My Hymn

I'm reading Poetry as Spiritual Practice by Robert McDowell. In it he challenges us to write a hymn of our own in our own tradition, that expresses how we feel about the divine. This is my first stab at such a thing.

My Hymn

God, I see you in the majestic mountains

I see you in the roaring, restless sea

I see you in the incredible beauty of a sunset

I see you in the wildness of the eagle's flight.

God, I see you in the faces of friends

In the innocence of children

In those sharing the pews with me

In voices raised in hymns of praise.

God I see you in the tall sunflowers

In the simple daisies

In the perfumed rose

In the crowd of foxglove.

God I see you in your care of me

In the words of authors I read

In the moving images of poetry

In the words you inspire me to write.

God I hear you in symphonies

In the song of birds

In Christmas Carols

In children's laughter.

God you are very near my heart:

In Advent, waiting for Christ to come

In the rest after a busy week

In the kindnesses of friends

In the creation of things with my own hands.

God I want to see with your eyes:

The sadness of things happening in the world

The horror of incessant warfare

The hunger of children around the world

The needs in my own community.

My God, help me to see

Help me to hear

May I become your hands and feet

To this needy world.

Christmas Thoughts

This is an interesting year for me. It was only last year that I finally admitted to myself that the Christmas story as recorded in the New Testament is a myth. I love the story of the birth in the stable, the choir of angels, the curious shepherds, and the Magi from the East. It was a real wrench for me to let it go. Consequently, it was a hard season for me.

However, this year is different. I've gotten over the idea that a story has to be factual to be true or important, and now I can celebrate the stories of Christmas again, without having to believe they actually happened. I should have remembered from the start that a myth can be a powerful story that teaches us about ourselves and our world - in this case, my spiritual world.

This year I can celebrate the underlying messages - the submission of Mary to God's will, the willingness of Joseph to believe, the angels appearing to slightly disreputable folks who act on their message - even as the ordinary respectable people saw and heard nothing - and the coming of those outside Judaism to see the new child. These are archetypes of not only different kinds of people and their reactions to the story of the Christ child, but part of myself as I relate in different times and different places to this myth of the beginnings of my tradition.

So put up that tree, hang those lights, and put the crèche in pride of place. I'm ready to celebrate Christmas!

The Case for God by Karen Armstrong

I recently finished The Case for God. It's an interesting book and well worth reading. However, there were places where I disagreed with Karen Armstrong. Maybe disagree is too strong a word. I believe she skimmed over some things - made them more simplistic than the complicated events going on.

I particularly noticed this in her description of the fourth century, since I've done research on that time myself. She talks about the big controversy of the time which we now call the Arian Controversy, which was a debate between two groups of Christians, with Arius on one side saying that Jesus was a created being, and therefore not equal to the Father, and Athanasius' group on the other, claiming Jesus was equal with God. To put it simply, the controversy was whether or not Christ was God in the same way God the Father is God, or whether or not Jesus was divine.

This may seem odd to modern ears, where many people would consider the belief that Jesus is God to be a litmus test of a person's Christianity. But the fact is, for the first three centuries, you did not need to believe this to consider yourself a Christian. In fact, it is likely the earliest followers of Christ - and Christ himself - would have been appalled to have it suggested to them that Jesus was God. For the Jewish Christians, Jesus was a prophet.

The Council of Nicaea was called in 325 CE to consider this very question. Constantine had recently declared Christianity to be the religion of the Roman Empire. I'll save the long explanation for another time, but basically, the two empire-wide institutions operating at this time were the church and the army, and the army was getting pretty fractured. So Constantine turned to the church to hold the empire together. But in order for it to do as he required, the church needed to be a single system with a single belief. So he called the Council to hash out the biggest controversy splitting the church at that time.

Anderson says about this: "Unfortunately, Constantine, who had no understanding of the issues, decided to intervene... Athanasius managed to impose his views on the other delegates, and the council issued a statement that Christ the Word had not been created, but had been begotten..."

