything. Afterwards while in the midst of trying to a good deed and be an advocate for someone I care deeply about, I instead found out something that shocked me so much that I started crying a little bit as it sunk in. It was really upsetting, but hey I did what I could, already feeling like a big moron, just did my best to get it together and get out of there.

Immediately when I came home, I jumped onto the bike and rode about two miles as fast as I could stand it to a favorite park in the woods. I listened to Van Morrison on on the ride, which to me is healing spiritual music. Then I jumped onto a swing and just starting swinging and swinging. I listened to the music and closed my eyes remembering how my feet used to seem like they were touching the sky when I was in kindergarten. I love that memory. I thought about all the kids at school, all the really good beautiful things in my life, and I was genuinely thankful.

So I started to feel better. I tried to take deep breaths and exhaust all the tension out of my being, and I started to feel full of love and good energy.

The sun was already down but there was still a little light. So I turned my bike toward the inlet for a short ride around the water. The tide was out. It was so gorgeous.

Then I saw it. The otter. At first it seemed like it was still moving around, even breathing. Then I realized that I was the one breathing so hard from riding the bike and that I was seeing my own pulse in the otter, literally. My eyes had a pulse. The otter didn't. It wasn't moving or breathing. It was laying with its snout pointed toward the low water. I don't know how it died.

Maybe it seems like a travesty to be grieved about an otter with all the other suffering in the world. Well let it be a travesty. I was sad about the otter.

But it wasn't just the otter.

Kyrie eleison

Someone made a comment to me the other day about how missionary work is an extension of cultural imperialism. The person was actually critiquing the church, Christianity and evangelism in general and I was trying to explain that not all Christians are nuts. (Actually I never thought that I would actually be sitting around defending Christianity to someone. Maybe I am the one that has gone nuts.)

Well anyway what if instead of "winning people for Christ" Christians just literally fed people food?! Real food, not metaphorical "food for the soul"!? What a radical idea! What if "missionaries" primary function was selflessly giving to others like Christ and not trying to indoctrinate people with their particular denominational religious doctrines and overall BS?!

Is "funneling people into the (Christian) church" what God wants? Wouldn't God rather have healed, loving, justice seeking communities of people that cared about each other and didn't continue to create more pain?! ISN'T THAT WHAT THE CHURCH WAS SUPPOSED TO BE?

Now I know there are Christians out there doing this already, and these are the Christians I was trying to stick up for. Even so there are other ways besides the Christian way, and there is such a multiplicity of "ways" within the "Christian way" that people ought to be able to let go of absolutisms and capital T Truth, and the evangelical aspect of Christianity. Let it go! Believe what you want! Help people!

I'm not saying that out of anything but love and respect for other people's views! Does it really matter if the values are still the same? If the end result is still seeking after justice... though I know there are different ideas as to what constitutes "justice"... its very complex..But to get back to the main emphasis of this rant: Why are there missionaries spread out all over the world "evangelizing" and then reporting back to church "who's who" for Christ? It's sick! Why don't they ever talk about who they fed, clothed and loved without religious dogma? Is "winning people for Christ" the primary function, the ultimate goal of church, of missionaries? Or is it loving people unconditionally?

Tunc et Nunc: Then and Now

I don't know if I am a "Christian" or not, but I have finally decided it is ok to do things differently, to try and wing it, if that makes sense.

I guess I personally do have some kind of faith. At the same time I think its stupid to walk around acting like you know and understand who or what God is, or that you can decide for anyone else what spiritual truth is.

But when I pray, I pray to Jesus, I ask Jesus to forgive me, to heal me, to help me be a better person, to help me love people completely, to help me be a part of creating a more just world. It works for me, this Jesus thing. Sometimes. Sometimes it really does work for me.

Other times, not so much. But I've decided that's ok! I am just going to go with it, whatever "it" is.

Don't ask me when this some-kind-of-faith happened. I don't think the kind of faith I have happens in a moment. Maybe it does for some people. But that's not the way it's happened for me. For me it has been and probably will be, years and years, and years. And I am learning to be ok with that. Maybe for the rest of my life I will have some kind of faith.