Now I wouldn't say it quite like this. Constantine had as his advisors those bishops who were around Rome. The belief in the divinity of Christ was fairly well split geographically, with the European Christians believing in his divinity, and those in Asia Minor and north Africa not. So Constantine made sure the Council went the way of the Roman bishops, as those were the ones he needed to have on his side. I think he didn't care about the theological implications of either view, but he understood the issue all right - at least as far as it affected him and the empire he was trying to strengthen. I hope to write later about the tragedy of Constantine on the Christian Church, but that's enough for here.

On the plus side, Armstrong confirmed for me what I had long suspected, but had not been able to verify, that the Trinity was a Greek invention. I knew it had to be, but had not tracked down the source, probably because my researches pretty much end with the Council in 325. A generation later, Basil of Caesarea (the brother of Gregory of Nyssa) postulated it, and it entered into church doctrine. A century after that, Augustine of Hippo gave us the doctrine of original sin, a doctrine which nicely increases the power of the church - if you are a sinner by nature and can only be saved by the church, they have a distinct power over you.

I wonder what church history would be like if the fourth century had never happened? What could we have avoided?

What Price Respect?

A friend forwarded an anti-Obama video to me today, wondering what we can do to combat such, well, crap. It is filled with news clips taken out of context, which make the president seem to be saying things which he was not. If you want to view it for yourself, you can do so by following this link.

What makes me the saddest is that some people are so threatened by a man who shows respect for another religion. They have no idea that the people involved in terrorism are an extreme arm of Islam, and don't represent the majority of Muslims. What I see are Christian fundamentalists - who believe all Christians are like them - saying that all Muslims are terrorists, when it is only the fundamentalist wing of Islam.

These are people who not only see the present in a narrow-minded way, but who also have no sense of history. They conveniently forget the Crusades when Christians were the terrorists against Islam, as well as all the other times Christians have been the aggressors, such as how we treated the Native Americans, or immigrant groups, or funded corrupt political groups in Central and South America or ... I could go on to create quite a long list.

Just this morning the Thought for the Day from the BBC was a Muslim woman saying that respect costs nothing. When I was listening, I thought "You're wrong. Show respect and people label you a wuss." Then I got the video. It seems respect will label you as un-American, and someone who condones terrorism.

What really bothers me is that people who want to get Mr. Obama out of office would resort to these scare tactics to frighten ordinary people into believing something untrue. And it frightens me how easy it is to lead ordinary people into this mob mentality by resorting to lies and fear. I know it's how the world is, but it shouldn't be! May we all remember to listen, and to explore the complexities of questions before coming down on the side that speaks to our prejudice. May we all learn respect for others who believe differently than we do.

To Whom, About Whom Do We Sing?

We have a new song leader at church. He just sings choruses, which is something I've come to expect now in meeting for worship. The songs we sang today, however, really got to me.

They were all filled with sky god imagery, the paternalistic god out there, looking down on us poor human beings, while we call out to be taken care of. We need to be taken care of because we are totally incapable of taking care of ourselves. So the all-father in the sky brings us his light and delivers us. And Jesus is come as savior of the world.

So there are several parts of this that annoy me. First is the statement that God is "out there" somewhere, rather inside of us. The assumption that God is someone we have to call on in order to get his/her attention. Quakers say that we seek to speak to that of God in everyone, but these songs seemed to forget that the divine is part of our very being.

Second is that the songs so exclusively see God as male. At the last election, Sojourners had a bumper sticker that said God is not a Republican, nor a Democrat. Well, let me rephrase that: God/Goddess is not a male, nor a female. Or perhaps God/Goddess is both male and female. I get so very tired of the paternalistic speech I hear all the time in church, and not only in the songs.

Three is the exclusionary tone of the songs. Yes, as Christ Followers, we find great meaning in Jesus, in his life and death. But you can't listen long to Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, and others telling how meaningful their traditions are to them before you realize there are many ways to God. I get tired of Christians assuming we have the only truth or a universal truth.

Fourth is the emphasis on light. Yes, light is important, and this time of year has traditionally (for thousands of years) been the time when people would gather to encourage the light to return, for the longer days that herald spring to come again. But we seem to forget that God is also the God of darkness. All life begins in the dark, whether that is a child in the womb, or a seed in the ground or a caterpillar in a cocoon. We need both light and dark to survive. If you stop to think about it, having no darkness ever would be terrible.

And fifth and last is one of the real bees in my bonnet, seeing ourselves as helpless people who need to be taken care of. I'll likely write about this again and again, so let me just say here that God can't be pleased with us wanting to stay dependent. I call it the infantilization of Christianity.

I expect better of Quakers.

Spirituality and Religion

I have friends who equate spirituality with Christianity. I have other friends who would equate spirituality with anything but Christianity. What's the difference between spirituality and religion? I wish I could remember who said this, because it's exactly right: spirituality is something we all have inside us. The various religions are our ways of working out our spirituality.

What is helpful for me is the analogy of a wheel. The various religions and other belief systems are the outside of the wheel - seeming very far from each other. But as you follow the spokes down, they get closer and closer together, until they meet at the axle. So it is with us, I believe. The deeper we go into the heart of our various traditions, the closer we come to the divine and to each other. I have more in common with a deep-thinking, deep-feeling Buddhist, than I have with one who holds shallow beliefs in the doctrines of Christianity - particularly one who is exclusionary in belief, and seeks to keep or even strengthen the walls between Christianity and other religions. Nor do I feel any commonality for anyone who follows a sky-god, paternalistic, judgmental religion, whether that's Christian, Muslim, or anything else.

Recently Karen Armstrong developed the Charter for Compassion, which states "The principle of compassion lies at the heart of all religious, ethical and spiritual traditions, calling us always to treat all others as we wish to be treated ourselves. Compassion impels us to work tirelessly to alleviate the suffering of our fellow creatures, to dethrone ourselves from the centre of our world and put another there, and to honour the inviolable sanctity of every single human being, treating everybody, without exception, with absolute justice, equity and respect." Her belief is that the Golden Rule: do unto others as you want others to do to you, or as she says it: Don't do to others what you don't want done to yourself is at the heart of all religions, and is something we can all agree on and aspire to. I urge readers of this blog to sign this charter, and seek to live out its principles. The Charter can be found at: http://charterforcompassion.org/.

T-Shirt Death Prayer

I don't intend this blog to be political, but couldn't let this pass.

My friend Shari pointed me to an interview with young Frank Shaeffer about T-shirts being sold that say Pray for Obama (Ps. 109:8). Now in the King James Version, this is rude, but not intimidating. It says, "Let his days be few; and let another take his office." Said this way, it could simply refer to someone's term ending, although the next verse is "Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow." Of course those who are of a conservative bent see this as nothing more serious than the Countdown Clocks which were sold when Bush was in office.

But let me give this verse in The Message, which cuts through the old language and says what the verse actually means in English: "Give him a short life. Give his job to somebody else." Give him a short life. Moves it out of the category of rude and into menacing.

There's a lot being said one way and another about this. It certainly is more threatening than a simple countdown clock until someone's term is over. What worries me is that someone who is more unbalanced or more filled with hate will take this as a call to action.

I also realize that those of us of a more liberal bent politically can condemn this 'til the cows come home and it means nothing. It simply becomes liberal against conservative - or that's the way conservatives see it according to many of the comments I've read on the Web. What we need are conservative Christians - the Evangelicals and Fundamentalists stepping forward and calling this the hate speech that it is.

The other thing that troubles me about this is that it is just another way that Christians turn to the Bible to find hateful things to say. Even if you consider Obama an enemy, what happened to Jesus' command to love our enemies? Why are we being more swayed by conservative talk show hosts and news networks than the words of Christ? If we call ourselves by his name, shouldn't we be following his teachings?

The Purpose of this Blog

I want this blog to be a place where not only can I chronicle my own spiritual journey, but can dialogue with other seekers that we might learn from each other. So please feel free to send postings to koberst@faith-writer.com. Of course, please comment on anything written here.

There are few rules. The postings will be about spirituality. I welcome any true seekers – and of course those who have found a way that works for them. What I do not welcome is proselytizing or a tone that suggests that all people need to follow the way you have found to work for you. I welcome all faith traditions, and also those who are seeking, but have no particular tradition. Again, I’m looking for honesty, and your own story.

I’m particularly interested in the feminine view of spirituality, but just being male does not automatically disqualify you. :-). So let the dialogue and stories and poetry and whatever begin!